Moreover, if one woman was discriminated against, you can't make up for it by hiring a different woman in some other job because humans aren't fungible.
California brought in a law banning all male boards in 2018 because the problem is so endemic. Not 1988, 2018.
A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.[1]
So this is still happening now, and for decades most boards just had a token woman at best.
For me personally, when I found out about how unrepresentative corporate boardrooms were, that changed my mind about positive discrimination.
It showed me clear evidence that network effects were too strong, meritocracy is a farce and it had to be broken by forcing a cultural change, i.e. positive discrimination was the right solution.
If you go back far enough in my comment history here you'll probably find me arguing against it. But I learnt about the persistent gender and minority inequality on boards a decade or two ago and changed my mind.
You should too.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/california-requi...
>A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.
is an arbitrarily defined measure (I expect intentionally to make things look worse) when we care about how many women hold board seats. In 2022, 29% of board seats are held by women. In 2018 it was something like 21%. Not at all good, but nearly double the 11% you'd get for a token woman on every board (assuming the average of 8.9 seats/board from Russell 3000).
If a person making hiring decisions says that the next candidate for such-and-such role should be a person from such-and-such group (a woman, a person of color, etc.), then the criterion of being the better candidate doesn't apply. Or, rather, it gets adjusted such that belonging in the desired group is included in the list of what makes a candidate better.
I completely agree with you, which is what makes all these recent trends in hiring all the more fascinating to me. If the only concern of a company were the bottom line (which I would expect it should be), then there wouldn't have been any conversation about marginalised groups etc., because, for companies, a candidate's demographics would have been irrelevant. The only thing that would have mattered is which candidate is expected to be the best fit for a given position. That it doesn't work like that suggests that companies are also political creatures, and are concerned about their public image and, possibly, about things like ESG scores. It may even be that the public image and things like ESG scores are a strong contributor to the bottom line.
In reality, people often hire the one they like best - which often tends to naturally be someone who resembles themselves.
Not to mention, very very few companies and positions within those companies operate at a level where they will succeed or fail based on whether they have the best possible candidate. For the vast majority of jobs, a candidate has to be adequate, and you can easily find 10 adequate candidates for every position you want to fill.
It's just like hiring the best street sweeper in the world is not going to significantly impact your bottom line - most CRUD jobs aren't too different from that.
If you're working on cutting edge technology, then finding ten adequate candidates is actually pretty tricky, because by definition the applicant pool is very small. Doubly so for fields that have high demand compared to the supply.
But the reality is that the vast majority of tech jobs are in the first category. There are far more people building web sites than kernel network stack hackers.