New EU law on gender balance on corporate boards
ec.europa.eu
ec.europa.eu
The point of these quotas is that some companies, even after decades of society striving for more gender equality, banning sex discrimination, etc, still prefer to hire one gender over the other for some functions, and especially for executive roles, this often happens through old-boys networks that exclude women. They may claim that they can't find women suitable for the role, but that's because the networks they hire from tend to exclude them.
It's also been known that people tend to hire people who look like the people already working in that particular role. Even when the people doing the hiring do not look like that. Even when they are aware of this effect.
If we want people to be hired for their ability and not their gender, we need a way to rid ourselves of these effects. For men and women to have the same opportunities to get hired, they already both need to be represented in the pool of people that have already been hired. And they need to be equally represented in the pool that people are hired from.
These sort of quotas are an ugly way to accomplish that, but so far, nobody has been able to come up with a better way of reaching that goal. Don't like quotas? Come up with something better. Because not doing anything is clearly not fixing the issue, and perpetuating the existing inequalities.
How this then goes into law in the countries is a different thing, but the directive seems like a reasonable nudge.
The linked report talks about the effectiveness of quotas: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/fs_22_...
And the page with more details about the law here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/policies/justice-and-fundamental-r...
Have you considered maybe they hire based on qualifications only and not gender? There are 2 implications from such thing:
- genders have different preferences in work and do not apply for some jobs (not just CEO, but also coal miners have even larger gender imbalance)
- some people do not want to make the insane effort to become a CEO. Men usually are the one sacrificing a lot for some goals (including life on the battlefields), women tend to be wiser and think if it is worth
If you're only hiring from one specific gender, you're most likely not hiring based on qualifications, or the qualifications you're hiring on include gender.
This at least has been the case with most single-gender boards. Now if you can show that there really are not any qualified women available at all, of course you should hire another man for the job. But I think it's not unreasonable to expect companies to demonstrate that first, and not simply allow them to blindly use it as an excuse for gender discrimination.
> genders have different preferences in work and do not apply for some jobs (not just CEO, but also coal miners have even larger gender imbalance)
True, but there's no shortage of women complaining about a glass ceiling. The women are there for the CEO jobs. I don't see a lot of women complaining nobody will consider them for a coal mining job.
> some people do not want to make the insane effort to become a CEO. Men usually are the one sacrificing a lot for some goals (including life on the battlefields), women tend to be wiser and think if it is worth
This is all baseless assumption to justify gender discrimination. Women sacrifice plenty.
There is an absolutely enormous gender difference in preferences for a coal mining job (unless you think it's due to discrimination). Could preferences also explain the differences in some other jobs, like CEO? How many women vs. how many men want to become CEO? Is it the same number? Saying that some women want to is not an argument, it's about relative numbers.
I live in Western Australia and it’s been a rather big thing recently looking into massive systemic sexual and non sexual, harassment and assault throughout the entire industry… because it was a “blokes job” for so long and they are now grappling with the fact women want these sorts of well paid jobs too. Women are even on record by multiple employers as statistically better drivers of the large vehicles throughout the industry, they want women.
But we have been hearing stories of women being warned off by other female staff, of people leaving or deciding not to take promotions not because they don’t want the job… but because of the other people.
Correlation is not causation, just because we see an effect of women not wanting a job does not allow us to attribute it to any one cause without investigation and evidence!
For extra context… it’s sort of telling that I didn’t notice that word missing. That’s how pervasive the mining industry is in Western Australia, it’s a huge percentage of our economy, and has literally shaped this city (Perth) sociologically speaking.
I will happily argue till I’m out of breath my theory that Perth’s world leading level of suburban sprawl is almost entirely due to the significant percentage of “fly in, fly out” (FIFO) jobs, if you only commute once or twice a month to and from the airport; you give zero fucks about that commute being one two or even three hours drive… not even exaggerating, there are people who take multi hour regional trains or drive 1.5 to 3 hours in slow traffic to the airport on the days they fly out… hours heading to Perth airport to fly out to the farthest reaches of WA to did valuable rocks from the ground. This entire city had been irreparably harmed by the “FIFO lifestyle” and its just such a part of the culture at this point I do not have any expectations that we can turn this ship around … valuable jobs for men and women that in years past paid off houses in under a decade, but required you to spend half to two thirds of your time away from that house have distorted social normal to a ludicrous degree in so many weird ways… it’s sort of reminiscent of the weirdness of several other cities like Phoenix Arizona, and Los Angeles, and middle eastern cities with the migrant workers, but as with every city it’s also entirely it’s own.
But this is just context. Don’t let it distract from my point about how an entire industry full of attractive jobs that women want to work in, has been pushing away women due to systemic culture issues.
> If you're only hiring from one specific gender, you're most likely not hiring based on qualifications, or the qualifications you're hiring on include gender.
This assumes quotas are better than what we already have in place, which is equality of opportunity, not of outcome. That assumption is exactly what is being debated here.
You clearly are a male, is my bet. I happen to have a Romanian female roommate (we do not live in Romania) and this is not at all the picture she is painting. I’m not saying Romania is particularly bad. But equality of opportunity is still very far away.
To add some factual information: https://eige.europa.eu/gender-equality-index/2021/country/RO
But that's actually very likely to happen if gender discrimination is mandated by law.
Don't pretend people in charge of financial decisions are completely rational. They quite clearly are not.
There's nothing far-fetched about they idea that they hire people who look the part, rather than people who have been objectively tested to have the best skills.
Please apply quotas in hospitals too so that we get 50% of men who are acting as nurses, by all means. And let's also make sure that women are adequately represented at 50% for construction work and car mechanics.
If you want to be silly, we can be two.
I do understand the worries about recruiting under qualified personnel due to diversity laws but overall, I support this kinds of laws. There is an objective over representation of man in management and higher management position. We know that people tend to recruit people they "fit" with. Recrutement is incredibly biased. This tend to lead to men recruiting more men and women recruiting more women. In a man dominated field, like higher management, it means that it is very hard for a woman to enter the field, this lead to less woman having experiences in this field which create a vicious circle. This kinds of laws might indeed lead to some less optimal recrutement in the short term, but I would argue that it is better in the long term because it allows to enlarge the worker pool and allow for more diverse profile to get the experience to be a better worker.
Also, maybe it is more cynical of me, but I have seen higher up recrutement in many companies. The actual worker skill is just one of the factor at play, and sometimes it is far from being the biggest factor. We are already doing sub-optimal recrutement right now, we just choose the criteria ...
I have a really hard time seeing this as a bad thing. Recruiting people you fit with is a requirement for you to be able to work with them. And there are already laws in place that you can't define "fit with" as not being a woman, a person of color, etc.
Let people hire who they want (discrimination based on sex, race, religion, etc, not included) and if they don't hire optimally their company will be out-competed by another company who does.
Why all the mundane jobs are OK to be performed only (or mostly) by men?
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for more diversity in all jobs (as long as people meet the requirements). But more diversity in trash collectors is unlikely to result in more diversity in CEOs. The opposite is much more true.
You think more diversity in CEOs will result in more diversity for trash collectors?
Not being rhetorical, genuinely curious to the reasoning.
Sorry for being pessimistic and realistic here, but I honestly don't think that what you get when you mix a white man from an Ivy-league school, a black man from an Ivy-league school and a woman from an Ivy-league school, all from the same closed upper-class social circles, is in any significant way more "diverse" than if it had all white men from those same Ivy-league schools.
Hiring people (men/women/colored/gay/trans/whatever) from actual other social circles probably will though. That will provide real diversity.
But that's not what anyone is mandating or wants to shove down other people's throats.
Also keep in mind that lots of companies are already doing this, and have been for a while. Lots of companies today have much more diverse boards, in several dimensions, than they had 30 years ago.
People notice the unusually suboptimal but miss more subtle effects.
There's no reason at all to assume women would be less suitable for these jobs than men. And many companies have shown that a more diverse board is just as effective, if not more so. Limiting their hiring to a smaller pool means companies are holding themselves back.
If that was the goal, how about creating a more startup-friendly climate? Stop treating business like the enemy, stop burdening them with red tape and onerous regulation and you'll have more employers. The competition between them will ultimately offer more hiring opportunities, regardless of gender or race.
what a weird rationalization. So these companies purposefully hire someone they deem better for whatever reason and the EU decides for them that they are wrong. This has to go badly, the EU via a continent-wide policy does not in fact know better than the individual entrepreneur. To deny this is a wild theory to say the least. Also the hiring pool right now was: Everyone. Now the new mandated policy is actually limiting the pool in specific circumstances depending on who already works there. Weird how casually people choose to distort truth.
Quite the opposite. Read again what you quoted. These companies limit their hiring pool, and the EU tells them to broaden it. They will find better candidates that way. They'll be forced to look beyond their old-boys networks and immediate surroundings.
> Also the hiring pool right now was: Everyone.
Sorry, but that is incredibly naive.
> It’s also the kind of thing that quietly improves economic efficiency by X% per year by expanding the workforce.
How does this law do that? You can keep 100% one gender if for some weird reason that's who is best.
> Companies with a lower share will be required to make appointments on the basis of a comparative analysis of the qualification of candidates by applying clear, gender-neutral and unambiguous criteria and to ensure that applicants are assessed objectively based on their individual merits, irrespective of gender.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/1_1_200090_dir...
HR and DEI (ironically) are almost 99% female and wield almost absolute power over the corporation. When will we have proper gender-representation there?
First off, it doesn't specify how biological men temporarily identifying as female during the hiring process are to be treated, which seems like an obvious loophole to me.
Second, the actual resolution says: "Where two candidates of different sexes are equally qualified, preference shall be given to the candidate of the underrepresented sex" and that "equally qualified" is another huge loophole. The average male candidate will have a lot more experience, simply because it's been a male-dominated field.
Thirdly, it is up to the member states to come up with appropriate punishment for failing to meet this and "could include fines" doesn't sound that strict to me.
That is a discussion of gender, not sex.
Identity quotas do little but foster distrust of the members of the assisted category. How does this even work as more and more peoples' gender identities deviate from the classical male and female? Does a non-binary person count toward the quota? Do they count only if they were assigned female at birth? Can executives change their legal gender to manipulate their stats? Are companies similarly required to have at least 33% males on their boards? How does telling a company who they must hire, as opposed to who they're not allowed to discriminate against, not violate the right of freedom of association?
This is a whole damn mess.
Only for a while. After a while it will become normal and the distrust will fall away.
And what else do you propose? Because we've tried doing nothing for decades and the results aren't great.
Really? What do you base this on? From my understanding of race-based affirmative action in the United States, that distrust hasn't gone away after many, many decades. I've heard African-Americans complain it's more difficult to be taken seriously when quotas are in place, but it's hard to say how common that experience is.
- the last 4 senior directors of my department were all females, the last 2 were fired for incompetence, the previous 2 moved out with different golden parachutes (one in an extended maternity leave of several years, one in retirement)
- we are no longer allowed to do technical interviews in IT with very few exceptions for key positions. The reason: the ratio of people passing tech interviews were ~ 10:1 male to female, not enough to hire 60% women (that was the quota for new hires)
- we are losing Application Managers at rapid fire. They either leave the company, get fired or move to other functions (HR, sales). They are all females, only a few developers are males.
- the last 2 cafeteria managers were promoted to IT directors (Facility Management is technically part of IT function for some historical reason). Both females.
Why do you say that? The proportion of female executives is increasing at a phenomenal rate. Look at, for instance, the number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500. In 1998 it was one. In 2008 it was twelve. In 2019 it was thirty-three.
I can imagine we could arrive at "gender for quota purposes", where someone may declare themselves as female, but for quota purpose they'll still be regarded as male.
Agreed.
> How does this even work as more and more peoples' gender identities deviate from the classical male and female?
Well. Colour me plain, but I don’t think allowing people to select a gender disparate from their biology is useful, nor is going to help in this regard.
Kids these are getting more confused than ever before, because we as adults are afraid to draw clear lines and put up simple, reliable structures they can relate to.
Being handwavey about something as fundamental as gender is doing our kids a gross disservice.
Also, since this is a Directive it just tells member nations governments to do it right? If it did it itself, it would be a Regulation. Like MiFID (told nations to do X) vs MIFIR (did it at the EU level directly). Similar to a US "unfunded mandate".
Most famous was Finnish Labor Minister, who was on board of a company hiring "temporary workers" permanently, thus bypassing labor laws.
When asked, she basically said "I was there for coffee and pastries, I was not responsible for their day-to-day operations".
See, a policy can have the intended effect on society as a whole even if there are plenty of anecdotes about situations where it doesn't. So the existence of such cases as your Finnish Labor Minister doesn't mean the policy doesn't work in the long run. To answer that, you need data.
My university is growing into having a more balanced faculty mainly because it is now seeing an increasing number of female candidates. This is a result of the study (economics and finance) becoming more popular in the past two decades with women, and we are seeing the results only now. There will always be lagged effects in this.
Granted, there are quotas in place too.
* They say they have good and relevant studies about this, but I never bothered to dig.
Well, there is some alternative of course, because a lot of companies and organisations already do meet these quotas. But what about those that don't? What about those that steadfastly refuse? Allow them to continue their gender discrimination (technically illegal, but easily excused)? Or require them more strongly to change?
Takes a little longer but in the end you have a much healthier economy.
[1] Not saying over-regulation isn't a problem, merely not my main concern.
I find it somewhat insulting I even have to argue for this - this move of power further away is a change. It should be justified, instead of happening by default, while the former status quo of sovereign nations has to argue for its continued existence.
However, if you believe this, you must equally believe that growing a single nation's population from 10M to 500M has the exact same problems. So if you were from Belgium and it grew to 500M, you'd have to support a move to partition Belgium into 50 separate nations, for the same reason you're against the EU. Right?
Such as how the British empire partitioned into the US, Canada, Australia.., or how China and Japan became distinct countries despite a common origin? Yes. A shared identity can support a larger country (the inverse can be seen in the breakup of Yugoslavia), but not without limit.
> I buy that smaller democracies could work better in many ways
It's not just about size. It's about the simple and intuitively obvious idea that it matters who chooses your rulers. I find it both fascinating and frightening that people have been so trained into ignoring their instincts (evolved through millions of years of inter-group competition, but now casually dismissed as "irrational"), that this basic notion now needs arguing.
[1] A small correction: I am not against the EU - the opposite, I am strongly in favor of it, for the simple pragmatic reasons that it safeguards peace among the member states, and because the relatively small European countries would otherwise be picked off individually by larger geopolitical rivals. What I am against is the expansion of EU law into areas of law and life that can be perfectly adequately addressed by individual states themselves.
How this fails is difficult to arrive at through theory. "Fortunately" we have examples from practice: Tibetan, Uyghur, and Hong Kong voters in China, Kurdish voters in Turkey, Kashmir voters in India [1], or Ukrainian voters under the Soviet union, to name a few.
People don't behave as atomic individuals, but as members of groups.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...
Because if you disagree with the law or want to change it, it’s a lot easier to go over to your neighbors house than it is to travel to Brussels. That’s the entire point of small / local government.
My vote is diluted with 60mil others. Does diluting it with 500m others in the eu actually cost me any say? I think not in practical terms...
And nations might exist. But that doesn't have much to do with governments these days. I like in the UK, 4 countries (plus other bits)under one government. A whole bunch of different nations under those countries. I have a lot more in common with people in other big cities like (say) Paris or Berlin since I am from London. I have very little in common with someone from the Welsh valleys or the rural england. Yet we're all under the same UK government.
The point here is that moving power from Westminster to Brussels has no real effect on my representation. Nor does it harm "common interest". Both of those are basically gone when you have more than 100 people in your sovereign entity.
Adenauer and de Gaulle must be turning in their grave seeing the current generation of European leaders destroying everything generations of hardworking Europeans have built up in record speed.
Any company not meeting quotas could simply have half the men start identifying as women.
Like if women mostly get smaller salary for same work (as media claim), everyone would jump and hire them over man because its more efficient lol
If you support free market companies, you should not tell them how to hire (put quotas like the one now mandated in the EU).
A govt can put quotas on it's own organizations. Sure. No problem there, as it is not a market-force company to begin with.
Next up the C-family invents some new Cs (CWO, CQO, CJO, CYO) and puts some women on it just so the CTO/CFO/CEO can be men. In Nigeria foreign companies have to hire locals: they sit all day on "the locals bench" waiting for their shift to be over. I wait for this to happen on EU company boards with women.
Great move EU! /s