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Comment by Uchikoma | Hacker News Reader

Not only cause and correlation but what's the cause?

Do companies with women on their board perform better, or do companies that perform better take women into their boards.

Do companies that have the mindset to take on less dept, have the mindset to encourage women to take board positions, or do companies with women in board positions get a mindset to take on less dept.

Do companies that perform better take on less dept or do companies that take on less dept perform better.

The article is inconclusive for me.

(I personally think women in director positions are a good thing because an all-men board obviously can't consist of the best people available)

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(I personally think women in director positions are a good thing because an all-men board obviously can't consist of the best people available)

I don't want to turn this into a flame war about gender, but this does not seem obvious to me. It's certainly not the case in other fields. For example, the best mathematicians are predominantly male. (No female has ever won the Fields Medal or Abel Prize.) The same goes for computer science (only two women have won the Turing Award).

I'm not saying there's no inertia or social dynamics involved, but publicly-traded companies have large incentives to select the best board members they can find. Considering these incentives, a massive imbalance would make sense if one gender was better at running public companies.

While it's not clear if this is gender specific or culture.

To be the devil's advocate (I do NOT seriously defend sexism) why does the cause matter if you are looking for the best person? If women are almost always better potters in Norway, and you must make pots in Norway, then it makes sense that you would hire a lot of women.

That does not imply that the best male mathematicians or computer scientists were male: it suggests the most widely-recognized such were. That's like saying the best writers are mostly European because that's where most of the Nobel prizes for literature have been awarded. By the time you have gotten to that prize you have gone through a large number of potentially-biased filters.

If men were better at running companies, companies that hired women would have worse performance, the opposite of what was observed. It is far more likely that men are in charge because they always have been and such decisions are made by humans with systematic cultural prejudices. In fact, such prejudice can explain gendered difference in advancement. For example, see http://www.west-info.eu/files/SSRN-id2018259.pdf about how men with stay-at-home wives denied women opportunities for promotion and saw companies that employed women as less successful than those that didn't.

I don't understand how an all-male board obviously implies not having the best people available. Doesn't that mean that for any group of any size of only males, there exists at least one woman that is better at at least one of their jobs?

I don't see how that's a given.

(I should have refreshed sooner, it appears I wasn't the only one to make this point)

I don't understand your last statement. Why is it obvious that an all-men board can't consist of the best people?

A merit-based company doesn't care about genitals, whereas a boys' club company cuts out 50% of potentially meritorious workers (though I agree the idea was poorly worded)

A board that must necessarily select only men may not be composed of the best people available, but a board that happens to consist only of men may, in fact, have the best people available...looking a posteriori at a group's gender composition is not very helpful.

though I agree the idea was poorly worded

>(I personally think women in director positions are a good thing because an all-men board obviously can't consist of the best people available)

Does that mean that education, social sciences, social care and healthcare suck because they obviously don't consist of the best people available?

Well, not necessarily suck, but aren't using the full potential of the population.

There are plenty of men who could be perfect social workers, or stay-at-home dads, but instead waste their potential, because "it's a woman's job" and "the man should bring money home".

I just can't subscribe to the notion that "god" is walking around with a measuring instrument and carefully distributing talents in a 50% manner.

Or that solely due to one's talents a person is obliged to "serve the society" in hers designated role.

Do I believe that diversity is good? Hell yeah!

Do I believe that enforcing mandatory quotas is the way to improve overall quality? Hell no.

If anything we should spend more resources on overall quality. And I am really afraid that this focus on females will cost us dearly. There is a lot of evidence that we are losing whole generations of boys. How is (not intentionally, mind you) making men feebler going to help society is beyond my comprehension.

Why did you assume I'm for mandatory quotas?

The only thing I'm saying is that a plenty of people get pushed by society into suboptimal life choices.

Mutiple research from various countries says that girls are as good at math/computer skills as boys, up to the graduation from high schools. After high school they don't choose science in universities though. Why could that be? If the distribution of talent is exactly the same in high school within boys & girls, I'd expect that they'd pick similar directions at universities.

If they don't, it means that some of them waste their talents.

I don't believe mandatory quotas are the solutions, I'm all against it. But I think we've got a problem, because we could have twice as many great programmers, and great scientists.

I did not assume that you are for mandatory quotas.

It was more of a general remark, since a lot of times the talk of gender equality is thinly veiled advocacy for mandatory gender quotas.

And I believe that (honest) gender equality advocates should be hell bent against mandatory quotas and not accepting them as "better state of affairs" or a "temporary compromise".

> It was more of a general remark, since a lot of times the talk of gender equality is thinly veiled advocacy for mandatory gender quotas.

Really? Honestly, the only people I see talking about gender quotas are the people who are fervently against them, which is why I suspect kolinko took your comment about gender quotas the way they did.

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