8 ms·

Are gender quotas good for business?

19 points by known 8y ago

adiusmus 8y ago
Last time I looked, “gender” had been redefined to include many more than just two genders according to various universities. Multiple countries are likely to legislate in extra genders. So mandating one logically requires mandating all of them eventually. Just mandating sex and racial attributes alone will cause significant board changes. Interesting times ahead. The market will have fun sorting out the profitability of these changes in due time.
m1el 8y ago
No. This is mathematical nonsense. Let's say there's a fitness function for each candidate in a candidate pool. If you filter candidates by any criteria, the expectation of fitness function will be less or equal to expectation before filtering.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "This is mathematical nonsense." Board members might be the least likely of all people related to the company to have the right credentials. It's networks, power, relationships. Not usually talent. Though I'm totally against board quotas, it's very easy to see how women are locked out of this game. Far, far more so than for normal roles within an organization.
  - dsajames 8y ago
    Not even close. Networks and relationships can be important. It's the friends of low level managers who get hired who sometimes have the least credentials.
- the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
  Humans are not numbers. If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company.
  - m1el 8y ago
    There are plenty of numbers associated with humans in workforce. For example, their salary. > If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company. I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions. Then you haven't looked very hard. There are even programs with financial incentives, e.g. http://www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/new-bursary-introduced-by-coventry-university-to-increase-number-of-male-nurses/159398/ http://www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/new-bursary-introduce...
      - repolfx 8y ago
        That story seems to come up a lot in these discussions. IIRC it appeared in a prior HN discussion of the same thing. The bursary in question is only £3,000 which is nothing. And the total fund is only £30,000 - so enough for 10 nurses. This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeting.
        icebraining 8y ago
        This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeting. Of course, because no such jobs exist from which men are mostly absent. You can't expect a response of the same size when the problem is nowhere near the same size.
        repolfx 8y ago
        You're changing the subject. The original poster's point was that there isn't any real advocacy towards the benefit of men - in other words, that "diversity" doesn't mean diversity, it means benefits for women. You responded with an article about a sum of money so trivial it would cover 10 men for perhaps a couple of months depending on where they live. If that's the best you can find, this doesn't really disprove his point.
- j16sdiz 8y ago
  But it help reduce needless lawsuit, which cost lots of time money and mindpower
- pvg 8y ago
  What is the fitness function currently in use to select board members?
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  With respect, I think what you just wrote is statistical nonsense. If your ultimate selection from a pool is heavily biased towards an irrelevant fact (gender) then countering that bias can lead to a better selection.
  - m1el 8y ago
    A better solution would be to do gender-blind hiring, not gender quotas.
    - ChrisSD 8y ago
      I was only responding to the suggestion that quotas are "mathematical nonsence". I don't know if they are the best solution or not.
    - kraigie 8y ago
      This would also account for transgender and intersex individuals too. Why shouldn't the right person be hired just because they have both sets of genitalia? How does that fit in to the quota system?
  - AnIdiot 8y ago
    That's true. But consider that in some majors such as software engineering there are 5 times as many men as women. If you try to hire women, your pool will be so much smaller you'll almost certainly choose worse candidates.
- CositaS 8y ago
  One problem with this reasoning is that it assumes one can assign a fitness function to each single employee in isolation, independent of their different roles and how they relate to each other.
- icebraining 8y ago
  How are you supposed to choose a candidate without filtering by any criteria?
  - m1el 8y ago
    The statement is true for all possible criteria.
- notahacker 8y ago
  The counter argument is that in practice, the true fitness function is only very roughly approximated by the selection heuristics used. And if - consciously or otherwise - $ismale happens to be weighted positively in the selection heuristic (more so than any positive effect maleness might actually have on their performance in the job), a quota which artificially inflates the number of females might actually go some way towards redressing that mismatch. Obviously this is considerably more likely to actually be the case in some businesses and industries than others.
- sago 8y ago
  What very confident nonsense! Individual fitness is not independent, let alone group fitness. And without independence you are just plain wrong. Sociology dressed up as a priori mathematics is rarely credible. Even worse if the math simply isn't correct.
  - m1el 8y ago
    > Individual fitness is not independent, let alone group fitness. And without independence you are just plain wrong. Who said that fitness in my description cannot include group fitness? The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce?
    - sago 8y ago
      > Who said that fitness in my description cannot include group fitness? I did. Because doing so contradicts your conclusion. Though I also said it is not necessary. Lack of independence alone makes you wrong. > The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce? Which same argument? The argument you made was about filtering lowering fitness.
      - m1el 8y ago
        > I did. Because doing so contradicts your conclusion. Going for the conclusion instead of the argument. You can't demonstrate where my reasoning is wrong, but saying that the conclusion is wrong. Congratulations, you're an ideologue.
        sago 8y ago
        > You can't demonstrate where my reasoning is wrong I specifically said why your argument was wrong. Without independence it is simply untrue. > Congratulations, you're an ideologue. I am. Mathematical flummery triggers me.
- lucozade 8y ago
  That's meaningless. If it were true then it would apply to selection by any attribute e.g. experience or qualification. The only way you'd get around that would be to include the attribute in the fitness function. You're then back to deciding what effect gender has on the fitness function i.e is gender selection good for the business?
- AnIdiot 8y ago
  Of course that assumes you can select the best candidate from a pool. Feminists argue that there is bias that prevents this. However studies on the gender pay gap reveal that there's very little bias and most differences can be explained by education, experience, job choice, hours worked, etc. More recently psychological differences between men and women have been shown to contribute to the pay gap.[1] My opinion is that affirmative action is naive and that society is better off to strengthen meritocratic hiring. Removing names from CVs may help women slightly but there's no reason to believe that men and women would achieve the same outcomes given equal opportunity. [1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep/gpy021/5046671 https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep...
  - ncphillips 8y ago
    Why assume technical skill in one area is the only variable in determining merit?
    - AnIdiot 8y ago
      I didn't do that. Merit is meant broadly to encompass many things.
- ncphillips 8y ago
  Humans aren’t cogs in a machine. Our value to an organization is not absolute and based solely on our technical proficiency in a single area. An individuals value is relative to the team. Adding another programmer to my company would be less valuable then adding a salesperson. Similarly, adding people with diverse perspectives is more valuable then hiring only people that grew up in the same city, at our income level, with same gender, ethnicity, age, etc. An assumption I suspect you’re making is that we already have THE correct fitness function. They aren’t just trying to filter the fitness function, they’re trying to improve it.
  - m1el 8y ago
    > Humans aren’t cogs in a machine. Humans aren't gender either. Doing gender quotas reduces candidates to their gender. > An assumption I suspect you’re making is that we already have THE correct fitness function. > They aren’t just trying to filter the fitness function, they’re trying to improve it. Ohh, no. My assumption is that current hiring is not perfect, but gender quotas are waaay worse. Gender-blind hiring would be better than both.
chungy 8y ago
No-paywall link: http://archive.today/mTZp3 http://archive.today/mTZp3
- mirimir 8y ago
  Paywall? I see no paywall.
  - tomhoward 8y ago
    Some people do, evidently. There's a limit on articles per month, at least in some regions, and maybe other restrictions in different regions.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Huh. I'm using a VPN exit in the US, to avoid GDPR bullshit.
    - AviationAtom 8y ago
      Obligatory interesting read on the science that goes into paywalls: http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-wall-street-journal-has-built-a-paywall-that-bends-to-the-individual-reader/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-... Side-note: WSJ is the only news source I feel is worthy of purchasing, as a student subscription is only $4/mo
  - desdiv 8y ago
    The Economist allows two free articles per week for non-registered users[0]. You are not seeing the paywall likely because you have not hit that limit yet. [0] https://www.economist.com/help/paywall https://www.economist.com/help/paywall
michaelgv 8y ago
I’ve always said to hire the people who can do what we need as a business, regardless of their gender
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  Which is a noble sentiment but simply doesn't happen in the business world (or in many other places). So the hard question is, how do you effectively encourage business to choose the best people regardless of gender? Some have tried blind interviews but these are very hard to do properly and effectively. A 40% quota is another way to push business into looking beyond gender.
  - lemagedurage 8y ago
    Then a minority-only company should be both cheaper and more productive, by supply and demand.
    - tdb7893 8y ago
      I think there are three potential issues with this, firstly, minorities are being discriminated against and paid less in the scenario so it wouldn't be desirable on that metric. Secondly competition in many markets isn't robust enough to have an even playing field if you wanted to start a new company with all "minorities". Third, if the company was all "minorities" you would be drastically reducing the hiring pool so even with good competition it would be hard to hire well (which could wipe out any minor efficiency gains).
  - AnIdiot 8y ago
    > Which is a noble sentiment but simply doesn't happen in the business world (or in many other places). On the contrary, all the evidence I've seen points to discrimination being a very small part of the gender pay gap. The problem is that men and women are different.[1] So it becomes very difficult to even measure if women are being discriminated against much or are just different to men. [1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep/gpy021/5046671 https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep...
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afwjaeif 8y ago
That's not the goal of gender quotas. (With this I don't mean that I support them.)
lnsru 8y ago
I remember 2nd term math lecture. There were students from different engineering disciplines. There were 600 students with ~15 females among them. Some years later situation is no different: ~100 people on the floor, 5 females here: 2 secretaries, 2 export specialists and senior researcher with PhD degree. Where find suitable candidates for these quotes when women avoid technical stuff at university level?
- kypro 8y ago
  Seems the answer to this more and more is to discourage men and encourage women. I wonder personally if men and women just have different interests. I worry that we're perhaps pushing men and women into jobs they're unhappy with than if just left to their own devices?
- rawfan 8y ago
  I read a study last year, that at least in the US actual STEM graduates are more and more balanced between male and female with females having better degrees. When they looked at the jobs the graduates got it was not at all representing of the quota that graduated. E.g. 30% of graduates were female but only 3% of accepted job applicants (nmumbers are made up, just to demonstrate the point of the study).
  - belorn 8y ago
    There was a similar government study done on teacher graduates here in Sweden and it got the same results, through genders were reversed. The conclusion they had is that by drop rates and gender segregation get amplified in every step between first year student to long term employee.
codingdave 8y ago
Before the comments go too far down a rabbit-hole, I encourage everyone to respond to the article instead of answering the question in the headline. The article is talking about boards, not employees, and states that there is no causation proven, despite some correlations found in Europe after they required quotas on company boards.
- repolfx 8y ago
  I was surprised and encouraged to see that the Economist actually cited the papers they were discussing - this seems new, and progress. Way too often, news outlets refer to "studies" or "a study" without making it easy to find out what studies were actually cited. I'll queue up the studies to read later, but I am skeptical. I've looked at studies that claimed quotas for women in boards = more profit before and without fail, they weren't controlling for confounding variables. Usually it was as simple as "companies in Norway do better than companies in Saudi Arabia, look at the gender differences!" which is of course totally invalid. Unfortunately the way governments have forced women into boards via legislative fiat means it's very hard to control for the pre-existing economic state of countries: you'd need to compare two economies that were basically the same except for gender differences, or compare the same country before and after and then try to control for all other changes in the world economy, which is very hard. The article is quite balanced about the limits of these studies though. Which is good.
- belorn 8y ago
  Shouldn't we ask why this is only about boards and not employees, and why state and governments that issue laws like this don't lead by example and mandate gender diversity on themselves. Why is the scope so narrow defined as to exclude any criticism on how state and government operate as the largest group of organizations with paid employees. Seems very convenient from the position of power that government and states enjoy.
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  I can't see an article, only a paywall.
onion2k 8y ago
I've never worked in a company that hires based on quotas, but I have found organically diverse teams seem to make better products. Having people who are able to see that a product doesn't work for them means features don't get added/dropped as easily. I've never made software as accessible as the code I wrote with a disabled person on the team, or as friendly as when 50% of the team were women. I suspect the reason is that building software that works for users is about asking the right questions, and more diverse groups ask more diverse questions. That doesn't mean an all-male or all-white team can't ask the right questions but in my limited experience it seems they don't.
- yorwba 8y ago
  If you only discover that a product doesn't work for some of your users because one of those users is on the development team, then you probably need a better way to get user feedback. You can hire developers of diverse gender, ethnicity and age, but those are most likely still very similar along other dimensions like income, location and ability to deal with complex systems. Rather than trying to hire more diverse developers, you might be better off paying someone to find out what your actual users think about your product.
deleted 8y ago
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enterx 8y ago
This is an implementation of pure form of gender type discrimination. Employee should be of a neutral color, creed or gender.
dazzawazza 8y ago
I love the idea that there is a scarcity of "golden skirts" that make this too hard. It presupposes that the current male members are all "golden trousers", the cream of the crop, the best of the best. I've met many many board members over the years and they are often very unimpressive. I'm sure we can find some equally unimpressive women to replace them! Better still anyone with even a modicum of talent would do!
- dijit 8y ago
  I have a different take; If we suppose a meritocratic hiring process is the best way forward, and that girls are equal to boys (and only considering those genders (if we surmise that there are more)): Then, if we take the stance that there has been historic bias against girls then it leads to them not having the experience to be in the same category as boys. It's not about "all guys being good", it's that historically girls have not necessarily had the same opportunity to gain experience and learn. (Except for the most dedicated or those who went to shops that did not practice any kind of discrimination). This leads to a small pot of experienced girls but a large pot of experienced guys. If you hire "the most qualified candidate" you'll end up with mostly guys because guys have had the opportunity to work unfettered, and if you have a quota to hire more women and want someone experienced, then you're competing against many in a small pool of experienced women. -- EDIT: I should add that I haven't read the article; but the above is a topic I think about often in the context of discrimination and its role in the future. I don't believe in hiring quotas, I believe the problem should be fixed at its root- But this is not the current topic- and I would kindly ask those who downvote me to argue their points if they wish me to be more understanding.
  - kraigie 8y ago
    There are much better options than quotas, but that doesn't make them inherently bad. The question is are they an improvement over the current system or not? However they should be at most a stop gap solution, a truly diverse system would make it impossible to know the race and gender of your workers, so implicit basis would be impossible. Or maybe we could train a neural net to have no implicit bias.
- 8y ago
blackbrokkoli 8y ago
Is there an idea where to go with these quotas in the long run? I mean as I understand it, the numbers are just pulled out of thin air. So we have a company, following the however implemented rules and has, let's say has 60% of group A and 40% of B on their board. But maybe the ideal quota is 70% / 30%. Or 10% / 90%. Or the standard deviation is so high that there is a high probability that everything from 20 % / 80% to 70% / 30% was achieved without any bias but just because of differntly distributed skillsets. Point is, by setting a quota like that without any research, you're gonna end up with one group having it statistically harder to get their well deserved board place as the other, which is the problem that we're trying to fight in the first place, right? And now it is locked in stone, because abandoning the quota would have big political implications. I understand that it is an attractive short term fix and that we might not have good other solutions, but where are we going with it?
- repolfx 8y ago
  No, the "problem" they're trying to solve is that women want more power and money. Have you noticed how pushes for "diversity" always ignore jobs that are dangerous and unskilled? Brickies are 95%+ male, you don't read about the importance of setting quotas for female bricklayers do you? Primary age teaching is essentially a female only job at this point, we don't see governments imposing quotas for male teachers. Board seats and other senior management roles however get enormous pressure from feminist campaign groups - because that's where the money and power is.
gamesbrainiac 8y ago
This is truly unfortunate, I can understand giving incentives to bring more women into upper management, but a quota is somewhat punitive in nature. The main objective of the article it seems is to allay fears that more women in boardrooms would not be a bad thing. I honestly don't care for such studies. What I do care about is the fact that more and more businesses are going to be told _how_ to hire. This is a terrible idea. Furthermore, the article goes on to say that there have been no changes in the profits reported and that the companies across Europe have seen no change whatsoever. This might say much more about boards and their lack of effect more than anything else. What I see happening is that due to the increased regulation on how businesses operate, more of them will not go public and thus prevent a lot of the population will miss out on good investment opportunities.
insickness 8y ago
I don't see what's stopping a male board member from identifying as a woman. In Canada, a man identified as a woman to save $1100 per year on car insurance. He did have to change his gender on his birth certificate. https://debatereport.com/canada/alberta-man-identifies-as-woman-and-saves-1094-on-car-insurance/6564 https://debatereport.com/canada/alberta-man-identifies-as-wo...
Const-me 8y ago
No it’s not good for business. And it’s not bad, either. I don’t think anything measurable will happen. Men and women are different in many qualities, but doing business in modern relatively civilized society is not one of them. Both genders do just fine.

19 points by known 8y ago

Last time I looked, “gender” had been redefined to include many more than just two genders according to various universities. Multiple countries are likely to legislate in extra genders. So mandating one logically requires mandating all of them eventually. Just mandating sex and racial attributes alone will cause significant board changes. Interesting times ahead. The market will have fun sorting out the profitability of these changes in due time.

m1el 8y ago

No. This is mathematical nonsense. Let's say there's a fitness function for each candidate in a candidate pool. If you filter candidates by any criteria, the expectation of fitness function will be less or equal to expectation before filtering.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"This is mathematical nonsense." Board members might be the least likely of all people related to the company to have the right credentials. It's networks, power, relationships. Not usually talent. Though I'm totally against board quotas, it's very easy to see how women are locked out of this game. Far, far more so than for normal roles within an organization.
- dsajames 8y ago
  Not even close. Networks and relationships can be important. It's the friends of low level managers who get hired who sometimes have the least credentials.
the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
Humans are not numbers. If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company.
- m1el 8y ago
  There are plenty of numbers associated with humans in workforce. For example, their salary. > If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company. I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions. Then you haven't looked very hard. There are even programs with financial incentives, e.g. http://www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/new-bursary-introduced-by-coventry-university-to-increase-number-of-male-nurses/159398/ http://www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/new-bursary-introduce...
    - repolfx 8y ago
      That story seems to come up a lot in these discussions. IIRC it appeared in a prior HN discussion of the same thing. The bursary in question is only £3,000 which is nothing. And the total fund is only £30,000 - so enough for 10 nurses. This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeting.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeting. Of course, because no such jobs exist from which men are mostly absent. You can't expect a response of the same size when the problem is nowhere near the same size.
        repolfx 8y ago
        You're changing the subject. The original poster's point was that there isn't any real advocacy towards the benefit of men - in other words, that "diversity" doesn't mean diversity, it means benefits for women. You responded with an article about a sum of money so trivial it would cover 10 men for perhaps a couple of months depending on where they live. If that's the best you can find, this doesn't really disprove his point.
j16sdiz 8y ago
But it help reduce needless lawsuit, which cost lots of time money and mindpower
pvg 8y ago
What is the fitness function currently in use to select board members?
ChrisSD 8y ago
With respect, I think what you just wrote is statistical nonsense. If your ultimate selection from a pool is heavily biased towards an irrelevant fact (gender) then countering that bias can lead to a better selection.
- m1el 8y ago
  A better solution would be to do gender-blind hiring, not gender quotas.
  - ChrisSD 8y ago
    I was only responding to the suggestion that quotas are "mathematical nonsence". I don't know if they are the best solution or not.
  - kraigie 8y ago
    This would also account for transgender and intersex individuals too. Why shouldn't the right person be hired just because they have both sets of genitalia? How does that fit in to the quota system?
- AnIdiot 8y ago
  That's true. But consider that in some majors such as software engineering there are 5 times as many men as women. If you try to hire women, your pool will be so much smaller you'll almost certainly choose worse candidates.
CositaS 8y ago
One problem with this reasoning is that it assumes one can assign a fitness function to each single employee in isolation, independent of their different roles and how they relate to each other.
icebraining 8y ago
How are you supposed to choose a candidate without filtering by any criteria?
- m1el 8y ago
  The statement is true for all possible criteria.
notahacker 8y ago
The counter argument is that in practice, the true fitness function is only very roughly approximated by the selection heuristics used. And if - consciously or otherwise - $ismale happens to be weighted positively in the selection heuristic (more so than any positive effect maleness might actually have on their performance in the job), a quota which artificially inflates the number of females might actually go some way towards redressing that mismatch. Obviously this is considerably more likely to actually be the case in some businesses and industries than others.
sago 8y ago
What very confident nonsense! Individual fitness is not independent, let alone group fitness. And without independence you are just plain wrong. Sociology dressed up as a priori mathematics is rarely credible. Even worse if the math simply isn't correct.
- m1el 8y ago
  > Individual fitness is not independent, let alone group fitness. And without independence you are just plain wrong. Who said that fitness in my description cannot include group fitness? The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce?
  - sago 8y ago
    > Who said that fitness in my description cannot include group fitness? I did. Because doing so contradicts your conclusion. Though I also said it is not necessary. Lack of independence alone makes you wrong. > The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce? Which same argument? The argument you made was about filtering lowering fitness.
    - m1el 8y ago
      > I did. Because doing so contradicts your conclusion. Going for the conclusion instead of the argument. You can't demonstrate where my reasoning is wrong, but saying that the conclusion is wrong. Congratulations, you're an ideologue.
      - sago 8y ago
        > You can't demonstrate where my reasoning is wrong I specifically said why your argument was wrong. Without independence it is simply untrue. > Congratulations, you're an ideologue. I am. Mathematical flummery triggers me.
lucozade 8y ago
That's meaningless. If it were true then it would apply to selection by any attribute e.g. experience or qualification. The only way you'd get around that would be to include the attribute in the fitness function. You're then back to deciding what effect gender has on the fitness function i.e is gender selection good for the business?
AnIdiot 8y ago
Of course that assumes you can select the best candidate from a pool. Feminists argue that there is bias that prevents this. However studies on the gender pay gap reveal that there's very little bias and most differences can be explained by education, experience, job choice, hours worked, etc. More recently psychological differences between men and women have been shown to contribute to the pay gap.[1] My opinion is that affirmative action is naive and that society is better off to strengthen meritocratic hiring. Removing names from CVs may help women slightly but there's no reason to believe that men and women would achieve the same outcomes given equal opportunity. [1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep/gpy021/5046671 https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep...
- ncphillips 8y ago
  Why assume technical skill in one area is the only variable in determining merit?
  - AnIdiot 8y ago
    I didn't do that. Merit is meant broadly to encompass many things.
ncphillips 8y ago
Humans aren’t cogs in a machine. Our value to an organization is not absolute and based solely on our technical proficiency in a single area. An individuals value is relative to the team. Adding another programmer to my company would be less valuable then adding a salesperson. Similarly, adding people with diverse perspectives is more valuable then hiring only people that grew up in the same city, at our income level, with same gender, ethnicity, age, etc. An assumption I suspect you’re making is that we already have THE correct fitness function. They aren’t just trying to filter the fitness function, they’re trying to improve it.
- m1el 8y ago
  > Humans aren’t cogs in a machine. Humans aren't gender either. Doing gender quotas reduces candidates to their gender. > An assumption I suspect you’re making is that we already have THE correct fitness function. > They aren’t just trying to filter the fitness function, they’re trying to improve it. Ohh, no. My assumption is that current hiring is not perfect, but gender quotas are waaay worse. Gender-blind hiring would be better than both.

chungy 8y ago

No-paywall link: http://archive.today/mTZp3 http://archive.today/mTZp3

mirimir 8y ago
Paywall? I see no paywall.
- tomhoward 8y ago
  Some people do, evidently. There's a limit on articles per month, at least in some regions, and maybe other restrictions in different regions.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Huh. I'm using a VPN exit in the US, to avoid GDPR bullshit.
  - AviationAtom 8y ago
    Obligatory interesting read on the science that goes into paywalls: http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-wall-street-journal-has-built-a-paywall-that-bends-to-the-individual-reader/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-... Side-note: WSJ is the only news source I feel is worthy of purchasing, as a student subscription is only $4/mo
- desdiv 8y ago
  The Economist allows two free articles per week for non-registered users[0]. You are not seeing the paywall likely because you have not hit that limit yet. [0] https://www.economist.com/help/paywall https://www.economist.com/help/paywall

michaelgv 8y ago

I’ve always said to hire the people who can do what we need as a business, regardless of their gender

ChrisSD 8y ago
Which is a noble sentiment but simply doesn't happen in the business world (or in many other places). So the hard question is, how do you effectively encourage business to choose the best people regardless of gender? Some have tried blind interviews but these are very hard to do properly and effectively. A 40% quota is another way to push business into looking beyond gender.
- lemagedurage 8y ago
  Then a minority-only company should be both cheaper and more productive, by supply and demand.
  - tdb7893 8y ago
    I think there are three potential issues with this, firstly, minorities are being discriminated against and paid less in the scenario so it wouldn't be desirable on that metric. Secondly competition in many markets isn't robust enough to have an even playing field if you wanted to start a new company with all "minorities". Third, if the company was all "minorities" you would be drastically reducing the hiring pool so even with good competition it would be hard to hire well (which could wipe out any minor efficiency gains).
- AnIdiot 8y ago
  > Which is a noble sentiment but simply doesn't happen in the business world (or in many other places). On the contrary, all the evidence I've seen points to discrimination being a very small part of the gender pay gap. The problem is that men and women are different.[1] So it becomes very difficult to even measure if women are being discriminated against much or are just different to men. [1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep/gpy021/5046671 https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep...

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afwjaeif 8y ago

That's not the goal of gender quotas. (With this I don't mean that I support them.)

lnsru 8y ago

I remember 2nd term math lecture. There were students from different engineering disciplines. There were 600 students with ~15 females among them. Some years later situation is no different: ~100 people on the floor, 5 females here: 2 secretaries, 2 export specialists and senior researcher with PhD degree. Where find suitable candidates for these quotes when women avoid technical stuff at university level?

kypro 8y ago
Seems the answer to this more and more is to discourage men and encourage women. I wonder personally if men and women just have different interests. I worry that we're perhaps pushing men and women into jobs they're unhappy with than if just left to their own devices?
rawfan 8y ago
I read a study last year, that at least in the US actual STEM graduates are more and more balanced between male and female with females having better degrees. When they looked at the jobs the graduates got it was not at all representing of the quota that graduated. E.g. 30% of graduates were female but only 3% of accepted job applicants (nmumbers are made up, just to demonstrate the point of the study).
- belorn 8y ago
  There was a similar government study done on teacher graduates here in Sweden and it got the same results, through genders were reversed. The conclusion they had is that by drop rates and gender segregation get amplified in every step between first year student to long term employee.

codingdave 8y ago

Before the comments go too far down a rabbit-hole, I encourage everyone to respond to the article instead of answering the question in the headline. The article is talking about boards, not employees, and states that there is no causation proven, despite some correlations found in Europe after they required quotas on company boards.

repolfx 8y ago
I was surprised and encouraged to see that the Economist actually cited the papers they were discussing - this seems new, and progress. Way too often, news outlets refer to "studies" or "a study" without making it easy to find out what studies were actually cited. I'll queue up the studies to read later, but I am skeptical. I've looked at studies that claimed quotas for women in boards = more profit before and without fail, they weren't controlling for confounding variables. Usually it was as simple as "companies in Norway do better than companies in Saudi Arabia, look at the gender differences!" which is of course totally invalid. Unfortunately the way governments have forced women into boards via legislative fiat means it's very hard to control for the pre-existing economic state of countries: you'd need to compare two economies that were basically the same except for gender differences, or compare the same country before and after and then try to control for all other changes in the world economy, which is very hard. The article is quite balanced about the limits of these studies though. Which is good.
belorn 8y ago
Shouldn't we ask why this is only about boards and not employees, and why state and governments that issue laws like this don't lead by example and mandate gender diversity on themselves. Why is the scope so narrow defined as to exclude any criticism on how state and government operate as the largest group of organizations with paid employees. Seems very convenient from the position of power that government and states enjoy.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
I can't see an article, only a paywall.

onion2k 8y ago

I've never worked in a company that hires based on quotas, but I have found organically diverse teams seem to make better products. Having people who are able to see that a product doesn't work for them means features don't get added/dropped as easily. I've never made software as accessible as the code I wrote with a disabled person on the team, or as friendly as when 50% of the team were women. I suspect the reason is that building software that works for users is about asking the right questions, and more diverse groups ask more diverse questions. That doesn't mean an all-male or all-white team can't ask the right questions but in my limited experience it seems they don't.

yorwba 8y ago
If you only discover that a product doesn't work for some of your users because one of those users is on the development team, then you probably need a better way to get user feedback. You can hire developers of diverse gender, ethnicity and age, but those are most likely still very similar along other dimensions like income, location and ability to deal with complex systems. Rather than trying to hire more diverse developers, you might be better off paying someone to find out what your actual users think about your product.

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enterx 8y ago

This is an implementation of pure form of gender type discrimination. Employee should be of a neutral color, creed or gender.

dazzawazza 8y ago

I love the idea that there is a scarcity of "golden skirts" that make this too hard. It presupposes that the current male members are all "golden trousers", the cream of the crop, the best of the best. I've met many many board members over the years and they are often very unimpressive. I'm sure we can find some equally unimpressive women to replace them! Better still anyone with even a modicum of talent would do!

dijit 8y ago
I have a different take; If we suppose a meritocratic hiring process is the best way forward, and that girls are equal to boys (and only considering those genders (if we surmise that there are more)): Then, if we take the stance that there has been historic bias against girls then it leads to them not having the experience to be in the same category as boys. It's not about "all guys being good", it's that historically girls have not necessarily had the same opportunity to gain experience and learn. (Except for the most dedicated or those who went to shops that did not practice any kind of discrimination). This leads to a small pot of experienced girls but a large pot of experienced guys. If you hire "the most qualified candidate" you'll end up with mostly guys because guys have had the opportunity to work unfettered, and if you have a quota to hire more women and want someone experienced, then you're competing against many in a small pool of experienced women. -- EDIT: I should add that I haven't read the article; but the above is a topic I think about often in the context of discrimination and its role in the future. I don't believe in hiring quotas, I believe the problem should be fixed at its root- But this is not the current topic- and I would kindly ask those who downvote me to argue their points if they wish me to be more understanding.
- kraigie 8y ago
  There are much better options than quotas, but that doesn't make them inherently bad. The question is are they an improvement over the current system or not? However they should be at most a stop gap solution, a truly diverse system would make it impossible to know the race and gender of your workers, so implicit basis would be impossible. Or maybe we could train a neural net to have no implicit bias.
8y ago

blackbrokkoli 8y ago

Is there an idea where to go with these quotas in the long run? I mean as I understand it, the numbers are just pulled out of thin air. So we have a company, following the however implemented rules and has, let's say has 60% of group A and 40% of B on their board. But maybe the ideal quota is 70% / 30%. Or 10% / 90%. Or the standard deviation is so high that there is a high probability that everything from 20 % / 80% to 70% / 30% was achieved without any bias but just because of differntly distributed skillsets. Point is, by setting a quota like that without any research, you're gonna end up with one group having it statistically harder to get their well deserved board place as the other, which is the problem that we're trying to fight in the first place, right? And now it is locked in stone, because abandoning the quota would have big political implications. I understand that it is an attractive short term fix and that we might not have good other solutions, but where are we going with it?

repolfx 8y ago
No, the "problem" they're trying to solve is that women want more power and money. Have you noticed how pushes for "diversity" always ignore jobs that are dangerous and unskilled? Brickies are 95%+ male, you don't read about the importance of setting quotas for female bricklayers do you? Primary age teaching is essentially a female only job at this point, we don't see governments imposing quotas for male teachers. Board seats and other senior management roles however get enormous pressure from feminist campaign groups - because that's where the money and power is.

gamesbrainiac 8y ago

This is truly unfortunate, I can understand giving incentives to bring more women into upper management, but a quota is somewhat punitive in nature. The main objective of the article it seems is to allay fears that more women in boardrooms would not be a bad thing. I honestly don't care for such studies. What I do care about is the fact that more and more businesses are going to be told _how_ to hire. This is a terrible idea. Furthermore, the article goes on to say that there have been no changes in the profits reported and that the companies across Europe have seen no change whatsoever. This might say much more about boards and their lack of effect more than anything else. What I see happening is that due to the increased regulation on how businesses operate, more of them will not go public and thus prevent a lot of the population will miss out on good investment opportunities.

insickness 8y ago

I don't see what's stopping a male board member from identifying as a woman. In Canada, a man identified as a woman to save $1100 per year on car insurance. He did have to change his gender on his birth certificate. https://debatereport.com/canada/alberta-man-identifies-as-woman-and-saves-1094-on-car-insurance/6564 https://debatereport.com/canada/alberta-man-identifies-as-wo...

Const-me 8y ago

No it’s not good for business. And it’s not bad, either. I don’t think anything measurable will happen. Men and women are different in many qualities, but doing business in modern relatively civilized society is not one of them. Both genders do just fine.