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California has a new law: No more all-male boards (2018)
- colejohnson66 8y agoWhile noble in its intentions, if flipping the roles is seen as discrimination (no all female boards), it’s discrimination.
- jeromebaek 8y agoNope, you're confusing the syntactic definition of discrimination with the semantic definition of discrimination.
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- maxander 8y agoI get what you’re trying to say, but I’m not sure there’s such a thing as the “syntactic definition” of a word.
- colejohnson66 8y agoNo. Reverse discrimination is just that: discrimination
- dragonwriter 8y agoAll law is discrimination. Some is impermissible discrimination, but the test for that isn't “would it be impermissible if reversed”, and not only because that would produce infinite regress with no answer, but because mirroring policy without mirroring social context does not result in mirror policies necessarily falling on the same side of the legal tests of impermissible discrimination.
- torstenvl 8y agoBut see Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/515/200 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/515/200
- dragonwriter 8y agoSure, the standard is the same in either direction.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI hope they'll not mind someone identifying as trans to get on a board. You get what you measure, and you can hack around all sorts of discrimination. Edit: To be clear, I do not support, encourage, or condone discrimination of any protected class. You should be able to discriminate by skill level, of course.
- jakelazaroff 8y agoYou know, for all the worry about people "identifying as trans in order to do X" it seems to happen very infrequently.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI'm not taking issue with it (ever, really, live your best life), especially when used to obviate quotas. I take issue with "good" discrimination efforts, never how someone identifies or their biological attributes.
- jakelazaroff 8y agoGotcha, I'm sorry I misinterpreted your position! I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but I am (genuinely!) curious as to how we can actively prevent "bad" discrimination without using "good" discrimination. Board seats are a zero-sum game, far more men have them than women, so how can we give more to women without taking some from men?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> so how can we give more to women without taking some from men? We don't, just like we don't have quotas for roles and say, "This role is being held open for a woman, person of color, or other non-white, non-male person". If it's an all male board, it's an all male board. If it's an all female board, same. You don't legislate discrimination because you feel like it's helpful. Equal opportunity, not equal outcome. No mandated quotas. If evidence is uncovered that discrimination is occurring (against any protected class), you pursue legal action against the corporation and its officers.
- jakelazaroff 8y agoThis is pretty easy to word neutrally: "No boards where every member has the same gender." Is this really a problem, though? Do we really expect a situation in which men are systemically prevented from being board members?
- FakeComments 8y agoHow about we just don’t pass sexist laws because we’ve somehow told ourselves that this particular instance of institutional sexism is okay? We’re already having enough trouble getting people to accept Title IX protects male students, after 40 years of females being the majority in student populations. I’m not nearly as optimistic about the outcome of intentional sexism as you.
- adamsea 8y agoIntentional sexism has worked quite well for the patriarchy.
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- jakelazaroff 8y agoI'm not sure we could enact any policies that don't look like institutionalized sexism, though. As the Parable of the Polygons [1] shows, merely removing bias from a system isn't enough to break down structures that are already in place. We need to actively de-bias. Board seats are a zero-sum game, so that means we have to take some seats from men to give to women. This is a good faith question! It doesn't seem to me that there's any real way to remove bias against women without adding bias against men, but I'm genuinely curious as to how we might do so. [1] https://ncase.me/polygons/ https://ncase.me/polygons/
- FakeComments 8y agoBoard seats are literally not a zero sum game: we can make more in any of several ways. It troubles me that you’re factually mistaken on basic things like that — new board seats come into existence literally daily, to which every indication shows women are free to compete — but expect me to take your arguments seriously that we should institute bigotry at the highest levels. No, get your facts straight first. You’re also trying to respond to empiric failures in the real world with parables and abstract highly simplified models, which is somewhat silly: the decayed state of gender and race relations in the US and elsewhere is due to the sexist and racist policies enacted to “fix” things, and somewhere between 1990 and 2000 started stepping backwards decades of progress, with the situation the worst it’s been in a generation by 2020. Forcing the final steps of integration has been shown time and again to foster generation-scale resentment and undermine healing, particularly through forcing every interaction to be viewed through the lens of base racial or gender tribes. It literally teaches people to be bigots all over again. A rotten tree bears rotten fruits: I don’t believe you can cause a good outcome through institutional bigotry, and I challenge you to show me it works. It’s certainly been tried enough it should have produced positive results — show me those, and not a cheap game. Also, yes, merely removing bias in a dynamic system that shows a strong reversion to the mean on generational scales is enough to remove historical bias within just a few generations — a fact that comes directly from analysis of system dynamics and differential equations. Notice that if you drop the bias below 10%, there’s absolutely no problem — it just sort of wanders over long time periods. To me, you merely seem a fiddler: someone who knows very well that debiasing works on the 3-4 generation scale, you’re just not willing to wait a century because you believe you’re smart enough to use evil for good, and are willing to risk sure progress based on that belief. I think that’s reckless and immoral. Reckless because you’re endangering something important — the fixing of gender and race relations in society; and immoral because you’re knowingly doing harm and discriminating, out of some very strange logic that’s making the world “better”. Your model also has massive failures as a mechanism to explain social situations: it doesn’t, for instance, explain why Asian immigrants have thrived. Were the interned and destitute Japanese incomparably better off than other groups? If not, how does your model explain their recovery and integration compared to other groups? What the puzzle actually seems to say is that if people have a preference you don’t like, you feel entitled to overrule them because you know better, and your global vision for society is better than the emergent one from individual choices. (The conclusions really seem oriented around forcing people to integrate when their natural tendencies would have them live in more or less homogeneous clusters.) It’s tyranny gussied up with math: look at how if people have wrongthink preferences, we need to overrule them via force and targeted discrimination for the greater good!
- dragonwriter 8y ago> While noble in its intentions, if flipping the roles is seen as discrimination (no all female boards), it’s discrimination. You are overcomplicating things; making a legal distinction is discrimination on the basis used to make the distinction; this is overtly sex discrimination. Your mirror test isn't needed. Whether it is permissible discrimination likewise does not depend on a mirror test, but on whether (at least, from the perspective of federal Constitutional jurisprudence, using the test that applies to sex discrimination) it serves an important government purpose by means substantially related to that purpose. Which a mirror test of the type you propose doesn't help answer, both because it doesn't answer it for the mirror case and because the mirror case won't be similarly situated compared to the actual legal test unless you mirror all of society, not just the policy.
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- writepub 8y agoN/A
- happytoexplain 8y agoWouldn't that require dishonesty?
- dang 8y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- writepub 8y agoOK - deleted
- DoreenMichele 8y agoAbout 30 years ago, I read as much as I could to try to understand why I had ended up with some "barefoot and pregnant" type life as the full-time wife in a 1950s style marriage. My takeaway: European women did better than American women in terms of greater wage parity, etc, because they focused on getting accommodation for the burden of bearing children plus help carrying the burden of rearing the children. Quotas seem unlikely to work as long as America continues to be the only developed nation that lacks paid maternity leave as a kind of "canary in the coal mine" test of this issue. My sons are adults. I'm post menopausal. I'm largely out of touch with childcare issues today. But our continued lack of maternity leave makes me feel that we are likely still in the dark ages on this issue.
- chongli 8y ago.
- aeternus 8y agoCalifornia does have 6 weeks of paid maternity leave. Some companies pay 100% but the state guarantees 60-70% depending on how much you make.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoThank you. I wasn't aware of that. It's still a really short period of time compared to most developed countries. Here's a list (from 2012) I was able to find with a quick search: https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/05/22/maternity-leaves-around-the-world_n_1536120.html https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/05/22/maternity-leaves-arou... According to the article, Japan provides 14 weeks. Germany provides 14 months. So 6 weeks seems like a drop in the bucket on this issue.
- ToBeBannedSoon 8y agoIt's obvious that any sensible company will just headquarter itself in a friendlier state. California has shot itself in the foot with this law.
- sadris 8y agoClear violation of federal Civil Rights Act. Gender and race cannot be factors in employment. Why waste time with blatantly unlawful legislation?
- Simulacra 8y agoIs serving on the board considered employment? What if it’s not paid?
- screye 8y agoIt is already being used elsewhere. NSF grants are being rejected with massive frequency if the proposal doesn't document women and minorities being involved in the project. I am all for diversity. I support providing minorities with opportunities to gain skills needed to excel in a certain field or make them feel welcome. Equality of opportunity is great. Trying to skew incentives in hope that it will facilitate an inflow of talented minorities is something I've seen no proof of working. Anecdotally or statistically. If anything, it only breeds resentment.
- derrick_jensen 8y agoNSF grants favoring diverse groups and outlawing private corporations that don't meet diversity quotas is a false equivalency
- the_trapper 8y agoSee also California's unconstitutional gun control laws. They believe they have moral superiority on their side and federal laws don't apply to them.
- floatingatoll 8y agoUnconstitutional is a term that only applies when a court of law has found a violation to occur. Which California gun control law has been found to be unconstitutional by a court of law without further possibility of appeal?
- pmoriarty 8y agoNow if only they could mandate that every board has to have someone poor on it. Sadly, I doubt that will ever happen.
- zdragnar 8y ago> Now if only they could mandate that every board has to have someone poor on it. Unless the board positions are unpaid and merely advisory, then whoever joined would be de-facto not poor. Unless, of course, they were paid minimum wage while everyone else was paid normal wages for board level positions. Either of those options would be absurdly patronizing, in my opinion.
- guelo 8y ago> numerous independent studies that show companies with women on their board are more profitable and productive That doesn't tell you which is the cause and which is the effect. It could be that companies that hire women for boards are better run to begin with so that forcing poorly run companies to hire women won't make them better.
- taborj 8y agoWait, you mean correlation doesn't equal causation? (I'm being sarcastic, of course)
- ratboy666 8y agoOf course, this doesn't (arguably) matter. In California, persons are allowed to change gender. At some point, Senate Bill 179 can be used to align government documentation, but that doesn't need to happen. So, prior to a board meeting: "Who is female?". Ok, we are covered.... Don't know what happens after the meeting, but that doesn't matter. For the purposes of the law, the board is not "all-male". Anyone who disagrees can then be taken to court, for discrimination. That is how I would play this. Just good fun. FredW
- Beardeddragon 8y agoGood way to build resentment. This is CA after all.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- rlt 8y agoThis seems like an ill-advised game to start playing. Why stop at women? Shouldn't other underrepresented groups be legally entitled to board seats too? I'm definitely not saying there aren't qualified women or people from other underrepresented groups, but eventually if the quotas are subdivided and specific enough the available talent pool won't support the quota.
- rexpop 8y agoWho has stopped?
- nathanvanfleet 8y agohttps://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope
- tomlock 8y agoThe average board has 9 members. If we were to randomly flip a coin 9 times, we'd expect to see 9 of tails/heads about 0.2% of the time.
- tomlock 8y agoIt is honestly incredibly funny that this comment, about factual probabilities, would get downvoted.
- sdinsn 8y agoBecause it's not relevant. Job positions aren't coin flips. There are more men who work as welders, there are more women that work in nursing, for example.
- tomlock 8y agoThere used to be more male lawyers than female lawyers.
- apta 8y agoThere are more men in construction, let's make it a law to have more women work there.
- tomlock 8y agoIf you think the reason there are fewer women on construction sites is that they don't want to work there, I'd encourage you to work on a construction site, like I have, and talk to the very few women that work there about their experiences. Over the last few years there's been a marked increase in women working on construction sites.
- apta 8y agoEven if that's true, at the end of the day it's going to come down to biological differences. Men are overall, stronger than women, so when you find the best person for the job, you'll most likely end up hiring a bulky man. Same with firefighting where they need to carry heavy equipment and be able to perform their duties safely. So short of hiring women body builders, you're most likely going to end up with a man. Why don't these "equal outcome" groups make a fuss about that? What about trying to get more men into nursing or day care?
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- dang 8y agoThis had several major threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=california%20boards%20points%3E10 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story... It's a good idea to search before posting, especially when the story happens to be news of the second freshness.
- AmericanChopper 8y agoNever seen a thread removed as dupe for being posted 6 months ago. Old news is reposted on HN daily. It’s hard to see this moderation as being anything other than political.
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- dang 8y agoPlease see the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Reposts are allowed after about a year. Otherwise, if a story has significant attention already, we mark reposts as dupes. This is standard HN moderation. I'm not sure what amazes me more: that we can do something routinely every day, and users still report never having seen it; or that people rush to assume political skulduggery as the explanation for whatever they do see.
- arduanika 8y agoWhy do companies wait so long before IPO these days? Do the restrictions on publicly traded companies grow more burdensome with each passing year?
- taborj 8y agoI'm sure there are many reasons, but one of the reasons is that after you IPO, your business decisions - indeed, the very direction of your company and what products you develop and sell - are dictated not by management, but by shareholders. That's a lot of control to give up.