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I mean, it is pretty diverse for a corporate board. About a third women, couple people of color including the CEO and chairman. That's well ahead of the curve.
by vikramkr 7y ago
I mean, it is pretty diverse for a corporate board. About a third women, couple people of color including the CEO and chairman. That's well ahead of the curve.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoSomewhat diverse by race and gender. Completely non-diverse in terms of socioeconomic status, which may have been jayzalowitz's point. (Or may not. Maybe there wasn't a point except some drive-by snark. It's hard to tell with a post like that.)
- syedkarim 7y agoDo any Fortune 500 boards have diversity in socioeconomic status?
- burkaman 7y agoWell, there's 29 German companies in the Fortune 500, and all of them are required to have half of the board be elected by the workers, so I imagine some of them should have socioeconomic diversity.
- scarejunba 7y agoIs it true, though, about those 29 having diverse boards? Working class folks don't necessarily vote in working class folks.
- vikramkr 7y agoI think economically they'll have boards with people that started out at different points in life, probably vastly skewed towards people that had head start of some form or another, and you can probably tease apart economic diversity through figuring out where people started. In terms of in the present day though, the pay for being on the board is alone enough to knock these members into the 1%, and by definition they've succeeded in the current system, so I don't know if it's physically possible to have that sort of diversity
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vikramkr 7y agoBy definition it's not going to be diverse for the economically part of socioeconomic since no matter where people began if they're on Microsoft's board they're doing quite well. In terms of where they began, looking up a few of them real quick, a couple of them are immigrants, a few of them (including the chairman) seem to have gone to public high schools and or universities. I won't deny that most of them didn't start out with head starts, and of course all of them are 1%ers now probably by board pay alone, but this isn't a super homogeneous board, especially compared to the rest of corporate america
- lukevdp 7y agoIs anyone actually advocating for diversity of socioeconomic status on boards? Board members need to be highly skilled and experienced in business, which I would guess correlates very well with wealth.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Is anyone actually advocating for diversity of socioeconomic status on boards? Yes.
- selimthegrim 7y agoAsk Germany.
- smallstepforman 7y agoPlace your quota of women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, LBGT minorities, disabilities and the rest and you end up with a board where the best potential candidates based on skill are excluded.
- dragonwriter 7y agoSkill directed in a manner hostile to one's interest is a harm, not a benefit, so arguing that representing interests that the current elite is hostile to on boards would limit their skill isn't really a negative for the purpose for which the diversity push is made.
- scarejunba 7y agoThere's 12 people. To be honest, you can always construct a set of characteristics that are under-represented in such a group. Go ahead and pick 12 people and I'll pick the characteristics that aren't represented in proportion.
- vikramkr 7y agoIt would be unexpected for them to be perfectly represented. Even with large external pressures to be representative any variation means you get the most average person paradox where having a board perfectly representative is less likely than having nonrepresentative characteristics