11 ms·

Female fund manager opposes gender quotas for startup boards

59 points by cwwc 6y ago

globular-toast 6y ago
Paywall.
- cwwc 6y ago
  If you block cookies for Bloomberg.com, you should be set!
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    I ended up using reader mode. But the title includes the words "no paywall" so I thought I should point out that it's wrong.
    - cwwc 6y ago
      yep, you're right - my bad. After reading a few more articles the paywall kicked in, though I initially didn't have it.
supergirl 6y ago
can be opened in incognito
hirundo 6y ago
> “There are simply not enough experienced women in the sector and of suitable caliber to fill a third of board posts” in the smaller tech company space, the founder of U.K.-based Herald Investment Trust Plc said I imagine this as part of the political purpose of the assault on the concept of merit. If merit is just a cover for miscellaneous class, race and gender supremacisms, and people are largely the same in capability underneath achievement-skewing social conventions, then the above quote makes no sense. Of course there are plenty of women for these posts. Just pick some random suitably intersectional people and the overall competence of the board won't likely change much, but fairness will increase.
- DC1350 6y ago
  > Just pick some random suitably intersectional people and the overall competence of the board won't likely change much Why don’t you think it would change? If you select from random people then of course it would be worse. A good chef can come from anywhere but that doesn’t make everyone a good chef.. Maybe we should select Olympic athletes randomly too since Olympic training is a form of class supremacy
- omginternets 6y ago
  I don't understand. Either we're not properly measuring merit, in which case you may have a point, or selecting random people will reduce the competence of the boards. Of course, if we're not good at selecting competent people, one might argue that we should address that issue, instead of substituting the goal of competence for the goal of fairness. Who knows, we could even focus on properly training a more diverse set of people in addition to making things more meritocratic... I really don't understand your reasoning, here. I'm at a complete loss.
  - hirundo 6y ago
    It's not my reasoning, it's my attempt to repeat the reasoning I've heard from highly intelligent people who really don't think individual differences in competence matter much -- even when their own clearly does. I think they do matter, a lot. One of the most competent people I've ever known is one of them. He told me that Elon Musk is somewhat intelligent, but his success is due to luck and underhandedness, and he could be easily replaced by another somewhat intelligent and similarly underhanded person. He seemed sincere in believing that merit wasn't much of a thing and meritocracy is a racist trope. I got roundly mocked on twitter for arguing that merit is real. I'd like to understand that point of view better, because I'm at a loss too.
    - omginternets 6y ago
      Ah i see! Makes much more sense now :)
    - cycloptic 6y ago
globular-toast 6y ago
I don't care about the gender (or colour, height, weight etc.) of the fund manager. This seems like common sense and it's a shame this has to be news.
KaiserPro 6y ago
I am for diversity, I think it makes a better, stronger, more agile company. However Quotas I don't think are the answer. 1) because they reinforce negative stereotypes (you are only here because you are x, rather than being qualified) 2) They make the candidate feel like they don't belong/less valued 3) they don't fix the underlying issues Now, this is from a UK perspective, so the next points are less universal. In the UK we have a training issue. It is hard as a startup to source mid/senior "diversity" candidates because they are rare. Therefore we as an industry need to get into schools and provide mentorship to allow children of all types to come into IT. UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop. since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships. From a business perspective its a brilliant way to source cheap, loyal and effective workers. For companies like the financial times, its worked out pretty well. They have something like 70 apprentice/apprentice grade employees in a tech team of 400.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships. Right, you can't solve pipeline problems near the end of the pipeline. You have to provide robust support as far back as possible. Quotas are a lackluster response to outrage porn and a desire to implement quick fixes, when thoughtful, long term policy decisions are what provides the desired outcome (equitable power distribution). “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
- supergirl 6y ago
  > UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop. That actually sounds universal. I think a big part of choosing a career/education track is having role models. If there are no women now in tech, then girls will not be inspired. Imagine how many boys are inspired by Elon Musk to work on cars and rockets. Quotas are not the end game. It can be seen as a necessary hack to kick start the process.
supergirl 6y ago
> For fund manager Katie Potts, setting mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of technology startups is a bad idea. Not because she’s against diversity, but because she says there just aren’t enough suitable candidates. This argument always appears when discussing improving diversity: e.g. fewer women engineers so it makes sense to hire fewer women, women not as a good football players as men so it makes sense to pay them less, etc. My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow. If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards (even though they might not be as good now as men) then the pool of such women will always be smaller than men. Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually. Women are second class people for literally thousands of years and now we want to make it right but we're not willing to pay even a small price? > In this case, especially for smaller companies already battling bigger companies for the best candidates, it’s not easy to find good non-execs This sounds like a separate problem requiring its own solution - any extra regulation benefits big companies. EDIT: multiple replies are questioning "inspiring the next generation". I'm talking about inspiring small girls to choose IT in school, so that there is a big pool of women in tech. That's where the problem is fundamentally but you can't just fix it by spreading flyers in schools. Girls get motivated by seeing successful women.
- jackdh 6y ago
  >If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards This is a good point but it's likely to boil down to everyone's favioute idiom: You First.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually. Citation needed.
  - tropdrop 6y ago
    I've always maintained that women seem to me subtly more susceptible to peer pressure for most things, and a bigger part of that seems to be representation than for men. This is grounded in the massive shift in how the population of US "programmers" changed from majority women to majority men. "In 1967, there were so many female programmers that Cosmopolitan magazine published an article about “The Computer Girls,” accompanied by pictures of beehived women at work on computers that evoked the control deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise" [1] But in the next decade, there was a massive cultural shift – PCs were sold, and its ad campaigns targeted the image of a young geeky boy playing with toys. The campaigns were successful, so "By the mid-’80s, some college freshmen were showing up for their first class already proficient as programmers." Those were boys who had bought PCs and tinkered with them at home – excluded from ad campaigns, young girls never asked for a PC for Christmas, and they would show up to these freshmen courses like they did before but find themselves already terribly behind. So the number of women in programming started dropping around this time [1]. This was not seen in, say, Russia, which was not subject to the same ad campaigns, and so the number of women in programming stayed about the same. You might note that a lot of the female programmers you find in SV are Eastern European – this is not an accident. I do also have a citation that showed how the number of women signing up for archery was minuscule prior to the Hunger Games series, but subsequently ballooned and stayed high since. So the above assumption – that visible token women in a particular field makes a huge impact on the number of girls in that field – is based in some fairly well-known effects. [1] – https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-com... [2] – https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/anne-arundel/bs-exho-the-katniss-effect-archery-in-howard-county-gets-a-boost-from-popular-books-movies-20121205-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/anne-arundel/bs-exho-t...
max_ 6y ago
Someone should push for gender quotas in fields dominated women in earning & number .... just to remind people that both genders , have an edge that causes these disproportionalities
- pid_0 6y ago
  People don’t care about those examples. No one is pushing for gender equality in nursing, doctors, manual construction jobs, etc Wonder why.
- hemogloben 6y ago
  Interestingly, fields in which women dominate tend to have lower pay. [1] So even where the playing field is in their favor sexism wise, the system still gets them. So not sure forcing gender quotas on them will prove any point. 1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=women+dominated+fields+pay+gap&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=women+dominated+fields+pay+gap&t=h...
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    fields in which women dominate tend to have lower pay Fields where men dominate tend to have greater risk of death or injury on the job. 97% of deaths at work were men. Could it be that when averaged out safer jobs pay less? https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/fatalinjuries.pdf https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/fatalinjuries.pdf
    - cauliflower2718 6y ago
      I imagine that's not the case for tech (approximately the subject of HN) and finance (the topic of the article), so while the fact may be true on average, I'm having trouble seeing its relevance here.
      - goatinaboat 6y ago
        I imagine that's not the case for tech (approximately the subject of HN) and finance (the topic of the article), so while the fact may be true on average, I'm having trouble seeing its relevance here I'm replying to a comment which doesn't make that distinction either. But finance is notorious for the health problems in the field. Heart attacks and other stress related fatalities are not uncommon. And in tech there's burnout.
asah 6y ago
Cry me a river: she and all of us had *decades* of notice that this was coming, and yet we all did nothing to nurture leadership and force "old white men" to accept different cultures and communication styles. Now the hammer has come down. Sure, this is a crude and ugly way to force the matter, but private industry f*ked this up bigtime. If you don't want government regulation, you have to step up. Success example: Google and the other cloud hosting providers got ahead of environmental regulation by many years for the "green"ness of their data centers - yeah yeah greenwashing whatever, the point is that they're making a much more serious attempt than anybody else, and unsurprisingly, nobody's talking about mandating green data centers, because they're demonstrated leadership.
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago
  >she and all of us had decades of notice that this was coming, and yet we all did nothing to nurture leadership and force "old white men" to accept different cultures and communication styles. I generally am in agreement with you. Slightly tangential but still related subject, my take on why organizations decline: https://realminority.wordpress.com/ https://realminority.wordpress.com/
DC1350 6y ago
How many unqualified board members does it take before paying qualified men to take estrogen shots saves the company money? A good board can be worth billions
dfilppi 6y ago
Quotas are evil
talesfromearth 6y ago
Just pick the right person to do the job irrespective of the politics. How hard can it be honestly?
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  If only it were that easy.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Hiring the right person is hard problem even if you ignore the gender part. So you just replaced one problem we don't know how to solve by another problem we don't know how to solve. Though from certain perspective, it gives us extra motivation to find out who is the right person for the job.
jancsika 6y ago
> Board positions also tend to be taken up by people toward the end of their careers, most of whom are men, Potts said, adding that this may shift in the next generation. I guess I don't understand the argument: 1. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates. (The argument implied by the very first paragraph of the article.) 2. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates who the same age as the typical male board member. (The argument implied in this quote.) 3. I'm going to say there are too few qualified female candidates to generate a title suitable for much clicking. Then in the interview I'll switch to talking about how I've met a lot of perfectly capable female candidates of the younger generations and speculate about how they'll probably eventually fill board positions in the future. (The argument implied by the "smell" I get from clicking on stories like these and leaving with no more knowledge than I had before I clicked.) 4. Something completely different. Which is it? I can't tell because it appears a stenographer wrote down utterances from an ostensibly well-known person in their field, and didn't press for clarification or supporting evidence. Edit: clarification
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/4KS3b https://archive.is/4KS3b

59 points by cwwc 6y ago

globular-toast 6y ago

Paywall.

cwwc 6y ago
If you block cookies for Bloomberg.com, you should be set!
- globular-toast 6y ago
  I ended up using reader mode. But the title includes the words "no paywall" so I thought I should point out that it's wrong.
  - cwwc 6y ago
    yep, you're right - my bad. After reading a few more articles the paywall kicked in, though I initially didn't have it.

supergirl 6y ago

can be opened in incognito

hirundo 6y ago

> “There are simply not enough experienced women in the sector and of suitable caliber to fill a third of board posts” in the smaller tech company space, the founder of U.K.-based Herald Investment Trust Plc said I imagine this as part of the political purpose of the assault on the concept of merit. If merit is just a cover for miscellaneous class, race and gender supremacisms, and people are largely the same in capability underneath achievement-skewing social conventions, then the above quote makes no sense. Of course there are plenty of women for these posts. Just pick some random suitably intersectional people and the overall competence of the board won't likely change much, but fairness will increase.

DC1350 6y ago
> Just pick some random suitably intersectional people and the overall competence of the board won't likely change much Why don’t you think it would change? If you select from random people then of course it would be worse. A good chef can come from anywhere but that doesn’t make everyone a good chef.. Maybe we should select Olympic athletes randomly too since Olympic training is a form of class supremacy
omginternets 6y ago
I don't understand. Either we're not properly measuring merit, in which case you may have a point, or selecting random people will reduce the competence of the boards. Of course, if we're not good at selecting competent people, one might argue that we should address that issue, instead of substituting the goal of competence for the goal of fairness. Who knows, we could even focus on properly training a more diverse set of people in addition to making things more meritocratic... I really don't understand your reasoning, here. I'm at a complete loss.
- hirundo 6y ago
  It's not my reasoning, it's my attempt to repeat the reasoning I've heard from highly intelligent people who really don't think individual differences in competence matter much -- even when their own clearly does. I think they do matter, a lot. One of the most competent people I've ever known is one of them. He told me that Elon Musk is somewhat intelligent, but his success is due to luck and underhandedness, and he could be easily replaced by another somewhat intelligent and similarly underhanded person. He seemed sincere in believing that merit wasn't much of a thing and meritocracy is a racist trope. I got roundly mocked on twitter for arguing that merit is real. I'd like to understand that point of view better, because I'm at a loss too.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    Ah i see! Makes much more sense now :)
  - cycloptic 6y ago

globular-toast 6y ago

I don't care about the gender (or colour, height, weight etc.) of the fund manager. This seems like common sense and it's a shame this has to be news.

KaiserPro 6y ago

I am for diversity, I think it makes a better, stronger, more agile company. However Quotas I don't think are the answer. 1) because they reinforce negative stereotypes (you are only here because you are x, rather than being qualified) 2) They make the candidate feel like they don't belong/less valued 3) they don't fix the underlying issues Now, this is from a UK perspective, so the next points are less universal. In the UK we have a training issue. It is hard as a startup to source mid/senior "diversity" candidates because they are rare. Therefore we as an industry need to get into schools and provide mentorship to allow children of all types to come into IT. UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop. since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships. From a business perspective its a brilliant way to source cheap, loyal and effective workers. For companies like the financial times, its worked out pretty well. They have something like 70 apprentice/apprentice grade employees in a tech team of 400.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
> since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships. Right, you can't solve pipeline problems near the end of the pipeline. You have to provide robust support as far back as possible. Quotas are a lackluster response to outrage porn and a desire to implement quick fixes, when thoughtful, long term policy decisions are what provides the desired outcome (equitable power distribution). “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
supergirl 6y ago
> UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop. That actually sounds universal. I think a big part of choosing a career/education track is having role models. If there are no women now in tech, then girls will not be inspired. Imagine how many boys are inspired by Elon Musk to work on cars and rockets. Quotas are not the end game. It can be seen as a necessary hack to kick start the process.

supergirl 6y ago

> For fund manager Katie Potts, setting mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of technology startups is a bad idea. Not because she’s against diversity, but because she says there just aren’t enough suitable candidates. This argument always appears when discussing improving diversity: e.g. fewer women engineers so it makes sense to hire fewer women, women not as a good football players as men so it makes sense to pay them less, etc. My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow. If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards (even though they might not be as good now as men) then the pool of such women will always be smaller than men. Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually. Women are second class people for literally thousands of years and now we want to make it right but we're not willing to pay even a small price? > In this case, especially for smaller companies already battling bigger companies for the best candidates, it’s not easy to find good non-execs This sounds like a separate problem requiring its own solution - any extra regulation benefits big companies. EDIT: multiple replies are questioning "inspiring the next generation". I'm talking about inspiring small girls to choose IT in school, so that there is a big pool of women in tech. That's where the problem is fundamentally but you can't just fix it by spreading flyers in schools. Girls get motivated by seeing successful women.

jackdh 6y ago
>If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards This is a good point but it's likely to boil down to everyone's favioute idiom: You First.
alpaca128 6y ago
> they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually. Citation needed.
- tropdrop 6y ago
  I've always maintained that women seem to me subtly more susceptible to peer pressure for most things, and a bigger part of that seems to be representation than for men. This is grounded in the massive shift in how the population of US "programmers" changed from majority women to majority men. "In 1967, there were so many female programmers that Cosmopolitan magazine published an article about “The Computer Girls,” accompanied by pictures of beehived women at work on computers that evoked the control deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise" [1] But in the next decade, there was a massive cultural shift – PCs were sold, and its ad campaigns targeted the image of a young geeky boy playing with toys. The campaigns were successful, so "By the mid-’80s, some college freshmen were showing up for their first class already proficient as programmers." Those were boys who had bought PCs and tinkered with them at home – excluded from ad campaigns, young girls never asked for a PC for Christmas, and they would show up to these freshmen courses like they did before but find themselves already terribly behind. So the number of women in programming started dropping around this time [1]. This was not seen in, say, Russia, which was not subject to the same ad campaigns, and so the number of women in programming stayed about the same. You might note that a lot of the female programmers you find in SV are Eastern European – this is not an accident. I do also have a citation that showed how the number of women signing up for archery was minuscule prior to the Hunger Games series, but subsequently ballooned and stayed high since. So the above assumption – that visible token women in a particular field makes a huge impact on the number of girls in that field – is based in some fairly well-known effects. [1] – https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-com... [2] – https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/anne-arundel/bs-exho-the-katniss-effect-archery-in-howard-county-gets-a-boost-from-popular-books-movies-20121205-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/anne-arundel/bs-exho-t...

max_ 6y ago

Someone should push for gender quotas in fields dominated women in earning & number .... just to remind people that both genders , have an edge that causes these disproportionalities

pid_0 6y ago
People don’t care about those examples. No one is pushing for gender equality in nursing, doctors, manual construction jobs, etc Wonder why.
hemogloben 6y ago
Interestingly, fields in which women dominate tend to have lower pay. [1] So even where the playing field is in their favor sexism wise, the system still gets them. So not sure forcing gender quotas on them will prove any point. 1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=women+dominated+fields+pay+gap&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=women+dominated+fields+pay+gap&t=h...
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  fields in which women dominate tend to have lower pay Fields where men dominate tend to have greater risk of death or injury on the job. 97% of deaths at work were men. Could it be that when averaged out safer jobs pay less? https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/fatalinjuries.pdf https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/fatalinjuries.pdf
  - cauliflower2718 6y ago
    I imagine that's not the case for tech (approximately the subject of HN) and finance (the topic of the article), so while the fact may be true on average, I'm having trouble seeing its relevance here.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      I imagine that's not the case for tech (approximately the subject of HN) and finance (the topic of the article), so while the fact may be true on average, I'm having trouble seeing its relevance here I'm replying to a comment which doesn't make that distinction either. But finance is notorious for the health problems in the field. Heart attacks and other stress related fatalities are not uncommon. And in tech there's burnout.

asah 6y ago

Cry me a river: she and all of us had *decades* of notice that this was coming, and yet we all did nothing to nurture leadership and force "old white men" to accept different cultures and communication styles. Now the hammer has come down. Sure, this is a crude and ugly way to force the matter, but private industry f*ked this up bigtime. If you don't want government regulation, you have to step up. Success example: Google and the other cloud hosting providers got ahead of environmental regulation by many years for the "green"ness of their data centers - yeah yeah greenwashing whatever, the point is that they're making a much more serious attempt than anybody else, and unsurprisingly, nobody's talking about mandating green data centers, because they're demonstrated leadership.

dennis_jeeves 6y ago
>she and all of us had decades of notice that this was coming, and yet we all did nothing to nurture leadership and force "old white men" to accept different cultures and communication styles. I generally am in agreement with you. Slightly tangential but still related subject, my take on why organizations decline: https://realminority.wordpress.com/ https://realminority.wordpress.com/

DC1350 6y ago

How many unqualified board members does it take before paying qualified men to take estrogen shots saves the company money? A good board can be worth billions

dfilppi 6y ago

Quotas are evil

talesfromearth 6y ago

Just pick the right person to do the job irrespective of the politics. How hard can it be honestly?

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
If only it were that easy.
Viliam1234 6y ago
Hiring the right person is hard problem even if you ignore the gender part. So you just replaced one problem we don't know how to solve by another problem we don't know how to solve. Though from certain perspective, it gives us extra motivation to find out who is the right person for the job.

jancsika 6y ago

> Board positions also tend to be taken up by people toward the end of their careers, most of whom are men, Potts said, adding that this may shift in the next generation. I guess I don't understand the argument: 1. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates. (The argument implied by the very first paragraph of the article.) 2. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates who the same age as the typical male board member. (The argument implied in this quote.) 3. I'm going to say there are too few qualified female candidates to generate a title suitable for much clicking. Then in the interview I'll switch to talking about how I've met a lot of perfectly capable female candidates of the younger generations and speculate about how they'll probably eventually fill board positions in the future. (The argument implied by the "smell" I get from clicking on stories like these and leaving with no more knowledge than I had before I clicked.) 4. Something completely different. Which is it? I can't tell because it appears a stenographer wrote down utterances from an ostensibly well-known person in their field, and didn't press for clarification or supporting evidence. Edit: clarification

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/4KS3b https://archive.is/4KS3b