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> 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

> 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...
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    > women seem to me subtly more susceptible to peer pressure for most things Isn't the basic assumption behind this entire movement that women are NOT different from men? In any case, if what you need is "token women", then why not highlight the presumably very competent women that already work in finance (my co-founder is one), rather than forcing quotas? If your assumption is correct then it's not about the percentage that are women, it's about having a few well known role-models.
    - tropdrop 6y ago
      No, the basic assumption is that women have equal rights. Most of the movement acknowledges real differences from men, aside from a subset of the movement that subscribes to the gender assignment idea, and its mutability. I would say it's a loud and educated minority, since the lived lives of most women includes childbirth and insisting "NOT different" runs into some pretty obvious problems here. But yes, if my hunch is correct, it is about having a few powerful role models so that the image of pursuing this option becomes viable. It's also about removing patent ideological blocks (she's just not a "culture fit"), lessening the barrier to entry (she needs to have a proper engineering degree), etc. But doing the latter without the former yields poorer results.
      - Grustaf 6y ago
        The problem is of course that if you open up for the possibility that women and men are different then it could simply be that women are less interested in launching startups, rather than a plot to keep women down.
        tropdrop 6y ago
        Have you been to a dry-cleaner's? A bakery? A hair-dresser's? All of those were startups. Actually, South Korea has recently seen an influx of female entrepreneurs because their barriers to entry in tech were so high, it encouraged a lot of highly educated women to pivot into the start-up scene (12% of all working age women! [1]) So it seems at least a modicum of women are somewhat interested in "launching startups," and many of them already do in domains outside of tech. But the hostility to them in tech in the west is tricky. It's not overt, which is easier to protest, but subtle, sometimes even well-intentioned – for instance, your claim in this very comment, when spoken "around the water cooler" during a lunch hour with many coworkers present will make many of the women in the room question themselves – is this true? ("Is there something wrong with me that I am interested in this?") Those instances aggregate – how often do you think that your personal failure might be a failure of your entire demographic? How debilitating is that for productivity? They'll think of the lack of female Elon Musks and hang their head in shame, and many who were considering doing something like that will be a little more discouraged, despite many powerful figures in domains outside of tech. Again, this is encapsulated into my theory of greater acquiescence to social acceptance for this group of people, and greater measures needed to fight it. 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/south-korea-women-startups-entrepreneurs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/south-korea-wome...
goatinaboat 6y ago
Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation Inspire the next generation how exactly? "Your predecessor was filling a quota but you're here on merit, honest"?
- Grustaf 6y ago
  I don't know about you but I didn't choose to study physics based on the demography of physicist. It's always strange to hear people argue that correctly gendered "role models" are so important. The main difference between an average female physics student and Isaac Newton is not their gender, she is just as different from him as I am.
  - pleasejuststop 6y ago
    Rather than strive for "not judging a book by its cover", the culture of America has pulled a 180 and decided that the cover matters most. Trying to argue counter to this makes you an enemy, or confirmation bias for being a racist (as seen in such chartoppers as "White Fragility")
  - supergirl 6y ago
    here is a highly cited article: https://www.hw.ac.uk/services/docs/same-gender-role-models.pdf https://www.hw.ac.uk/services/docs/same-gender-role-models.p... > In both studies, results indicated that female participants were more inspired by outstanding female than male role models; in contrast, gender did not determine the impact of role models on male participants.
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      Perhaps that indicates better approach than forced quotas, try to get women to be less concerned by the gender of role models?
  - nathan11 6y ago
    I tend to downplay the impact of role model demographics as well, but then I recognize that I'm represented literally everywhere--except perhaps US football and basketball. I'm willing to accept that because the norm is people that look like me are everywhere, I don't notice the impact it has on me.
Grustaf 6y ago
> My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow If you for some reason want more female fund managers, clearly the better way is to improve the pipeline, encourage women to study business. Forcing companies to hire people they didn't want to hire is obviously a very bad idea. More importantly, why is the number of female fund managers relevant? > If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards "Dear Alice, we are happy to tell you that XYZ Asset Management has decided to take the hit and hire you for the position as fund manager, congratulations!"
- DC1350 6y ago
  Changing the way the fund managers look is the easiest way to project a progressive image without actually doing anything meaningful. It’s great for the brand.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  Surely you can see how punting the problem back to academia is not a long-term solution. The industry keeps on being an old-boys club that way, and academia can select only for people who are willing to put up with that aspect.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    On the contrary. The problem (if you consider it a problem) is one of supply, not demand. So the only long-term solution is to increase the supply, not create an artificial demand.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      That's what I'm saying though, punting it back to academia doesn't increase the general supply, it only increases the supply with a smaller subset of people who are willing to put up with the "old-boys network" aspect for their entire career.
pleasejuststop 6y ago
Is this twitter? > My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow. > 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 You're saying that because women were/are second class citizens, non-women that may have worked harder, and LITERALLY BE BETTER, should not get the position. Your implementation details in fixing the problem is sexist and naive. You and the rest of twitter should stop fixing SYMPTOMS and start fixing the UNDERLYING PROBLEMS.
henryaj 6y ago
> fewer women engineers so it makes sense to hire fewer women It's not about what 'makes sense' - it's literally that there are fewer of them. If women make up 10% of the hiring pool (say in tech) and your company employs 50% women, all that means is that every other company now has fewer than 10% women.
rectang 6y ago
Surprise, surprise — the only female-indicating handle in this discussion is getting downvoted into oblivion. One reason boards stay demographically skewed is because everybody on them vehemently opposes taking concrete action to address said demographic skew. Members of underrepresented minorities tend to favor active steps, disqualifying them as candidates from the perspective of the status quo. A similar effect preserves the demographic skew of Hacker News. HN is overwhelmingly male dominated, and thus disproportionately unreceptive to views typically held by women and not typically held by men. That disagreement gets expressed through downvoting, which is ultimately indistinguishable from animus even if the intent was benign. And thus people who hold views common among women, finding this forum unfriendly, go elsewhere.

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...
- Grustaf 6y ago
  > women seem to me subtly more susceptible to peer pressure for most things Isn't the basic assumption behind this entire movement that women are NOT different from men? In any case, if what you need is "token women", then why not highlight the presumably very competent women that already work in finance (my co-founder is one), rather than forcing quotas? If your assumption is correct then it's not about the percentage that are women, it's about having a few well known role-models.
  - tropdrop 6y ago
    No, the basic assumption is that women have equal rights. Most of the movement acknowledges real differences from men, aside from a subset of the movement that subscribes to the gender assignment idea, and its mutability. I would say it's a loud and educated minority, since the lived lives of most women includes childbirth and insisting "NOT different" runs into some pretty obvious problems here. But yes, if my hunch is correct, it is about having a few powerful role models so that the image of pursuing this option becomes viable. It's also about removing patent ideological blocks (she's just not a "culture fit"), lessening the barrier to entry (she needs to have a proper engineering degree), etc. But doing the latter without the former yields poorer results.
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      The problem is of course that if you open up for the possibility that women and men are different then it could simply be that women are less interested in launching startups, rather than a plot to keep women down.
      - tropdrop 6y ago
        Have you been to a dry-cleaner's? A bakery? A hair-dresser's? All of those were startups. Actually, South Korea has recently seen an influx of female entrepreneurs because their barriers to entry in tech were so high, it encouraged a lot of highly educated women to pivot into the start-up scene (12% of all working age women! [1]) So it seems at least a modicum of women are somewhat interested in "launching startups," and many of them already do in domains outside of tech. But the hostility to them in tech in the west is tricky. It's not overt, which is easier to protest, but subtle, sometimes even well-intentioned – for instance, your claim in this very comment, when spoken "around the water cooler" during a lunch hour with many coworkers present will make many of the women in the room question themselves – is this true? ("Is there something wrong with me that I am interested in this?") Those instances aggregate – how often do you think that your personal failure might be a failure of your entire demographic? How debilitating is that for productivity? They'll think of the lack of female Elon Musks and hang their head in shame, and many who were considering doing something like that will be a little more discouraged, despite many powerful figures in domains outside of tech. Again, this is encapsulated into my theory of greater acquiescence to social acceptance for this group of people, and greater measures needed to fight it. 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/south-korea-women-startups-entrepreneurs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/south-korea-wome...

goatinaboat 6y ago

Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation Inspire the next generation how exactly? "Your predecessor was filling a quota but you're here on merit, honest"?

Grustaf 6y ago
I don't know about you but I didn't choose to study physics based on the demography of physicist. It's always strange to hear people argue that correctly gendered "role models" are so important. The main difference between an average female physics student and Isaac Newton is not their gender, she is just as different from him as I am.
- pleasejuststop 6y ago
  Rather than strive for "not judging a book by its cover", the culture of America has pulled a 180 and decided that the cover matters most. Trying to argue counter to this makes you an enemy, or confirmation bias for being a racist (as seen in such chartoppers as "White Fragility")
- supergirl 6y ago
  here is a highly cited article: https://www.hw.ac.uk/services/docs/same-gender-role-models.pdf https://www.hw.ac.uk/services/docs/same-gender-role-models.p... > In both studies, results indicated that female participants were more inspired by outstanding female than male role models; in contrast, gender did not determine the impact of role models on male participants.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    Perhaps that indicates better approach than forced quotas, try to get women to be less concerned by the gender of role models?
- nathan11 6y ago
  I tend to downplay the impact of role model demographics as well, but then I recognize that I'm represented literally everywhere--except perhaps US football and basketball. I'm willing to accept that because the norm is people that look like me are everywhere, I don't notice the impact it has on me.

Grustaf 6y ago

> My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow If you for some reason want more female fund managers, clearly the better way is to improve the pipeline, encourage women to study business. Forcing companies to hire people they didn't want to hire is obviously a very bad idea. More importantly, why is the number of female fund managers relevant? > If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards "Dear Alice, we are happy to tell you that XYZ Asset Management has decided to take the hit and hire you for the position as fund manager, congratulations!"

DC1350 6y ago
Changing the way the fund managers look is the easiest way to project a progressive image without actually doing anything meaningful. It’s great for the brand.
cycloptic 6y ago
Surely you can see how punting the problem back to academia is not a long-term solution. The industry keeps on being an old-boys club that way, and academia can select only for people who are willing to put up with that aspect.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  On the contrary. The problem (if you consider it a problem) is one of supply, not demand. So the only long-term solution is to increase the supply, not create an artificial demand.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    That's what I'm saying though, punting it back to academia doesn't increase the general supply, it only increases the supply with a smaller subset of people who are willing to put up with the "old-boys network" aspect for their entire career.

pleasejuststop 6y ago

Is this twitter? > My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow. > 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 You're saying that because women were/are second class citizens, non-women that may have worked harder, and LITERALLY BE BETTER, should not get the position. Your implementation details in fixing the problem is sexist and naive. You and the rest of twitter should stop fixing SYMPTOMS and start fixing the UNDERLYING PROBLEMS.

henryaj 6y ago

> fewer women engineers so it makes sense to hire fewer women It's not about what 'makes sense' - it's literally that there are fewer of them. If women make up 10% of the hiring pool (say in tech) and your company employs 50% women, all that means is that every other company now has fewer than 10% women.

rectang 6y ago

Surprise, surprise — the only female-indicating handle in this discussion is getting downvoted into oblivion. One reason boards stay demographically skewed is because everybody on them vehemently opposes taking concrete action to address said demographic skew. Members of underrepresented minorities tend to favor active steps, disqualifying them as candidates from the perspective of the status quo. A similar effect preserves the demographic skew of Hacker News. HN is overwhelmingly male dominated, and thus disproportionately unreceptive to views typically held by women and not typically held by men. That disagreement gets expressed through downvoting, which is ultimately indistinguishable from animus even if the intent was benign. And thus people who hold views common among women, finding this forum unfriendly, go elsewhere.