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California outlawed all-white-male boardrooms – reshaping corporate America
- sanity31415 5y agoWoke racism strikes again.
- anon23anon 5y agough this shit is hard to stomach
- Romanulus 5y agoMeritocracy be damned.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ctdonath 5y agoI thought racism & sexism were bad.
- gibsonf1 5y agoCalifornia is cancelling itself, and this will not end well.
- btheshoe 5y agoAh yes, symbolic, meaningless change to appeal to woke twitter that will have exactly zero effect on solving any real problems
- bradlys 5y agohttps://archive.is/6pNGi https://archive.is/6pNGi
- TechnoTimeStop 5y agoAhhhh dog shit racism brought to you by Chinese Russian troll bots on ... you got it ... even hacker news!
- postingawayonhn 5y agoIs that legal?
- NDizzle 5y agoNo, and they know it isn't.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoQuite frankly, no, it's not. The article touches on this, and I'd easily bet my house that, if it gets that far, that courts will eventually invalidate this law. That said, there is hardly any company that would want to be the plaintiff in this case: "So, you're the company that led the lawsuit trying to keep corporate boards all white and male" is what the headlines will say, and no corporation would want to be branded as such.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kjksf 5y agoRoad the hell is paved with good intentions. As much as I support equality and diversity, I'm even more strongly opposed government over-reach. The state shouldn't have a say in who gets a job at a private (non owned by state) company. As the article state, I hope this will get over-turned by the courts. This would set a bad precedent. If the state can dictate the kind of person gets a highly coveted job, what else can state dictate?
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThis is about equity, not equality, and it's increasingly clear that a lot of people don't know the difference.
- GenerocUsername 5y agoLiterally impossible to provide equitable outcomes to all possible segmentations of humans since those segments can be gerrymandered as easily as our geographic definitions used in the past. For instance, the most hyper-modern views of gender vs sex.
- ctdonath 5y agoPunishing someone based on “wrong” color/gender is evil.
- ramesh31 5y agoYes it is. And that's what we've done as a society for hundreds of years in the US. That we are now attempting to fix that will obviously be seen as an attack, because losing privilege is never easy.
- ctdonath 5y ago“Privilege” is getting a job over a better candidate just because of inclusion in an artificial social construct.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThe comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not. I do not think it is unreasonable for a corporate board to be required to include at least one woman or at least one non-white person. I also think it's quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common that this is even necessary. It's an artifact of institutional racism and sexism that is easy to observe in hard data, and so this law feels like a single step towards modern equity.
- baremetal 5y agowhat you are saying is that women and people of color are not capable of competing on merit? they have to be installed by decree? i am insulted.
- walls 5y agoThen you are woefully oblivious to the state of the world.
- RheingoldRiver 5y agoIt's not that they're incapable of competing on merit; it's that the established institutions are unwilling to recognize based on merit, and a coercive outside force is required to counterbalance the entrenched racism & sexism until we're at a point where society can function on a truly meritocratic basis on its own.
- sanity31415 5y ago> it's that the established institutions are unwilling to recognize based on merit Example?
- captainredbeard 5y agoShow me a rule that actually enshrines this.
- throwawaysleep 5y ago
- baremetal 5y agothis should work out well...
- malchow 5y agoThe law doesn’t pass constitutional muster. There are several challenges underway.
- NDizzle 5y agoI really don't like this pattern that's developing. The pattern that I see is, "Implement an obviously unconstitutional law. Let it affect people in some manner for N months until the courts get around to saying that it's illegal. Repeat indefinitely." The speed of the courts depends on the political party of the offender, of course. See also: Executive Orders that can be removed and how swiftly they are removed.
- thrill 5y agoThat's because passing unconstitutional laws carries no penalty and little threat.
- baggy_trough 5y agoDiscrimination on the basis of race is always unethical.
- captainredbeard 5y agoThis comment ten years ago would be agreed to by almost everyone in the United States. Not anymore; it is now fashionable to be racist against Whites. No more!
- kenjackson 5y agoThis comment has never been agreed upon by almost everyone in the US. The difference now is that we want to take action to try to even the playing field against the majority of those who didn't agree with the statement then or now.
- captainredbeard 5y agoNonsense
- I_am_tiberius 5y ago2 years from now: "California outlawed all-white-male startups"
- BrianOnHN 5y agoWhat a shockingly sad interpretation from most (all at the time of writing) comments here. When did you ever have a job that you didn't learn 90% of what's needed, while on the job itself? Cries for meritocracy are woefully ignorant for this fact alone. If you want meritocracy, focus your energy on improving education. Until then, your worth is determined mostly by whether someone gives you a chance, which depends on your skin color, location, and last name, aka luck.
- sanity31415 5y ago> What a shockingly sad interpretation from most (all at the time of writing) comments here. It's shockingly sad to see people defending state discrimination based on race and sex.
- BrianOnHN 5y agoHow so? If the state continues to allow a small subset of the population to discriminate based on race and sex, isn't that also the state defending discrimination?
- sanity31415 5y ago> If the state continues to allow a small subset of the population to discriminate based on race and sex Example?
- waterhouse 5y agoI think discriminating based on race and sex (for hiring decisions) is already illegal. Therefore, the only new scenarios covered by this law are where a board ends up being single-sexed and -raced for reasons that one can't make a strong case were due to discrimination.
- kbenson 5y ago> When did you ever have a job that you didn't learn 90% of what's needed, while on the job itself? The older and more specialized my roles get, the less I'm learning about how to do the job on the job, and the more I'm just learning the small differences at the current location. I assume that's why CEO's are routinely hired away from other companies. I assume the stuff they'll learn at the new job is the specifics of that company, but not "how to be a CEO". I would assume the same of some board members (as I understand it, they don't all bring the same things to the table).
- indianpianist 5y agoY'know, back in my day we had a word for this... I think it was "racism" but I'm not entirely sure
- proc0 5y agoThey've been playing a game of redefining terms for a few years now, at least since 2015. People not paying attention (not wanting to be labeled with scary terms) basically fell for it and here we are.
- mountainriver 5y agoI guess we’ve stopped hiring the best people for the job. Moves like this put the US at a competitive disadvantage. We can solve our inequality problems without making us weak. The US army took equal opportunity seriously long ago, their model works and can be replicated.
- walls 5y agoIf we were ever at the point where companies were hiring the best people for the job, this wouldn't be necessary as the companies would already have a diverse board.
- throwawaysleep 5y agoAssuming skill is equally distributed by race. Except that everywhere, including when admission is solely based on performance on a test you can study for, there end up being massive racial disparities. Other races need to be shoehorned in.
- Falling3 5y agoAnd you believe that's due to innate differences and not anything about the environments in which these disparities arise?
- mountainriver 5y agoThe whole point is it’s not innate differences but it’s a bad solution. There are better ways of providing equal opportunity that don’t compromise the integrity of the system
- larkost 5y agoBut these are board positions. They are not chosen based on measurable skills, but rather almost always on some combination of connections and a specific mindset. This has often been called the "old boys club", and the persistent pattern of boards being overwhelmingly white and male is great evidence that there has a (predominately unconscious) bias in the selections. Since the makeup of these boards affects the decisions made by these companies, and those decisions have a large impact on society, society (California) has decided that they have to clean up their act and make those decision makers at least vaguely reflect the makeup of that society.
- MaximumYComb 5y agoBoards with at least 6 members must have at least 3 female board members (from https://www.advocate.com/business/2018/10/01/california-outlaws-all-male-corporate-boardrooms https://www.advocate.com/business/2018/10/01/california-outl...). My understanding was there is a smaller pool of qualified women to pick from due to career/family balance choices.
- MattGaiser 5y agoWhat is not a white male? Will this be a self declared sort of thing?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- PopePompus 5y agoThey'll use the Potter Stewart test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 5y ago> What is not a white male? Will this be a self declared sort of thing? Except for Native Americans, where active tribal affiliation is sometimes required, racial/ethnic identity in the US is generally purely self-identification, despite having legal significance for various purpose (e.g., government contracting and minority-owned business incentives/requirements.)
- conspiracist 5y agoUh... isn't this anti-Semite?
- tehjoker 5y agoQuotas are good for increasing diversity, but lol @ thinking someone of a different gender or race will lead to a gentler kinder capitalism. This is a decision that will affect at most a few hundred or a few thousand people in a state of tens of millions. Those millions are suffering far more than bourgeois C-level aspirants one rung too low on the ladder for their taste. Pure spectacle. We need workplace democracy and social services for everyone! Healthcare, housing, and integration on a local level. That's what it means to change society, not changing the paint on a machine that grinds people up and spits them out. The country got worse thanks to Obama's presidency because he refused to even chip away at pure financial capitalism and let people get crushed in the financial crisis. His refusal to help people created the "liquidity trap" that strangles the economy because people have no money to spend in an economic system that requires a buyer and a seller.
- elzbardico 5y agoYeah. Some of the most cruel and exploitative slaver I had as bosses were women, even had one asking why I needed to take a day off to be with my son at the hospital if I was married,”couldn’t my wife spend one more day? “
- Falling3 5y agoYup. It's frustrating neoliberal nonsense to be so concerned with increasing diversity in roles that shouldn't even exist while ignoring the widespread impacts of sexism and racism.
- elzbardico 5y agoWorry not my brethren! The elite also have daughters they sent to elite schools. Nothing will really change here in practice.
- logicalmonster 5y agoThe funny thing is that any actually bigoted company has a built in out. "Johnson, as the youngest member, the board has decided that you must identify as a woman for regulatory compliance." What are woke progressives going to do, deny that a man can identify as whatever gender she wants?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kenjackson 5y agoI think that gender identity for the purposes of pursuing a loophole would be happily denied. Woke progressives don't pursue their goals simply to say they do, but in order to provide relief to marginalized groups. Unlike conservatives who use it as a shield to try to continue to oppress marginalized groups.
- dinkleberg 5y agoThat is getting into dangerous territory. How do you prove someone's gender identity? Do you have to declare that with a legal document? Will there be blind tests to make sure you're conforming to your declared identity?
- kenjackson 5y agoSorry. I thought they were saying they used that gender only for submitting for compliance to this. If they took on being a woman for all legal purposes even if for this loophole then fine.
- BrandoElFollito 5y agoSerious question from a non-American: is this actually possible? Can you just identify as a man on Monday, than a woman on Tuesday? In other words, is sex a flag in your documents, or just something you say to be? I am asking because I read that the racial identification is purely declarative.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- monological 5y agoGenuinely curious how women would feel if they were given a job not based purely on merit and credentials, but their gender. Isn’t that a slap in the face? Like, “yea there were other much more qualified candidates, but we just have to fill this quota.” That’s what would be nagging me in the back of my mind if I was a women.
- slightlyCyborg 5y agoIt completely undermines credibility. If there is a person in authority who may have been put there under affirmative action policies, the people under that authority will always wonder whether or not the person was put in that position because of their competence or because of the policy.
- nradov 5y agoHow will the state government legally determine whether a particular board member is or is not a white male? Is it just a matter of checking boxes on a form, or will there be specific criteria?
- pugets 5y agoI couldn’t think of a more Californian approach to fixing racial inequity. Instead of providing more economic opportunities for minorities to become executives, just make it illegal for the companies to not make them executives. Meanwhile, continue your state tradition of gentrifying diverse neighborhoods and letting techies take over San Francisco and LA. I think a lot of these dumb laws get pushed through because few people are willing to speak out against them for fear of being mischaracterized. The liberal Democrats are riding the wave of the cultural zeitgeist.
- oliwarner 5y agoIf your belief is minorites aren't promoted by all-white executive boards, this is a very rapid fix that could work across all levels within a company. Worth a shot.
- davidjytang 5y agoYeah it is fixing the symptom not the cause.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y agoAs a poor Eastern European “white” male I must say, America is a weird place.
- jmpman 5y agoLet’s say a 10 person board is populated with 9 white male board members. They need to appoint the 10th board member. It can’t be a white male? So, for this specific role, they must make a hiring decision based upon the individual’s membership in a class, such as sex, race or color. That seems to violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
- snicker7 5y agoI mean, the law is unconstitutional. Racial quotas are not legal. And this will get struck down by courts. Democrats literally just don't care.
- omk 5y agoIndia should be held up as a classic example. Racial reservation once initiated is difficult to eradicate and there is no assurance that such a program benefits the under-privileged. If at all it creates further class divide.
- mynegation 5y agoAren’t all big tech Delaware corporations anyway?
- andrecarini 5y agoI think this kind of imposition is frustrating not because of the end result (we'd all appreciate more diversity, no doubt) but because of the method: is painting over the symptoms a meaningful solution? Maybe we should discuss instead what's leading to such lack of diversity (misaligned incentives? lack of opportunities?)
- throwaway334234 5y ago> we'd all appreciate more diversity, no doubt Why would one appreciate more diversity instead of appreciating more homogeneity? I for one prefer to live among my own kind.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway334234 5y agoStuff like this contributed to my opinion that ethnostates are favorable.
- NotChina 5y ago"Chud" is the modern term for "Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus" Given California's absolute failures in fixing their inequity, lack of any middle class or upper middle class african-americans, homelessness, schools. They're not the shining example they think they are.
- ctdonath 5y agoInteresting this thread got flagged. Fair honest discussion of relevant law as reported by a leading news source.
- vehemenz 5y agoYikes. 1. If White is understood to be a "race," then racial groups can distinguish ethnicity, nationality, extended ancestry, phenotype, or self-identifying group. It's not clear what "white" is, legally speaking. There may be legal precedents set for other "races," for other purposes, but they shouldn't apply across the board (see 2). 2. The typical racial groups in the US are highly asymmetrical. Think of Latino, Hispanic, Black, White, Asian, Pacific Islander, Mixed, etc. In ordinary usage, these all pick out different combinations of dimensions. Compare this to another group predicate, such as color. When we identify colors, we use the identical process to distinguish pink from blue, green from orange, etc. 3. This should go without saying, but one should be able to earn a board seat no matter their race. Further, if we care at all about merit (boardrooms are peak capitalism, after all), it should be possible for a group of all Black, all White, all Chinese, or all Jewish to earn seats on a merit basis. 4. No matter how you cash out racial differences, they are ultimately superficial. Putting this much importance on superficial categories places more importance on race and (almost certainly) division. 5. The move toward "equity" is hollow. To me, it looks like rhetorical salad dressing for shifting equality to a different variable to favor one demographic over another. It's equality, but with respect to a different purpose/demographic. There is literally no way to make any law universally equal for everyone. Laws purporting equity, such as this, are passed at the expense of the majority and the *supposedly* powerful; let's stop pretending otherwise. 6. IANAL, but this is probably illegal.
- themgt 5y agoThat is to say, as is ever clearer and ever more important to note, [identity] politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class. - Adolph Reed, Jr.
- beecafe 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiconfessionalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiconfessionalism
- lsiebert 5y agoI tend to take the view that laws like this are attempts to reduce existing racism and sexism in corporate governance. For example, and I'll link to an article for all of this at the bottom, Hispanic people are the biggest ethnic group in California, making up 39.4% of the state, but 83% of public companies boards have no Latino or Hispanic board member. Latino and Hispanic Board members make up 2.5% of the population of California board members of public companies, and in the 12 months from June 30 2020 to June 30, 2021, only 3.5% of new directors were Hispanic. I don't think you get those kind of disparities in this day and age if board members are awarded entirely on merit. I think there are often many qualified candidates for any position, but historical and structural and cultural reasons often push people to hire people like themselves, thus perpetuating inequity. Maybe you disagree, but at the very least it seems like board rooms don't reflect the state's population very well. The article talks about people like the Chief Medical Officer at Merck becoming a board member now, and a Black division head at United Talent Agency with 40+ years of experience becoming a board member now. Not exactly people lacking experience and expertise, but not people who were being asked to serve on boards. If corporations are people, and if a person was only hiring white men for a particular role at a company and not looking to hire equally qualified candidates who happened to be women or minorities, I would consider that the opposite of a meritocracy, and likely indicative of discrimination. And if that was what's happening, I don't think the problem was going to correct itself. If it was, I imagine it would have done so by now, or at least there would have been much greater progress. Further, studies from Morgan Stanley and others linked in the article suggest that diversity is better for shareholders! If true, then these changes help pave the way for people who have more merit in terms of benefit to the corporation. I don't think diversity is some magic that makes companies run better, I think racism and sexism makes people ignore the value that people could bring in to a company in favor of choosing people more similar to themselves. Corporations under these two laws have to have someone who is a woman and someone who is part of a minority community, and I believe they can be the same person, so it's not like white male board members are going to disappear just because a board seat or two is required to be more diverse. A white male board member is almost certainly wealthy, so nobody is going hungry even if they lose a board seat, and boards can, I believe, just add additional seats, so nobody actually has to lose their position. Ultimately it seems like this may make companies perform better, and promote racial and gender equity, and it doesn't cost taxpayers anything to make it a condition of a California corporate charter. So what exactly is the real harm, when compared to the benefits? https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/california-latino-boardroom-representation-lags-study-2021-09-13/ https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/califo...
- Zandikar 5y agoJust want to point out this isn't a new bill just passed, but multiple bills/initiatives, the first of which that started a few years ago and have been (and continue to) going into effect. Additionally, the number of boards that were subject to needing to make a change to comply were quite numerous it seems. > While Black representation on boards has grown amid the nation’s reckoning on race, people who are not white or straight still hold only 18.4% of the board seats in the top 1,000 public companies nationwide, according to data released in August by executive data firm Equilar. > There were at least 115 California public companies that did not have a single woman on their board in 2017. Now there are only five...
- medvezhenok 5y agoThis is a most interesting chart - the race ratios by generation. Boomers are predominantly white, whereas each successive generation is more diverse: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common... So I wonder if that has some thing to do with it - once the later generations age into the "leadership" ages, boards should naturally become more diverse over time.
- xyzzy21 5y agoSimple answer: don't incorporate in California and if they try to extend this to any business doing business in California, stop doing business in California. The answer is to Go Galt!
- IdontRememberIt 5y ago20 years ago, my IT friends and I were all enviously looking at California as a model to replicate. TC and Michael Arrington made us understand daily the opportunities we were missing. Today, I honestly feel sad to see the decrepitude of this once beautiful lady we were in love with. She does not inspire me anymore. Sad.
- slightlyCyborg 5y agoRacists always implement racially discriminatory policies under the guise of moral superiority and California's legislature in this case is no exception. Somebody forgot to read their Sowell.
- john90 5y agoIf u a white man and u still vote for the Democrats…. Smh