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The 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 un

• baremetal 5y ago
  what 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 ago
    Then you are woefully oblivious to the state of the world.
  • RheingoldRiver 5y ago
    It'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 ago
      Show me a rule that actually enshrines this.
    • throwawaysleep 5y ago
      So create a company full of passed over women and minorities and clobber the existing ones.
    • deleted 5y ago
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• kovek 5y ago
  If a board rejects a (very) competent person based on the person’s gender, race, sexuality, age, then… they lost a very competent person. That person will do great work outside of that board. Can we agree on this? Also, is that some sort of Nash equilibrium?
  • kenjackson 5y ago
    No, we can't agree on this. If most boards reject this person based on one of these things, they may never actually do this work or achieve anything near their potential. We've seen already in the US that culture trumps almost everything else. I've had people tell me that they'd rather their daughter marry a poorer white guy than a richer black guy. That said, all this really ends meaning is that the all-white board hires a couple of tokens they provide no power to and make their lives hell. It's standard process.
  • BrianOnHN 5y ago
    You're assuming board memberships are meritocratic. Don't assume.
  • ivalm 5y ago
    I don’t think that this formulation reflects the actual situation. Realistically you have a broad pool of near-identical performers (in a sense that your error in judgement is similar to difference in performance) mixed with some bad performers. The goal of the company is not to hire good, but to avoid the bad. So if someone isn’t bad then it’s fine to give preference based on some diversity metric, because you are just choosing between equivalent candidates (to within your ability to objectively measure).
    • kovek 5y ago
      They still lose a (very) competent candidate, and that candidate will do great work elsewhere (and not for the board)
      • ivalm 5y ago
        If you have a fixed headcount, then forgoing one candidate for equivalent another doesn’t carry a cost. By hiring person A you would be missing out on person B, by hiring person B you would be missing out on A. The point is that the net cost is 0. So if B brings more diversity then A you should hire B. You are not (net) missing anything.
• elzbardico 5y ago
  Why?
• lloydgrossman 5y ago
  > The comments here as I write this are quite shocking. I would have imagined that HN's readership would be quite progressive. Maybe not. good chunk of morons around here are old chuds who get upset over the silliest thing and have no self awareness. it's a give and take. dang sure has too much work.
  • draw_down 5y ago
    Grow up
• pcf 5y ago
  "Progressive" doesn't mean "jump on any bandwagon that comes along". I think HN's readership is much more nuanced and analytical than your average AOC fan, and luckily it shows in these comments.
• rajamaka 5y ago
  Racially discriminatory policies are anything but progressive.
• BrianOnHN 5y ago
  I agree with you, about HN's audience, which is I guess what "bro culture" devolves into, and that the idea isn't crazy. Board room implies scale. If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway. So many knee jerk reactions are a sad reflection of this community, though.
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    >"If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway." That's not necessarily true. There are plenty of organizations all over the world that are not "diverse" but those institutions manage to succeed. Not every company needs to have a board room that looks like a university admissions pamphlet in order to operate and respond to competition.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • throwawaysleep 5y ago
    > If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your doomed to fail anyway. The market would have slaughtered tech firms if this were true.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • newfriend 5y ago
    > If you don't have diversity at scale, in so many senses of the word, your [sic] doomed to fail anyway. Then why do we need a law banning it? If these white-male-only-board-led companies are doomed to fail, they should be outcompeted by sufficiently-diverse-board-led companies. I have a feeling the physical attributes of the board doesn't actually matter when it comes to a company's performance.
    • deleted 5y ago
• tayo42 5y ago
  There's a lot of vocal conservatives, libertarian, "centrists", contrarians here. These kinds of topics bring out the worst. I only clicked because I misread board rooms.
• captainredbeard 5y ago
  Sorry to disappoint you but there are plenty of smart people who are not "progressive", they just have learned to not make it obvious.
• ctdonath 5y ago
  It is shocking that one could be punished for hiring based on “wrong” color/gender. We spent decades getting past that, only to have it codified in law. “You’re great, but we’ll be punished if we hire you, because your skin is pale and you have testicles” is evil.
• mynegation 5y ago
  I have an impression that HN readers are more libertarian than progressive. The ambiguous part of this law that this is employment (or something close enough to employment) contingent on race and gender. Imagine a single woman of color on the board resigns and the seat must be filled. If the best candidate is a white male, he will be rejected based on gender and race.
• retrac 5y ago
  How non-white does someone have to be to qualify? Should it be based on self-identity? Should the race of corporate board members be determined by a state bureaucracy? While I agree with the goal, such a policy seems to raise questions like that immediately. And the more I wrangle with them the more intractable they seem. > quite shocking that all-white-male boards are so common Not if you knew the distribution of wealth by race (and gender) in America. Black people in America are poor after being slaves unable to own property for generations. Until very recently (in living memory) widely denied due process, access to employment, social and labour organizations, etc. that would enable building wealth. To this day, still disproportionately denied. There is less intergenerational wealth to transfer. Less educational capital. And so on. A different but cousin tale for women. This is one angle of systemic racism, I suppose. But to my eye the solution is mostly to address the poverty by the transfer of wealth, not legislate representation among the elites. Especially when you can do wealth transfer to poor people without legal racial classification systems, which is a notion that immediately evokes opposition from many.
• newsclues 5y ago
  Institutional racism, as this proposed, is not the answer.
• deleted 5y ago
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• strken 5y ago
  I want to redistribute more wealth to poor people, and I don't give a damn what colour the rich people sitting on corporate boards are. Americans have a myopic obsession with the race and gender of their rulers, but are willing to let the crippling poverty and poor working conditions of their neighbours slide. Progressivism sometimes takes time and energy that previously went to helping the working and middle classes, and redirects it off into the aether to help the very top of the pile.
  • lamontcg 5y ago
    This is actually core liberalism. Nancy Pelosi is probably very much on board with this law. Get left enough and universal healthcare, universal college and universal child care become a lot more important than equality of CEOs.
• radisb 5y ago
  While we are at it, just off the top of my head, lets make it required to include at least one bald person, at least one person with blood type AB, and at least one person with freckles. We shouldnt descriminate against them should we?
  • chillwaves 5y ago
    Are these groups of people under represented in company leadership?
• _hilro 5y ago
  Is a non-American European counted as white in this? Or are we pretending that the various different non-Anglo/WASPy "whites" in Europe have the exact same cultural & socio-economic headstart in the US as the US whites? It's a stupid rule. > are quite shocking Sheesh, your hyperbole is showing.
  • MaximumYComb 5y ago
    Even within a single country, I imagine the rural Alabama white is quite different from the rich, privately educated executive board member. I was born and raised in a poor, rural town with a high crime rate. Neither of my parents had a trade nor a university education. It is very obvious to me that I am culturally different from a lot of other educated people in tech. Hell, the military even covered my education. I don't hold the same values or interests as my peers, but I'm a white male so I get lumped into a "homogenous" group.
• nonameiguess 5y ago
  I'm not sure why you think that. Hacker News is amazingly conservative, not in the "God and guns" sense, but in the "please don't change anything ever" sense. I'm not even going to pretend that doesn't apply to me, too. Hate crypto, short AI hype, can't stand Electron apps, refuse to touch anything written in JavaScript, wish code would get out of my damn browser and into compiled executables I can keep on my local filesystem. We're basically all old men yelling at clouds here. Reflexively, this sounds like a stupid law to me, but unless the LA Times is just lying, it sounds like it's been successful and similar policies are now being pushed privately, apparently by Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is behind an effort to do something similar but without actual punishment. It's probably illegal, though, and seems destined to eventually be struck down whenever it gets to the Supreme Court. I also share your surprise that all white-male boards were even common before this. Mostly white-male boards I expected, but not 100%, at least for publicly traded large companies. Anybody trying to say that was meritocracy is fooling themselves. There is no way in hell there is that much of a skew in merit across gender and race boundaries. At the same time, I very much agree with the other comments saying this is focusing on exactly the wrong kind of progressivism. It feels like George Bush putting together the most ethnically diverse cabinet of all-time, but they were still uniformly war hawks, liars, and authoritarians. Making the 0.00001% of the world allowed to have power more diverse doesn't change that power is still way too centralized. It's fine for the extreme upper echelon of women and ethnic minorities but does nothing for the vast masses of actually underprivileged people.
  • erik_seaberg 5y ago
    > There is no way in hell there is that much of a skew in merit across gender and race boundaries. It’s the long pipeline. Bias from 30 or 40 years ago determined who got a chance to earn executive experience and build connections to become qualified to hold a board seat today. We should expect effectiveness, not fairness, from meritocracy, because merit was often not fostered fairly and much potential went undeveloped.
• gorwell 5y ago
  This is not progressive, it's regressive.
• deleted 5y ago
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