17 ms·
I guess it depends on how you define a goal of quotas. If it’s meant to increase women’s presence in certain areas just for the sake of having more women somewh
by nme01 5y ago
I guess it depends on how you define a goal of quotas. If it’s meant to increase women’s presence in certain areas just for the sake of having more women somewhere, then quotas might work. But if you apply quotas to fight the gender/sexuality/skin color bias then usually those policies are applied in a wrong place which creates yet another bias, just of a different direction.
Let’s get a promotion policies for example: if you say that at least 50% of board of directors should be women but 95% of all employees is man, then average woman in the company is 19 times more likely to be promoted than average man which seems extremely unfair.
The problem should be well understood first. That is: why do we have so few female employees. Then it might turn out that we are biased in our hiring process. If there’s no evidence for that, then maybe there’s a bias during university recruitment process etc.
- eesmith 5y agoIn order to make a data-driven decision, where's the evidence that your hypothesis is correct? FWIW, Norway requires at least 40% gender representation on the boards of public companies, so there's data right there. The best I can tell is "mixed", but definitely not "actually counter-productive". I quoted "mixed" from https://www.ft.com/content/6f6bc5a2-7b70-11e8-af48-190d103e32a4 https://www.ft.com/content/6f6bc5a2-7b70-11e8-af48-190d103e3... . One of the observations quoted there is: > Ms Helleland says three-quarters of recruitment is down to informal networks: “Men recruit men. Men recruit CEOs that look like themselves. I interpret that as an informal quota system for men. There's decades of research on this topic. Either it's "well understood" now, or there's no good way to make a data-driven decision.