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New EU law on gender balance on corporate boards
- cge 4y agoAs it isn't noted prominently in this announcement, it is worth clarifying that the directive does not apply to small and medium-sized enterprises, and applies only to listed companies.
- jacooper 4y agoAre the companies listed somewhere?, I couldn't find anything on the EU's website.
- cge 4y agoListed in this context means publicly traded and listed on a stock exchange.
- nickpp 4y agoThus creating yet another disincentive for companies to list themselves on the market, leaving EU markets further behind their US counterparts.
- throwboi123 4y ago
- Ligma123 4y agoCan't wait for an execs board room full of bearded guys who just happen to identify as women to circumvent these laws.
- medstrom 4y agoProblem is you presumably care about the company's success, so you don't want to take such risks messing with the intent of the law.
- mantas 4y agoThen create a board for the sake of the law, but make sure that the board does exactly nothing. While having a shadow board to run the company?
- medstrom 4y agoStill messing with the intent, so you'd still need the company lawyers to stay on top of this arrangement and double-check regularly that your bases are covered and you can't be slammed in some way. Oh and you'd need to be sure your company lawyers or perhaps a disgruntled board member won't make voicetapes and leak them once they stop working for you. And on and on...
- causi 4y agoBy 2026, companies will need to have 40% of the underrepresented sex among non-executive directors or 33% among all directors. Identity quotas do little but foster distrust of the members of the assisted category. How does this even work as more and more peoples' gender identities deviate from the classical male and female? Does a non-binary person count toward the quota? Do they count only if they were assigned female at birth? Can executives change their legal gender to manipulate their stats? Are companies similarly required to have at least 33% males on their boards? How does telling a company who they must hire, as opposed to who they're not allowed to discriminate against, not violate the right of freedom of association? This is a whole damn mess.
- ClassyJacket 4y agoSex is not assigned at birth, it's observed.
- medstrom 4y agoYou must know this claim of yours can trigger a huge discussion. If you want to discuss it in good faith, you must write more, not toss in a one-sentence slogan like a grenade and hope it gets people to spend a ton of effort in response. And I'd advise replying to a post more directly related to the point.
- causi 4y agoDumb or not, assigned female at birth and assigned male at birth, AFAB and AMAB, are the contemporary terminology.
- Nathanba 4y agoThis is the kind of thing that can break entire economies: forcing you to hire people you don't want to hire, people who may be entirely unoptimal but you have to hire them anyway due to a quota. Of course the consequences will be too gradual to see at first. People will only implement this stuff slowly, fines will probably not appear for a decade and by the time these changes are actually in effect nobody will know why the economy runs X% worse than before. It will be as if it has always been slightly bad and economists will ponder for years and years how to improve the ailing continent.
- varispeed 4y ago
- notlukesky 4y agoMaybe they will allow boards to just allow self-identified genders. And on that note what happens with non-binary and gender fluid people? Will they be counted as well?
- ogig 4y agoThis is a legit question. I can totally see some men turning legally women only for a spot in the board. Possible in Spain, and considering how good with are at bending rules this seems low hanging fruit for unscrupulous people. I guess the only thing preventing this could be the public backslash towards the company if their board women are regular dudes in suits.
- lzooz 4y agoNo more unscrupulous than telling you that you can't have a job because you are a man. Socialist governments in Spain have been introducing unconstitutional laws that discriminate depending on your gender (longer prison sentences if you are a man for example). Letting you change your gender whenever you want is going to finally bring some equality back.
- pavlov 4y ago
- cies 4y agoMy opinion: If you support free market companies, you should not tell them how to hire (put quotas like the one now mandated in the EU). A govt can put quotas on it's own organizations. Sure. No problem there, as it is not a market-force company to begin with. Next up the C-family invents some new Cs (CWO, CQO, CJO, CYO) and puts some women on it just so the CTO/CFO/CEO can be men. In Nigeria foreign companies have to hire locals: they sit all day on "the locals bench" waiting for their shift to be over. I wait for this to happen on EU company boards with women. Great move EU! /s
- Owen69 4y ago[dead]
- pannSun 4y agoThe scope of EU laws is growing. Do member countries enjoy having social-economical policies dictated from above? This is meddling in what should be internal matters of sovereign states. Then they are surprised anti-EU sentiment is growing.
- techpression 4y agoThe problem with power is that you never get enough of it, and having a massive machine like the EU populated with people elected by no other merit other than nepotism was always doomed to become a tyranny or a failure. It just takes a few decades until it becomes noticeable (like the growing anti-EU sentiment amongst member states).
- AdrianB1 4y agoEU is leaning towards German-style management of regulating everything in excess. Most people in my country don't realize what is going on, there is only a minority that is making a bit of noise, but they are too few to be believed (we have a culture where the majority opinion is considered to be "right").
- pannSun 4y agoIt is not the amount of regulation I take issue with[1], but the scope. While I am strongly pro-EU, I am also strongly in favor of it being made up of countries that are more than just nominally sovereign and independent. Power is slowly being moved from national governments and to the EU, and I don't like this slow subversion of nations one bit. [1] Not saying over-regulation isn't a problem, merely not my main concern.
- medstrom 4y agoWhy don't you like it? Do you perceive rights being lost, or...?
- pannSun 4y agoYes, I believe a government that is more local, and representing a community that has more in common, will be more reflective of the wishes of that community, and more responsive (and vulnerable!) to its criticism. I find it somewhat insulting I even have to argue for this - this move of power further away is a change. It should be justified, instead of happening by default, while the former status quo of sovereign nations has to argue for its continued existence.
- baal80spam 4y agoHonest question - why only on corporate boards? Why not trashmen (trashwomen)? Why not miners? Why all the mundane jobs are OK to be performed only (or mostly) by men?
- medstrom 4y agoThis is one law, not a whole policy. The law has only to do with corporate boards and doesn't imply all is OK with the rest.
- mcv 4y agoThey are less likely to result in an unequal distribution of power. Don't get me wrong; I'm all for more diversity in all jobs (as long as people meet the requirements). But more diversity in trash collectors is unlikely to result in more diversity in CEOs. The opposite is much more true.
- alickz 4y ago>But more diversity in trash collectors is unlikely to result in more diversity in CEOs. The opposite is much more true. You think more diversity in CEOs will result in more diversity for trash collectors?
- mcv 4y agoI think more diversity in positions of power will lead to more diversity across all aspects of society.
- alickz 4y agoWhy? Not being rhetorical, genuinely curious to the reasoning.
- mcv 4y agoWhy wouldn't it? If the people making the decisions are more diverse, represent more different walks of life, demographic groups, etc, the decisions made will take more situations into account. Less incorrect assumptions will be made about one size fitting all, because that one size doesn't fit the people making the decision.
- josteink 4y agoGreat. Now do the HR or DEI boards :D HR and DEI (ironically) are almost 99% female and wield almost absolute power over the corporation. When will we have proper gender-representation there?
- ClassyJacket 4y agoThis is meaningless when you've destroyed the meaning of the word 'gender'. Any company not meeting quotas could simply have half the men start identifying as women.
- m000 4y agoGenuine question: Are there ways to "organically" promote gender balance without having to rely on gender quotas?
- cies 4y agoThis happens already. I'd love to add some more women to my dev team, as that has shown great benefits in earlier teams i hired for.
- grenoire 4y agoInvestment in education and social welfare, combined with time. My university is growing into having a more balanced faculty mainly because it is now seeing an increasing number of female candidates. This is a result of the study (economics and finance) becoming more popular in the past two decades with women, and we are seeing the results only now. There will always be lagged effects in this. Granted, there are quotas in place too.
- zozbot234 4y agoExcept that poorer countries that invest less in social welfare tend to feature more gender balance than advanced countries. Because preference and aptitude matters a lot; male and female folks simply tend to care about different things.
- maytc 4y agoOne simple method: You start the search with a 50%/50% split, in this case half men and half women, then hire the best candidate from that cohort
- medstrom 4y agoThe problem in this approach is that even people who think they judge only on merits rarely do. If it was that easy, our laws would all be this sort of thing. It's easy to trust people to counter biases they know they have. Quotas exist to counter biases people don't know they have.
- 4y ago
- fruit2020 4y agoWhy not have at least one woman and one man in combination with one being old, one being young, one being black, asian, etc, one being gay, one having a disability, etc
- Y_Y 4y agoI always got upset that my eye colour is not common among the ultra-rich. What can I do about it? Presumably I'm be unfairly kept in my low social stratum as a result and would like to leave these other peasants behind please.
- fxtentacle 4y agoThis is mostly PR and will likely not do any serious damage :) But it might do some good by setting a positive goal. First off, it doesn't specify how biological men temporarily identifying as female during the hiring process are to be treated, which seems like an obvious loophole to me. Second, the actual resolution says: "Where two candidates of different sexes are equally qualified, preference shall be given to the candidate of the underrepresented sex" and that "equally qualified" is another huge loophole. The average male candidate will have a lot more experience, simply because it's been a male-dominated field. Thirdly, it is up to the member states to come up with appropriate punishment for failing to meet this and "could include fines" doesn't sound that strict to me.
- seekingcharlie 4y ago> biological men temporarily identifying as female That is a discussion of gender, not sex.
- mcv 4y agoSome comments here focus on transgender and gender fluid people, but that's completely missing the point; those are such a tiny percentage of the population they don't figure in these quotas at all. The point of these quotas is that some companies, even after decades of society striving for more gender equality, banning sex discrimination, etc, still prefer to hire one gender over the other for some functions, and especially for executive roles, this often happens through old-boys networks that exclude women. They may claim that they can't find women suitable for the role, but that's because the networks they hire from tend to exclude them. It's also been known that people tend to hire people who look like the people already working in that particular role. Even when the people doing the hiring do not look like that. Even when they are aware of this effect. If we want people to be hired for their ability and not their gender, we need a way to rid ourselves of these effects. For men and women to have the same opportunities to get hired, they already both need to be represented in the pool of people that have already been hired. And they need to be equally represented in the pool that people are hired from. These sort of quotas are an ugly way to accomplish that, but so far, nobody has been able to come up with a better way of reaching that goal. Don't like quotas? Come up with something better. Because not doing anything is clearly not fixing the issue, and perpetuating the existing inequalities.
- trabant00 4y ago> Don't like quotas? Come up with something better. This assumes quotas are better than what we already have in place, which is equality of opportunity, not of outcome. That assumption is exactly what is being debated here.
- yrgulation 4y agoWhat about focusing on solving why parts of the EU have regressed to 3rd world economic status, capital cities that mostly look like ghettos, lack of energy supplies, and poor administration? The EU is gradually becoming a joke. Not that gender issues shouldn't be taken care of, but this is not the way to solve them.
- rjzzleep 4y agoThey're well on their way to de-industrialization due to their ill advised attempt at an economic war that has completely backfired. And it happened by and large due to moral incontinence and unnecessary virtue signalling. There are after all still a couple of NATO members bombing or occupying various countries without much uproar. Adenauer and de Gaulle must be turning in their grave seeing the current generation of European leaders destroying everything generations of hardworking Europeans have built up in record speed.
- maeln 4y agoWell I am sure that this will be unpopular on HN, with the usual argument thrown whenever this kinds of laws pop-ups. I do understand the worries about recruiting under qualified personnel due to diversity laws but overall, I support this kinds of laws. There is an objective over representation of man in management and higher management position. We know that people tend to recruit people they "fit" with. Recrutement is incredibly biased. This tend to lead to men recruiting more men and women recruiting more women. In a man dominated field, like higher management, it means that it is very hard for a woman to enter the field, this lead to less woman having experiences in this field which create a vicious circle. This kinds of laws might indeed lead to some less optimal recrutement in the short term, but I would argue that it is better in the long term because it allows to enlarge the worker pool and allow for more diverse profile to get the experience to be a better worker. Also, maybe it is more cynical of me, but I have seen higher up recrutement in many companies. The actual worker skill is just one of the factor at play, and sometimes it is far from being the biggest factor. We are already doing sub-optimal recrutement right now, we just choose the criteria ...
- trabant00 4y ago> We know that people tend to recruit people they "fit" with. I have a really hard time seeing this as a bad thing. Recruiting people you fit with is a requirement for you to be able to work with them. And there are already laws in place that you can't define "fit with" as not being a woman, a person of color, etc. Let people hire who they want (discrimination based on sex, race, religion, etc, not included) and if they don't hire optimally their company will be out-competed by another company who does.
- LatteLazy 4y agoSilly question: aren't directors in listed companies elected (at least nominally) by the share holders? What happens if they keep picking too many of the same sex candidates? Can the CEO overrule them? Are members of the majority sex not allowed to stand anymore if to many are elected? Also, since this is a Directive it just tells member nations governments to do it right? If it did it itself, it would be a Regulation. Like MiFID (told nations to do X) vs MIFIR (did it at the EU level directly). Similar to a US "unfunded mandate".
- Geee 4y agoHorrible. I'm convinced that EU is being sabotaged.
- Nitrolo 4y agoI believe this is the full text of the law: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/1_1_200090_dir_gen_cor_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/1_1_200090_dir...
- nkzd 4y agoI don't know a single person who is for gender quotas. Do I live in a bubble or are policymakers bringing laws that are highly unpopular and go against a will of the people they serve? How could that be?
- timonoko 4y agoNot a big thing. Most European corporations already have a board for politicians and "sauna-board" for real issues.
- medstrom 4y agoI believe it occurs, but how did you come to believe it occurs for "most"?
- timonoko 4y agoBecause all have politicians on board. Most famous was Finnish Labor Minister, who was on board of a company hiring "temporary workers" permanently, thus bypassing labor laws. When asked, she basically said "I was there for coffee and pastries, I was not responsible for their day-to-day operations".
- medstrom 4y agoIt sounds like you're content letting anecdotes stand in for data. I'm not. See, a policy can have the intended effect on society as a whole even if there are plenty of anecdotes about situations where it doesn't. So the existence of such cases as your Finnish Labor Minister doesn't mean the policy doesn't work in the long run. To answer that, you need data.
- deliriumchn 4y agoWhy not let businesses decide? I'm pretty sure that higher positions are being hired mostly based on effectiveness and not just because they're male? Like if women mostly get smaller salary for same work (as media claim), everyone would jump and hire them over man because its more efficient lol
- skozharinov 4y agoHow about balancing HR? Teachers? Or jobs regarded as dangerous and/or unpleasant, like miners or garbage collectors? What about prisoners? I heard there are huge gender balance issues too.