4 ms·

(I personally think women in director positions are a good thing because an all-men board obviously can't consist of the best people available) I don't want to

by chroma 14y ago

(I personally think women in director positions are a good thing because an all-men board obviously can't consist of the best people available) I don't want to turn this into a flame war about gender, but this does not seem obvious to me. It's certainly not the case in other fields. For example, the best mathematicians are predominantly male. (No female has ever won the Fields Medal or Abel Prize.) The same goes for computer science (only two women have won the Turing Award). I'm not saying there's no inertia or social dynamics involved, but publicly-traded companies have large incentives to select the best board members they can find. Considering these incentives, a massive imbalance would make sense if one gender was better at running public companies.

Uchikoma 14y ago
While it's not clear if this is gender specific or culture.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  To be the devil's advocate (I do NOT seriously defend sexism) why does the cause matter if you are looking for the best person? If women are almost always better potters in Norway, and you must make pots in Norway, then it makes sense that you would hire a lot of women.
roguecoder 14y ago
That does not imply that the best male mathematicians or computer scientists were male: it suggests the most widely-recognized such were. That's like saying the best writers are mostly European because that's where most of the Nobel prizes for literature have been awarded. By the time you have gotten to that prize you have gone through a large number of potentially-biased filters. If men were better at running companies, companies that hired women would have worse performance, the opposite of what was observed. It is far more likely that men are in charge because they always have been and such decisions are made by humans with systematic cultural prejudices. In fact, such prejudice can explain gendered difference in advancement. For example, see http://www.west-info.eu/files/SSRN-id2018259.pdf http://www.west-info.eu/files/SSRN-id2018259.pdf about how men with stay-at-home wives denied women opportunities for promotion and saw companies that employed women as less successful than those that didn't.

by chroma 14y ago

Uchikoma 14y ago

While it's not clear if this is gender specific or culture.

slurgfest 14y ago
To be the devil's advocate (I do NOT seriously defend sexism) why does the cause matter if you are looking for the best person? If women are almost always better potters in Norway, and you must make pots in Norway, then it makes sense that you would hire a lot of women.

roguecoder 14y ago

That does not imply that the best male mathematicians or computer scientists were male: it suggests the most widely-recognized such were. That's like saying the best writers are mostly European because that's where most of the Nobel prizes for literature have been awarded. By the time you have gotten to that prize you have gone through a large number of potentially-biased filters. If men were better at running companies, companies that hired women would have worse performance, the opposite of what was observed. It is far more likely that men are in charge because they always have been and such decisions are made by humans with systematic cultural prejudices. In fact, such prejudice can explain gendered difference in advancement. For example, see http://www.west-info.eu/files/SSRN-id2018259.pdf http://www.west-info.eu/files/SSRN-id2018259.pdf about how men with stay-at-home wives denied women opportunities for promotion and saw companies that employed women as less successful than those that didn't.