Six person board? “At least” three women. Says it all.
Six or more.
Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
101–110 of 128 posts
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an abuse of this site to use HN primarily for ideological battle, which this account has been doing for a long time. Would you please stop? We don't care about your ideology, but we do care about not letting a minority of users ruin this site for everyone else by turning it into a political tire fire—especially given what's happening on the rest of the internet, which people come here for refuge from. The rest o…
I will obey your decisions as a mod. However, I disagree with the assertion that my comment was about ideology or politics. My comment was about the very concrete conditions of life of someone working in the tech industry in California, which is why I thought it may be of interest to the readers of HN. The situation I mentioned is not about following this or that political faction. It is a threat to free discourse, t…
It seemed to me an ideological rant like countless others—but I don't read them so closely, for the same reason a competitive hot dog eater doesn't savor each morsel: far too much quantity.
Your account's history seems clearly to be that of a single-purpose political account, and we ban those. HN is for the gratification of intellectual curiosity, not the prosecution of political battles. Those two things are incompatible, so we have to be proactive about this.
Throwaway comments don't change the equation much. The test is this: if someone is using HN primarily for political battle, we ban them (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). If they're occasionally commenting on a political topic as part of a range of intellectually curious interests, that's ok. In practice, these are two different classes of user: one is here for flamewar while the other isn't. There are always exceptions, but it's relatively clear where the line is. We don't want users who are here for flamewar.
Most users who create throwaway accounts to post political comments are just doing it so they can flame without restriction. We ban those. Earnest throwaway accounts are quite a bit rarer.
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#103Why isn't the excuse of "representing the public" used to require certain members have a particular religion or race as well? What about income? Board members are about as far from representing society as you can get (and that's not the purpose of a board anyway) so I don't understand why this is being mandated. Seems like a strategy for cheap political points rather than any kind of well-reasoned reform.
Seeing “quotas” in action already I can tell you they have the opposite effect than desired or imagined. Until now some people could imagine they didn’t get the job but she did because she’s a woman. Now they know and they’ll always hold this kind of law as proof. This does nothing to further women’s rights but certainly does a lot to discredit the ones that deseved to be there by casting a shadow over whether they’r…
Quotas have been a disaster in my country. Instead of hiring the best people so that we can compete better we've had to optimize for this variable q and often those seats have been kept empty as we haven't found that special person.
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't desegregation. This is a law requiring employers to discriminate based on gender.
I didn't post the parent because I agree with this law completely, but to bring up the point. The advocates of this law would probably argue that everyone discriminates all the time, including by gender. I am on the fence. When I was younger I would have been firmly on the hands off libertarian side. Then I saw what a sham meritocracy can actually be and how much success is based on who you know. The more I saw of th…
Success =/= Merit
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#105I (a man) for one am happy about this decision. Not because this, the intermediate state, is one I'm happy with, but because it creates female role models that girls can look up to. This in turn will show girls that it's something they can achieve and aspire to, and ideally, soon, this legislation won't be required anymore. It's a bootstrapping tool. We're talking about a single board member. This isn't going to dest…
Hey to those down voters, maybe stop by an explain your position! I'd love a conversation.
I can't downvote, but I can read.
Many people feel sexism, and bigotry in general is not solved by more of the opposite kind of bigotry. I feel their theory that it will somehow lead to more rolemodels is optimistic, but misplaced.
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as a point of contention if I hypothetically identify as a trans women can I count as a women in the opinion of california
If you mean it, as in get a statement from a psychologist, and are executing a meaningful transition plan, your chances are good.
It seems wrong to assume that all trans people have the intention of undergoing a transition. I imagine there's a significant amount of people who feel that they were born into the wrong body, but find the transition process uncomfortable for whatever reason and choose to remain the way they were born.
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#107Honestly surprised at how many people are posting comments about this. You know you'll end up on some list, right? Maybe you think it's ok to debate this kind of measure now, but the line will keep moving. In three years you may have people scouring your internet history for past wrongthink to deny you that promotion, or to get rid of you. In five years, machine learning algorithms may take your comments as input for…
This reads to me as "don't say things that leave you on the wrong side of history" - a solid recommendation for life in general.
This boils down to "don't be wrong" except far more subjective.
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#108This is just staggeringly stupid and makes me ashamed to live in California. I'm all for having women on boards, when there's a qualified female candidate. I am categorically not for forcing them to be on boards for some misguided sense of social justice.
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#109I read in Wikipedia that:
As of August 2015, only 2% of S&P 500 companies had all male boards of directors
Is California trying to solve a problem that has already been solved?
Re: Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, they bussed kids in in the South.
Uppercase Liberal politicians and their education wizards (those who forgot liberal values, but would rather inflict collective punishment as a "solution") had forced bussing of kids in Northern California in the 80's and 90's. I had to ride the bus for an hour and a half each way, three hours total per day, because there were "too many" whites and Asians at a better school one block from where I lived. And I got to…
That's a different type of mess. Was the specific quota mandated by law or left to the school or district level? It sounds more or less like what was happening with the self imposed quotas in companies until now. Many internal rules were re-written in such ways that sometimes finding the best person for the job was no longer the actual goal, but rather finding the best woman for the job. This was aimed at fixing discrimination with more discrimination at local level.
Now they took the next step and made it into law. They completely removed any illusion of a fairness for the next appointment on any currently male only board. Which isn't to say it was fair until now. Probably far from it. Just that now it's unfair with the blessing of a law.
The point is this is not about liberalism. The target isn't to fix the inequality issues. It's a vote grab. Which is why categories with less voting power and more PR issues are largely ignored many times and by many people.