Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards

Have you asked that question and looked for a scientifically valid answer instead of jumping to bigotry?

There are many objective reasons for that, one being:

> Fewer women than men become executive managers. They earn less over their careers, hold more junior positions, and exit the occupation at a faster rate. We compiled a large panel data set on executives and formed a career hierarchy to analyze mobility and compensation rates. We found that, controlling for executive rank and background, women earn higher compensation than men, experience more income uncertainty, and are promoted more quickly. Amongst survivors, being female increases the chance of becoming CEO. Hence, the unconditional gender pay gap and job-rank differences are primarily attributable to female executives exiting at higher rates than men in an occupation where survival is rewarded with promotion and higher compensation.

> There is still a question of why women have a higher nonmarket outside option than men. One explanation is that women acquire more nonmarket human capital than men throughout their lives, and hence find retirement a relatively attractive option. Women in the top executive market are mostly beyond childbearing age, but there is evidence that such women are more likely to leave for personal and other household reasons than their male counterparts. For example, Sicherman (1996) finds that in a case study of a large insurance company, female executives were more likely than their male counterparts to exit the firm because of better working conditions elsewhere, to be near home, change of residence, household duties, personal health, illness in the family, and positions abolished. Most of those reasons, except position abolished, are voluntary departures related to home or family.

http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Gayle_Golan_Mill...

The US Black population is around 13%; Hispanic population is closer to 18-19%. Asian and Pacific Islander is around 5%. LBGT population is estimated at around 5-6%; transgender estimated at around 0.3%. Muslims are In 2017, 80.4 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.3 percent of all wage and salary workers. Minimum wage isn't a protected class though.

> "despite numerous independent studies that show companies with women on their board are more profitable and productive"

The scourge of biased 'social science' strikes again. The politician believes that science has shown that women make companies better (but oddly, men don't make companies with all female boards better).

I've encountered a few studies over time claiming to show this. Every single one was junk. Common problems are:

1) No ability to replicate, e.g. citing private databases and then just asserting the outcome. This is a frequent problem with studies that come out of management consultancies and other such groups.

2) Dropping data points. One study I read that concluded women on boards = more profit started by excluding all the unprofitable companies from the analysis.

3) Confounding variables. It's typical for such studies to simply compare profitability against gender without controlling for other factors. For example they look at firms in the middle east (all men) and say, look, western firms are more profitable, it must be because of women. This is especially problematic when they include countries in the analysis where there are already laws forcing women onto boards - invariably it's the richest countries that do this i.e. those without bigger problems to worry about.

I have never encountered a study that showed with any scientific validity that companies make more money when they have women on the boards. Yet now these faux 'studies' are causing major law changes throughout the world.

This is of course exactly what the (invariably female) authors of these studies wanted in the first place. It is sickening and may eventually result in severe blowback.