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Are gender quotas good for business?

economist.com

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Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#51

Post by gamesbrainiac »

This is truly unfortunate, I can understand giving incentives to bring more women into upper management, but a quota is somewhat punitive in nature.

The main objective of the article it seems is to allay fears that more women in boardrooms would not be a bad thing. I honestly don't care for such studies. What I do care about is the fact that more and more businesses are going to be told _how_ to hire. This is a terrible idea.

Furthermore, the article goes on to say that there have been no changes in the profits reported and that the companies across Europe have seen no change whatsoever. This might say much more about boards and their lack of effect more than anything else.

What I see happening is that due to the increased regulation on how businesses operate, more of them will not go public and thus prevent a lot of the population will miss out on good investment opportunities.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#52

Post by repolfx »

icebraining wrote: post #26
m1el wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of numbers associated with humans in workforce. For example, their salary. > If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company. I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions.

I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions. Then you haven't looked very hard. There are even programs with financial incentives, e.g. http://www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/new-bursary-introduce...

That story seems to come up a lot in these discussions. IIRC it appeared in a prior HN discussion of the same thing.

The bursary in question is only £3,000 which is nothing. And the total fund is only £30,000 - so enough for 10 nurses.

This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeting.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#53

Post by sago »

m1el wrote: post #38
sago wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who said that fitness in my description cannot include group fitness? I did. Because doing so contradicts your conclusion. Though I also said it is not necessary. Lack of independence alone makes you wrong. > The same argument goes for adding a worker to the workforce. Does the worker fit the existing workforce? Which same argument? The argument you made was about filtering lowering fitness.

> I did. Because doing so contradicts your conclusion. Going for the conclusion instead of the argument. You can't demonstrate where my reasoning is wrong, but saying that the conclusion is wrong. Congratulations, you're an ideologue.

> You can't demonstrate where my reasoning is wrong

I specifically said why your argument was wrong. Without independence it is simply untrue.

> Congratulations, you're an ideologue.

I am. Mathematical flummery triggers me.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#54

Post by icebraining »

repolfx wrote: post #52
icebraining wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions. Then you haven't looked very hard. There are even programs with financial incentives, e.g. http://www.independentnurse.co.uk/news/new-bursary-introduce...

That story seems to come up a lot in these discussions. IIRC it appeared in a prior HN discussion of the same thing. The bursary in question is only £3,000 which is nothing. And the total fund is only £30,000 - so enough for 10 nurses. This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeti…

This doesn't even begin to compare with organised political lobbying on a continental scale to force women into jobs where people earn £3,000 for simply sitting in a single board meeting.

Of course, because no such jobs exist from which men are mostly absent. You can't expect a response of the same size when the problem is nowhere near the same size.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#55

Post by sonnyblarney »

dazzawazza wrote: post #40

I love the idea that there is a scarcity of "golden skirts" that make this too hard. It presupposes that the current male members are all "golden trousers", the cream of the crop, the best of the best. I've met many many board members over the years and they are often very unimpressive. I'm sure we can find some equally unimpressive women to replace them! Better still anyone with even a modicum of talent would do!

"I've met many many board members over the years and they are often very unimpressive."

This is an extremely difficult thing to assess frankly.

There are so many reasons for board members.

Often they could be from a family fund. Maybe they are from an institutional investor who own a lot of share. They are not there to provide strategic guidance, rather just to sit there and keep an eye on things. They may be simply there as an 'extra head' for another party, like the CEO who wants to keep the power. And sometimes they're there because they have deep networks that you might not know about.

Instead of forcing women on boards, they should try to convince companies that having female board members is a good thing, maybe provide some data, and then create some networks for hiring.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#56

Post by sonnyblarney »

m1el wrote: post #2

No. This is mathematical nonsense. Let's say there's a fitness function for each candidate in a candidate pool. If you filter candidates by any criteria, the expectation of fitness function will be less or equal to expectation before filtering.

"This is mathematical nonsense."

Board members might be the least likely of all people related to the company to have the right credentials. It's networks, power, relationships. Not usually talent.

Though I'm totally against board quotas, it's very easy to see how women are locked out of this game. Far, far more so than for normal roles within an organization.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#57

Post by adiusmus »

Last time I looked, “gender” had been redefined to include many more than just two genders according to various universities. Multiple countries are likely to legislate in extra genders. So mandating one logically requires mandating all of them eventually. Just mandating sex and racial attributes alone will cause significant board changes.

Interesting times ahead. The market will have fun sorting out the profitability of these changes in due time.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#58

Post by yorwba »

onion2k wrote: post #28

I've never worked in a company that hires based on quotas, but I have found organically diverse teams seem to make better products. Having people who are able to see that a product doesn't work for them means features don't get added/dropped as easily. I've never made software as accessible as the code I wrote with a disabled person on the team, or as friendly as when 50% of the team were women. I suspect the reason…

If you only discover that a product doesn't work for some of your users because one of those users is on the development team, then you probably need a better way to get user feedback.

You can hire developers of diverse gender, ethnicity and age, but those are most likely still very similar along other dimensions like income, location and ability to deal with complex systems.

Rather than trying to hire more diverse developers, you might be better off paying someone to find out what your actual users think about your product.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#59

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

m1el wrote: post #16
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are not numbers. If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company.

There are plenty of numbers associated with humans in workforce. For example, their salary. > If your workforce has a craptastic gender ratio you will hammer that in because potential new members of the minority will be less interested in joining the company. I don't see any complaints about "diversity" in female-dominated or minority-dominated professions.

I live in Austria and I know two fields were men voice their concerns: nursing and kindergarden teachers / daycare.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#60

Post by rawfan »

lnsru wrote: post #17

I remember 2nd term math lecture. There were students from different engineering disciplines. There were 600 students with ~15 females among them. Some years later situation is no different: ~100 people on the floor, 5 females here: 2 secretaries, 2 export specialists and senior researcher with PhD degree. Where find suitable candidates for these quotes when women avoid technical stuff at university level?

I read a study last year, that at least in the US actual STEM graduates are more and more balanced between male and female with females having better degrees. When they looked at the jobs the graduates got it was not at all representing of the quota that graduated. E.g. 30% of graduates were female but only 3% of accepted job applicants (nmumbers are made up, just to demonstrate the point of the study).
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