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Are gender quotas good for business?

economist.com

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Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#71

Post by icebraining »

repolfx wrote: post #69
icebraining wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're changing the subject. The original poster's point was that there isn't any real advocacy towards the benefit of men - in other words, that "diversity" doesn't mean diversity, it means benefits for women. You responded with an article about a sum of money so trivial it would cover 10 men for perhaps a couple of months depending on where they live. If that's the best you can find, this doesn't really disprove hi…

No, parent said "any", not real; you introduced that term. Which is the kind of ambiguous language that impedes debate.

If you're saying the efforts are not of the same absolute magnitude, then I would agree; my point is that they are similar relatively to the size of each problem.

If you insist that diversity efforts are only "real" if the same effort is applied to solving two problems which are of clearly different orders of magnitude, then I can only say that I find your definition of "real" perplexing.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#72

Post by Const-me »

No it’s not good for business. And it’s not bad, either.

I don’t think anything measurable will happen.

Men and women are different in many qualities, but doing business in modern relatively civilized society is not one of them. Both genders do just fine.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#73

Post by repolfx »

icebraining wrote: post #71
repolfx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're changing the subject. The original poster's point was that there isn't any real advocacy towards the benefit of men - in other words, that "diversity" doesn't mean diversity, it means benefits for women. You responded with an article about a sum of money so trivial it would cover 10 men for perhaps a couple of months depending on where they live. If that's the best you can find, this doesn't really disprove hi…

No, parent said "any", not real; you introduced that term. Which is the kind of ambiguous language that impedes debate. If you're saying the efforts are not of the same absolute magnitude, then I would agree; my point is that they are similar relatively to the size of each problem. If you insist that diversity efforts are only "real" if the same effort is applied to solving two problems which are of clearly different…

I wouldn't define gender disparities as a problem to begin with, so arguments of the form "but the problem is big so it's OK if the actions are big" have no weight with me.

What remains is that the word "diversity" doesn't mean diversity. It means focusing on getting women into positions of wealth and power - which you appear to be agreeing with me about, but for you it's an "ends justify the means" situation whereas for me and other posters here it isn't.

If diversity advocates cared about diversity they'd attack all gender disparities with equal vigour because it'd be the disparity itself they care about. But obviously they don't: they only go after the ones where there are big benefits of money and power to be had. Gender disparities that favour women or that don't yield large streams of money and power are ignored.

However they don't admit that. This is what rankles. Instead of talking about money and power they claim they merely want "gender diversity", which is false.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#74

Post by kraigie »

dijit wrote: post #47
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 have a different take; If we suppose a meritocratic hiring process is the best way forward, and that girls are equal to boys (and only considering those genders (if we surmise that there are more)): Then, if we take the stance that there has been historic bias against girls then it leads to them not having the experience to be in the same category as boys. It's not about "all guys being good", it's that historicall…

There are much better options than quotas, but that doesn't make them inherently bad.

The question is are they an improvement over the current system or not?

However they should be at most a stop gap solution, a truly diverse system would make it impossible to know the race and gender of your workers, so implicit basis would be impossible. Or maybe we could train a neural net to have no implicit bias.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#75

Post by kraigie »

m1el wrote: post #21
ChrisSD wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, I think what you just wrote is statistical nonsense. If your ultimate selection from a pool is heavily biased towards an irrelevant fact (gender) then countering that bias can lead to a better selection.

A better solution would be to do gender-blind hiring, not gender quotas.

This would also account for transgender and intersex individuals too.

Why shouldn't the right person be hired just because they have both sets of genitalia? How does that fit in to the quota system?

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#76

Post by daleharvey »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #68
daleharvey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"maybe we should just tell the people that benefit from the sexism that the sexism is bad, surely they will stop"

Well, your project, PouchDB has 20 'contributors' listed on Github, it would seem all but one are male. Give or take maybe one. So until your own project isn't blatantly gender biased, maybe you should refrain from waiving the 'sexism' card to broadly. Because I'll gather your probably not trying to 'oppress women' over there, rather, there are any number of other more nuanced and complex reasons for the absence of f…

The reasons that boards (and OSS projects) systematically exclude women ... is what sexism is.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#77

Post by sonnyblarney »

daleharvey wrote: post #76
sonnyblarney wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, your project, PouchDB has 20 'contributors' listed on Github, it would seem all but one are male. Give or take maybe one. So until your own project isn't blatantly gender biased, maybe you should refrain from waiving the 'sexism' card to broadly. Because I'll gather your probably not trying to 'oppress women' over there, rather, there are any number of other more nuanced and complex reasons for the absence of f…

The reasons that boards (and OSS projects) systematically exclude women ... is what sexism is.

It's important to differentiate between overt sexism (i.e. 'women can't or shouldn't be in business') to the kinds of negative externalities that result from a gendered world.

We have gender (despite what a fringe group of academics might believe) and 99.9% of the world is fine that that.

This creates gendered outcomes in various fields which in some cases might be, or perceived to be exclusionary. The difference is more than nuanced to the pointe wherein I think it's wrong to merely point at any gendered situation and say 'sexism!'.

I'll bet $100 that OSS projects are not actually very exclusionary at all, and more actually representative of the fact that women for whatever reason, don't want to do that kind of stuff to the extent men do. At least today. Of course, one could argue than the ranks of female engineers are thin due to lack of role models, sexism in early years and that would be true, but even without this ... there would still be a mismatch.

Screaming sexism at OSS teams or boards is counterproductive.

Imagine if the government mandated that 25% of all OSS contributions of 'major projects' had to be made by women? I don't think that would make sense, nor would it be well received.

But - I'll bet that the managers of major open source initiatives might be open to some facts and figures, right? Or open to networks that have more women? If the 'women's coding club of London' indicated they had a bunch of young ladies who wanted to learn the ropes of OSS would you help out? Probably, right?

And shareholders are not some pasty group of old white men either. They'll listen and change will happen, though fairly slowly admittedly.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#78

Post by icebraining »

repolfx wrote: post #73
icebraining wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, parent said "any", not real; you introduced that term. Which is the kind of ambiguous language that impedes debate. If you're saying the efforts are not of the same absolute magnitude, then I would agree; my point is that they are similar relatively to the size of each problem. If you insist that diversity efforts are only "real" if the same effort is applied to solving two problems which are of clearly different…

I wouldn't define gender disparities as a problem to begin with, so arguments of the form "but the problem is big so it's OK if the actions are big" have no weight with me. What remains is that the word "diversity" doesn't mean diversity. It means focusing on getting women into positions of wealth and power - which you appear to be agreeing with me about, but for you it's an "ends justify the means" situation whereas…

If diversity advocates cared about diversity they'd attack all gender disparities with equal vigour because it'd be the disparity itself they care about

Yeah, to me this makes no sense. It's like saying that if you care about infant hungriness, you have to help with equal vigor both those starving in war-ridden areas and those in wealthy neighborhoods whose parents occasionally forget to give lunch money. Or that if you care about forest fires, you give the same number of fire engines to California and to Delaware.

In my opinion, if you care about a problem, you dedicate more resources to where its effects are more pronounced.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#79

Post by belorn »

icebraining wrote: post #78
repolfx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't define gender disparities as a problem to begin with, so arguments of the form "but the problem is big so it's OK if the actions are big" have no weight with me. What remains is that the word "diversity" doesn't mean diversity. It means focusing on getting women into positions of wealth and power - which you appear to be agreeing with me about, but for you it's an "ends justify the means" situation whereas…

If diversity advocates cared about diversity they'd attack all gender disparities with equal vigour because it'd be the disparity itself they care about Yeah, to me this makes no sense. It's like saying that if you care about infant hungriness, you have to help with equal vigor both those starving in war-ridden areas and those in wealthy neighborhoods whose parents occasionally forget to give lunch money. Or that if…

Please give a suggested way to measure the effect in a objective way.

With hunger this is easy. Measure the number of children sick of malnutrition or that dies of hunger per population and square miles. With forest fires you measure the number of forest fire per square miles and affected people per square miles.

So what should we use in order to measure gender disparities. What about gender segregation, ie the professions with the highest rate of gender segregation get also the highest number of resources dedicated to it. We could measure by effectiveness, looking at the historical rate that gender segregation goes down per number of resources in gender equality. We could look at gender disparities in the form of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, addressing each layers gender disparities.

The parent comments implies that money and positional power is the metric being exclusively used here to measure anything.

Re: Are gender quotas good for business?

#80

Post by daleharvey »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #77
daleharvey wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons that boards (and OSS projects) systematically exclude women ... is what sexism is.

It's important to differentiate between overt sexism (i.e. 'women can't or shouldn't be in business') to the kinds of negative externalities that result from a gendered world. We have gender (despite what a fringe group of academics might believe) and 99.9% of the world is fine that that. This creates gendered outcomes in various fields which in some cases might be, or perceived to be exclusionary. The difference is…

    I'll bet $100 that OSS projects are not actually 
    very exclusionary at all, and more actually 
    representative of the fact that women for whatever 
    reason, don't want to do that kind of stuff 
    to the extent men do.
* http://theeverygirl.com/why-women-are-leaving-stem-and-how-w... * https://thenewstack.io/women-open-source-still-fighting-good...

If you could donate that $100 to a relevant charity (maybe https://www.womenwhocode.com/)

And read up why the "negative externalities that result from a gendered world" is called "sexism" and why its not counterproductive to able to identify sexism in order to work towards solving it, it is actually pretty critical.

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