
California state law mandates female board directors by 2019 - mrleiter
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-board-women/california-state-law-mandates-female-board-directors-by-2019-idUSKCN1MB172
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DoreenMichele
This is possibly a duplicate:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109162)

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hn_throwaway_99
I've always considered myself a liberal, but I've become so frustrated by what
seems to be passing for "liberal solutions" in the past few years.

For example, I believe having more women on boards is a desirable, admirable
goal, but this mandate has to be about the dumbest way to accomplish it. It's
similar to what I feel about the housing crises in big cities. I'm very much
in favor of increasing affordable housing, but things like rent control
(coupled with relatively small numbers of government funded affordable housing
units) are so probably counter-productive it's laughable.

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TekMol
How is rent control counterproductive?

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pwnguin
The California model of rent control limits the amount you can raise rent on a
tenant, and the reasons you can evict someone. Surprisingly, you can often
transfer a lease to a family member, leading to situations where someone is
living in a rented house originally rented to their grandparent.

It also leads to situations where an empty nester has spare bedrooms but
cannot afford to move into a smaller rental unit, effectively taking bedrooms
off the market and making prices higher for everyone. Presumably AirBNB
relieves some of this pressure, though I seem to recall some landlords running
sting operations in order to evict long term tenants and reset the market
rate.

Over the past 30 years of SF rent control, this dynamic has created a group of
people for whom in-fill redevelopment would be disastrous: they'd lose their
rent control, and definitely can't live here anymore. Much of SF is pretty low
density, and housing supply would come from building up. Doesn't need to be a
60 tower millenium tower deal. But you'll need to tear up some buildings to
make it happen, and the cheapest properties are the ones under rent control.
So anyone campaigning on a 'build baby build' platform is more or less running
a platform of evicting the poor and/or elderly.

At it's core, rent control is treating the symptom of high prices rather than
the disease of tight supply.

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stevecalifornia
I have lived in California for about 30 years. Yesterday I took my kids to the
Barnes and Nobles in San Luis Obispo. The kids section is next to the
bathrooms. Inside the bathroom a homeless guy was smoking meth and another was
using the sink and paper towels to give himself a bath. On the ride home I
noticed that there was literally no less than one homeless guy per block on
both sides of the road.

It has not always been like this and it's getting worse.

This is on top of all the other issues California has. Ridiculous housing
prices, horrible schools and a wildly business unfriendly environment, etc.

My point is: The governor was working on mandating public companies have
female board members instead of the laundry list of catastrophes that are
destroying this state. Think about who you vote for this upcoming election in
CA.

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DoreenMichele
California has about 25% of the nation's homeless population. It's quite bad
and there are complex reasons for it.

One contributing factor is the lovely California weather that makes it much
less of a hardship to "sleep rough" than it is in most parts of the
continental US.

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bsaul
i cab imagine there are much more lovely weather than in SF, yet it’s the city
with the largest number of homeless i’ve ever seen ( and i live in europe).

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DoreenMichele
The San Francisco Bay Area is the only part of the US with a Mediterranean
climate.

As I said, there are many factors, weather being just one.

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dragonwriter
> The San Francisco Bay Area is the only part of the US with a Mediterranean
> climate.

No, it's not. A significant fraction of California outside of the Bay Area,
and some of Oregon and, IIRC, Washington also does.

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DoreenMichele
I stand corrected:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_climate](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_climate)

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mlindner
Well this won't stand court challenges hopefully. It's dreadful that they ever
passed this law. It's demeaning to women and simply will make people think
that any woman on a board of directors is there for the sake of being the
token woman to fulfill the requirements of the law.

EEOC:
[https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm)

> The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment,
> including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff,
> training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

Even if they argue a loophole "directors aren't employees thus aren't subject
to discrimination law" then that will simply result in companies outside
California (and considering most corporations are registered as Delaware
C-Corporation, that's most of them) openly legally discriminating in selection
of board members.

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gammateam
This law was about symbolism, the Governor says so himself.

The bill passed the House and Senate, and was signed by the Governor. His
signing was purely symbolic and is aware of the serious legal concerns.

So although a court challenge would put it on shaky ground, it actually might
be politically tenuous to pursue the case at all!

And plus, the Equal Rights Amendment will nix it anyway (but too bad the 50
year red supreme court will nix that)

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mlindner
Why are we signing and creating laws purely for symbolism?

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_Codemonkeyism
I was against this for a long time going against meritocracy, fairness and
makeing a company weaker.

Now I think this is a good idea to kickstart more women into top management,
as one reason people want to make a career and see it achievable are role
models, which there currently aren't too many.

This should be limited to a kickstart period, say 5y.

~~~
cam_l
I got down voted into oblivion on the previous dupe of this post for saying
pretty much the same thing with regard to a sunset clause. I think it is a
very reasonable idea.

The argument that this goes against meritocracy only makes sense if you
inherently think men are better at the role. If you think men and women are
likely to be equally as good, it makes more sense that men are currently in
the privileged position of getting a role that could be filled by a more
qualified woman.

As an aside, on the dupe, there are 40 posts or so arguing against this move.
Literally every positive post was downvoted, none with a single argument in
response. There are clearly a few toxic down voters on HN, particularly when
it comes to issues of male privilege.

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alexandernst
I cant wait to see a law requiring hospitals to have 50% male nurses. Because
equality!</sarcasm>

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torgian
ok, so we will waste money on A: token female board members or B: a female
board member who is under qualified because the company couldn’t find a better
qualified woman to fill the role; when that male candidate had to be passed up
because of his gender.

Hmm.

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NTDF9
Isn't this illegal? Gender based employment opportunity?

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buboard
An essential step in the right direction. If one can use the legal system to
grab a board seat, maybe they will stop paying them so much.

