
16% of Corp Board Members Say Racial and Gender Diversity Has No Benefit at All - lnguyen
http://fortune.com/2017/10/17/corporate-board-diversity/
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apk-d
Given how aggressively the progressive agenda is pushed (especially against
corporate circles), I'm not surprised at all that some people take a
contrarian position, regardless of reality.

By the way, "84% of corporate board members agree with us" is a surprisingly
good score, and it's weird they're portraying it in a bad light.

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yuhong
The most important problem with anti-discrimination laws is it is often
difficult to prove claims in lawsuits etc. The other problem is that it
promotes thinking like 25% of workers has to be woman, which was probably fine
for manual labor jobs but not for other kinds. I suggested a compromise
limiting the kinds of jobs in which these laws apply.

~~~
apk-d
> 25% of workers has to be woman, which was probably fine for manual labor
> jobs

How is forcing a gender ratio for manual jobs fine? I mean OK, I kind of want
to see the chaos and panic as a result of a law that would require 25% of
sewer workers/trash collectors to be women (currently 1% or less), but I'm
evil like that.

~~~
yuhong
They are jobs that are easily measurable and are similar for every worker,
which made it less bad. Note that I am talking about even thinking in terms of
ratios that are for example centrally monitored by HR, not just forcing it.

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peoplewindow
I was curious about the claim that companies with women on the board are more
likely to experience strong financial performance. Nobody has presented a
clear explanation of how this mechanism would work: "women have unique
insights" is about as precise as it gets, but I have yet to see a concrete
example of that be presented myself.

So I followed the links and downloaded the research paper. I noticed a few
things about it.

Firstly, it is research that comes from an investment advisory firm of some
sort (MSCI ESG Research). It is not academic research, and the firm is not
free of bias: they claim to be committed to diversity on their website. They
clearly start with conclusions they'd like to reach. Did that affect their
rigour?

The paper doesn't actually look at all companies with women on the board. It
actually examines companies that the researchers classify as having "strong
female leadership". Strong female leadership is defined as follows:

\- 3 or more women on the board

\- Or one woman on the board but a female CEO

\- Or its percentage of women on the board is above the country average

\- And has not "been implicated in discrimination allegations in the past
three years, as captured by our proprietary controversies database".

The first three seem OK, although the phrasing is ambiguous - strong female
leadership would usually be interpreted as meaning decisiveness by female
leaders, not the mere presence of them.

The final item is problematic. If companies that have a lot of women on the
board were in fact yielding worse financial performance due to being
distracted with lots of bogus discrimination lawsuits then this study simply
wouldn't show it at all, as it arbitrarily drops 53 data points from its
sample.

The list of companies dropped and included is not available, so the study is
not reproducible.

I wondered if they'd engaged in any other dubious data analysis practices. The
most apparent one is that they're measuring financial performance but don't
control for other variables that could affect it. The report notes that many
countries included in their analysis have mandatory quotas for women in the
boardroom. If those countries experienced slightly better stock market
performance in general, for reasons unrelated to gender diversity, then that
would yield a spurious result of "more women = better performance". In fact
without controlling for this it would appear that what they're really doing is
comparing economic performance of different countries, as those countries are
all mandated to have "strong female leadership" by law.

In fairness, the paper does note that they find no causal link and can't
explain their own results. Unfortunately, being advocacy and not academic
research, most of the paper is devoted to promoting the cause of women on
corporate boards anyway.

Overall the few minutes I spent on researching this does not further endear me
to feminist views. The casual repetition of a dubious claim that's literally a
case of "correlation is not causation", based on cherry picked data to boot,
simply to attack men who sit on boards - this does not sit well.

 _edit: also note that the claim about bribery comes from the same source and
paper_

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disagreeseenit
This is obviously true and relevant but will get:

1: Few social media points, because the people in charge of internet media
points have an agenda the deceive the public precisely and exactly to believe
the opposite of this.

2\. Anyone agreeing with the basic premises of this artcile - and the rest of
the work even in the same ball park - it almost or is illegal because of
racist/sexist/no inclusive of aboriginie etc.

~~~
PeachPlum
The article itself has an agenda, telling me how I should feel about the
facts:

> __What’s perhaps just as concerning __is how directors split at a more
> fundamental level, with large swaths of respondents—33% and 24%,
> respectively—saying socioeconomic diversity and racial diversity are “not at
> all important” to fostering diversity of thought in the boardroom.

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beingmyself2
How many of the remaining 84% just want to avoid becoming a social pariah? The
number of times I personally have bleated the party line just to avoid having
a "comply or be fired" talk with HR continues to increase in frequency.

