
California's Unconstitutional Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards - ayanai
https://reason.com/volokh/2018/10/04/californias-unconstitutional-gender-quot
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test6554
At the risk of sounding insensitive, can one member of an all-male board just
legally change their gender identity? Its like 2 forms filed with the clerk
and maybe an appearance before a judge, then you are legally recognized by the
state as a female whether you make any other life changes or not.

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eli
...is that really easier than finding a qualified woman?

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test6554
The company can just do nothing and meet the quota. Whats easier than doing
nothing if one board member happens to take the initiative?

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xevb3k
I find quotas in bad taste, and somewhat lazy.

There is clearly an issue, but if we attempt to fix it with positive
discrimination, we just create more issues.

A better way to approach the problem might be increased scrutiny (for
discrimination) on boards/companies with significant gender bias, and
increased penalties.

This would be harder to implement of course, but might go further to actually
solving the issue.

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djrogers
How can you implement penalties for gender bias without introducing a
threshold for an acceptable division of representation? And once that
threshold is established, how exactly does it differ from a quota?

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eli
I guess the argument would be that you look at practices instead of outcomes,
but that seems impossibly hard to implement

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alexandernst
What about gay people? What about mexican people? Asian people?

Why not extend the law for these too?

"Based on the number of people that run your company, you're required to hire
at least 1 women, 1 trans gender, 1 muslim and 1 person older than 60"

Sounds fun!

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test6554
The alternative is that companies can select anyone for their board that they
want and if they make bad choices, they have do deal with the consequences of
their actions. Either with less money or lawsuits or collapse of the whole
company.

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banamba
I'm curious if this is likely to be struck down as unconstitutional in the
California or Federal courts?

Also, why is this an acceptable attempt to address the issue of under
represented groups in corporate boards? Should there be similar legislation
for ethnic minorities in boards as well. If not, why is gender special in this
regard?

For women that are appointed to boards as a consequence of this legislation,
would it be unfair to consider those women to be 'diversity hires', and not
appointed strictly on merit?

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_rpd
My understanding is that there is a solid constitutional challenge at the
Federal level because the bill specifies designated headquarters rather than,
for example, state of incorporation, which means that they are trying to
enforce state law on national and international entities.

Regarding 'diversity hires', if the experience in Europe is any guide,
qualified women will just be members of even more boards than they are now.
There's no limit on the number of boards that a person can be a member of.

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confounded
David Koch’s libertarian monthly dislikes policy to get women on boards.
Shocker.

If this policy is truly counter-productive wrt its stated aim, I’d be
interested to see that in the thoughts of people who have consistently _given
a damn about female representation on boards_.

It’s less convincing when people who bark “regulation is evil” for a living
find that _“regulation is, once again, evil”._

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wyoh
Disliking using force to get women on boards != Disliking women on boards.

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ur-whale
It's not as bad as it sounds: one more incentive for corporations to vote with
their feet and move their HQ out of the great socialist state of california.

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sdinsn
Nothing is socialist about this law, nor any other law California has. This
law is stupid (and unconstitutional), but it has nothing to do with socialism.

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ciupicri
Webster's dictionary defines socialism as a form of society in which
government owns or controls major industries. This law controls what happens
in corporate boards.

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sdinsn
Um, no, that's not how Webster's defines it.

> government owns or controls

The definition is 'government (or the community) owns _and_ controls'.
Ownership by the masses is an absolute requirement for socialism, having a bit
of control is not enough.

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jorblumesea
I feel like this is just another step in a series of trends where we use
legislation to enforce diversity, to the detriment of everyone involved. Let
companies run their business as they please. If they don't want to hire women,
they shouldn't have to. You see the same thing with hiring engineers. 50% goal
for women engineers but that's not even possible given the current pipeline.

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test6554
Dont forget about companies that are very open to appointing women, but can’t
find any female candidates that surpass all the male candidates available at
the moment.

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Alex3917
Except for that it's not a quota, at least not in the sense that the word is
used within the context of affirmative action, because there is no maximum cap
set on the number of board members.

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djrogers
It is a quota - quotas need not be proportional to be quotas. From the
dictionary:

“3 : a fixed number or percentage of minority group members or women needed to
meet the requirements of affirmative action”

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Alex3917
Of all the supreme court cases involving quotas, which have involved a mandate
to admit a fixed number of minorities with an uncapped class size or whatever?
The "dictionary says" isn't a very good argument if it's not aligned with case
law.

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djrogers
The Supreme Court interprets law - it does not define words.

