
Are gender quotas good for business? - known
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/09/03/are-gender-quotas-good-for-business
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codingdave
Before the comments go too far down a rabbit-hole, I encourage everyone to
respond to the article instead of answering the question in the headline. The
article is talking about boards, not employees, and states that there is no
causation proven, despite some correlations found in Europe after they
required quotas on company boards.

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repolfx
I was surprised and encouraged to see that the Economist actually cited the
papers they were discussing - this seems new, and progress. Way too often,
news outlets refer to "studies" or "a study" without making it easy to find
out what studies were actually cited.

I'll queue up the studies to read later, but I am skeptical. I've looked at
studies that claimed quotas for women in boards = more profit before and
without fail, they weren't controlling for confounding variables. Usually it
was as simple as "companies in Norway do better than companies in Saudi
Arabia, look at the gender differences!" which is of course totally invalid.
Unfortunately the way governments have forced women into boards via
legislative fiat means it's very hard to control for the pre-existing economic
state of countries: you'd need to compare two economies that were basically
the same except for gender differences, or compare the same country before and
after and then try to control for all other changes in the world economy,
which is very hard.

The article is quite balanced about the limits of these studies though. Which
is good.

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dazzawazza
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!

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dijit
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 historically girls have not
necessarily had the same opportunity to gain experience and learn. (Except for
the most dedicated or those who went to shops that did not practice any kind
of discrimination). This leads to a small pot of experienced girls but a large
pot of experienced guys.

If you hire "the most qualified candidate" you'll end up with mostly guys
because guys have had the opportunity to work unfettered, and if you have a
quota to hire more women and want someone experienced, then you're competing
against many in a small pool of experienced women.

\--

EDIT: I should add that I haven't read the article; but the above is a topic I
think about often in the context of discrimination and its role in the future.
I don't believe in hiring quotas, I believe the problem should be fixed at its
root- But this is not the current topic- and I would kindly ask those who
downvote me to argue their points if they wish me to be more understanding.

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kraigie
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.

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onion2k
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 is that building software that works for users is about
asking the right questions, and more diverse groups ask more diverse
questions. That doesn't mean an all-male or all-white team _can 't_ ask the
right questions but in my limited experience it seems they don't.

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yorwba
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.

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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.

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lnsru
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?

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rawfan
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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belorn
There was a similar government study done on teacher graduates here in Sweden
and it got the same results, through genders were reversed.

The conclusion they had is that by drop rates and gender segregation get
amplified in every step between first year student to long term employee.

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m1el
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.

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ChrisSD
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.

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m1el
A better solution would be to do gender-blind hiring, not gender quotas.

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ChrisSD
I was only responding to the suggestion that quotas are "mathematical
nonsence". I don't know if they are the best solution or not.

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blackbrokkoli
Is there an idea where to go with these quotas in the long run? I mean as I
understand it, the numbers are just pulled out of thin air.

So we have a company, following the however implemented rules and has, let's
say has 60% of group A and 40% of B on their board.

But maybe the ideal quota is 70% / 30%. Or 10% / 90%. Or the standard
deviation is so high that there is a high probability that everything from 20
% / 80% to 70% / 30% was achieved without any bias but just because of
differntly distributed skillsets. Point is, by setting a quota like that
without any research, you're gonna end up with one group having it
statistically harder to get their well deserved board place as the other,
which is the problem that we're trying to fight in the first place, right? And
now it is locked in stone, because abandoning the quota would have big
political implications.

I understand that it is an attractive short term fix and that we might not
have good other solutions, but where are we going with it?

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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.

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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.

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enterx
This is an implementation of pure form of gender type discrimination.

Employee should be of a neutral color, creed or gender.

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michaelgv
I’ve always said to hire the people who can do what we need as a business,
regardless of their gender

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ChrisSD
Which is a noble sentiment but simply doesn't happen in the business world (or
in many other places). So the hard question is, how do you effectively
encourage business to choose the best people regardless of gender?

Some have tried blind interviews but these are very hard to do properly and
effectively. A 40% quota is another way to push business into looking beyond
gender.

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lemagedurage
Then a minority-only company should be both cheaper and more productive, by
supply and demand.

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tdb7893
I think there are three potential issues with this, firstly, minorities are
being discriminated against and paid less in the scenario so it wouldn't be
desirable on that metric. Secondly competition in many markets isn't robust
enough to have an even playing field if you wanted to start a new company with
all "minorities". Third, if the company was all "minorities" you would be
drastically reducing the hiring pool so even with good competition it would be
hard to hire well (which could wipe out any minor efficiency gains).

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chungy
No-paywall link: [http://archive.today/mTZp3](http://archive.today/mTZp3)

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mirimir
Paywall? I see no paywall.

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tomhoward
Some people do, evidently.

There's a limit on articles per month, at least in some regions, and maybe
other restrictions in different regions.

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mirimir
Huh. I'm using a VPN exit in the US, to avoid GDPR bullshit.

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afwjaeif
That's not the goal of gender quotas. (With this I don't mean that I support
them.)

