Why isn't the excuse of "representing the public" used to require certain members have a particular religion or race as well? What about income?<p>Board members are about as far from representing society as you can get (and that's not the purpose of a board anyway) so I don't understand why this is being mandated. Seems like a strategy for cheap political points rather than any kind of well-reasoned reform.
This is one hell of an overreach and will absolutely not improve the problem that it tries to solve.<p>I am against identity politics on principle, but a much more amenable solution would have been something like offering tax incentives for companies who do.<p>But aside from being way too heavy handed for a state, are they planning to do this for every “protected” class? Why only women?
There's no way this doesn't backfire in the long term. We're gonna see "yes women" added to boards which will discredit the women who are there for reasons other than to just check a box.
They should have went all the way: 50% women, 10% african-americans, 5% asian, 5% choose-some-other-race, of which 5% must be LGBT, 20% catholic, 50% christian, 25% none/agnostic/atheist, 5% "other" and 99% should NOT be in the 1% :-)<p>I suspect a working-class Lesbian Asian Hindu is gonna find themselves in demand!
How does something like this get implemented? A company has limited control over the gender composition of the board. The aggregate actions of myriad outside and independent shareholders may not align to produce the necessary result in aggregate. Furthermore, virtually all of these companies are foreign corporations, California has limited ability to modify the intrinsic nature of the board construction process -- <i>it has no jurisdiction</i>. The only obvious escape hatch that make this reliably executable in any sane legal framework is to guarantee that the CEO is female. Or to have a male member of the board exercise the "identify as female" clause if the shareholders in aggregate don't produce a board composition that meets this law. The whole thing is a setup for some absurd theatrics in the board room. I fail to see how this will produce a positive result for anyone.<p>That said, I am skeptical that this passes Constitutional muster. California has no jurisdiction over corporate law in the rest of the US, and (for good reason) nobody incorporates in California such that they would have jurisdiction. This is a publicity stunt that will stir up outrage by various factions and accomplish nothing.
This makes no sense.<p>So a company that has a target market of men must have a woman on the board? So an all woman board will be legal?<p>How female is female enough for them? Can someone just identify as a woman, or will there be a mandatory screening of what's between their legs (or what their DNA has)?<p>I predict the outcome will just be companies will move headquarters to another state (already happening because of taxes!) and/or the company will go private.
Requiring a private entity to spend resources in favor of one class of citizens is almost certainly unconstitutional. There are many actionable avenues available to California to promote equality in workplaces, by signing this soon to be struck down law, California’s leaders are exploiting politica division for political gain. Politicians going to politician.
I wish these laws would focus on the issues with the pipeline, instead of bandaid "fixes" like this. It's insane to me that we can look at women still being encouraged to study soft majors like art, history, teaching, etc, and then be surprised that they're not becoming board members of huge companies 20-30 years later.<p>There are SO MANY reasons that women are not becoming leaders of companies at the same rate as men, and the glass ceiling is such a small part of the larger picture.<p>This seems like an unbelievable lazy and dishonest attempt at fixing a real problem.
This is only going to lead to "We don't have a female, let's just find one and put her there because the law says so."<p>First and hopefully last state, but I'm not optimistic...
The article seems light on explaining the reasoning behind the law. Its proponents clearly want to increase the average female-male ratio on corporate boards. But that doesn't mean that a few boards being nearly all-male is necessarily bad. There must be a better, less blunt way to encourage companies to open more board seats up to women.
This is just staggeringly stupid and makes me ashamed to live in California. I'm all for having women on boards, when there's a qualified female candidate. I am categorically not for forcing them to be on boards for some misguided sense of social justice.
I read in Wikipedia that:<p>As of August 2015, only 2% of S&P 500 companies had all male boards of directors<p>Is California trying to solve a problem that has already been solved?
Extreme left-wing politics is basically defined by hypocrisy at this point. "Discrimination is bad... Unless we do it!" "Violence is bad... Unless you're punching people the mob deems Nazis!" "Free speech is good... Unless you say something we don't like!"<p>I'd like to imagine that most moderate liberals are seriously embarrassed by this kind of stuff. It seems from the thread that this is true, so that gives me hope that it's not all bad.
Shouldn't they also be required to have at least one black person, one Asian, one gay, one handicapable person and one non-cisgender member?<p>Imagine the job prospects of your average handicapped, transgender blasian lesbian? You could have your pick of any company board.<p>I kid, but I can't help but imagine there will be some unintended consequences of legislation like this.
Honestly surprised at how many people are posting comments about this. You know you'll end up on some list, right? Maybe you think it's ok to debate this kind of measure now, but the line will keep moving. In three years you may have people scouring your internet history for past wrongthink to deny you that promotion, or to get rid of you. In five years, machine learning algorithms may take your comments as input for your Ethical Credit Score. Hacker News is not going to delete your comments if you come to regret them.<p>It's best not to think about these things at all. What can you do, anyway? Suppress your mind's wandering. Focus on that algorithm on that refactoring, someone needs to get that work done, and it's you. You need that promotion. You need to make a lot of money for the federal government, for the state of California, and for your landlord, and you better make enough that there is something left to save. You don't want to look back in ten years and realize your youth disappeared while you were sitting in front of a monitor, you're still unmarried, you don't own a house, and you haven't had an independent thought in a decade, right? At least you've got to have some money saved up, that's going to make it worth it. So put your head down and get back to coding.
Fascinating to see all comments against this at the moment.<p>Some level of mandatory female board presence seems to work OK in plenty of places elsewhere in the world without a great backlash. No visible campaigns to repeal because of the great damage or tokenism that's resulted.
It would be great if all the comments in this thread could give full disclosure for their position. As you would for any other potential conflict of interest.<p>For my part, I think legislation like this could be immeasurably improved if there was a sunset clause once parity was reached (in the state). Which would prove that this is only instituted due to the compete failure of the status quo of the old boys clubs.<p>Full disclosure: blokes opinion.
I (a man) for one am happy about this decision. Not because this, the intermediate state, is one I'm happy with, but because it creates female role models that girls can look up to. This in turn will show girls that it's something they can achieve and aspire to, and ideally, soon, this legislation won't be required anymore. It's a bootstrapping tool.<p>We're talking about a single board member. This isn't going to destroy companies. It's not going to force companies to do without the best and brightest, that's incredibly hyperbolic. If you really want to add a specific man, add a seat, or drop someone.<p>Especially since as the article points out, companies with female board members tend to be more profitable [1]. Correlation is not causation. On the other hand, there's no apocalyptic collapse coming because they let a lady into the boardroom, my lord, what's becoming of California?! I do believe I've got a case of the vapors.<p>It's really amazing how little empathy is being displayed here. I'm sure each of you would feel differently if 90% of board members were women. Maybe it's just the demographics on here? Maybe it's because as engineers we live in a world we can control by simply moving a letters around on a computer screen. The real world, society, is messy. It's not as simple as declaring meritocracy and suddenly equality arrives. Change requires making uncomfortable decisions, making compromises and taking real steps. And yes, rolling them back if they don't work out as planned.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/41365364" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/41365364</a>