By 2026, companies will need to have 40% of the underrepresented sex among non-executive directors or 33% among all directors.
Identity quotas do little but foster distrust of the members of the assisted category. How does this even work as more and more peoples' gender identities deviate from the classical male and female? Does a non-binary person count toward the quota? Do they count only if they were assigned female at birth? Can executives change their legal gender to manipulate their stats? Are companies similarly required to have at least 33% males on their boards? How does telling a company who they must hire, as opposed to who they're not allowed to discriminate against, not violate the right of freedom of association?
Hopefully they'll define this quota in terms of sex rather than gender identity. Otherwise this is a pointless endeavour.
Their press release seems to imply this will be the case but, well, you never know these days. There's a lot of confusion and contention around this issue.
That's now what Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiatives at companies, universities, and governments are aiming for though. It's quotas for everyone and anything other than 50% females and 50% or more of "minorities" [in quotations since this is the vaguest term ever] means there is rampant racism and sexism in this toxic patriarchy.
The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things.
It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year (arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance that I am not sure which universe your comment applies to.
And yes, what you said matters, as does race, country of origin, and economic background. Intersectionality is a fancy word, but it's useful, and the article mentions it.
So that said, 50% is a useful number. It's useful to say that if the actual hiring rate is at 15%, we still have a problem.
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.
This is a nice idea if they were trying to change the process to work better for everyone.
That's not what's happening. They just demand explicit quotas for themselves.
The whole 'diversity and inclusion/feminism makes things better for everyone' is largely a myth, it's just identity groups out for themselves in corporate America.
Women are not automatically making you a better perspective on that, genders are not some kind of homogeneous religious group where everyone thinks the same. Companies should just hire competent workers, trying to fill quotas is a meaningless task.
would all the pro-equality people tell me how you suggest to fix the inequality of XY chromosomes between males and females? or inequality of melanin in people's skins? or inequality of hair on our heads?
demanding to have 50% male/female or black/white speakers reminds me of a joke: "- what is the chance that dinosaur will cross this road this very moment? - 50%. it will either cross or will not."
rather than whine and cry about not having enough women in tech go and tell your employer to hire your female friend because she's good.
The industry would be 80-85% men in perpetuity? I can understand the author's desire not to have gender be such a big issue. But it is a big issue whether we talk about it or not, and if we don't talk about it, we'll never fix it.
Any company not meeting quotas could simply have half the men start identifying as women.
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