Corporate affirmative action for women?

[wiggin]

I'd agree with you it's probably nothing to do with "discrimination". Maybe its wanting positions of power to reflect Euro gender demographics, which they also want in education, government, and legislators(?) Women are largely half of university students/grads and the general workforce, diversity recruitment is desirable and common, and women move up in tandem with men until they hit a plateau and start to lose traction....what's not so clear is why.

Actually, women are awarded more than 50% of higher education degrees... in some cases by quite a bit. But I think it's very clear why women, despite being hired just as much as men, do not have careers that go as far in the corporate hierarchy. In fact, I mentioned a number of them in my post. See more below.

European nations also have great Child Care/Cay Care/Elder Care (both public and private), generous maternity/paternity and family leave policies, subsidized continuing education and professional degree advancement, and laws for equal pay and anti-discrimination hiring. That doesn't sound like an environment where women (or men) are having to choose between career or family, or could be rejected for pregnancies or family issues. Women in healthcare and education can also strive for 'moving up the ladder' into management and leadership positions, or branching out into other sectors, so I wouldn't say 'service professions' can't mirror 'corporate professions'.

Uhm, generous maternity leave is a good way to keep women from coming back to work. There's quite a bit of data from Germany in particular about this. Even if they do go back, an absence of 12-18 months may have done irreparable damage to their skills and career.

As for the service/corporate thing, it's irrelevant to the discussion. I don't doubt that women can and do move up the ladder in, say, academic professions (certainly the number of tenure track female professors has skyrocketed in the last few decades, though serious social stigma still exists for the female academic who prioritizes family over work). That's irrelevant to the question of women being guaranteed near-equal representation on corporate boards. If the available pool of corporate workers is already skewed towards men (because more women are working in other sectors), why try to reflect an even distribution at the top level when it doesn't exist elsewhere? That almost certainly results in less qualified candidates being given the position.

Not discrimination. Well, if they're talking about Boards of Directors, those positions still tend to be dominated by the grandfathers of that current generation of new workers. And they don't die off or retire at age 63 anymore, but can hang around well into their 80's. People in powerful positions are known to like, and sometimes use their position, to keep their power. That's nothing new at all. They're asking them to voluntarily invite women into the boardroom, using a threat of mandates and quotas to speed up the "percolation". My impression is that Europeans are more acceptable of that kind of tinkering.

Okay, so board members may be old and likely to be more conservative. So what? If you're looking for 60-year old board members, you're going to find precious few women who are qualified and fit the criteria - there simply isn't a large enough population of women who embarked on the corporate management ladder 40 years ago. But I think some of your assumptions are wrong - lots of boards are full of people in their 40s and 50s, not their 60s and 70s. These people entered the workforce in a very different world from the 1950s and 1960s, and I don't doubt that they will happily value the contributions and participation of qualified women.

I agree that Europeans are more accepting of that kind of tinkering, but they're wrong. Coercing firms (through threat or regulation) to add potentially unqualified members to their boards for some very fuzzy reasoning is uncompetitive, counterproductive, and unfair. Speeding up something that is already happening - even if the natural steady state number might be lower than their quota - is silly and a good way to make companies underperform.

More broadly, even though there's no consensus of why women hit a plateau or glass ceiling in POP, my personal opinion is that women aren't drawn to the old/traditional type of management or power hierarchies that still dominate corporate culture and the boardroom. Also, I'd be more likely to support share-holder 'activism' by changing disclosure and proxy-voting rules than a quota hiring law.

1. Maybe a fair point about corporate culture being anathema to some women, but why force boards to recruit women for it if women are intentionally avoiding it? There's no crime in women preferring some jobs over others - should we require that contracters hire 40% female construction workers just because they are underrepresented in the field? A hostile work environment is one thing, but this is just a question of preference.

2. What the hell does shareholder activism et al have to do with this at all?


Just a clarification for you and others: I personally think it's great to have a diversity of viewpoints in the workplace, ranging from different cultural and education backgrounds to different gender. I think it's good for any number of reasons, and I would welcome (qualified) women as colleagues or superiors - in fact, for the last 7 years I worked almost exclusively under several female superiors and have only the highest respect for their abilities. My broad field tends to be dominated by men, for obvious reasons, but my little subfield has a very significant number of women. I've found that the women I work with can be just as competent (or incompetent) as the men, though there are definite differences in style and interpersonal dynamics. I just don't think that women should be given some special privileged status just because they might be underrepresented in some jobs.

[GGT]

Actually, women are awarded more than 50% of higher education degrees... in some cases by quite a bit. But I think it's very clear why women, despite being hired just as much as men, do not have careers that go as far in the corporate hierarchy. In fact, I mentioned a number of them in my post. See more below.

That why is more interesting to me, personally, than why some EU minister is making quota proposals.

Uhm, generous maternity leave is a good way to keep women from coming back to work. There's quite a bit of data from Germany in particular about this. Even if they do go back, an absence of 12-18 months may have done irreparable damage to their skills and career.

Germany is sort of a cultural outlier, from things I've read. There are distinctly pragmatic German values that are not shared by the EU as a whole, whether it's Kindergarten or monetary policy. If it wasn't discussed on this forum, then apologies for my bad memory, but if German mothers didn't return to the work force, or lost momentum in ladder-climbing---it wasn't because they hadn't kept skills/knowledge current during maternity leave.

As for the service/corporate thing, it's irrelevant to the discussion. I don't doubt that women can and do move up the ladder in, say, academic professions (certainly the number of tenure track female professors has skyrocketed in the last few decades, though serious social stigma still exists for the female academic who prioritizes family over work). That's irrelevant to the question of women being guaranteed near-equal representation on corporate boards. If the available pool of corporate workers is already skewed towards men (because more women are working in other sectors), why try to reflect an even distribution at the top level when it doesn't exist elsewhere? That almost certainly results in less qualified candidates being given the position.

I was responding to your mention of womens' labor force participation by sector, as if health and education don't eventually lead to corporate involvement. When it comes to why European nations craft their policies as they do, I was surmising they'd seen some level of success at federal levels, and were trying to expand that to the private sector, with a (?). After that point, it becomes political science theory vs social science theory.

Okay, so board members may be old and likely to be more conservative. So what? If you're looking for 60-year old board members, you're going to find precious few women who are qualified and fit the criteria - there simply isn't a large enough population of women who embarked on the corporate management ladder 40 years ago. But I think some of your assumptions are wrong - lots of boards are full of people in their 40s and 50s, not their 60s and 70s. These people entered the workforce in a very different world from the 1950s and 1960s, and I don't doubt that they will happily value the contributions and participation of qualified women.

Too many notes! It's a difficult task to compare the EU with the US, public policy with private corporate behavior, quotas with social engineering, and gender issues to boot.

I agree that Europeans are more accepting of that kind of tinkering, but they're wrong. Coercing firms (through threat or regulation) to add potentially unqualified members to their boards for some very fuzzy reasoning is uncompetitive, counterproductive, and unfair. Speeding up something that is already happening - even if the natural steady state number might be lower than their quota - is silly and a good way to make companies underperform.

Americans do the same kind of tinkering, too, it just takes a really long time the way our judicial process works. Maybe the crux is what's defined as "fuzzy reasoning", or who defines what's unfair or counterproductive? Yes, there are huge differences between the EU and the US, and how we approach natural states or "percolating" the process.

2. What the hell does shareholder activism et al have to do with this at all?

It's obviously my American-female-consumer-investor approach in how to deal with corporate boardroom appointments. I'd think you might also prefer that to what the EU minister is attempting, right? Women are the main purchasers for families, that's a fact. In our consumer-driven culture, women are more likely to boycott a product using child labor (Gap, Nike), a corporation with crappy employment standards (Walmart), or enterprises that fund discriminatory policies (Target)...if they're aware of it. That's how we can influence Board of Directors, without having to be on the board itself.