- 19 Jun 2020 01:21
#15101232
Every once in a while this idea makes its appearance again, triggering debate in society. It can sound like a good idea on the surface, but it takes quite a bit of explaining logic to shoot it down.
Gender quotas that have been implemented have mostly only concentrated job opportunity into just a handful of the career women that really are working as hard as men. Just as has been the experience in other forms of "affirmative action" in various other countries, quotas can actually increase inequality. The benefits from the quotas go mostly to an "upper crust" of the discriminated gender/ethnicity. There is no reason to take job opportunity away from men to give to childless career women that are already earning as much as men, just because most of the other women are not focusing on their careers as much as men.
In Norway, when the law suddenly required that 40 percent of a company's board of directors be women, there were not enough qualified women available, so the small number of qualified women suddenly found themselves with positions on multiple boards, earning extremely high incomes, even though they could not possible be fully fulfilling their responsibilities on so many of these boards.
from The Economist :
...
The evidence from Norway, the first European country to impose strict quotas, suggests that compulsion has been bad for business. Norwegian boards, which were 9% female in 2003, were ordered to become 40% female within five years. Many reached that target by window-dressing. The proportion of board members in Norway who are female is nearly three times greater than the proportion of executive directors (see chart).
To obey the law, Norwegian firms promoted many women who were less experienced than the directors they had before. These new hires appear to have done a poor job. A study by Amy Dittmar and Kenneth Ahern of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan found that firms that were forced to increase the share of women on their boards by more than ten percentage points saw one measure of corporate value (the ratio of market capitalisation to the replacement value of assets, known as Tobin's Q) fall by 18%.
...
A single Norwegian business woman, Mimi Berdal, sat on the board of 40 different companies at the same time! There were not enough qualified women available to comply with the law. So the few woman that did have experience were suddenly in huge demand. Obviously this did not do much to help all the other women.
South Africa had the same experience when they implemented racial quotas to require that 50 percent of every publicly-traded corporation be owned by Blacks. There were only a small handful of Blacks that had the money to buy the corporate stock, and a select few suddenly became extremely wealthy, again doing virtually nothing to help all the other Blacks. This is how Patrice Motsepe became South Africa's wealthiest man.
Gender quotas that have been implemented have mostly only concentrated job opportunity into just a handful of the career women that really are working as hard as men. Just as has been the experience in other forms of "affirmative action" in various other countries, quotas can actually increase inequality. The benefits from the quotas go mostly to an "upper crust" of the discriminated gender/ethnicity. There is no reason to take job opportunity away from men to give to childless career women that are already earning as much as men, just because most of the other women are not focusing on their careers as much as men.
In Norway, when the law suddenly required that 40 percent of a company's board of directors be women, there were not enough qualified women available, so the small number of qualified women suddenly found themselves with positions on multiple boards, earning extremely high incomes, even though they could not possible be fully fulfilling their responsibilities on so many of these boards.
from The Economist :
...
The evidence from Norway, the first European country to impose strict quotas, suggests that compulsion has been bad for business. Norwegian boards, which were 9% female in 2003, were ordered to become 40% female within five years. Many reached that target by window-dressing. The proportion of board members in Norway who are female is nearly three times greater than the proportion of executive directors (see chart).
To obey the law, Norwegian firms promoted many women who were less experienced than the directors they had before. These new hires appear to have done a poor job. A study by Amy Dittmar and Kenneth Ahern of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan found that firms that were forced to increase the share of women on their boards by more than ten percentage points saw one measure of corporate value (the ratio of market capitalisation to the replacement value of assets, known as Tobin's Q) fall by 18%.
...
A single Norwegian business woman, Mimi Berdal, sat on the board of 40 different companies at the same time! There were not enough qualified women available to comply with the law. So the few woman that did have experience were suddenly in huge demand. Obviously this did not do much to help all the other women.
South Africa had the same experience when they implemented racial quotas to require that 50 percent of every publicly-traded corporation be owned by Blacks. There were only a small handful of Blacks that had the money to buy the corporate stock, and a select few suddenly became extremely wealthy, again doing virtually nothing to help all the other Blacks. This is how Patrice Motsepe became South Africa's wealthiest man.
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