> “There have been numerous objections to this bill, and serious legal concerns have been raised,” Brown said. “I don’t minimize the potential flaws that indeed may prove fatal to its ultimate implementation. Nevertheless, recent events in Washington, D.C. — and beyond — make it crystal clear that many are not getting the message.”
I feel like passing a flawed or badly-implemented law that forces companies to restructure their boards in order to send a political message will have the opposite of the effect you want.
Surely it'll just galvanize peoples' negative opinions of "liberal policies," and do little to actually change anything substantial?
Call me cynical, but I'm not sure this was about achieving anything other than political points. I doubt anyone cared about who they galvanize into disliking this genre of legislation.
Out of all classes who experience unequal representation on corporate boards, why were women chosen as the exclusive beneficiaries of this legislation? My guess is because a lot of the hot button social issues being discussed right now focus on women, thus there's a lot of political capital to be gained if one takes a radical position in favor of women.
Or maybe because women are the most extreme example? Women are not a minority - they are ~51% of the population. When most of your population is treated like a second-class minority, well, that's kind of a big crisis.
And yes, it helps that women's issues are du jour. A lot of credit goes to a lot of women for their diligence in this matter.
Of course, there's no evidence that women are "treated like a second-class minority". There are individual instances where women fare worse than men (e.g., sexual assault victimization), but there are also individual instances where men fare worse than women (e.g., literally every other kind of assault victimization).
This hand waves away the complexity involved. Witness the immigrant backlash and rise of populism in Europe, Britain, and the United States.
Progress is needed, of course. But these are pipeline issues that take decades to nudge in the right direction. Push the lever too far, too fast, and it is going to snap back in your face (See: Brexit, Trump, Poland, etc). There are consequences for disregarding the climate you operate in. Voters and companies can respond faster than you can; recognize the leverage points in your feedback loop and the appropriate amount of pressure to apply to each (and what each point can tolerate).
White women are far and away the primary benefitiary of affirmative action. The simple reason is that they are the wives, girlfriends, and daughters of white men and thus are closest to them and it's not a lose-lose for white men.
Legislation seems like an absolutely terrible venue for a symbolic gesture like this. Unfortunately, you’re probably right that the measure will backfire, ultimately setting the cause back further.
I don’t know what the right answer is to fix the gender imbalance in boardrooms, but lawsuit-bait like SB 826 only serves to further muddy the waters while sacrificing public faith in the legislative process.
Passing a law to send a message to political opponents in a faraway state, that's admission to pure abuse of power. Can US governors say that with a straight face and without repercussions?
It's problematic to say the least. It beats me why they didn't just make this a more targeted amendment e.g. to a California b-corp statute. Let founders decide if they want to have this restriction in place. I think such a narrow opt-in kind of statute would pass constitutional muster. Obviously no Article IV problem, since it is only that state's chartered corporations. And I don't see it as a freedom of association or equal protection issue, since it would be opt-in.
Would you elaborate on the ideal liberal platform?
I see and hear comments like this quite frequently (from folks of all political alignments, interestingly) and I'm always interested to hear what beliefs and policies people around me want to see in their government but don't.
Not the OP, but the best way to contrast liberalism is from the perspective of Puritanism. Puritans were certainly not liberal socially, but they were also not liberal governmentally - many of the laws in Puritanical societies were highly restrictive, and pre-modern liberalism had its roots in creating a more free society - Puritanism is a non-negligible part of American history.
Modern leftism tends to be more authoritarian - it encourages restrictive legislation as a mechanism for progress. This is the dystopian future alluded to in a lot of e.g. Heinlein's work - things like forced sexual liberalism, erosion of parental rights or even parentage itself, elimination of the individual for the cause, and discrimination against the individual based on factors outside of their control.
Americans tend to view political affiliation as a binary - left or right, progressive or conservative, liberal or authoritarian. That's because, due to our history, we have always tended to have a leftist, progressive, liberal party contrasted with a right-leaning, conservative, authoritarian party.
That language is in and of itself somewhat complex - prohibitionists were considered progressives in their time, though today we would view them as otherwise.
Great response, the historical Puritan context is something I hadn't considered before.
I mention in another response that I'm looking for a description or model that isn't reactionary, but your reply makes me wonder if that's even possible. Is Liberalism more of an emergent, regulating social phenomena than a proper political alignment?
1. We are forcing people to do the wrong things and should do that less.
2. We shouldn't force people to do anything (libertarianism).
The problem with the latter is obviously that libertarians tend to be ignorant of the social contract, but the problem with the former is that lots of those type of liberals stop being liberals when they're the ones in power.
Liberal is supposed to mean “freedom.” When a government tells you what to do, that isn’t liberal. Of course there is a government and even classical liberals acknowledge the need for some government, but liberal really should mean a support of a government that provides for a common defense and has a court system that would provide for the enforcement of civil contracts. A “liberal” government doesn’t mandate actions of private entities unless those mandates are to protect the life, liberty or property of other individuals.
Mandating gender on corporate boards doesn’t protect any of that. Nobody has a right to serve on a board and not serving on a board isn’t threatening anyone’s right to pursue happiness or live their life as they see fit. In fact, it does the opposite: it imposes a requirement that limits the freedom of people to run their business how they see fit. Unless the running of that business infringes on the rights of others, the government really has no business with that sort of mandate. And the key to understanding this is that no person has a “right” to success or a right to a specific job — they have a right to pursue happiness, but not a right to actually be happy.
Progressivism is well-intentioned totalitarianism. There is nothing wrong with supporting progressivism, but let’s not pretend is has anything to do with liberalism.
But this is where the Marxist has to step in and point out that "the invisible hand" doesn't work. It's how you get robber-barons and child labor and unlivable wages. Having a system in which a group sees such little representation begs the question of WHY. The conclusion being drawn (accurately or not) by the progressive liberals is that the game is being fixed (perhaps intentionally, perhaps not)
The argument between "classical liberals" or libertarians or whatever they're calling themselves that day and progressive liberals is the belief that this will all just sort itself out if the government looks the other way and lets the economy run itself. We have seen time and time and time and time again that all that does is lead towards monopolies and exploitation of the masses. You can't possibly pretend that pure unadulterated capitalism is the best choice, since it just winds up leading to people being enslaved (literally or figuratively), murdered and oppressed.
Anarcho-capitalism is a horrible thing. It's impossible to tell what's market forces, and what's unfair advantages. The progressive liberals are of the opinion that in order for the whole to be better, sometimes the state needs to step in and act force people to play nice where it believes they aren't. It's not perfect, but it's a long slippery slope from totalitarian gulags to "put one fucking woman on your board you idiots".
I'm not making a case for progressivism here and I'm clear on the traditional (and international?) definition of "liberal."
I'm mainly interested in what specifically constitutes a liberal platform or policy model in the US. I genuinely don't know what it looks like. The descriptions I hear are typically hand-wavey in a way that reminds me of communist rhetoric; lots of ideals, few details, and typically reactionary (defined by what it isn't).
I'm assuming this is a gap in my knowledge/experience and I'd love to fill it in.
The libertarians are most in line with a classical liberal ideology.
It is a platform that acknowledges individual rights that exist independent of government, which finds its only legitimate role in ensuring those rights. Those rights are life, liberty, and property.
Any policy that prefers individual liberty and private property over government power and government-granted privileges would be more libertarian.
Libertarians support:
- Decriminalization of all "moral crimes" such as drug possession and use, prostitution, etc
- Freedom of trade and exchange, zero tariffs or import/export restrictions, elimination of price-gouging laws
- Elimination of taxation, government welfare programs, corporate welfare
- Immediate cessation of all foreign wars and assuming a defensive posture in foreign policy
- Elimination of most, if not all, regulations on consumer goods
- Sound money and the elimination of fractional reserve banking
For the most pure, detailed explanation of libertarianism, check out The Ethics of Liberty[1]
In many other countries, the right-wing party is called "Liberal". The reason is that the history of liberalism is closely intertwined with the history of economics, but they started to diverge when economists started to argue that wage floors and welfare could result in slower economic progress. The most extreme example of the latter argument is John von Neumann's turnpike theory:
There was a sort of "split" between people who wanted to maximize economic growth and people who wanted to optimize for some other measures of social well-being, but, crucially, they were both operating within the "social metric optimization" context of 19th century liberalism, aka classical liberalism, which included e.g. Bentham, Mill, and Schopenhauer. The major 19th century competitors to this philosophy were the various flavors of socialism, largely comprising the followers of Marx and Ricardo, which prefer to build social structures that naturally encourage human freedom (at least in theory), and also the various flavors of conservatism, which aim to preserve historical social structures believed to be beneficial for reasons that are often not clearly expressed. In countries subject to colonial conquest -- that is, everywhere except Western Europe, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Oman, Thailand, China and Japan -- these historical social structures were destroyed, and along with them the population's appetite for conservatism. In Japan, Italy and Germany, conservatism was heavily curtailed after World War II.
When liberalism's main competitor was conservatism, the growth-maximizers tended to align themselves with the conservatives and liberals were on the "left". But when it was socialism, the well-being-maximizers aligned themselves with the socialists and liberals were on the "right". What connects the two kinds of liberals is a reliance on numerical measurements of individual status (wealth, happiness, lifespan) and dynamical theories (economics, sociology) to define, promote and produce social progress.
"Democratic" isn't quite the right word there. "Democratic" is just "something done through the process of Democracy" not "something belonging to the Democrats".
Small "d" democratic is something done through the process of democracy. Capital "D" Democratic is something belonging to the Democrats. It's that capitalization which indicates that it's a proper noun and referring to the party with that name. Without the capitalization it's not a proper noun and does not refer to the party.
>By the end of July 2021, a minimum of two women must sit on boards with five members, and there must be at least three women on boards with six or more members. Companies that fail to comply face fines of $100,000 for a first violation and $300,000 for a second or subsequent violation.
This is so utterly bizarre. I suspect that this law will be struck down in court fairly quickly, and the politicians who pushed it through were just doing it for the sake of virtue signalling.
I'm curious why they went the punitive route rather than providing some kind of incentive structure. In some ways it works out to the same thing, but tax breaks for businesses committed to the cause seem way easier to enact and defend than authoritarian quotas.
Anyone with public policy or legal experience who can chime in here?
The really interesting part is that the amount of money seems to be one that would be extremely harmful to small companies but basically chump change to large corporations.
> high time corporate boards include the people who constitute more than half the ‘persons’ in America
Why everything need to match the country's overall demographics?
This is legislating a desired outcome without regard for basic logic and sovereignty. Are they also gonna force NBA to become racially diverse? Or for K-12 to have an equal amount of male to female teachers? You know the answer is no, but why not?
This is nothing but stupendous, overreaching, smug political posturing.
Does this mean companies with no women on their board need to fire a current board member on the sole basis of their gender? Isn't that discrimination based on a protected class?
>SEC. 2. Section 301.3 is added to the Corporations Code, to read:
301.3. (a) No later than the close of the 2019 calendar year, a publicly held domestic or foreign corporation whose principal executive offices, according to the corporation’s SEC 10-K form, are located in California shall have a minimum of one female director on its board. A corporation may increase the number of directors on its board to comply with this section.
But it goes on to say:
>(b) No later than the close of the 2021 calendar year, a publicly held domestic or foreign corporation whose principal executive offices, according to the corporation’s SEC 10-K form, are located in California shall comply with the following:
>(1) If its number of directors is six or more, the corporation shall have a minimum of three female directors.
>(2) If its number of directors is five, the corporation shall have a minimum of two female directors.
>(3) If its number of directors is four or fewer, the corporation shall have a minimum of one female director.
So it appears that if you currently have, for example, five directors that are all men and they continue to be directors until 2021, you'll need to fire two of them and hire two women directors OR hire three new female directors.
I don't see anything in the actual law[1] that grandfathers existing corporations. It states the law is applicable to:
>a publicly held domestic or foreign corporation whose principal executive offices, according to the corporation’s SEC 10-K form, are located in California
You can have board members that aren't shareholders like Al Gore being on Apple's board. You pay them in options like board advisors but they can vote.
Like all major corporation boards? Amazon and Google have college professors, Oakley has Michael Jordan, Tesla has the owner of Ebony Magazine, Boeing has the former ambassador to Japan. Can you name a company that all board members have skin in the game? I can't.
Technically, no -- the person selected to be fired could not be fired on the sole basis of their gender because they are the same gender as everyone else on the board.
I can't help but feel like this is falling into the trap of Goodhart's Law[1]. While granting that the relationship can be somewhat complex and potentially reinforcing, it feels like this is really primarily treating the symptom and not the cause.
This may be a good proxy for gender equality with regard to economic opportunities; however, forcing it to hit a certain threshold merely makes the measure meaningless without appreciably impacting actual gender equality (this only impacts a vanishingly small percentage of the overall population).
I strongly support efforts to increase gender equality, but I also believe they should be evidence-based and ideally on their face gender neutral (for example: banning gender-based discrimination is neutral, even though it would currently be far more beneficial to women than men).
That's exactly the problem- you can't create a state law that trumps federal law. The law itself is illegal, it's existence violates gender discrimination laws already.
I guess you know the answer, but: for the same reason it doesn't apply to all those other jobs with high mortality, or crippling dangers, or plain nasty ones.
There’s a lot of people getting riled about this but recent history in Europe shows that it has little effect either way. Not a great way to solve the imbalance but it’s not going to cause anyone’s collapse.
Europe is only globally competitive in the entrenched industries that were created before WW2. It entirely missed the computer revolution. The general economic direction of Western Europe is downward.
Hardly. Europe who you can credit for inventing the www missed the computer revolution? Funny how banking, payments, government services, car tech, happen to be at a higher level than in the US.
People tend to underestimate Europe and the EU. When asked what the world's leading financial power is almost half of people say the USA. The USA is third, with China first and the EU second. The EU's share of the world's GDP is shrinking because the rest of the world, especially the developing world, is catching up, which is a good thing.
What people think depends upon perspective. US tech companies are in the news more but there are unicorns and big tech companies in Europe, some of which I couldn't tell you what they do. As well as many large older IT companies there are also big new tech companies like Spotify, ASOS, Just Eat, skyscanner, Deliveroo. All big, all tech, all headquartered or started in the EU recently.
This is also ignoring the current shift to offshoring development to Europe. Eastern Europe is getting the lion's share of that but the western side is home to a lot of big divisions of international companies.
It does like you have the tech blinkers on, which happens to a lot of people working in tech. "Tech is the future and tech is everything." People tend to forget that the traditional industries are massive (the biggest companies in the world by revenue aren't tech companies) and they tend to play a larger role in a country's economy that tech does. These are companies that build their own towns if they need to and cause massive effects when they move.
Manufacturing is huge and ultimately everything tech uses is a product of manufacturing. Foxconn is as much a manufacturer as a tech company. The biggest companies working on self driving cars are the traditional car manufacturers, including European giants Volkswagen and Daimler. Other players like Uber use other people's cars. And when these cars go on sale half or more of the profit will be to the company that makes the metal.
Finally, a large part of Trump's promises were to bring back these old industries to the US because they're the industries that create long term jobs and transform towns.
You are confusing incorporations and headquarters. You can be incorporated in Delaware (as is popular) and headquartered in California (this already happens).
In California: "Gender identity is a person's understanding of their gender, or perception of their gender identity (which may include male, female, a combination of both, or neither of those), a gender differing from the one assigned at birth, or transgender."
So it's essentially whatever the individual defines their gender to be. A person can have their gender changed by court order on various documents if certain criteria are met; federal documents are more difficult to change than CA-issued documents.
(f) For purposes of this section, the following definitions apply:
(1) “Female” means an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.
That starts getting into difficult territory. A strict interpretation of SB 826 would require a person to self-identify as "female" and nothing else. It would be a legal question to be decided by a court if genders such as "genderfluid" or "non-binary" would be acceptable.
There is a law in CA that prohibits employers from asking for documentation of your gender or sex. However, I don't think board directors are considered employees. They are either volunteers or independent contractors.
AFAIK, there is a process by which you change your legal gender. Each person is also assigned a legal gender identity; AFAIK, it's used for which prisons population you go to, what it means to request same-gender officers/doctors/etc.
IANAL in any way, but my guess would be the same set of laws and systems would apply.
The more interesting thing is if/when there's someone legally identified as neither male nor female.
I've read that only like 90 corporations are headquartered in CA for which this law is applicable. Most of the others are headquartered in Delaware or other states. One exception I've heard of is Apple.
Depends on your interpretation of "headquartered". The article points out that many companies are headquartered in California, but incorporated in Delaware.
Is there any requirement in the law that the women on the board actually do anything other than be a member of it? Would anything stop a woman from offering to sit on your board and pinky promise not to vote for $1k a year? Someone could do that with a whole bunch of companies and everybody wins.
They can also add "paper women". There is probably even an opportunity for a service company to provide a catalog with profiles, from which to add paper women to your board:
"Add a paper woman to your board! Cheap and easy! $9.99/year excl. sales tax"
While I'm all for women serving on boards, I'm not keen on this being a legal mandate. I'll be sure to not incorporate in CA. Furthermore, how do they determine "female"ness?
So Alphabet will need to add two women (currently 8 board members, 1 woman). Apple, Tesla, and Facebook will need to add 1 (7/2, 9/2 and 9/2 respectively). Uber surprisingly enough already has 3 female board members, so they’re all set. That’s all assuming that this bill sticks of course. I’m sure there’ll be some heavy opposition to it.
I’m a bit surprised Alphabet’s board is one of the more gender imbalanced right now among the giants.
Alphabet seems to have [1] 11 directors, two of which are women. So they can either (1) hire one more women director, or (2) fire six of the male directors.
Ah, you’re right, I was looking at an out of date list of board members.
So they’ll only need to hire 1 additional woman. The bill requires there to be at least three women on boards with six or more members. Not pairity, just 3.
People complain about affirmative action, because it favors one group of people over another.
What if you algorithmically defined quotas instead of saying group X you say of the n groups that are underrepresented in the subset population relative to their existence in the larger population of the country they are weighed favorably by a multiplier of X.
This way you can get around writing policies that expressly prefer one group over another. Instead of saying we prefer black people over Asian people into our institution, we prefer "women" over men. The policy should be written as we prefer the lower X% represented ethnic categories to ensure preventing homogeneity and ensure a level of diversity.
Of course the issue with this becomes how do you define group identity. People can be divided into infinitesimal categorizations, and how do you define what qualifies as being part of a group. Is Barack Obama black or white? What percentage of genetic markers, indicate that someone deserves a specific label or categorization. Why is that percentage accurate? Why do we prefer one class of discriminated people over another class of discriminated people? The questions go on and on.
The current submission is clearly a dupe, since it's the exact same news from 4 days ago. Moreover, the discussion is predictable; it consists of the same two things over and over: (1) "discrimination"; (2) "it works in Europe". Plus trolls. Nobody participates in these threads out of intellectual curiosity, so they're actually off topic by HN's core standard: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It's bad both ways: having these news creates sort of unconstructive discussion, but removing it creates a perception of bias/censorship.
I think between these two bad options not removing them is a better option: news of this magnitude are rare and it will blow away after a few days. It relates to California corporate law and thus is pertinent to HN nevertheless I think.
This legitimizes tokenism for every diversity agenda. But it raises the problem of how do you set up, say, a 5 member board with the correct numbers of white, black, asian, women, Indian, gay, hispanic, etc. on it?
I've seen people kept around for that exact reason in govt contracting. For example, one employee never pulled her weight, and managers always wanted to fire her, but she was a black senior citizen. Since she allowed them to check off 3 diversity boxes when bidding for govt contracts, the company wouldn't let anyone fire her, so she kept getting promoted because that was the only way the managers could get her off their team.
In the trades it's common to have a personal LLC so you can expense your work truck, your lunch, etc and to have your wife own the LLC so you can have a woman owned business (which makes you a more attractive sub for government jobs)
The implicit argument you're posing is that board membership is a meritocracy where there are no implicit or explicit barriers to entry based on certain groups.
I don't think I need to go into the result of holding that belief with the current makeup of boards of directors.
> “There have been numerous objections to this bill, and serious legal concerns have been raised,” Brown said. “I don’t minimize the potential flaws that indeed may prove fatal to its ultimate implementation. Nevertheless, recent events in Washington, D.C. — and beyond — make it crystal clear that many are not getting the message.”
Why do people so often assume -- as Brown has here -- that more women in power will lead to progressive outcomes?
41% of women voted for Donald Trump. 37% of women currently approve of his performance. These numbers are lower than men, it's true, but not that much lower (52% and 45%, respectively).
The reason is pretty simple. Women have husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. It's not women vs men.
For example, a female colleague of mine a few years back had her son forced out of university and ruined due to an allegation of rape that was entirely he said / she said. She did a lot of crying about how unjust that was.
I feel like passing a flawed or badly-implemented law that forces companies to restructure their boards in order to send a political message will have the opposite of the effect you want.
Surely it'll just galvanize peoples' negative opinions of "liberal policies," and do little to actually change anything substantial?