Dr Jordan B Peterson on Twitter - "If equity is equality and equality is similarity (as equal things are by definition identical) isn't diversity its opposite?"
It’s Time to Expand the Narrative About Queer and Disabled Communities - "LGBTQ+ people remain underrepresented in the media, and what representation there is centers on white, cisgender, neurotypical, able-bodied people. According to GLAAD’s yearly report on inclusivity in mainstream media, there was only one disabled LGBTQ+ character in all major studio releases in 2020, which was the first year that GLAAD even counted disabled LGBTQ+ characters in their roundup."
Why chasing "diversity" is a losing proposition - the slippery slope will slip and grievance mongers will continue to be outraged - just over new and even more trivial shit
Identity politics - dividing us into ever smaller constituencies
Hmong American PhD student rejected for prestigious fellowship for not being in ‘underrepresented’ group - "Explore the topics mentioned in this article A Hmong American Ph.D. candidate studying neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was refused a fellowship after it was determined that she was not from an “underrepresented” group because she’s Asian American. “Model minority” myth: In a Twitter thread, doctoral student Kao Lee Yang said she was nominated for the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Gilliam Fellowship but was told by a committee that she didn’t fit its “Racial/Ethnic Underrepresentation” criteria. “We are not a monolithic group,” she said. “While some Asian Americans are academically successful, others like the Hmong, are underrepresented in STEM and academia in general.” Yang asked the fellowship committee and others in the scientific community to name a Hmong American woman neuroscientist: “I would love to connect with her if she is out there.”... Under its eligibility criteria, HHMI defined “excluded groups to be persons who identify as Black or African American, Latinx or Hispanic American, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, Alaska Native, and from groups indigenous to the Pacific Island territories of the United States.”"
Too bad this just causes greater balkanisation instead of treating people as individuals
In Push For Diversity, Military Canine Units To Give Equal Opportunities To Chihuahuas | The Babylon Bee - ""We've always had this narrow-minded view that the German Shepherd is the best dog for chasing down dangerous terrorists and sniffing out improvised explosive devices," said Austin. "But why not Chihuahuas? Why not poodles? Bringing in more dog breeds will increase our diversity-- which is the greatest strength any military can have." So far, there have been no Chihuahuas capable of taking down a 250-pound man by the arm, so the military has elected to eliminate that test altogether."... "We're proud of this beautiful mosaic we have created here," said one Staff Sergeant while knitting a cute sweater for Squeaker, his working dog. "This is what our military is all about!""
Marvel writer quits after learning editor-in-chief pretended to be Asian to further his career - "Former “Daredevil” executive producer and Marvel Comics writer Steven S. DeKnight has announced that he will no longer write for Marvel until C.B. Cebulski, the publication's editor-in-chief, steps down from his position... Cebulski drew outrage in November 2017 when he admitted in an interview with Bleeding Cool that he used to write under the pseudonym Akira Yoshida from 2004 to 2006 while an associate editor at Marvel in order to get more work."
Since we're told that affirmative action doesn't promote the unqualified and there're few enough Asians in the industry that means AA is "needed", this didn't hurt anyone, so really no one was hurt (beyond psychic hurt)
Meme - "Love Island South Africa criticised for near all-white cast"
"South Africa is 8% white. So it is completly minority casted which makes it one of the most diverse shows there is"
McDonald's Will Slash Executive Bonuses If They Don't Promote More Women and Minorities to Senior Leadership Roles - "McDonald’s donated millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter last summer, so it should come as no surprise how committed they are to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in their own ranks as well.Big League Politics has previously covered the diversity hires of a Mediterranean restaurant chain called CAVA, which bragged about reducing the number of their white employees by 43 percent in just one year."
If they don't need to make money...
Cambridge University to admit students with BBB grades in new diversity drive - " The usual offer to students who want to study at Cambridge is at least A*AA"
McMaster University uploads racially discriminatory job postings - "McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario uploaded job postings in November which discriminate on the basis of race, seeking to "contribute to the advancement of Black academic excellence across all six McMaster Faculties."... Employment discrimination on the basis of race is illegal in Ontario"
Woke boardrooms have left the working class out of their drive for diversity - "Finally, a major British company has admitted that this country is suffering from a serious problem with social mobility. KPMG, better known in recent years for blundering from one public relations disaster to the next, has vowed to make sure that 29pc of its partners and directors come from a working class background by 2030. It is remarkable that this is the first major UK business to set such a target... KPMG chairman Bina Mehta, who comes from a working-class background herself and this year replaced Bill Michael after he told staff unconscious bias was “utter crap”, has unearthed an uncomfortable truth by shining a light on the class ceiling: a small proportion of society has a major advantage over the rest... The class ceiling is even worse in creative jobs, where the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre has found that only 16pc of people are from working class backgrounds... The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) even warned earlier this year that boardrooms were at risk of “replacing one under-represented group with another” after finding that some companies trying to bring in more senior female staff could be appointing high socio-economic status (SES) women “in place of low SES men”... The broadcaster was ridiculed by critics last week, however, after offering staff an “allyship” test that identifies whether they are more privileged than their colleagues. Herein lies the problem with this debate. As one well-known businessman who grew up in a tower block in Glasgow puts it: “everyone has examples where they feel like an outsider.”"
English Touring Opera drops half its orchestra in controversial move, citing ‘increased diversity’ - "The Arts Council, which provides funding to the ETO, has responded by saying that they did not advise the opera company to fire musicians as part of their work to increase diversity in classical music... “We are now in conversation with ETO to ensure no funding criteria have been breached.”"
Good excuse to fire people
Lesbian Quits Job After Learning She's 'Diversity Hire': AITA
‘Shang-Chi’ Tops $150M But Highlights The Limits Of Diversity At The Box Office
"Movies should be forced to be diverse for the sake of being diverse, and consumers should go watch films that they don't want to see to support diversity"
Laurence Fox ✌🏼🇬🇧✌🏼 on Twitter - "Diversity - Equity - Inclusion Strange triumvirate of words to describe their exact opposites. Division - Inequality - Exclusion D-I-E"
Women directors, firm performance, and firm risk: A causal perspective - "Norway was the first of ten countries to legislate gender quotas for boards of publicly traded firms. There is considerable debate and mixed evidence concerning the implications of female board representation. In this paper, we explain the main sources of biases in the existing literature on the effects of women directors on firm performance and review methods to account for these biases. We address the endogeneity problem by using a difference-in-differences approach to study the effects of women directors on firm performance with specific consideration of the common trend assumption, and we explicitly distinguish between accounting-based (i.e., operating income divided by assets, return on assets) and market-based (i.e., market-to-book ratio and Tobin's Q) performance measures in the Norwegian setting. The control group are firms from Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. We further extend the analysis of causal effects of women directors to firm risk. Our results imply a negative effect of mandated female representation on firm performance and on firm risk."
The crowd who love to crow "correlation isn't causation" only do so when they don't like the findings. Too bad the feel-good claims about diversity are immune to challenges about causality
Of course the researchers will be slammed as misogynists who don't think women are capable
California governor signs corporate boardroom diversity law - "Hundreds of California-based corporations must have directors from racial or sexual minorities on their boards under a first-in-the-nation bill signed Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The diversity legislation is similar to a 2018 measure that required boardrooms to have at least one female director by 2019. Like that measure, it could face court challenges from conservative groups who view it as a discriminatory quota... By the end of 2021, the more than 660 public corporations with California headquarters must have at least one board director from an “underrepresented community," according to the measure.Those who qualify would self-identify as Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian or Alaska Native, or as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. The measure requires at least two such directors by the end of 2022 on boards with four to nine directors. Three directors are required for boards with nine or more directors. Firms that don’t comply would face fines of $100,00 for first violations and $300,000 for repeated violations... The legislation was part of a package of racial justice measures signed by Newsom before a midnight deadline. Others bar the use of peremptory challenges to remove potential jurors based on racial, religious or gender identity; allow judges to alter sentences that are believed to involve racial or ethnic discrimination; and set up a state task force to study the idea of reparations to African Americans for slavery... The only official opponent in a legislative analysis was former California commissioner of corporations Keith Bishop. He objected that that bill, coupled with the existing diversity law, would make it more desirable for corporations to pick women who also are members of the underrepresented communities to simultaneously meet both sets of quotas, to the detriment of men or women who do not meet the qualifications in the new bill."
Just get some board members to "come out"
Nasdaq’s doomed push for diversity - The Spectator - "If 2020 was the year of the obligatory corporate diversity statement, it looks like 2021 is set to be the year when woke capitalism comes to collect. If your company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion isn’t reflected by the faces of your executive board, you’ll be in for a reckoning — not from an angry mob on social media, but from the overlords at the NASDAQ index.This is per a new proposal from Nasdaq itself, which hopes to codify a diversity mandate into its listing rules... Instead, assuming the SEC agrees to Nasdaq’s proposal, we can expect to see companies scrambling to poach the same few high-achieving women and people of color from a pool of talent that’s still shallow as ever due to structural issues, with the sole goal being a board of directors that looks as much as possible like a 1990s Benetton ad. It’s a policy that’s highly beneficial to the people in that pool, and to the bottom line of compliant companies who get to stay on the Nasdaq index…but that’s about it, really, which seems to be the point. When Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman explained the reasoning behind the rules, the notion of opportunity or equity was notably absent; rather, she noted that ‘diversity of the board is an important element of giving investors confidence in the future sustainability of the company’. In other words, people like the look of diversity; they don’t much care if it came cheap. And as inclusion initiatives go, this is about as cheap as it gets. Reshuffling boardrooms to be more colorful requires zero innovation, very little investment, and virtually no meaningful cost to anyone except, possibly, a handful of already-mega-privileged dudes who have to give up their seats in the name of representation. Meanwhile, the underlying reasons for the white male hegemony will remain unaddressed, and the divide between the country’s haves and have nots will stay as entrenched as ever — and at least until the frustration at the state of affairs boils over again in the form of another nationwide reckoning, it’ll all be business as usual."
Get Woke or Go Broke! NASDAQ Plans to Implement Diversity Requirements for Companies to be Listed - "What a comforting thought, powerful stock exchanges partnering with and pressuring governmental agencies to force private and public corporations to adhere to certain woke political values.This isn't scary at all. Normally, this is proprietary information that businesses are not required to share. NASDAQ wants to partner with the S.E.C. to force corporations to disclose this information to NASDAQ so they can, essentially, blackmail companies into complying with certain political goals.The New York Times is already thinking a few steps ahead, hypothesizing that this could also be used "to force action on other hot-button issues, like climate change."Oh, joy. I cannot wait until we get powerful organizations like NASDAQ to tell us "If you are a climate denier we will absolutely destroy your business and livelihood because we care about the planet and you are an anti-science loser." This policy is not in place yet, but the request has been made to the S.E.C. It will be very interesting to see if the S.E.C. caves to this woke mob or stands by their duty to uphold the law as written."
Hiking has a diversity problem. These BIPOC groups are working to fix it - Los Angeles Times
Facebook - "Has it ever occurred to any of these people that instead of “hiking has a diversity problem,” that maybe, just maybe, it’s “diversity has a hiking problem?!”"
Comments: "BIPOC = dogwhistle for "No asians, no Jews""
"Are they saying everyone must enjoy everything by exactly the same amount? Are they suggesting diversity of choice is wrong? Are they trying to inflict hiking on groups that choose not to do it? We’re having this debate in the UK."
"You have to have a particular level of income to consider walking around aimlessly to be a plausible use of your time and energy. I think there are also cultural differences. When I was growing up (I'm a 'second generation' Indian immigrant to England) nobody once suggested going hiking. It took me years to accept that other people consider it a leisure activity."
"Spend some time around black twitter and you're bound to see commentary to the tune of hiking and other outdoor activities being "white people things", with amusement being expressed at the silly ypipo, going to distant places on foot and all. Clearly hiking doesn't appeal to everyone, but if you're a diversity Kommissar, that's your opportunity to spout out more drivel."
"I once was at a hackathon where the winner made spammy chatbots to annoy minorities to go hiking... Other competitors made things like better 9-11 dispatch algorithms, and Opioid crisis prediction models... "
"I saw some idiots in the leftist climbing Instagram community suggest that the reason black people aren't hiking or camping is because they don't "feel safe" on the trails because they fear racist violence or racist attitudes against them. Hilarious since I've never come across someone on a hiking trail that wasn't obsessively fucking friendly and not to mention that 98% of the damn outdoor community here is leftist af."
"My favorite of the absurd arguments about parks lacking diversity is that they're too expensive for minorities and require too much specialized equipment."
"Has anybody in a wheelchair climbed Mt Everest? Did they even hike to base camp? How about K2? I’m reminded of what Blade said about people who try to ice skate uphill..."
"I like how it’s okay to picture a white guy in the group as long as he’s disabled."
"Reality has a diversity problem."
"After reading through the comments, the solution is simple: ban hiking. There, problem solved."
"if i asked my mother if she ever wanted to go “hiking,” she would look at me as if I just came out as a lesbian"
Some SJWs got very upset when I cited hiking as an example of white culture, since they adopted a ridiculously narrow definition of culture being something that Group A does but no one else. This was in a thread where people were claiming there was no white culture so it shouldn't be celebrated, but every other race did so they deserved to be. Of course, black, Asian etc cultures were not subject to the same ridiculously narrow definition, since the conclusion was pre-ordained and they were working backwards to justify their anti-white racism, and calling everyone who disagreed troglodytes
James LindsBae on Twitter - "Children's books eight times as likely to feature animal main characters than BAME people"
"Imagine being envious of animal characters in children's books."
Dylan Byers on Twitter - "NEW: Cesar Conde, Chairman of NBCUniversal News Group, says the company will strive to have “50% of our News organization employees be women and 50% of our total workforce be people of color.”"
Not just is this judging people by the colour of their skin and their gender identity (though the latter is easily changed), this goes beyond proportional representation and is now over-representation of "minorities". So much for the "myth" of the slippery slope
Cindy Arboleda, M.A. on Twitter - "Diverse photo shoot sends powerful message: ‘Never be sorry for being black’ #CindyReports"
BBC embroiled in race row after Carols from King's broadcast - "Viewers have complained to the BBC after its festive service Carols From King’s failed to feature a single non-white chorister. None of the 13 singers on the programme, which aired on BBC2 on Christmas Eve, appeared to be from an ethnic minority... King's has also been criticised previously for not admitting female members into it's choir, with the decision not to said to be down to the 'unique choral sound' of boys and men."
Diverse = Non-white
Presumably if King's cannot find any non-white choristers of a certain standard, they must shut down their choir rather than being not "diverse" enough
Anyone who says men should get to enter female-only spaces is a misogynist, of course
Meme - "EricaJoy @ @EricaJoy: 2021 ally challenge: if a product, service, or company is built by either all men or all white people, you don't use your platform (social, newsletters, blogs, etc) to champion it, promote it, or help it gain traction (yes, even if it's a portfolio company, VCs). who's in?"
"She tweeted on a platform run by a white guy on a device created by a white guy."
Weird. Liberals claim that diversity leads to better performance. So if you use the best products you should be supporting diversity already
EricaJoy on Twitter - "here’s the thing: this shouldn’t be a challenge because it costs literally nothing. not a dime. if the very basic *idea* of just not amplifying a product made by a team that lacks diversity is a problem for someone, i wonder how they’d do with more challenging ally work."
Weird how she deleted the first tweet but not the second
Moral of the story: it's perilous to be an "ally" since they will always have contempt for you
University of Rhode Island to remove murals commemorating WWII veterans for lack of diversity - "The University of Rhode Island announced on Thursday its plans to remove several, almost seventy-year old murals from its student union for their lack of diversity.The murals depict many unique scenes, including servicemen returning after the war, a class reunion, a university commencement ceremony, a beach scene, and students in a jalopy dressed in letter sweaters... URI’s Vice President of Student Affairs, Kathy Collins, defended the decision, citing concerns over the murals’ impact on students of color... “Some of our students have even shared with us they didn’t feel comfortable sitting in that space.”"
So much for liberals' professed love for History and World War II veterans
Academy Strips 'Schindler's List' Of Best Picture Award Due To Lack Of Diversity | The Babylon Bee - "The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has stripped Schindler's List of its Best Motion Picture award for not having enough LGBTQ+ characters, people of color, and other oppressed groups... "Also, the movie has Nazis -- this is the current year, for goodness' sake!"Steven Spielberg has been ordered by the Academy to re-release the film with an unnecessary LGBTQ+ side plot, a gay roommate for Schindler, and a song and dance number set to a Lady Gaga song over the end credits if he wishes to re-earn the Academy Award. Otherwise, it will be re-awarded to Brokeback Mountain."
Facebook - "The industry saying tech is racist is far less diverse than tech itself. Big Tech is about 51% whitie, more diverse than the society at large. Tech journalism is 80% white, far less diverse than society at large. Diversity journalism = a white industry, pushing white guilt on a white audience desperately seeking grace. Not surprising in the least."
Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay started a "Resign for Diversity" campaign urging white wokies to be the "QUIT" in "EQUITY" 🤣 - "The idea behind the "Resign for Diversity" campaign is simple: if you are a woke white person who believes we need to overhaul all of society to eliminate merit on the basis of racial "equity," then you can be the first to show your devotion by quitting your job and giving it to a person you think is oppressed... The outlet noted multiple cases where this was an actual talking point of woke disciples... be the QUIT in EQUITY!"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "After the Columbine shooting there was a rush to institute anti-bullying programs in schools. When their effectiveness was later analyzed, many were surprised to find that the anti-bullying programs actually increased bullying. A similar unintuitive result happened with anti-sexual harassment programs put on by corporations. Follow up research indicated that harassment complaints and lawsuits increased after the introduction of the programs. We now have several studies that indicate that implicit bias training doesn’t work and may well be pseudoscience. Diversity training classes are popular now with corporations but some research indicates that it leads to poorer outcomes for minorities within the company. It turns out that making race an important attribute ends up favoring the majority, not the minority."
Finally Some Robust Research Into Whether “Diversity Training” Actually Works – Unfortunately It’s Not Very Promising - "a prominent team of researchers, including Katherine Milkman, Angela Duckworth, and Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, partnered with a large global organisation to measure the real-world impact of the researchers’ own anti-bias intervention, designed principally to “promote inclusive attitudes and behaviors toward women, whereas a secondary focus was to promote the inclusion of other underrepresented groups (e.g., racial minorities).” The results were mixed at best – and unfortunately there are good reasons to be sceptical that even the more positive results are as positive as they seem... One thing that immediately jumps out is that the top row, which deals with attitudes, shows more impressive results than the bottom row, which deals with actual behavior (though even the top-row results are modest in terms of the size of their effect). But in looking at the attitudinal measures the researchers used, critical readers might fairly wonder whether they’re really measuring what they are supposed to be measuring – i.e. support for women in the workplace. For example, the “attitudinal support for women” score was drawn from levels of (dis)agreement with items like “Discrimination against women is no longer a problem” and “Society has reached the point where women and men have equal opportunities for achievement.” But arguably, whether an individual believes equality has already been accomplished is different from whether they believe that women should be fully supported in the workplace. Someone can believe that discrimination against women is no longer a problem but still believe they should be treated in exactly the same way as men. These questionnaire statements seem to be more geared at measuring political liberalism or conservatism with regard to gender issues than misogynist attitudes directly. So the risk, then, is that the training successfully increases political liberalism (to a modest degree), but it’s not possible to tell from the questionnaire items whether it alters the kind of attitudes that are likely to more directly underlie discriminatory behaviour. Arguably, there is also a problem with the “gender-bias acknowledgment” result, which was based on those participants in the training group admitting (more than the control participants) to having gender biases more similar to the average person. This finding is complicated by the fact that the bias training involved taking the gender-bias Implicit Association Test (IAT). Setting aside the other well-documented problems with the IAT, the gender IAT, in particular, has produced some strange results. As this chart from FiveThirtyEight showed in 2017, the normal “pattern” of IATs relating to minority or marginalised groups – in which conservatives (and members of majority groups) tend to score higher for implicit bias toward such groups than liberals (and members of minority groups) – is more or less reversed when it comes to the gender-bias IAT. Specifically, results from the gender IAT suggest that women are more implicitly biased against women than men are, that this is the case at every point on the political spectrum, and that within many subgroups, political liberals are more biased against women than conservatives... A lot of the effects were clustered right around zero and/or differed greatly on the basis of sex or nationality (which isn’t a good sign for programmes that are designed to be delivered to large, diverse groups of employees)."
Goldman to Refuse IPOs If All Directors Are White, Straight Men - Bloomberg - "Wall Street's biggest underwriter of initial public offerings in the U.S. will no longer take a company public in the U.S. and Europe if it lacks a director who is either female or diverse. Asia is not yet included in the firm’s new policy... BlackRock Inc. and State Street Global Advisors are voting against directors at companies without a female director. Public companies with all-male boards based in California now face a $100,000 fine under a new state law... The corporate board has become a rare bright spot for gender and racial diversity at the highest echelons of corporate America. Almost half of the open spots at S&P 500 companies went to women last year, and for the first time they made up more than a quarter of all directors. In July, the last all-male board in the S&P 500 appointed a woman. Still, new boards are less diverse: Among the top 25 IPOs by value each year from 2014 through 2018, 10 companies had no female directors... Next year, the bank will raise the threshold to two diverse directors, which includes diversity based on sexual orientation and gender identity"
The racism of low expectations!
The fact that top IPOs have fewer women than established companies is strong evidence that women on boards indeed is not the causal factor leading to better performance by companies with them, i.e. it's signalling and omitted variable bias
New research shows the more women on a company's board, the more market value is lost - "A company with a gender-diverse board of directors is interpreted as revealing a preference for diversity and a weaker commitment to shareholder value, according to new research in the INFORMS journal Organization Science... one additional woman on the board results in a 2.3% decrease in the company's market value on average, which could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. Authors Isabelle Solal and Kaisa Snellman, both of INSEAD, looked at 14 years of panel data from U.S. public firms and saw that firms with more female directors were penalized. "Firms that increase board diversity suffer a decrease in market value and the effect is amplified for firms that have received higher ratings for their diversity practices across the organization"... Some reports by consulting firms and financial institutions have shown a positive correlation between firm value and gender-diverse boards, but recent studies based on long-term data show a negative effect on female board representation"
Luckily both authors are women, so they can't be accused of sexism or having male privilege, only having internalised sexism
Study claims women on company boards ‘take fewer risks’, causing profit slump - "Increasing the number of female board members reduces a company’s profitability by up to 12 per cent, new research suggests.But firms with more gender-balanced boards tend to take fewer risks, which may “positively affect their long-term success and survival”, according to the analysis.In the study, published in the journal Leadership Quarterly, researchers from Germany, Norway and the US analysed the performance of publicly traded companies in Norway after the introduction of a mandatory 40 per cent quota in 2003... "we find a significant negative effect on accounting-based performance as measured by both return on assets and operating income divided by assets. The coefficients for market-based performance are negative as well.”... [Another paper argues] more women in the boardroom reduce risk, which is good for the value of a company’s debt."
This is a different paper from the above. Too bad they needed to add in the speculation about long term success to avoid being cancelled
Presumably servicing debt is what companies exist to do, not make money
Board Diversity In The News Again - "Thanks to California, corporate board diversity or, more specifically, gender diversity, is in the news again. SB 826 which, according to news reports, Gov. Jerry Brown is expected to sign, passed the state Senate in a 23-9 vote and the Assembly in a 41-26 vote. The statute would require “publicly held domestic or foreign corporation[s] whose principal executive offices, according to the corporation’s SEC 10-K form, are located in California” to have a minimum of one female director on its board by the end of 2019. By the end of 2021, those numbers would increase for corporations with five directors, who would need to have a minimum of two female board members, and for corporations with six or more directors, who would need to have at least three female board members... I have detailed at some length, both here, in a series of papers (co-authored with Lissa Broome and John Conley), in a piece for the NY Times, and in a recent public radio debate, why these studies that simply confirm the well-known correlation between board gender diversity and firm performance cannot be taken as evidence that gender diversity causes superior performance. This is more than just a recitation of the old “correlation doesn’t equal causation” argument. In this case there are strong empirical and theoretical reasons to believe that such a conclusion is premature. As an empirical matter, although some peer-reviewed studies do show improved corporate performance (or other benefits, e.g. better compliance with legal mandates) from having more women on boards, others show no effect or even a negative effect. As a theoretical matter, there are other plausible explanations for the correlation. For example, better performing firms could have the luxury to focus on board diversity in a way that firms struggling to meet basic earning goals might not. In fact, this point was emphasized to us in a number of director interviews, including interviews with female and minority directors. In addition, women and minority directors with the type of C-suite experience generally preferred for corporate boards are fairly scarce commodities who may have the luxury of choosing only the most profitable and least risky boards on which to serve... the bill has constitutional problems. The bill’s sponsors apparently recognize that quotas present an Equal Protection Clause problem yet argue that their proposal does not constitute a quota"
More on women on boards
Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn’t Propose Specific Plans To Advance Diversity - "The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system's 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party.It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment...
'Berkeley rejected 76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence or their ability to contribute to their field. As far as the university knew, these applicants could well have been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students' lives.'...
Ortner told The College Fix that the mandatory diversity plans for new faculty might be unconstitutional, and he is considering a lawsuit"
An obsession with diversity reduces performance
Erden Zikibay Art & Animation - "Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern. Why can’t Disney’s, Blue Sky’s, and now Pixar’s first black leading characters just stay human? Tiana from #PrincessAndTheFrog (2009) turned into a frog, black secret agent in #SpiesInDisguise (2019) became a pigeon, and black musician in the upcoming #PixarSoul (2020) transforms into a blob of a ghost. The disturbing trope of robbing non-white characters of much-needed representation screen time and detaching them from their racial and ethnic identities started with Disney’s ‘The Emperor's New Groove’ (2000) and ‘Brother Bear’ (2003), where Inca and Alaska Native human protagonists spent most of the film as animals. As British critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “Disney may wish to reach out to people of color — but the color green wasn’t what we had in mind.”... One way to fix representation of women and people of color on screen is to advance them to decision-making and executive roles and diversify the corporate boards of directors, so bad ideas don’t get green-lighted in the first place. It is disrespectful and it is okay to not be satisfied with these crumbs of representation. Separating black characters from their black bodies and the inability to see their innate humanity need to stop. Demand that animation industry stops dehumanizing black people and sign the petition below."
Once again, pandering to diversity is a losing strategy, since grievance mongers will always find something new to bitch about
