Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

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There is also evidence that it's not counter-productive. Eg, Clayton, A. "How Do Electoral Gender Quotas Affect Policy?", Annu. Rev. Political Sci. 2021. 24:235–52 at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-polisc...

> The large majority of work on quota adoption suggests that quotas are followed by the greater substantive representation of women’s interests, priorities, and preferences. However, several studies have documented cases in which quotas have resulted in limited policy changes or even more gender-inegalitarian outcomes. ...

> On average, quota-elected women appear to influence policy in ways that substantively benefit women constituents, either by distributing resources in ways that reflect women’s priorities or by enacting or enforcing policies that grant women greater rights. Yet, these findings are not universal, and some work uncovers null results or even instances of backlash against women officeholders in ways that exacerbate patriarchal policies and practices. That there is such variation in the observed policy effects of gender quotas suggests the potential for moderating variables.

That's specifically on policy making, but I think it's enough to highlight how evidence of backlash - which certainly does exist! - isn't on its own enough to make data-driven decisions.

I guess it depends on how you define a goal of quotas. If it’s meant to increase women’s presence in certain areas just for the sake of having more women somewhere, then quotas might work. But if you apply quotas to fight the gender/sexuality/skin color bias then usually those policies are applied in a wrong place which creates yet another bias, just of a different direction.

Let’s get a promotion policies for example: if you say that at least 50% of board of directors should be women but 95% of all employees is man, then average woman in the company is 19 times more likely to be promoted than average man which seems extremely unfair.

The problem should be well understood first. That is: why do we have so few female employees. Then it might turn out that we are biased in our hiring process. If there’s no evidence for that, then maybe there’s a bias during university recruitment process etc.

In order to make a data-driven decision, where's the evidence that your hypothesis is correct?

FWIW, Norway requires at least 40% gender representation on the boards of public companies, so there's data right there. The best I can tell is "mixed", but definitely not "actually counter-productive".

I quoted "mixed" from https://www.ft.com/content/6f6bc5a2-7b70-11e8-af48-190d103e3... . One of the observations quoted there is:

> Ms Helleland says three-quarters of recruitment is down to informal networks: “Men recruit men. Men recruit CEOs that look like themselves.

I interpret that as an informal quota system for men.

There's decades of research on this topic. Either it's "well understood" now, or there's no good way to make a data-driven decision.

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