The story is that research has shown that having women on boards of directors helps a company’s profitability. That may be true, but there’s cause to doubt the conclusion because you’re not allowed to say the opposite. Any research that showed that having women on boards hurts<\/i> a company would be suppressed. It would end careers, the researchers would be labeled as Nazis and driven to suicide, etc. (I’m exaggerating, but only a little.) <\/p>\n
IOW, you can’t believe conclusion A if nobody is allowed to contradict it. <\/p>\n
But let’s set that aside and assume it’s true, for the sake of argument. Let’s say honest research has clearly demonstrated that companies that have more women on their board of directors outperform companies that do not. <\/p>\n
Personally, despite what I say above, I think there might be something to the idea. Women can bring a different perspective, and viewpoint diversity is very important. As a side note, that illustrates the cognitive dissonance on the left, because they want to say “men and women are equal” and also say “adding women to a board of directors makes it better.” <\/p>\n
Moving on …. Would such research justify a rule that all companies must have some number of women on their board? <\/p>\n
I don’t see how that follows, and I think such a rule contradicts everything we’ve concluded over the years about discrimination. That is, you can’t judge an individual situation on the basis of group characteristics. <\/p>\n
Even if we are 100 percent sure that having more of such and so group is correlated with better outcomes, that does not justify a bias in favor of hiring people in that group. This is elementary and basic stuff, but if you need convincing, just run it through your mind a few times with some other groups. Irish, Calvinists, basketball players, former Marines, people who can play the piano. Pick any group you like. Then imagine a hiring situation where a company picks applicants based on their membership in that group. <\/p>\n
You can’t do that.<\/b> It’s insane. <\/p>\n
“Oh, sure, Bob is way more qualified than Jack, but Jack can play the piano, and we don’t have enough piano players on the board.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The story is that research has shown that having women on boards of directors helps a company’s profitability. That may be true, but there’s cause to doubt the conclusion because you’re not allowed to say the opposite. Any research that showed that having women on boards hurts a company would be suppressed. It would end … Continue reading “Women on boards of directors”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2784"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2786,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784\/revisions\/2786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}