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New California forced diversity bill.

Beer

Beer

Well-Known Member
This seems insane to me. Not sure how I'd feel if I was one of those minorities that get new positions. Would you always wonder if you really deserved it or were just some sort of mercy hire?

"Governor Newsom has signed a first-in-the-nation bill requiring California businesses including some Silicon Valley giants to have diverse boardrooms.

The law, signed into law by Newsom Wednesday, legally requires all public companies headquartered in California to have at least one board member from a racial or sexual minority by the end of 2021.

This includes someone who identifies as black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian or Alaska Native, or as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

As well as having one diverse director by the end of 2021, companies with four to nine board members will then be required to have at least two members from an underrepresented community by the end of 2022.

Three directors are required for boards with nine or more directors by the end of 2022.

Firms that don't comply will face fines of $100,00 for first violations and $300,000 for repeated violations. "
 
So as a hiring manager, here is the rub. I have 3 candidates that are all qualified. One white male, one white female, one black male or female. As the "decider" I make the decision that the white male is most qualified of the 3. I can provide evidence, things from the interviews, things on resumes, that back that up. However I have no idea how much my own internal biases played into the decision. Now I have a requirement to add a minority to the company. I instead, from the same 3, pick the black male or female to fill this requirement. I may convince myself they are the most qualified, even if on paper they might not be. I might just go with "they are all close enough". Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind it is sticking there like a thorn that I picked the wrong person, but hey, it was a requirement. Now I don't know that I had the right candidate, and they don't know if they were selected because they were the best candidate. This is a recipe for ugliness at some point. I do not feel this is the right approach to this particular dilemma.

Now at the board level this might be an entirely different animal. I just don't see this kind of mandate doing what they want it to do. In the end enough of these mandates and the companies just move out of the state if they feel it is too restrictive.
 
Eminence said:
Any company that's really hiring the best available should already be very near these guidelines.
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I would be very very interested to see how many of the 660 already meet the requirements.

The math seems askew also. So from 4 - 9 directors 2 have to be minorities. Do people of color and sexual minorities make up 20 - 50% of the state? I'm going to say no but I could be wrong.

Also not a fan of the sexual orientation part of it as anyone can say they are pretty much any of those things whether they are or aren't.

I don't think Newsome is a dumb guy but god damn he sure acts like it.
 
Eminence said:
Any company that's really hiring the best available should already be very near these guidelines.
Click to expand...
It goes deeper than this. I have posted now, in the past 6 months, for 4 operations manager level positions (a position that manages several supervisors and up to 100 hourly employees, for context). In this I have had maybe 40 applicants total. I can tell you we have had a total of about 8 minorities in that pool. I overwhelmingly get white male applicants. When I post for a position and get 12 white male applicants, and maybe that is it, then I end up likely hiring a white male. If I get a dozen white male applicants, and 2 black males, and 2 white females, what are the odds, simply from a probability standpoint, that the "best" candidate is going to be from any one of those group? Odds are, ceteris paribus, it will be one of the white males, just simply the odds of the numbers. Now that does not take unconscious biases into account either, which even moreso, in most cases, skews the results toward the white male group. We need to find a way to solicit more minority candidates to really get an affect on the overall number balancing out.
 
Diversity is a good thing for most companies. However, affirmative action can also make it harder in some fields to get good jobs.

As an example, an agency such as the Bureau of Land Management skews white male for most positions as more individuals with that background are interested in the field. You might be more qualified than others, but being a white male could be to your disadvantage when weighed against females or females that are minorities.

It's a slippery slope for sure as there's tons of examples of largely male, white leadership boards that are part of the good ol' boys circle.
 
Avery said:
Diversity is a good thing for most companies. However, affirmative action can also make it harder in some fields to get good jobs.

As an example, an agency such as the Bureau of Land Management skews white male for most positions as more individuals with that background are interested in the field. You might be more qualified than others, but being a white male could be to your disadvantage when weighed against females or females that are minorities.

It's a slippery slope for sure as there's tons of examples of largely male, white leadership boards that are part of the good ol' boys circle.
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Diversity is a great thing. I'm not worried about white males not being able to get jobs. But being forced to hire a certain # of minorities and LGBTQ is silly. Especially the LGBTQ part.

There are a *****ttt ton of Indians on these tech company boards so I bet a lot of them already meet the requirement.

Also what % of a certain race do you have to be to count? The language also says "identify" as one of them.
 
Beer said:
I would be very very interested to see how many of the 660 already meet the requirements.

The math seems askew also. So from 4 - 9 directors 2 have to be minorities. Do people of color and sexual minorities make up 20 - 50% of the state? I'm going to say no but I could be wrong.

Also not a fan of the sexual orientation part of it as anyone can say they are pretty much any of those things whether they are or aren't.

I don't think Newsome is a dumb guy but god damn he sure acts like it.
Click to expand...

People of color are like 60% of California's population.
 
Who needs free education when every company may be soon required to do this? Yikes. Good luck new entrepreneurs trying to compete in the cutthroat global marketplace.
 
Beer said:
This seems insane to me. Not sure how I'd feel if I was one of those minorities that get new positions. Would you always wonder if you really deserved it or were just some sort of mercy hire?

"Governor Newsom has signed a first-in-the-nation bill requiring California businesses including some Silicon Valley giants to have diverse boardrooms.

The law, signed into law by Newsom Wednesday, legally requires all public companies headquartered in California to have at least one board member from a racial or sexual minority by the end of 2021.

This includes someone who identifies as black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian or Alaska Native, or as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

As well as having one diverse director by the end of 2021, companies with four to nine board members will then be required to have at least two members from an underrepresented community by the end of 2022.

Three directors are required for boards with nine or more directors by the end of 2022.

Firms that don't comply will face fines of $100,00 for first violations and $300,000 for repeated violations. "
Click to expand...

Just reading this description, let's not confuse these positions with actual jobs. To my understanding, corporate boards meet once or twice a month, and are regularly filled with people who know onhy the basics about the company they are in charge of.

.

However, Standards for the Board does attempt to highlight the broad tasks that are pertinent to every board and also the indicators of good practice that can help them reflect on how they are fulfilling those tasks. Hence, it is argued, boards can be helped greatly by focusing on four key areas:

  • establishing vision, mission and values
  • setting strategy and structure
  • delegating to management
  • exercising accountability to shareholders and being responsible to relevant stakeholders
This sounds like standard MBA stuff. These should not be hard to fill with a variety of candidates.
 
One Brow said:
Just reading this description, let's not confuse these positions with actual jobs. To my understanding, corporate boards meet once or twice a month, and are regularly filled with people who know onhy the basics about the company they are in charge of.

.

However, Standards for the Board does attempt to highlight the broad tasks that are pertinent to every board and also the indicators of good practice that can help them reflect on how they are fulfilling those tasks. Hence, it is argued, boards can be helped greatly by focusing on four key areas:

  • establishing vision, mission and values
  • setting strategy and structure
  • delegating to management
  • exercising accountability to shareholders and being responsible to relevant stakeholders
This sounds like standard MBA stuff. These should not be hard to fill with a variety of candidates.
Click to expand...

True. They are not deeply involved in the day to days of the company. However, they often times are involved in how the company is ran, the executive teams decisions, etc .... so they aren't really figureheads even though they aren't as involved in the executive team.

This is not irrelevant, but sure, its not as bad as saying one of the CEO, COO, CFO, CMO has to be a minority or LGBTQ. It's just the fact that it's so ****ing stupid. California is so ****ing stupid. In the grand scheme of things it probably means next to nothing. I have no idea how big the boards are of Fortune 500 companies are. I imagine quite large. So like someone said above this probably doesn't even effect most of these companies. It's just out of principle. It's idiotic.

Edit: Just did some quick research and it looks like Facebooks board is about 8 directors. So having more than 9 is probably rare. So most boards will need 2 or more.
 
Beer said:
True. They are not deeply involved in the day to days of the company. However, they often times are involved in how the company is ran, the executive teams decisions, etc .... so they aren't really figureheads even though they aren't as involved in the executive team.

This is not irrelevant, but sure, its not as bad as saying one of the CEO, COO, CFO, CMO has to be a minority or LGBTQ. It's just the fact that it's so ****ing stupid.
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These are the people who set the direction of the company. I don't see where it's such a bad idea to require that the company get input from women, discriminated races, etc. We give a lot of protections to these companies, asking them to take more viewpoints into account is not a bad thing.
 
One Brow said:
These are the people who set the direction of the company. I don't see where it's such a bad idea to require that the company get input from women, discriminated races, etc. We give a lot of protections to these companies, asking them to take more viewpoints into account is not a bad thing.
Click to expand...

Forcing them to put people who might not be qualified or be the best candidate is a big deal. If Facebook one of the biggest companies in the world only has 8 or 9 spots, making them fill 2 with a certain demo is a big deal, in theory at least.
 
Beer said:
Forcing them to put people who might not be qualified or be the best candidate is a big deal.
Click to expand...

Why wouldn't they be qualified? Why is the assumption that a bill like this would somehow lead to a company going out into the street and pulling the first black man they see into the office? There are thousands of people of every race, creed, gender identity, in the country that are perfectly qualified to sit on these boards. You really think Facebook will go broke because they hired a black woman over a white man whose GPA was 0.1 higher?
 
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