At the risk of sounding insensitive, can one member of an all-male board just legally change their gender identity? Its like 2 forms filed with the clerk and maybe an appearance before a judge, then you are legally recognized by the state as a female whether you make any other life changes or not.

I find quotas in bad taste, and somewhat lazy.

There is clearly an issue, but if we attempt to fix it with positive discrimination, we just create more issues.

A better way to approach the problem might be increased scrutiny (for discrimination) on boards/companies with significant gender bias, and increased penalties.

This would be harder to implement of course, but might go further to actually solving the issue.

What about gay people? What about mexican people? Asian people?

Why not extend the law for these too?

"Based on the number of people that run your company, you're required to hire at least 1 women, 1 trans gender, 1 muslim and 1 person older than 60"

Sounds fun!

I'm curious if this is likely to be struck down as unconstitutional in the California or Federal courts?

Also, why is this an acceptable attempt to address the issue of under represented groups in corporate boards? Should there be similar legislation for ethnic minorities in boards as well. If not, why is gender special in this regard?

For women that are appointed to boards as a consequence of this legislation, would it be unfair to consider those women to be 'diversity hires', and not appointed strictly on merit?

David Koch’s libertarian monthly dislikes policy to get women on boards. Shocker.

If this policy is truly counter-productive wrt its stated aim, I’d be interested to see that in the thoughts of people who have consistently given a damn about female representation on boards.

It’s less convincing when people who bark “regulation is evil” for a living find that “regulation is, once again, evil”.

It's not as bad as it sounds: one more incentive for corporations to vote with their feet and move their HQ out of the great socialist state of california.

I feel like this is just another step in a series of trends where we use legislation to enforce diversity, to the detriment of everyone involved. Let companies run their business as they please. If they don't want to hire women, they shouldn't have to. You see the same thing with hiring engineers. 50% goal for women engineers but that's not even possible given the current pipeline.

Except for that it's not a quota, at least not in the sense that the word is used within the context of affirmative action, because there is no maximum cap set on the number of board members.