OK, so the government can offer tax incentives for not hiring black people to sit on BoDs? If not, what’s the difference?
That’s not the kind of “diversity” they want.
I don’t know if that’s true. The government can offer tax incentives to hire minorities, or to contract with minority or women owned businesses, etc. All of those favor minorities or women and there’s essentially no controversy over those actions. Whether the converse holds as well, I would guess no.
OK, maybe that’s too extreme to serve as an analogous example. Let’s say the government offers a tax incentive to have white people (or men) on your BoD. If you have an all non-white or all female BoD, you pay more taxes. Constitutional?
I think that the government can use race or gender as one criterion when awarding contracts, as is allowed in state university admissions. But I don’t believe they can say “X% of our contracts must go to women owned enterprises” or “Y% of the dollars allocated for this project must be awarded to women owned enterprises”. The bill, as it stands, puts numerical targets on women BoD members. If you have 6 BoD spots, 3 of them will have to go to women.
I could be wrong about that and hope that one of our legal experts will weigh in on this.
I hope you’re not wrong about it, but IANAL.
My company has contracts with the state of California. One of the stipulations is that we must buy a certain percentage of our hardware/services from businesses owned by minorities or women. This means occasionally I end up paying 2 to 3 times as much for hardware.
One would think that if the government cannot do it then the government cannot write it into contracts with vendors.
However, I could be wrong.
Slee
Far easier to infringe into a corporation’s rights than an individual’s.
How about a law that give’s a married man the right to date even just one other woman?
I think California gets maligned for laudible practices all the time.
This is not one of those cases.
I’ll probably be writing a scathing letter to my local representative, though I have no doubt it will have no effect. This is flagrant discrimination, couched in extreme hypocrisy. I cannot understate how distasteful I find this. I am beyond profanity, beyond hyperbole. This is wrong.
I can understand the objections to the described policy as it’s potentially discriminatory, but let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. If I were arguing in defense of this policy, I would argue that “equality of opportunity” is an idealistic lofty goal that is essentially impossible to legislate, except by intervening to ensure “equality of outcome” in many different areas that lead to opportunities. You can’t object to “equality of outcome” on general principle because that’s really the only thing amenable to legislative mandate, like equality of access to learning, education at all levels, and social participation. So if you’re going to legislate anything, at some level managing outcomes is ultimately the only real tool you have.
And such intervention of public policy may be justified because of entrenched systemic discrimination, however subtle it might be. I’ve dealt with many large organizations in my time who claim devotion to the principles of diversity, gender equality, and equal opportunity, and indeed even practice it at many levels, yet strangely, when you look at their leadership it can be really remarkable to see the extent to which the highest echelons of the executive ranks are nevertheless frequently dominated by white men with Anglo-Saxon names, especially in traditional conservative businesses.
ETA:
Good thing you don’t live in Canada! 
‘Because it’s 2015’: Trudeau forms Canada’s 1st gender-balanced cabinet
I haven’t been following this so I have to ask how likely to pass it is.
California proposes more odd things than it actually enacts.
Is this a comment about the federal DBE (Disadvantaged Business Enterprise) requirement? That’s a requirement to include a certain percentage (dollar value of contract) to DBE subcontractors OR to show that a Good Faith Effort was made to hire DBE subs. That’s not quite as difficult to manage from the contract compliance side as the Buy America program, which requires that all iron and steel items be certified as being made with American steel and fabricated, at all points of fabrication, within America. I assume this is the result of a steel lobby.
There’s also a relatively more recent requirement that any ocean shipping of materials or components be done with American ships. Also probably due to lobbying.
I’m of two minds about a law poking at BODs. I think that people forget that corporations (syn. embodiments) are government created things. It’s good to remind people that corporations aren’t natural things and that when something is government created it can be government controlled for community or government reasons.
On the other hand, this sounds clunky. So I approve of the proposal, but would prefer that it no pass.
I came here to say exactly the same thing.
If a corporation is PROHIBITING women, or men for that matter, from being on a board (when it’s appropriate for a mixed board; there may be situations where it isn’t), that’s one thing, but mandating it? I don’t know about unconstitutional, but it’s none of their business.
What if no (wo)men apply to be on a board, or they are invited and decline? This reminds me of a story some years ago about a small Midwestern town where someone threw a fit because there were no black schoolteachers. It turned out that the town was something like 99% white, and none of the nonwhite people in that town had a teaching degree in the first place.
This is quite close to tokenism. An appearance of diversity rather than actual diversity.
I recently saw an article (Spanish newspaper) about some research which showed that “banks which happen to have greater gender diversity on the board have more diversity in general and better results, so long as they are well-managed”. The reporter talked as if it was the presence of women on the board which caused the good results, and I kept thinking, first, well-managed anything will have better results (that’s pretty much the short words definition) and second, yeeeeah, since managing your company well includes not putting down artificial barriers, you end up with more diversity all around than your competitors who have those barriers…
ISTM as if the people pushing that law is applying the same reading as that reporter. I think the phrase is “putting the cart before the donkey” or something like that.