It's crazy that hiring a woman to be the second woman on a board is considered "diversity hiring" though. It's not a super minority that is being looked for to tout diversity, it's half the population! I'm sure there are women who are both utterly qualified AND can provide a perspective on the more inclusive culture they are trying to create.
Hiring a woman is not crazy in the least. Hiring a woman because she's a woman over a more qualified male candidate (or the other way around) is harmful. There are plenty of women who don't need such "help".
Not sure why we immediately need to jump to the trope that a more qualified male candidate would be passed over. You're treating a seat on the board as if were some sort of technical role with hard skills. It's not - it's a role to be a positive and influential voice within a company dealing with a toxic culture. Being a successful woman and having all the experiences and perspectives that come with that is literally part of their qualification for the position.
> Not sure why we immediately need to jump to the trope that a more qualified male candidate would be passed over.
This is the original piece comment we are talking about:
> He needs to be replaced by a woman
It's evident that the objective is to hire a women, not to hire a qualified person, therefore a less qualified person can be hired just because she is a women. A person hired like this would most likely not get too much respect because she had an advantage not because of her skill, but her gender.
> Being a successful woman and having all the experiences and perspectives that come with that
Replacing Bonderman with "a woman" will not magically solve issues around sexism. There is quite a bit of research, for instance on academic hiring, showing that women often have the same or at least similar sexist biases against women as men. See also the research on implicit stereotypes showing that both men and women associate men with traits related to strength and power and women with traits related to weakness. A female board member would probably not make stupid comments like Bonderman's but that alone is not going to change the toxic culture at Uber.
Not sure what straw man you are arguing against, certainly never said it would "magically solve issues around sexism" or that "alone" is "enough to change the toxic culture".
We are talking about the role of board member - which comes with the impact of immediately being one of the most powerful and influential voices within Uber. Bonderman's voice spoke volumes today about the culture the company previously condoned, and a new female board member could potentially have a far greater positive impact promoting a more inclusive culture. By definition, one person can't change a company culture, but could set an example and set the ball rolling.
Sorry, my previous comment wasn't clear enough. Perhaps I misunderstood you, but you seemed to suggest that being female would uniquely qualify a new board member to promote a more diverse and inclusive culture. The research that I referred to suggests that this may not be the case or at least not as much as you might think.
While I understand the sentiment... it DOES matter what gender they identify as. Uber's culture issues deal with sexism and harassment towards Women. You need a diverse group for the board and adding white males will not fix their issue.
So how many ways do you cut the diversity pie? You've now introduced skin color on top of gender. You've also removed the slice that represents "white" (whatever that means) males. Is it your stance that the pie now only represents females? What about other groups of people, how about we slice it into socioeconomic pieces, age, hair color, weight, etc.
The point is, your vision of diversity is just anti-white-male. You'll be satisfied until you find too many representatives of whatever arbitrary label you come up with next.
It's more about breaking up a monoculture. You can't introduce a representation of every possible division of humankind. But that's an unrealistic extreme, just like having no representation is an extreme. At some point, working in a diverse environment you just start thinking about others more than before.
Random example I've seen many times, but feel free to extrapolate to other positions/issues: If you have a group of native British developers of a web app, there's a good chance that any non-latin input will be either mishandled or rejected. Not because they hate other languages, but simply because that's not a problem they run into, or think about. Add one (for example) Greek dev, and the team will be quickly made aware of and learn about the locales and encoding issues. This will help the accessibility for all cultures, not just British and Greek.
Exposure to enough people different than you makes you think about others more. Even if you don't work with every possible token representation of the difference.
The theory says it shouldn't matter who you are it should only be based on your professional ability. And in theory it wouldn't make a difference to the ability of a company to function whether the gender or racial mix was one sided or not.
The reality is different. The reality is that having a uniform gender and race mix across a company causes all sorts of problems to the culture which in turn flows through to the companies actions and behaviours. And so if you want your company to be healthy you need to have at least some mix of men and women and races because the fact is that employees simply behave differently when there is a mix.
How does this reality, this idea that companies are dysfunctional if gender and race are uniform, fit the data of the previous few thousand years of human progress?
Has the world changed? Can groups of uniform gender-race people no longer act cordially to people who aren't same gender-race?
Hold the front page, groups of uniform gender-race people have acted cordially to people who aren't the same gender race for thousands of years? Citation needed.
I believe what he's saying is that without the action of individuals within certain groups, it would be impossible for those in groups without power to progress. If they were uniformly racist and sexist, then progress could not have been made.
That's to say they are capable of it, not that it's ideal or that they were responsible solely for progress. Most abolitionists were not African-American.
Your full quote is: "Imagine the optics of replacing a sexist old man with another sexist old man. Worth the risk to shareholder value?"
Your statement implied that replacing one "sexist old man" (who we believe to be a sexist by something he said) with another "old man" is a risk to shareholder value because that replacement, by virtue of being a man and/or old, will also be a "sexist".
Your statement is passing judgment on a potential candidate without knowing anything about them simply based on their potential gender. That is definitionally sexism, the same sexism you are identifying as a risk to shareholder value. Perhaps you didnt mean it that way but that doesnt change the valid interpretation of the statement. The irony is that this sexist statement was made in a thread about an article of a guy who made a sexist comment (that cost him his job).
Thank you for explaining my very, very little joke.
We might consider the possibility that a suitable woman in the role is significantly less likely to make this very embarrassing class of mis-step. And with billions of dollars on the line... where's the smart money? I suppose that is a sexist sentiment, too. Nuts, I can't win!
Ha, apologies for not picking up on the joke. It can be challenging to know when you are having a literal conversation or not in written form.
HN is probably not the place to have this conversation (I would have emailed you if it were in your profile) but to your point on "a suitable woman is significantly less likely to make this embarrassing mis-step"... that too is overt sexism of the kind I suspect you would find unacceptable coming from a man. Rhetorical question: how would you feel about a male manager justifying hiring a man because he is "significantly less likely to get pregnant and lose interest in the job"?
Lolz, yes, I do think that is a sexist comment and a part of me wonders if you actually think it isnt (maybe I'm being too literal). That said, I don't really care that you are making it. I'm a white male living in the 21st century, living with the double standard of being labeled a sexist or racist despite not being one is something you have to accept.
To your point, I think "smart money" buys the right tool for the job. I can see why you think replacing this old rich sexist white male with a young rich (sexist) white female is the smart move as it gets the trolls of your back and appeases the populists trying to hijack your company through negative PR. Anyway, I had fun with this. Hope you're having a good day.