[trendia]

"Those who look/think like themselves" has much more going than just sex/race. An individual choosing another board seat will likely a preference for people who went to the same Ivy League schools, who have the same wealthy family backgrounds, and, most important, share the same concept of how they want to run the business.

Making a law forcing a woman to be on the board won't eliminate those preferences, it will just mean that they'll choose a woman from a well-connected family who went to HBS and would be willing to support the voting positions of whomever is appointing them. You haven't changed the voting behavior too much, just the sex/racial makeup of it.

If the goal is to change how businesses behave, we would want people from entirely different fields. That is, we'd want representation from differing perspectives in the company -- perhaps from engineering or from labor.

In Germany, for instance, there is an expectation that the labor union has representation on the board [0], which would do much more for the people working in the company than having a female version of the male boardroom exec.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

[scarface74]

I listened to an episode of Freakonomics I believed where the (now former) CEO of PepsiCo said that it was harder for her to promote a woman because people would think that she was promoting them based solely on gender.

Can you imagine the uproar if Obama had appointed "too many Black people" to positions of power? He would have been called the "first affirmative action President". He was already being accused of being "a secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia law to the United States".

[ikeyany]

Even among rich perspectives, their inclusion of women would likely bring in views that tend to be overlooked by male perspectives.

But yes, if the goal is diversity in the truest sense then including those outside of elite/rich backgrounds may be more effective.

It seems like the topic is about gender, however.