Equity Means More than Non-Discrimination: Women on Corporate Boards Continued

I'm afraid that Elizabeth has interpolated a term into my argument that was not there, and used it to create a straw man (or person) to whack. In my insistence on "equity" rather than "difference" as the basis for why there should be more women on boards, I never argued that equity is simply a matter of non discrimination, and that all corporations should do is avoid discrimination in the way it hires directors (though of course it should avoid discrimination.) I am fully prepared to argue that "equity" includes a recognition that the workplace is gendered in a way that makes it very difficult for women to reach the highest ranks of leadership. This is true whether we are talking about the highest partnership ranks of law firms, the office of CEO or corporate boards. Joan Williams' excellent work on the gendered construction of the workplace and its impact on women's (and men's) lives shows the nature of this problem deamatically.This result in itself is inequitable, and reason in itself to want to see more women in all of those places, including corporate boards. Recognizing this inequity and resolving to do something about it will require much more than a "passive" policy of non discrimination. That is what I mean by "equity", which is something much more than what Elizabeth seems to assume I mean. Now, perhaps having more women on boards means that boards may be more sensitive to how employment and compensation policies effect women, then perhaps we should have more women on boards for that reason (as I suggested in my earlier post), but that does not mean that the larger presence of women on boards will make a meaningful difference to the larger question of corporate governance as a whole. Once again, this whole debate makes little sense without some threshold clarification of what one means by "good" and "bad" governance and how the greater presence of women will contribute to the former. The late pope's reference to the "genius of women" is helpful only when we understand when and how the "genius of women" (which itself could use some definition) is relevant to a particular question. Elizabeth's reference to "efficiency" also doesn't help: it does not help us understand how the dominant norm of shareholder wealth maximization is (or is not) adequate as a means of describing the goal of corporate governance (a very fraught debate), and whether (or how) women would take a different approach to that goal. Once again, intuitions of "difference" are not enough to make this argument fruitful.

--Mark