“Gender equality: Taking stock of where we are” is an article from McKinsey, management consultant to Enron (Guardian). This cluster of Harvard and Stanford MBAs has figured out that setting explicit quotas results in more employment for the targeted group:
Our experience has been that top-down targets make a difference. We didn’t set explicit gender goals for McKinsey until 2014, and in just one year after doing so, our intake of female consultants has increased by five percentage points.
McKinsey charges customers a lot of money for forward thinking, but they seem to be taking a backward attitude toward gender. What does it mean for a consultant to be “female”? How does McKinsey know that 100 percent of their employees won’t come in tomorrow morning identifying as “female” (or “male” for that matter)? If the modern way of looking at gender is that it is primarily a state of mind, wouldn’t the smartest employers achieve instant gender balance by offering a bonus to any worker of the over-represented gender to identify as a member of the under-represented gender? (See this report on papers from the American Economic Association on what people are willing to do in exchange for small financial incentives.)
Let’s assume for the moment that McKinsey is correct in its assumption that employee gender is persistent and/or biological. Why is their focus on the gender composition of their workforce? Does McKinsey have the same percentage of African-American partners in the U.S. as there are African-Americans in the U.S. population as a whole? If not, does switching the focus to gender mean that McKinsey has given up on achieving racial goals/quotas? (Or that McKinsey agrees with Rachel Dolezal regarding race being a social construction?) One thing that nearly everyone agrees on, except perhaps Tinder users, is that age is an immutable biological fact for humans. Why isn’t McKinsey interested in addressing age discrimination, establishing hiring quotas for older workers, or examining the potential for age disparity in new hires that results from recruiting almost exclusively from among fresh MBA graduates?
Let’s assume that the gender composition of a workforce is in fact something that should take higher priority than racial or age composition. According to the authors, McKinsey is interested in sorting employees by gender so that women can have “economic equality”:
Economic equality for women, to no small degree, depends on achieving a sweeping set of social-equality reforms. Is it the business of executives to help solve broader social issues? We would say yes, provided they don’t distract from the very real issues executives face in their own organizations.
The article does not mention, however, that women in many parts of the U.S. can obtain the after-tax spending power of a McKinsey partner by having sex with three McKinsey partners and harvesting the resulting child support (see Real World Divorce; works best in California, Massachusetts, New York, and Wisconsin; if she doesn’t want children she could have sex with six McKinsey partners and sell the abortions). If a woman and a man have the same spending power, isn’t that “economic equality”? If the goal is economic equality, shouldn’t McKinsey therefore make greater efforts to achieve gender balance in jurisdictions, e.g., Germany and Scandinavia, where unlimited child support profits are not available?
McKinsey is a member of the “30% club,” seeking a quota of 30% for corporate board representation, but the authors don’t explain why the goal should be 30 percent. Why not 50 percent, for example? Or 100 percent for a period of time in order to make up for past underrepresentation? (And if McKinsey has denied employment opportunities to women in the past, doesn’t fairness require that the quota for new hires be 100% female, at least for a period of time?)
The authors claim that it will be tough for McKinsey to hire and retain more women but they don’t explain why. Is it the case that among the 7 billion people on Planet Earth there are not enough qualified people who identify as “women” to occupy 50, or even 100 percent of the chairs at McKinsey? If there are sufficient qualified people who, at least for the present identify as “women,” what is preventing McKinsey from offering them a combination of salary and benefits that would induce them to join and stay at McKinsey?
If McKinsey is not competent to hire the mix of employees that it desires, why announce that failure to the world? Doesn’t that cast some doubt on McKinsey’s competence to serve as management consultants? Or is McKinsey’s point that they ran a quota system at their company, which bumped up the percentage of employees who identify as part of the female gender, and you can pay them to advise on running a similar quota system at your company?
What do readers think? Does this article make you more or less impressed with the quality of thinking at McKinsey?
I’ve never been impressed by the thinking at McKinsey.
It is interesting that they are going back to the 70s with a straight quota system, which I’m pretty sure is illegal. Steve Sailer once argued that straight, above the board quotas would have been less damaging to the labor market than the nudge nudge wink wink affirmative action policies that we got instead.
One thing that I think is missing from discussions of the labor market is just how much the labor pool expanded since 1970 due to global population increase, relatively free immigration, and the addition to the labor pool of people in China and the former Soviet bloc countries. I realize businessmen complain they can’t find good help all the time, but I think that is a combination of special pleading (for more immigration), refusal or inability to train, the decline of the education system, and some cases where the required skill really is very specialized and hard to obtain.
A labor glut works both ways with arbitrary discrimination in the labor market (by arbitrary discrimination, I mean either only considering applicants who have some non-job related criteria, or refusing to consider any applicants that have a certain non-job related criteria). A labor glut leaves an employer more free to do this and still get people with job-related skills, and there might even be a need to use arbitrary criteria to winnow down the number of applications to a manageable level. On the other hand, it means that you can tell the employer “hire six people from group x” and there is an increased chance that they will manage to find six people from group x that can do the job. This probably works in favor of quotas.
How hard can it be to borrow my watch or phone and tell me what time it is?
Just checking that last box….
http://tinyurl.com/p8cx98b
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, female college enrollment in 2012 was significantly higher than male enrollment, both in undergraduate programs (56% vs. 44%) and in graduate level programs (59% vs. 41%). In fact, women have outnumbered men in higher education since the late 1970s. This represents a major change from the early 1900s when only 19% of all undergraduate college degrees were earned by women.
In 1940, before the start of World War II, women made up only 27% of the U.S. workforce. Women now hold the majority (52%) of management, professional and related positions. Women are successful in many professions, comprising 60% of accountants and 54% of pharmacists nationwide. However, one area that has not seen comparable growth is the top leadership position in the country’s largest companies. As of 2014, women held less than 5% of the CEO positions and only 25% of executive and senior level roles at S&P 500 companies.
In time, more top roles will likely be filled by women as exceptional women move up through lower management ranks, where they are already in the majority. With all of this progress, women are now the primary breadwinners in over 40% of U.S. households. This represents an almost four-fold increase from 1960. Women also own 30% of all private businesses in the United States, employing over 7.8 million American, and control 51% ($14 trillion) of U.S. personal wealth. The wealth that women control is expected to grow to $22 trillion by 2020.