To ask your opinion on gender quotas

[eatabagofdicks]

After speaking with men who believe that many men are being pushed out of positions they deserve because of gender quotas. What are your opinions? Interested in women's point of view after being in a room full of men all night.

Quotas aren't generally brought in overnight. If companies (200+ employees) are told their board must be at least 40% female by e.g. 2025 then they will start looking at the pipeline for those roles now, how many senior female managers do they have, what is the post maternity return rate like, why are women leaving. They may also lobby government for better childcare provision. At the moment there is no incentive to do all this so there may be pockets of good practice but few companies are looking at the big picture.

What's your answer to my question above?

I think a Board needs to reflect not only different skills, but different experiences to allow it to have a broad outlook and look at all angles of an issue. If the 'more qualified' man had skills that weren't duplicated among the other men on the Board, and that I was particularly looking for, I would hire him. However, i see being a senior woman as an important level of experience that could not be brought to the table by another bloke, so I would weigh that up along with the paper skills too and if I felt the experience missing from the table was the experience of being a woman in that industry then I would rate that more highly.

Just also wanted to say, in my experience a significant number of highly senior people are utterly crap at their jobs. Length of service is no guarantee of capability.