Boardroom quota failure

Since 2008, Norwegian publicly traded companies have been required to have 40% women on their board of directors, or else be forcibly dissolved. Despite simply relying on brute force, this law has been praised as a paragon of equality; a great advancement for women that should be looked up to and imitated worldwide. If you believe in forcible equality of outcome, we are on the right track.

Or so it seemed. Now it turns out that roughly half the companies affected by the quota have changed their organization to avoid it. By opting no longer to be publicly listed, they can avoid having to appoint so many women to directorships. Finding qualified women is often problematic, it means you have to fire more highly qualified men, and in any case companies dislike this kind of government infringement on their autonomy. 31% of CEOs surveyed say they reorganized the company in order to circumvent the quota.

So not only has this attempt to coerce equality stirred up discontent and provided grist to the mill for MRAs who, as I do, advocate sexual coercion in response to feminism based on the feminists' own violent logic -- it has actually been counterproductive. In absolute numbers, because there are now fewer directorships to fill, representation of women in the boardrooms is now back nearly to the level of 2007, before the law went into effect, and declining.

Doubtless feminists will propose more stringent laws to close this loophole. Which will in turn stir up more hatred and more morally legitimate use of force for the advancement of equality for men as well. It is by now abundantly clear that equality is not achievable without violence (or at least threat of violence), and even rather drastic measures are largely ineffectual. As the use of coercion to promote women's equality escalates and becomes more accepted, the case for sexual coercion against women to even the score in that supremely important and unequal arena will inevitably be strengthened.