Though bringing more female representation and thereby creating gender parity in employment served as the impetus, this rule was broken in Paris in 2018 when 69% of jobs went to women under the mayor's (Anne Hidalgo) purview. This led to a fine of €90,000 against the Paris government.
Both the mayor and deputy mayor (Audrey Pulvar) publicly expressed happiness, pride, and a sense of honor at having been fined for breaking the rule. In 2019, the fine was subsequently dropped.
So here we have an interesting example of aiming for equality of outcome. What makes it interesting is that when the results led to inequality in favor of one particular side, it was actually championed and seen as progress.
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When women are overrepresented in every prestigious sector, I think it'll be worth having a rethink about policies like this. Until then, it seems a bit ridiculous - and I say this as a man. If you're a man, and you're not an idiot, you've doubtless noticed a ton of incidents where your gender has helped you advance socially or professionally. You can't just overnight shuck of centuries of history. Quotas are a simple way of trying to push back on that.
> If you're a man, and you're not an idiot, you've doubtless noticed a ton of incidents where your gender has helped you advance socially or professionally.
I don't think that's the case for everyone. Maybe that's because I'm young? But I haven't noticed much if any discrimination against women firsthand. Even around me, it's very rare to hear stories like that.
> You can't just overnight shuck of centuries of history.
I think you can. Culture erodes very fast when the people that enforced it are no longer around. We had two world war with Germany, and I don't know anyone that has any ressentment against the Germans. I think part of it is because most of the people from that time period are not around anymore, or are now very old. If someone said that he dislikes Germans because of the world wars, everyone would think that person is very weird. As another example, rights of LGBT have been moving very fast these last ~10 years.
I think it's very important to recognize that even if we are far from perfect, lots of improvements have already been and continue to be made. We should use this as an inspiration to know that what we're doing isn't useless or for the future generation, and that we can improve the life of people right now.
The recruiter told him directly that they were looking for people with disabilities to fill their quota of people with disabilities, necessary because it was a government position. So we're definitely out of the game of recruiting based on merit in at least some government spots, and instead focused on unrelated favoritism.
The actual requirement for government contractors is that they cannot require someone to disclose disability information, but they must give the applicant the opportunity to do so.
Because roughly 10% of the workforce has a disability, and it was found that government contractors appeared to discriminate against people with disabilities that were otherwise qualified for the work. So, large contractors became obligated to have a less-than-representative 7% of their workforce pulled from a pool of candidates with disabilities.
I'm not sure quota systems like this are the best way to handle the problem. However, this approach is hardly the death knell for merit-based hiring.
E.g if boards are required to put women in place, it creates an organizational incentive to improve the conditions so more women gets the training and promotions and mentoring that makes then suitable for those board positions, and also takes away an ability to avoid hiring qualified women.
I don't know if anyone that see those rules as desirable in and of themselves.