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One prominent example: a non-profit calling itself “Change the Ratio” hassles companies to hire more female executives and venture capitalists to extend financing to female-run businesses, presumably not because they are the best candidates but because they have two x chromosomes. In recent months, the movement seems to have taken a turn from generalized complaining (you could call it femplaining) about the inadequate representation of women among the rich and powerful to a drive toward gender ratio coercion. In a widely circulated article (“Hello, Quotas! The 2015 Diversity Imperative”), Change the Ratio founder Rachel Sklar predicted that 2015 will be the year that high profile businesses are forced to implement gender quotas. Quotas are already common practice in Europe — Norway, France, Italy, Belgium, Iceland, Spain and Germany have laws stipulating a minimum female presence on the boards of public corporations. It seems all they’ve achieved, though, is to replace a tranche of the Old Boy’s Club with “Golden Skirts,” an elite clique of women that make careers of sitting on multiple boards. They aren’t moving the needle much in corporate culture: 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs in the US are female; in Norway, the figure for public companies is 6%.

To be fair, Sklar’s piece called not for legally mandatory quotas, but for twitter-driven shaming campaigns against companies that fail to enact internal ones to put more females into corner offices. Even if the penalty is just bad PR, the very idea of gender quotas turns my stomach, not least because I’m the the owner-operator of a tech company with a staff that’s around 70% male — an imbalance resulting from the fact that I can’t afford to discriminate. Finding affordable talent in this industry is our single greatest struggle. As Marc Andreessen recently pointed out, companies are “lying on the beach gasping because they can’t get enough talented people.” Sure, there are tech companies whose male geek culture makes the integration of women awkward for both parties, but it seems to me that the existence of company cultures that are male, female, gay, and so on in private enterprise is part of a greater diversity — the attempt to eradicate it would be a remedy worse than the disease.