Gender Quota, a nonsense approach to solving a non-existing problem

Gender Quota, a nonsense approach to solving a non-existing problem

If you or any of your loved ones need a complicated medical operation, would you trust the surgeon hired as a quota filler or a tenured and competent person? Would you care about their suffering as a member of an underrepresented group in society or their competence, and their competence only?

In a less dramatic rhetorical question, if you are a male executive and want to hire a personal assistant, a man and woman applied for the job; they both understood the requirements and based on your judgment, they both fit. Whom are you going to hire? If you preferred the man to the woman, you would be judged to have a gender bias. But if you prefer a woman to a man, you are an inclusive leader who supports diversity and equality. On the other hand, if you are a female executive and prefer the female applicant for the personal assistant job, you support women's inclusiveness and help improve women's institutionalized underrepresentation.

Scene 1

A fresh graduate woman posted her CV in a recently created profile on LinkedIn, appealing to all who read her post to help recruit her, repost her CV, or hire her.

A senior official at a big bank in the Gulf region, an HR executive posted a comment under her post asking her to contact him directly, and he implicitly promised her a job. He has been hailed in the post's comments as a role model and a champion. Little did the HR executive know there was a person, a male candidate, who was competent and, seemingly from his CV (which I happened to see his and hers), had contacted this senior official for the same job, but it seems that this senior HR executive chose not to respond to him. The male candidate replied to the HR executive's comment, saying, "I have applied to your Bank for the same job, and I have reached out directly to you also through LinkedIn, but you chose to ignore my application, and now you are trying to play the role of the hero and the man of kindness and inclusivity and empathy to the women by hiring her when in fact I am more qualified than her."

 Scene 2

Two senior officials in the manufacturing industry are discussing two candidates for a job: Head of Quality Assurance, one man and another woman. The senior Manager recommended that the Manager hire the woman. When the Manager exclaimed that the male candidate was more experienced, tenured, and performed well in the interview, the Senior Manager said: "although she is not as skilled, she will tick more boxes of us, and we will show to the management (which is so excited about the women quota) that we are addressing the inclusivity and diversity thing by hiring a woman and also appear to be more welcoming and receptive. To keep that diversity enthusiast at bay from us."

Scene 3

A friend in the telecommunication sector said he shared the elevator with his CEO and Head of HR when leaving work at the end of the day. The Head of HR commented "jokingly" to my friend, "You are the only Head who does not have a woman on your team, LOL." He said: "That is a message, and I got it. I have to be watchful of an implicitly ingrained culture of the gender quota".

He is right. Gender quotas are being perpetuated. Its advocates are being slick with the terms; they do not call it gender quota, it is a "gender target benchmark," and it is not a gender mandate; it is instead a "gender equality," whatever that term means.

The irony is when some practitioners demand nationalizing some senior jobs; some open market enthusiasts say that we cannot set a preference in an open market between nationals or expatriates; it is a market based on capacity and capabilities, the survival of the most competent. In capitalism, capital is the most economical and valuable.

Fine, we get that. But why has that open market principle changed? Why is nationality quota against humanity, survival of the fittest, and open market capitalism, but gender quota is not?

If you are a gender quota advocate, I have the following questions. In any situation in which you wish to apply a gender quota, you will have one of the following types of women:

1)     The qualified and competent: This woman is competent, known in the market, respected, and has the skillset under her belt. Such a woman does not need you to campaign for her; she will be snatched from her employer, targeted, and attracted to work or join any board. So, she does not need a gender quota.

2)     The incompetent woman will jump on the wagon of such campaigns and ride all the way because she knows that without this, she will not be able to assume a post on board or executive management. This woman needs your campaign and quota; she is a great beneficiary.

3)     The agnostic woman: this woman does not care about the craze, is not an enthusiast, but would not say no to a high-paying post that she is nominated for just for biological anatomy. This lady needs you as well.

From the above, the beneficiaries of the quotas are either incompetent or agnostic. Are these the people you wish to make the gap filler to adjust the skewness of the women's underrepresentation, if any?

Promoting institutionalizing, accepting, and uplifting these people seriously affects the system and human development.

Of course, the world is not a perfect place. The competent woman I indicated in point 1 above will face the challenges of being hired or targeted in some organizations or cultural setups. That is for a gender bias. Gender bias is the same as any other bias we humans practice from the crack of the down to midnight, day in and day out. It is the same as ethnicity bias, nationality bias, race bias, creed bias, religious bias, community bias, etc.

However, intellectual people do not address human biases with quotas. If you have a minority, you do not address their underrepresentation by a quota but by changing the mindset of decision-makers and contributors to the representations to make a change. That is the long-term solution.

We are in crazy times. Even writing this article could hurt advocates' feelings or step on someone's toes. To the HR professional in scene 2, you are wrong; you are committing damage to society. The HR professional in scene 1, if you want to be a real gentleman and HR practitioner with ethics and vision for the benefit of society, use only one campus: competence. If she beats him, by all means, hire, promote, and elevate her and make her a superstar. But if she is not, do not go with a short-lived objective of "inclusivity and diversity" at the expense of society.

I will explain why an imposed gender quota is unhealthy for all in the workplace and society.

Suppose you are the head of a department and are forced to accept a new female employee to maintain the quota. And suppose she was 70% qualified for the job vis-à-vis the male candidate who was, say, 90% fit. If hired as a quota filler, she will know it, her boss knows it, and all her peers/ colleagues in the department will know it. Her peers will treat her as a gap filler, regardless of how excellently she performed her projects. They will always look at her as a mandate rather than merit. Her boss will have a negative attitude toward the person who has been shoved down his throat because of the quota. In the middle of all this negativity around her, she will be occupied with the motive to prove to her peers and her boss that she is not only a place filler but a person of caliber and contributions; she will always be seized by the "prove it to them" attitude which is draining and will burn her out eventually.

In an interesting study, the results published on forbes.com on 16 October 2016  indicated that many women did not like to work for a company that applies gender quotas. The reason was that they wanted their work, achievement, and value to be based on their merit, not because of their gender. The study also found that 18 percent of the women in the survey would attribute another woman's success in a company that applies gender quota to gender rather than merit.

Any organization in any part of the world, if it has a religiously followed policy for recruitment and promotion based merely on competence, would not need a gender quota because of the law of nature; anyone who fits joins.

Even the simple words in the English language, according to the gender quota enthusiast, have to be altered in the job ads and job descriptions to avoid hurting women's feelings and sense of being underrepresented and to reduce the men's domination so that they do think this job is only for them:

From	Should be changed to suit the feeling of the gender quota
Challenge	Nurture	What is wrong with the challenge? Women breathe challenge. Moms challenge their kids; wives challenge their husbands as they breathe.
Compete	Commit	So women do not compete?! Do they always commit? Have you heard a woman in a debate (or argument) with her husband? Just try listening to any random encounter in any house, and you will see who competes and becomes patient in this competition because of commitment. Have you been in any position with two peer women trying each other's boundaries? They radiate competition; they teach competition. Or dare I say, if two females are trying to win a man's heart, they do not only compete; they do manslaughter. So, cut the nonsense; all people, men and women, compete because it is human nature that we are, men and women, selfish creatures, but each with a different margin.
Challenge	Nurture	Please refer to the comment on compete.
Analyze	Understand	I believe women analyze more than men, and it is nonsense to think analyses are more masculine than understanding. It is also nonsense from the language point of view; analysis and understanding are two different meanings that have nothing to do with masculinity or femininity.

Gender quotas are symbolic measures and, as George Carlin said, "Symbolic things for simple-minded people." A female friend told me, "It is easy for you as a man to say that because you have not experienced being from an underrepresented group." Downright drivel.

I have been forbidden countless opportunities across countries because I come from the "wrong" group, background, etc. And on every occasion of these, notwithstanding the pain, I have become convinced that quotas for any group damage any society. It is competence, and competence alone is the right approach to building a society. Furthermore, I am a father of special needs daughters. I do not want nor do I expect my society and community to hire my daughter as a supermarket bagger; for instance, if that job requires 100% ability to talk and refuse to hire a person who is normal and has this ability to talk, just because my daughter is a special-need person or a woman. If her abilities serve her and suit the job, and that will put her ahead of other candidates, then, by all means, she should not take other people's chances banking on her special-need status or gender.

To be continued