Sonia Sotomayor arrives at the Court this week for a special
session, capping off a long and often heated debate about her qualifications,
her ideology, and her potential impact on the Court. This latter point, of course, has included many discussions
about the relative virtues, if any, of “wise Latina judges” and whether gender,
racial, and ethnic diversity are valuable on the Supreme Court.
Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and current Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, for example, have
urged the appointment of another woman. Similarly, the law
professors’ letter to Senators Leahy and Sessions in support of Judge
Sotomayor argues, without elaboration, that, “Judge Sotomayor will bring to the
Supreme Court an extraordinary personal story, academic qualifications,
remarkable professional accomplishments and much needed ethnic and gender
diversity.” (emphasis mine)
And the recent rumors that Justice
Stevens may retire (propelled by news that he has hired only one law clerk)
have again prompted discussions of Obama’s likely replacement choice, and whether diversity on the court
will play a role in it.
One of the striking things to me about many of these
discussions, at least as they have played out in the media and political arenas,
is their rather vacuum-like nature.
One can’t expect particularly sophisticated debate from politicians, of
course, and the press has papers to sell and a story to spin (although I note
that both Emily
Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick (here
and here) pressed better
than most the question of why
the gender make-up of the court might be relevant). But even an attentive follower of the Sotomayor debates could
have emerged from the fray with no inkling of the vast research conducted over
the years seeking to gauge diversity’s impact in a variety of settings – including
courts, corporate boards, state legislatures, and work teams of various sorts
— often with equivocal results.
The issue of diversity on corporate boards, for example, has
been the subject of intense public, academic, and regulatory focus in many
countries in recent years. In Norway, gender representation on corporate boards
is set by government mandate. Legislation enacted in 2006 required that roughly
40% of public company board seats be held by women by the year 2008, and as of
January 2008, women held close to 38% of board seats at Norwegian public
corporations, the world’s highest percentage. The news prompted claims of victory from the legislation’s
advocates, as well as charges of quotas, window-dressing, and divisiveness from
opponents. (For a discussion of
the Norway experience, see Reiersen and
Sjafsjell 2008).
In the United States, by contrast, the make-up of corporate
boards has been left to market forces and private advocacy efforts. Dozens of advocacy groups in the United
States are dedicated to promoting board diversity, by measuring it, studying
it, or providing training or mentoring to potential female or minority board
members. Examples include: Catalyst
(www.catalyst.org); The Executive
Leadership Council® (www.elcinfo.com); and
the Hispanic Association for Corporate Responsibility (www.hacr.org).
These debates about the value, if any, of diversity on
corporate boards have become all the more salient in the wake of the economic
crisis, centering primarily on whether diverse boards (and especially boards with
more female members) would have behaved more conservatively, averting excessive
risk-taking and the accompanying financial mishaps. Michael Lewis questioned in Vanity
Fair, for example, whether in Iceland, “where men are men, and the women
seem to have completely given up on them,” the presence of more women in
decision-making positions in financial institutions might have averted the
country’s financial collapse. Similar
refrains were echoed in the
U.K. and the
U.S, although others have argued that the increased monitoring associated
with more women on boards can have a negative
effect on well-governed businesses.
Over the next week or so, I’ll continue this discussion of race
and gender diversity, with a particular focus on the research on corporate
board diversity. Does such diversity
matter? If so, why? Does it matter across all institutions,
or does its importance vary with context?
What do we mean by “diversity” (and by this I do not mean whether Justice Cardozo qualifies
as Latino, but whether numbers matter – a critical mass, as it is sometimes
called.)
In my next post on this topic, Do The Right Thing, So Long As
It’s Free, I’ll discuss some of the theories that have been proffered
to explain why corporations might seek to diversify their boards, starting with
fairness theories. In subsequent
posts, I’ll discuss performance-based theories of board diversity, the
empirical research on corporate board diversity, and what corporate insiders
themselves say about whether and why board diversity matters.
Related Posts:
II. Do The Right Thing – So Long As It’s Free
III. Money Is Diversity, Or Diversity Is Money?
IV. What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters
V. Wrapping
It Up: The Struggle To Explain Why Difference Makes a Difference
Thank you so much! I was encouraged to do something now. Never give up our dream, the youth is our factor of success.