Free Republic

The economics profession embarked this year on a soul-searching appraisal of perceived hostility to women and minorities in its ranks, and the Federal Reserve—the nation’s largest employer of Ph.D. economists—wants to get ahead of the curve. For the Fed, where three quarters of its research economists are men and most are white, facing up to the lack of women and minorities among these employees isn’t just a matter of appearances. A staff that better reflects the U.S. population could limit the potential for groupthink or blind spots that hinder the central bank’s assessment of how the economy is changing. “The...

Advocate Aurora Health Care is accelerating its initiative for hiring diverse contractors on major construction projects and set a goal of 25% for a showcase $228 million campus in Mount Pleasant. The diversity program builds on goals Milwaukee-based Aurora Health Care previously instituted for spending 15% of construction costs with contractors owned by minorities, women, veterans and other groups, said Daryl Hodnett, Advocate Aurora’s director of supplier diversity and inclusion. “This is an important part of how you help grow and build and develop underserved communities,” Hodnett said. “We’re helping make healthier communities economically — helping create jobs and economic...

... In September 2018, California became the first state to legally compel corporate board diversity with a law mandating that every public company in the state have at least one female director by the end of 2019. The law set off a scramble to find hundreds of female directors, many of whom don’t fit the traditional mold. If companies fail to comply with that mandate, they face a one-time fine of $100,000. By the end of 2021, the law’s requirements ramp up, compelling companies with five board members to have at least two female directors and at least three on...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here.

Female entrepreneurs are more likely than their male counterparts to see their loan applications rejected or underfunded, and New York City is launching a program to close the gap. The Department of Small Business Services’ $5 million program will offer lines of credit up to $100,000 at about 12% interest to women-owned businesses, said Gregg Bishop, commissioner of the department. Entrepreneurs with credit scores of at least 620 who have been in business a year or longer and earn $50,000 or more in annual revenue can apply. The department surveyed more than 1,600 entrepreneurs in New York City for a...

A new lawsuit is challenging a California law that requires corporations to elect a minimum number of women to their boards of directors. On Wednesday, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) sued California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, the state official in charge of administering SB 826. That law, passed in 2018, requires that, by 2020, all publicly traded companies headquartered or incorporated in California have at least one woman on their board of directors. Come 2022, companies with five-member boards will need to have at least two female directors. Firms with six or more directors will need at least three...

By a slim margin, Washington state voters appear to have rejected the legislature’s attempt to reinstate racial preferences. (The result is still unofficial.) Both Heather Mac Donald and Peter Kirsanow summarized the history of this issue for NR last month. Essentially, a 1998 voter referendum outlawed the use of racial preferences by the state of Washington, but this year the legislature passed Initiative 1000 that would reverse that referendum. Opponents of preferences, led in large part by Asian Americans, then put a new referendum on the ballot that would allow voters to reject I-1000 and keep the 1998 ban on...

... Last September the state enacted a law requiring all public companies headquartered in California to have at least one female director by the end of 2019 and two by the end of 2021. Democrats claimed that increasing board diversity would benefit corporations. Investors supposedly needed politicians to tell them what was in their best financial interest. Economists at Clemson University tested this hypothesis by examining the effects of the law on public companies in California and how their shareholders reacted vis-a-vis those of companies in other states. About 28% of the 602 public firms headquartered in California needed to...

Jennifer Zeng grew up admiring the Communist Party of China and adhering to its stringent rules. But her life changed forever when she embraced religion and was swept up in a government crackdown on Falun Gong. Arrested four times as a young adult and held in as a prisoner in a labor camp, she quickly woke up to the horrors of living in a socialist state. After being subject to brutal torture, Zeng managed to escape China and now tells about the evils of socialism and communism. At a time when more Americans are embracing Karl Marx’s teachings, Chris Wright...

... Ms. Harris’s plan, which she released this month, first cites tendentious statistics. “Women who work full time,” it says, “are paid just 80 cents, on average, for every dollar paid to men.” To repeat for the 862nd time, these figures are raw medians for all men and women, meaning they don’t control for occupational choices, career paths, hours worked, differing risks of on-the-job fatality, and so forth. The “80 cents” figure is simply incompatible with calls of equal pay for equal work. Studies that compare apples with apples find a much narrower pay gap—or none at all. Last year...

WASHINGTON—Sen. Kamala Harris is proposing that large employers pay women on an equal basis with their male counterparts or face government fines, seeking a sweeping shift in the way the nation addresses pay inequity. The Democratic presidential candidate released a plan Monday that would put the burden on companies to demonstrate that they are not engaging in pay discrimination. Ms. Harris’s campaign said companies would be fined 1% of their profits for every 1% wage gap they allow to continue for work of equal value. The campaign estimated that the plan would generate about $180 billion over 10 years, with...

In December 2018, the New York law firm Paul, Weiss announced its latest class of partners. A scandal erupted: all 12 of the newly promoted lawyers were white, the photo accompanying the announcement revealed. The New York Times published a front-page hit job on the firm headlined: 12 WHITE FACES REFLECT BLIND SPOT IN BIG LAW. ... So why are there not more black partners? The same reasons that there are not more black computer engineers or physicians: the academic skills gap and counterproductive racial preferences. Blacks are hired as summer law interns and first-year associates at rates well above...

Excerpt not allowed from Quartz, story here.

After a heated debate, calls of racism, and shouting, the Illinois state House of Representatives voted to require all publicly held companies in the state to have at least one woman and one African-American on the company's corporate board. State Rep. Chris Welch’s bill, which passed Friday, would require any publicly-traded company headquartered in the state to have at least one woman and at least one African-American on its corporate boards starting in 2021. “No later than the close of the 2020 calendar year, a publicly held domestic or foreign corporation whose principal executive offices, according to the corporation's SEC...

White, suburban men are reaping the benefits of public construction projects in the Syracuse area, despite the city's demographics, according to a new report. Advocacy groups are sounding the alarm, before a decision is made regarding the future of the Interstate-81 viaduct in Syracuse. The I-81 project is expected to be a massive undertaking with the potential to create lots of jobs for local residents. Andrew Croom, staff attorney with Legal Services of Central New York, which issued the report with the Urban Jobs Task Force, said they reviewed the payroll records for five construction projects in the Syracuse area,...

Managers at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will be required to interview two diverse candidates for any open job, a push the firm hopes will change its heavily white, male workforce. The requirement is Wall Street’s version of the “Rooney Rule,” which requires National Football League teams to interview a minority candidate for head coaching jobs, and is part of new diversity targets Goldman rolled out Monday that include hiring more black and Hispanic employees. The bank previously set a goal of 50% women in its 2021 class of incoming analysts, and said Monday it was nearly there. The new targets,...

In the United States, women are still heavily under-represented in corporate leadership positions. Over the past 14 years, the percentage of female directors at the largest U.S. companies has increased by a meager 0.5% per year, and amounted to 26.3% in 2018, according to the most recent report of Corporate Women Directors International. If this growth rate remains unchanged, it will take nearly half a century to achieve gender parity at U.S. corporate boards. In other countries with similar gender disparities in corporate leadership, legislators have responded by adopting mandatory board quotas. The first country to act was Norway, which...

WASHINGTON—A federal court in Washington ruled Thursday that an Obama administration policy seeking to address the high proportion of black and Hispanic children in special-education classes must go into effect. The Trump administration attempted to delay the rule’s implementation last year, which would require school districts not to place disproportionate numbers of minority students—either too many or too few—into special-education tracks or isolated settings at school. The rule was originally set to take effect in July 2018, before the Trump administration delayed it. The federal judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, an Obama appointee on the District of Columbia district court, argued...

‘I am worried,” writes Harvard geneticist David Reich in the New York Times, “that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.”Reich was responding to anticipated resistance to his forthcoming book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. The “well-meaning people” Reich references are those who argue that race is a “social construct,” that there are no significant genetic differences among people of different racial ancestry. Maybe there...

New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres will introduce a bill Thursday that would certify lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-owned businesses through the city, allowing them to tap into a program to help underserved groups compete for government contracts. The bill calls for the Department of Small Businesses Services’ Division of Economic and Financial Opportunity to certify these businesses, as the agency does already in an effort to promote equity and opportunity among minority and women-owned businesses. Other cities like Nashville, Tenn., and states, including Massachusetts and California, already extend this type of certification to LGBT-owned businesses, according to Mr. Torres....