Former White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray published a letter to the editor in The Washington Post on January 30, rebuffing a recent editorial’s take on the rise of race and sex quotas in corporate boardrooms. He writes,
The Jan. 24 editorial “Boardrooms’ changing complexion” was uncommonly shy about conservatives’ main point: that race and sex discrimination is illegal and immoral. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger, “outright racial balancing … is patently unconstitutional.” Similarly, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in United States v. Virginia that the way to end sex discrimination is to prohibit policymaking based on shopworn stereotypes about women’s talents and abilities.
Such policies, beyond just being unconstitutional and unlawful, are frequently propped up on flimsy data. Gray continues,
Forcing “diversity” through quotas doesn’t even get you the profitability that the editorial asserted. As the Securities and Exchange Commission itself noted, Nasdaq’s evidence about the performance benefits of race and sex diversity is at best “mixed.” And more rigorous studies have shown that diversity efforts like Nasdaq’s actually hurt firm performance.
The full editorial, entitled Boardrooms’ Diversity Should Not Be Mandated, is available here.
Amb. Gray was White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and currently represents the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment in its legal challenges to California’s and Nasdaq’s board diversity mandates. The Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment is a non-profit membership corporation whose mission is to promote the recruitment of corporate board members without regard to race, ethnicity, sex and sexual identity.