Brandenburg approves first-ever gender parity election law - Polidicks

The right people include women. Sure I can learn about the female body but I will never understand what its like to live with it as a daily occurrence. Women should be in our government in larger numbers; and while on its face Quotas seem to increase the intelligence; the issue becomes what happens after the qualified are in and who says the party/elections in question will elect the right people?

I agree with you, but I'm starting to get the feeling I shouldn't based upon how transparently you are misinturpting people.

Elections should be anti- "merit" because the goal is to make a society that works for everyone, we're not voting for a warlord to conquer the neighbouring lands. Elections are imo one of the places where the answer is the least ambiguous: To represent the people you must have representative members of the people. The USA had ivy league lawyers, generals, bankers, and religious figureheads as leaders forever and the result is a society where there are more peopleless homes than homeless people, relentless wars, out-of-control inequality and structural xenophobia and racism. The combo of being rich, white, and powerful being the overwhelming type of representation in governance has created a society that works for the rich white people and not for others. Check out this article from the times on the origins of people in power in the usa : https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/26/opinion/sunday/paths-to-congress.html Also the skills to govern, economic skills, and other relevant skills can be brought in through aides and the cabinet so it's not like it would be worse than the republicans.

Well, I'm not sure it increases the quality of politicians, only that one study done in Italy showed that effect. It probably stays the same in most countries, I think. Here's the thing though: who says that without a quota, the right people are being picked?

He didn't say that. You're putting words in his mouth so you can be an easy critic of a point he didn't make. Try arguing better, huh?

Wouldn't that result in uneducated people being less represented though?

What post in this thread haven't you misinterpreted? Are you genuinely doing it on purpose? No one is even at all suggesting that they have a problem with more women being involved in politics, they simply have an issue with how it is being brought about. Shoving dogma through law won't change views, at least in the short-term. I don't believe in forced equality, I believe in equity. Hire the best whilst considering what they can bring to the table. If that happens to result in 100% women, so be it. If it happens to be 51% women and 48% men (and vice versa), so be it. Genuine question: Do you also believe in forcing a 50-50 split in every career field, e.g. education, medicine (and all its sub-fields), technology? Or just politics?

I don't think anyone could be ideologically consistent with wanting it only in politics.

In that case, I don't think I should have to explain why it wouldn't work. Consult all the data that shows that there are some fields that are naturally predominantly male/female. In these cases, not only would you be trying to add certain people to a field, but you'd also be trying to remove certain people at the same time.

That's a fair concern, though I'm guessing it's likely that in most countries the effect wouldn't be very notable yes I'm a baddy bad man who do bad Well what do you want to do then? I think pretty much everyone agrees by now that 'we want more women' but nothing is happening or changing, or something is happening but at a turtles pace. Some countries have been ambitious enough to pass something concrete like a quota, but a few words isn't going to change anything. Just to name an example: female representation in my country's parliament actually decreased, despite the large amount of debate about the issue. To me it's become pretty clear that, at the moment, something like a quota is necessary if we want to change anything. My question is how does having a quota thwart hiring people for their merits more than if there was no quota? How does having a quota contradict picking people for their merits? The whole reason some people want quotas is because some men are being picked despite having fewer merits than many women who are way more qualified, yet aren't being picked. You're still picking people for their merits, half of them just need to be women now. Period. It isn't difficult. Again, this could only be a problem if you believe that there are no qualified women, which is obviously bullshit and I know you all agree with me on that. So what is the problem? I guess I understand if you're talking about the larger issue of both men and women not being picked for their merits as candidates in general, but how does a quota make that worse? That's a far more fundamental problem with our electoral systems, how our democracies function, etc. And sorry but I believe being against (hopefully temporary) forced equality is just a bit arbitrary. At worst it will have no long-term effect on the public's perceptions, but that's it.

My initial reaction to the OP was negative - it felt a lot like another example of misguided affirmative action. But the longer I consider this, the more appealing it seems. Look at it this way: Quotas vs. Quality no longer applies, because political candidates *have* to be quality to win votes in the first place. In any real democracy, anyway. The parties will go out of their way to involve women more in the political process, and search harder to find the cream of the crop from both sexes. Given that this is politics, I can actually see this working out nicely.

Say you have three people, Person A (male), Person B (male) and Person C (female) and they range in quality of A is the best, B is the 2nd best, and C is the least best; they now must take A and C simply because C is a woman. And because it's for both genders, if Person A and B were female and C the only male, it'll still result in a less qualified person making it because of their gender alone. Yeah, they'll look for the best women like they do the best men for political positions. But this will hurt the times that the two best people for the position are the same gender.

I suppose how big an issue that is depends on how large a poll they're drawing from.

Forced diversity is dumb and will always be dumb. How would you feel if you're either of the mandated 50% and you're just there to fill a quota and nothing else?