No. of Recommendations: 11
I care about business acumen and ownership when it comes to selecting the men and women responsible for representing my interests and overseeing management charged with maximizing my long-term wealth. I care about skin in the game, not skin color."
Since we're talking about the Board of Directors, let's talk about this.
I find the language here to be particularly amusing: particularly the men and women part of the phraseology.
It wasn't so long ago that the words 'and women' would be omitted, and not just consciously, it wouldn't even occur to many to include it in the first place. I have done some reading of late about the composition of boards, and as recently as the 1970s the boards of (Fortune 500) American corporations were over 96% male. I can't find the percent of minority representation, but I would suspect it would be even less than 4%.
Owing to a lot of banging of pots and pans, street demonstrations, signs on sticks and other devices as have espoused once unpopular views, the percentage of women on boards has climbed to ' about 16%. Which, incidentally, puts Berkshire exactly average.
Now it's possible that it doesn't matter at all who is on the board, but a reasonable argument can be made that since 50% of the population is women, and that women buy lots of stuff, perhaps they should have a voice in the rooms where what gets sold and how those companies operate gets decided. That seems pretty fair to me, and while that 16% figure is a lot lower than 50%, I can see that might be an artifact of the lower participation in the workforce for women through the 80's and 90's.
I could make the same argument about minorities, who comprise over 40% of the US population today, and I would further say I think it's possible to advocate for 'more representation' without getting twisted into knots about 'quota systems'. In some industries having a diverse board probably doesn't matter much, but in many, particularly those which are consumer facing, I think it very well might.
