Is California's Boardroom Policy a Step Toward C-Suite Gender Parity?
*By Bridgette Webb*
Corporate boards are often much smaller than the companies they serve, but their importance shouldn't be underestimated, said Ăsa Regnér, UN Women's deputy executive director.
"Boards influence people's lives, so it's really important who is on those boards," Regnér said Monday in an interview on Cheddar.
That is perhaps why California just passed new legislation that requires public companies in the state to have at least one woman on their boards by the end of 2019. By 2021, a minimum of two women must sit on boards of five or more; three, when boards have more than six people.
For Regnér, it's about corporate America leading by example.
"I think these kinds of legislation are normally really good," she said. It's important "to ask people to actually shape up and do something about the injustice that we see."
But the law didn't sail through without opposition. Many argued it's not the government's right to dictate a company's board, and others argued the law may prioritize gender over other critical kinds of diversity ー like race and ethnicity, for example.
Regnér disagreed.
"There is already a quota going on, but it is an informal quota which favors men with a certain background," she said. "I don't think there is a contradiction to other backgrounds, this is one step I don't think \[demographics\] should fight each other."
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/%20Fostering%20an%20Unstereotyped%20Culture).
Eighty-five-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz spoke of a “hell that we never knew before and never thought we would experience” as she described the harrowing Oct. 7 assault on her kibbutz by Hamas militants and the terror of being taken hostage into the Gaza Strip.
Jenna Ellis, an attorney and prominent conservative media figure, reached a deal with prosecutors Tuesday and pleaded guilty to a reduced charge over efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.
U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez returns to court Monday to enter an expected not guilty plea to a conspiracy charge alleging he acted as an agent of the Egyptian government when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Hamas militants on Friday freed two Americans -- a mother and her teenage daughter who had been held hostage in Gaza since militants rampaged through Israel two weeks ago, the Israeli government said.
A Texas judge has ruled that Infowars host Alex Jones cannot use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billion to families who sued over his conspiracy theories that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax.
