German businesses better add women to their governances.  Or else Germany’s Großer Bruder will do it for them.  Regardless of qualification.

Big German companies need to put more women on their executive boards, said Germany’s Women’s Affairs Minister Katarina Barley. The official threatened legal measures if the firms fail to fix the problem within the year.

Bad idea.

Quotas just stigmatize those who got in via quota, whether they were truly qualified for the position or not.  And those who are not, and so fail, only strengthen the stigma.  Quotas are especially damaging to black women.  My GP was contemptuously treated as a twofer in med school because she allegedly filled two squares: she’s a woman, and she’s black.  It stinks.

The way to get more favored group into organization is to train those folks up for those positions in the first place so they can compete effectively.  That means the educational system needs to do a better job of training women to lead businesses (to take the present example) and to convince them they want to compete for those positions—which the German educational system already does, it seems, for boys and men.

That, though, would take time—years, a generation or two or three—and politicians (Germany’s are not unique here) don’t care about tomorrow, only about today.  And today’s virtue signaling.