A Los Angeles Superior Court judge is set to decide whether to allow California's gender quotas for corporate boards to continue.
Judicial Watch sued the Secretary of State in August 2019, on behalf of three California taxpayers, Robin Crest, Earl De Vries and Judy De Vries, who allege that quotas requiring a company’s board of directors to include women violates the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution.
“In our view, the unconstitutionality of it is flagrant,” said Tom Fitton, founder of Judicial Watch. “It seems like proponents of this quota system want to really upend decades of law prohibiting sex discrimination.”
Senate Bill (SB) 826 requires companies in California to appoint up to three women directors by Dec. 31 contingent on the company’s size.
“The way to end sex discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of sex,” Fitton told the Southern California Record. “In this case, this kind of vague notion about what numbers ought to be on boards being the basis for allowing discrimination broadly against entire categories of people to advance is not the law. It’s not constitutional.”
Judicial Watch’s complaint argues that any expenditure of taxpayer funds or taxpayer-financed resources on gender quotas is illegal.
“We had an expert go through what I would consider ex-post-facto rationales for why this is valid and we found the logic and the evidence wanting, or at least our expert did,” Fitton said.
The law also requires corporate boards headquartered in California to report to the state how they are meeting the mandates or potentially face fines.
“They didn't come up with any evidence that there is discrimination that needs to be remedied here in a way that would require this,” Fitton said.
Both the plaintiff and defendant moved the court to grant their respective moves for summary judgment and a hearing was held before Judge Maureen Duffy Lewis last week.
“The law doesn't allow for broad quota systems to be put in place to remedy alleged discrimination,” Fitton added. “No corporation has a policy in place that a woman can't and won't be considered for a board seat. That's just not our reality in the year 2021. Similarly, the law can't require that a seat only be limited to just one sex and a male can’t apply or be considered for it. It's just an abomination under our system of anti-discrimination laws."