Last week, CNN released a report detailing the latest effort by the People’s Republic of California to advance the cause of social justice warriors. In this most recent endeavor, California legislators passed a bill that would penalize publicly-traded companies for failing to place one or more women on their board. Yes, you read that correctly.

Now, one could define such an action as a form of tyranny—the act of government coercion to force a certain aesthetic on a company board of directors certainly falls under the definition of the Left’s favorite f-word, otherwise known as fascism. The very idea that progressive philosophy should be forcibly applied to private entities is certainly problematic enough in and of itself.

However, the aspect of this decision that is certainly the biggest slap in the face to working women is this medieval notion that women need government intervention in order to attain high level positions in these companies at all. Women like Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman of HP didn’t seem to need that help, neither did Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Ruth Porat of Google, or Barbara Corcoran of Shark Tank fame. The very idea that qualified men need to step aside from their positions so that less qualified women can fill their quota spits on the hard work of women everywhere who actually attain these positions based on the merits and not to fulfill a government requirement.

Such a decision degrades women’s contributions in the workplace, trivializing them as nothing more than a burden of special treatment and not workers of equal value. It is a step backwards for women who have fought to be seen as equals in the workplace, and will only foster resentment among men who were cheated out of a position for which they would have otherwise been qualified. It also gives women no impetus to achieve that position on the merits—why would any man or woman make the effort to work for a job they could more easily get by having a government mandate force someone to give it to them?

In the name of social justice, we are required to right the wrongs done to women of the past by forcibly taking action to achieve the result of equality of outcome. In reality, California’s decision mocks the work of women as never having been good enough to compete with men in the workplace, the ultimate definition of sexism.