It was unconstitutional from the start, and Gov. Jerry Brown knew it.

Senate Bill 826 — which forces any corporation incorporated or even just headquartered in California to have a minimum number of women on its board of directors—raised “serious legal concerns,” Brown admitted when he signed the bill into law in 2018. Nevertheless, Brown said he signed the legislation because it was “high time” that businesses have a minimum number of female board members. That decision was typical of a mentality that has held women back for generations: the condescending attitude that women can’t make it on their own — and that their freedom, or that of their male peers, should be limited “for their own good.” Fortunately, a state judge agreed with Gov. Brown last month, and struck SB 826 down as unconstitutional.

But how many women on a board is “enough”? And who should decide what positions women should hold: politicians—usually male—or women themselves? Laws like SB 826 treat women as incapable of choosing their professions or negotiating the terms of their employment, and brand them as victims if they choose flexibility or other benefits over jobs with more seniority or higher pay.

A century and a half ago, the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois law that prohibited women from practicing law. Of course, this wasn’t to hinder women, the justices claimed—it was to do them a favor: “The harmony … [of] the family institution,” the court said, “is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.” As recently as 1948, the nation’s high court upheld a Michigan law banning any woman from bartending unless her husband or father owned the bar. The ban was justified, the court reasoned, because female bartenders could “give rise to moral and social problems against which [government] may devise preventative measures.”

But 20 years later, the California Supreme Court rejected such reasoning, striking down a similar law “designed to protect women” by preventing them from serving as bartenders. “Sexual classifications are properly treated as suspect,” it said, because of “the stigma of inferiority and second class citizenship associated with them.” Government lawyers argued that blocking women from working as bartenders was for their own good. “Such tender and chivalrous concern for the well-being of the female half of the adult population,” the court replied, “cannot be translated into legal restrictions.”

Lawmakers who hoped to “protect” women by taking away their freedom may indeed have been sincere—but today, we recognize that overriding women’s individual preferences doesn’t protect them—it treats them as objects of charity, incapable of running their own lives.

But the same century-old justification for such discriminatory rules is still being recycled today—by proponents of SB 826 and other gender-based mandates who think Big Brother must “help” women because we can’t help ourselves.

Laws like SB 826, which impose one-size-fits-all standards based on lawmakers’ notion of what the ideal society would look like, ignore the decisions women themselves make when pursuing their careers, supplanting those decisions with the choices bureaucrats think they should make. And studies show that women usually choose jobs based on flexibility, whereas men tend to prefer larger paychecks and more traditional responsibilities.

In striking down California’s women quota law last month, the court noted that the government “was unable to present specific evidence of actual, unlawful discrimination against any specific woman by any specific corporation.” Legislators were simply imposing their preferences on men and women in the marketplace, without asking why they take the jobs they do.

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Unfortunately, that approach is now commonplace. Legislators across the country are proposing sex-based employment quotas, compulsory paid parental leave, and restrictions on the “gig” economy or home-based businesses—all in the name of “helping.” But such laws actually deprive women of their freedom to choose what jobs to take, what wages to earn, what hours to work, and what kinds of lives they want to lead.

As 20th century egalitarian feminist Suzanne LaFollette wrote, “women who rely upon [government] guarantees to protect them against prejudice and discrimination are leaning on a broken reed.” Special favors from government only exacerbate inequality and sexism. It is well past time, as LaFollette wrote, that the law treated women “not as women but as human beings.”

Christina Sandefur Is the executive vice president of the Goldwater Institute.