In China, Women Hired to Motivate Computer Programmers | Hacker News Reader

In China, Women Hired to Motivate Computer Programmers

kotaku.com

58 pointsourmandave51 comments

The way it's framed certainly seems a bit iffy, but on the face of it, having people create a fun and motivating work environment is a great idea. Plenty of companies offer massages and other perks to their programmers, and I've heard that ping pong coaches are apparently a thing in Silicon Valley. Is it bad to have someone always ready for a chat or a game of ping pong?

So is the problem that they specifically hire young women for this? Is sex appeal a factor here? Detail is scarce, making it easy to jump to incorrect conclusions. I find myself hesitant to call this sexism before I know a bit more.

>Is it bad to have someone always ready for a chat or a game of ping pong? Is sex appeal a factor here?

Of course not. There's nothing like playing ping pong in high heels.

Would agree with above, but given the evidence of chauvinism in the workplace I would say regardless of the facts this will be seen as sexism. Personally, I think it would be cool to have either a male or a female that was genuinely interested in some of my programming projects.

Motivational employees would help to significantly ease some of the social anxiety of programmers such as my self. Male or female the interaction of genuine interest is at the core of what seems to be lacking here. Typically any "collaborative" or "interest" showed by coworkers or superiors falls into two buckets.

- coworker: "oh that's cool reminds me of the time that I did x" with subtle connotations of why x is better than what you are doing.

- superior: "hmm really interesting, make sure you get this other stuff done before next week" with less subtle connotations of I have no idea what or why you are doing nor do I care as long as you get all your work done.

Agreed. I think the core of the idea is a good one. I also think there are sexist and non-sexist ways to implement this, and I think sexist approaches might undermine the goal by introducing sexual tension in the office. But if you do this right, I think it could be great.

It's definitely the sexism and sexual undertone that is what's gross here. It basically demeans the fuck out of male workers and potentially alienates female ones, and sets a massive precedent that it's a male only industry.

The idea of having "cheerleaders" of mixed sex who are just motivational people that cheer everyone up isn't terrible, and perks like massages or yoga or whatever are a fantastic idea.

I'm not sure we've really got enough info to decide whether this really is demeaning. It certainly could be, and the short skirt and high heels do give that impression, but I can also see how this could be positive and respectful, and the skirt and heels might just be her personal dress choice in an environment that doesn't stick to a formal office dress code.

I'm not saying it's not demeaning and gross; it certainly could be. But all we have is a handful of photos and we really don't know much. I like focusing on the positive and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Too often we judge each other on incomplete information.

But there's absolutely reason for caution here; it could get really creepy.

> So is the problem that they specifically hire young women for this?

It's completely legal to hire people based on looks for positions that require it, e.g. salespeople, models, "experience managers".

It doesn't mean we should do it. Especially not as we're evolving towards a developed, enhanced society.

Many SV startups display a website with 50% women programmers... all of them cute and young. We know very well they're not here to attract more women to programming. They're here to bias men into believing it's a balanced workplace where it's fun to work and where he might find a soulmate. It has an impact on the applicant's expectation.

Of course once males are recruited, it's a huge legal risk to date on the workplace, and a human interaction with a hired hostress isn't genuine.

>>Many SV startups display a website with 50% women programmers... all of them cute and young. We know very well they're not here to attract more women to programming.

Sorry, but... how do you know?

Ok, I'll open the question: What is the effect of a website with 50% cute females on a male programmer? I've always assumed it was supposed to have an effect on me (male), which is has.

Our team is ~45% women. The women on our team are exactly that, on our team. They aren't there to "attract male talent."

> Many SV startups display a website with 50% women programmers... all of them cute and young.

And 50% male programmers, also cute and young.

> We know very well they're not here to attract more women to programming.

You could interpret the cute/young males as aspirational images for males, and the cute/young women as bait for (presumably, heterosexual) males...

Or you could interpret both groups as bait for males of differing sexualities.

Or you could interpret the cute young males as bait for heterosexual females and the cute young females as aspirational images for females.

Or you could interpret all the images as aspirational.

Or...

"We know very well they're not here to attract more women..." of any of the images, including the cute/young females, requires some support.

It's completely legal to hire people based on looks for positions that require it, e.g. salespeople, models, "experience managers". It doesn't mean we should do it. Especially not as we're evolving towards a developed, enhanced society.

We're aspiring to such a society, not evolving. Evolution is an outcome, not a direction. It's not possible to say what we're evolving toward, except inasmuch as we are now closer to that ideal than we were 20 years ago.

Not only that, but I'm not sure that's true. Today's norms are those that survived yesterday. The ones we think we want tomorrow are not always the ones we'll have. When sex sells, sex sells, regardless of whether you want it to sell or not. What has happened over the last 20 and more years is more a fine tuning of how to use sex to sell, rather than removal of sex from the sales process.

> Many SV startups display a website with 50% women programmers... all of them cute and young. We know very well they're not here to attract more women to programming.

Really? Are you so shortsighted as to think that an attractive young woman can't actually be a programmer, and that her only actual job function is to appeal to her male coworkers? Despite the fact that the industry skews towards the young and attractive in the first place?

This attitude right here is why so many women have problems in STEM. If we're even remotely attractive we're considered to only be there to appeal to our male coworkers. If we're not attractive we're ignored and belittled. In either case, there's no acceptance of our technical skills. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe women programmers don't exist for the sole purpose of entertaining men, and that the cute and young women you see might actually be - wait for it - programmers?

People are quick to point out the sexism here, but NFL and NBA cheerleaders are totally cool? Those girls literally dance around in mini-skirts and shake their asses. At least these 'cheerleaders' are chatting, serving, and playing games with people. You know, being human.

On another note, this is probably being highly editorialized. Maybe cheerleader isn't the right word and "extra-curricular activity manager" got lost in translation. Throw in a couple of pictures of scantily clad women and hey! look how many clicks we got!

> People are quick to point out the sexism here, but NFL and NBA cheerleaders are totally cool?

Lots of people have lots of problems with NBA and NFL cheerleaders and the way they are employed, but that's not the subject here.

I always believed that, in many instances, the combination of an experienced software developer and a minimum wage worker who reminds them to focus throughout the day can have a really high ROI.

Isn't that one of the purposes of an assistant (in addition to offloading tasks that can be offloaded)?

No, it's typically not. I was thinking more along the lines of the comment mentioning the periodic slapping.

Along those lines: http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigsli...

Maybe productivity goes up because the female programmers are less pestered.

Original is here: https://www.facebook.com/trendinginchina/posts/6034617964239...

It is sexist in the sense that it is a motivation mechanism completely biased towards men. However, there is no such thing as discrimination going on. These girls applied for the job and get paid for it. It's not like they are being called engineers. They are not engineers and it makes no sense to say that "they should hire female engineers" because that 1) is not always possible (obvious lack of women in the field) and 2) may not even help to solve the social problems that most male engineers suffer from (which is the goal of hiring those girls), since female engineers are not there to cheer boys up. This would be replacing A with B -- it's not the same thing.

It is sad, however, to see that so many computer programmers struggle so much with social problems. I wonder how our (I am including myself in this set) future looks like.

I get that folks in the states feel like they want to get bent out of shape over this, however this isn't the US, and applying our cultural ideals to another country don't make sense.

But lets not pretend it doesn't happen here: http://firstwefeast.com/drink/secret-lives-of-los-angeles-bo...

If you follow the link to the source article ( https://www.facebook.com/trendinginchina/posts/6034617964239... ) there is this statement:

"According to the HR manager of an Internet company that hired three such cheerleaders, its programmers are mostly male and terrible at socializing, and the presence of these girls have greatly improved their job efficiency and motivation."

"mostly male" and "terrible at socializing" well this sounds a LOT like a good number of the engineers that I know. But even among those who DONT have these issues, were putting a LOT of them into conditions that DONT make a lot of sense.

Take a team of people, mostly men, force them to be in the same room for 60 hours a week, add liquor and beer. How long before it starts looking like the Stanford prison experiment, or lord of the flies? How long before you get weird, emergent, monolithic culture from a self contained team? How long before people start acting outside cultural norms because they lack a social or sexual outlet? How much of our current issues around women and tech and the experience they have is the result of the hours we put in, and the lack of outside experience it creates?

If the reality was "hire some women to hang out with your engineers" or "Reduce productivity so they can have a life" what course of action do you THINK companies will take?

Where is the source? The article links to nothing but a Facebook post. The whole thing was a joke that several Chinese companies made during this year's Apirl's Fool Day.

It is a very lame joke, though.

I read that in China the government is creating jobs for the sake of keeping people employed, even if they are not productive. Maybe this is another occurrence of that phenomenon. It's true that it's private companies hiring the cheerleaders here, but maybe they get subsidies from the government for doing that.

A more human mode of rubber-duck debugging. Might have a detrimental effect on office politics if these cheerleaders are not changed out regularly.

They might even become programmers themselves, after absorbing a lot of experience with many programmers' trains of thought.

It's almost crazy that a seemingly conservative country is embracing human nature and being progressive with it while western companies are struggling to balance diversity and being politically correct at the same time.

Objectification leads to productivity? Maybe they'd be better off stocking the men's restroom with lotion.

Is this really denying those women agency, though? We don't know the detailed circumstances, it's hard to say.

To play devil's/HR's advocate:

Couldn't this be better at producing the attitude and behavioral change that we aim for with "sensitivity training"?

Training might ask two of these men to have a mock encounter with a woman...and play act the legally approved way to deal with it.

But with cheerleaders you get the actual thing, and a tight feedback loop - "Oh, by speaking in that tone, I offended her. Now I'll learn to monitor my tone."

No, I don't think that paying women to be cheerleaders for men provides what you describe -- when you are literally paying the women to make the men feel good, you aren't going to get an honest feedback loop. (Heck, you won't get that often when people are paid as equals in the same workplace, because of conflict avoidance, you certainly aren't going to get it when the women as entertainers for the men.)

I don't think so. I could see it also creating more workplace animosity in the simple fact that when you put young guys and girls together, some of them will pair off. Guys tend to be accutely aware that there is a difference between "attention" and "sexual attention" (wrt. eye gaze, body language). Those receiving the former might not like seeing the latter done with coworkers. We may see some jealousy related issues with the ones that don't, or more frustration and aggression.

PS: Love the "devils/HR" advocate line.

To be fair, mild sexism would seems pretty low on the priority list of employee treatment issues in China.

They would probably get a better result if they opened a brothel next to their building or something.

Imagine Google hiring women to "cheerlead" programmer. I am sure Google would go bankrupt just to pay lawyers to fight lawsuits.

This seems like free market at work. These women have social skills to sell and programmers are buying it.

The way I see it the Chinese are being more progressive than the Europeans where prostitution and drugs are legal.

Why is it that every time I read an article about some degrading bullshit, I also have to read a comment about the free market?

(And in motherfucking China this time, apparently.)

Because internet libertarians just can't help themselves. Got to put those fake skulls to use.

Cursing at a country for what? Hate China that much?

I read that as China + free market = irony.

Even if I misread it, you've jumped the gun somewhat in ascribing the most negative interpretation without compelling evidence.

I don't hate China, but it's hardly a free market. The adjective "motherfucking" in this case was not meant as a pejorative.

legal drugs? in terms of cannabis availability for example, more US than european citizens have legal access to them. most countries here are more than backwardish here on similar topics. prostitution is same

Yes, the US has only recently started warming up to cannabis. It's ironic considering the US strong armed the world into banning Cannabis (starting with the International Opium Convention). Now they're claiming to be more progressive by fixing issues they created.

Europe is not a country, it's a geographic space that hosts several countries and some of those countries are gathered in a (mostly dysfunctional) political union.

In my small part of Europe (France) drugs and prostitution[1] are not legal[2].

Apart Netherlands I don't know any other country that legalized drugs. Prostitution is legal in all France's neighboring countries.

[1] to be exact, people can prostitute themselves legally, but clients and pimps are illegal.

[2] though the cops are not going out of their way to fight marijuana or paid sex between consenting adults

Apart Netherlands I don't know any other country that legalized drugs.

The Netherlands hasn't legalized anything. They haven't even decriminalized anything, AFAIK. They just voluntarily choose not to enforce against cannabis being traded and consumed, provided coffeeshops and the like remain discreet.

Portugal decriminalized plenty of drugs with set possession limits. Oddly, possessing cannabis seeds remains illegal.

Spain also tolerates private drug consumption and even lets grow shops which sell cannabis seeds to exist.

Several other European countries either have decriminalization of private consumption, as well. I think Sweden is in there, too.

So-o-o...comfort women?

You're likening women employed to chat and play games with lonely programmers to women forced into sexual slavery in wartime?

Food for thought:

Why is it OK for female cheerleaders to be used in male sports events whether amateur or pro (It's worth mentioning that this is chiefly a North American phenomenon) and all hell breaks loose when they're employed in other professional workplaces to perform the same duties?

It's disappointing to see a lot of smart and good people who are tolerant and open-minded in general engaging in moral absolutism when the issue at hand involves people of different cultural or linguistic backgrounds that are different from the prevalent mores and code of ethics in the Anglophone world.

It just shows how culture is so ingrained in people's brains even the smartest ones to the point that it blinds them to take note of similar 'faults' resting within.

Cheerleaders are not there for the football players, they're there for the audience, to direct cheers. It's about audience engagement not subservience so that's the difference.

An absurdly sexist practice, although kotaku seems hesitant to say it outright.

It's much more effective to let readers draw their own conclusions than to spell it out.

Or perhaps people avoid using the label sexist for practices that are clearly just that, in order to minimize the inevitable backlash. The way the article is written now allows for the interpretation that this is just harmless and quirky fun, which would be the wrong conclusion. Clear language that this isn't appropriate would prevent that misunderstanding.

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