It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won't
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It's even a signal nowadays. Companies with women in mid to upper management positions are signaling they're not corrupt, and they're all about efficiency and quality of work.
At least in the Gulf, if you want it done, put an Arab woman in charge.
I heard the complaints from right-wing groups when they said "it's a place for boys and girls to sit side by side and learn useless abstract mathematics that will server neither God nor the nation", and I thought ... FUCK YEAH!
My younger sister finished medical school only a few years ago, but because she speaks 4-languages and has a master's degree, she went on to manage an entire clinic, and soon after that the investors sent her to training in hospitality and gave her a hotel to manage, then a second. This is in Oman, btw. I know it's anecdotal evidence, but you couldn't imagine a 27 year old woman managing hotels and hospitals with a staff of several hundred. (I was worried they might be framing her for "something", but I went over her paperwork and it's all kosher; she answers to a board of directors and has clear rights, responsibilities, budget, and reporting procedures. She has been at it for 3 years now.)
Similarly, when dealing with companies in Gulf, I have seen a few repeating patterns in management. You have the national institutions headed by tribal/military chiefs, you have the domestically owned companies headed by foreign expertise, then you have this new breed of "agile" companies headed by women and young people that don't seem to respect the traditional order and hierarchy. Ten years ago, a Request for Proposal was a joke; a formality to waste people's time before the contract was given to the CEO's cousin.
This has been documented in the U.S. and is pretty core to advertising agencies today who have a goal of generating revenue from minority groups: you need to hire the minority groups into your companies because people tend not to buy where they cannot work (DBWYCW, or "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" is a popular acronym in the early 20th century from the United States). Don't read this the wrong way as "they only use minority groups to generate revenue," this is a marketing goal to do business with minority groups (it's not a bad or "evil" thing).
Revenue increases when you do this. There's a correlation there, but I really doubt that the cause is a supposed increase in productivity simply by giving people an opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have had. I think the key indicator is to look at the media and see if these people have boycotted against companies who refuse to hire members of their group (women and African Americans were the two major groups during the Great Depression who practiced this).
It was also suggested that women for example are cheaper, although if you have a company doing programming (just a random example) and you're hiring women for secretary jobs (another example), your revenues are going to be discounted by the fact that you have less programmers. I'm not sure what type of jobs they're filling, but I'm a bit skeptic about this although it at least sounds intuitive.
The typical economic argument is a variation on the general principle that when other people are making irrational decisions (e.g. not hiring the best candidate because of their gender), you can do better / take advantage of them.
The article also said the researchers were speculating that women made better decisions because they were traditionally in charge of household spending and therefor understood the consumer better.
Trying to hire for diversity doesn't mean you can't hire that excellent 20-something white male hacker that impressed you with the latest web-mashup, it might just mean giving other applicants a second chance, even if you don't necessarily feel a natural bond with them.
That said, this article specifically mentions "a setting where it was clear that companies were not just hiring women for PR reasons" whereas I've been on hiring committees with specific instructions to favor non-white or non-male applicants here, so the arbitrage opportunity is likely less.
Wouldn't a monoculture of yes-men, for example, be less likely to kill a failing project early on, and save money that would otherwise be wasted? Having a diverse team will provide better input on business practices, processes and work ethics, which all impact the product a business produces, and ultimately their bottom line.
I am not sure culture counts matter as long as it is a good culture. Sure a mediocre multiculture is better than a bad monoculture but that just means mediocre is better than bad not multi better than mono.
This said, if you are running a mining company, an automotive giant, or you are operating in any industry where the priority is on reliability and tradition, I can understand why diversity could make you nervous. But never forget that diversity can become a way of life.
That's very much what hapenned to American culture anyways with the great melting pot, isn't it?
Uh, that would appear to be you.
Actually, you can do the same right here at home by hiring minorities
So the conclusion would be that either 1) this isn't being tried, 2) it's still in the process of succeeding, such that discrimination hasn't been competed out of the market, or 3) there really is a gap in worker value, due to maternity or other gender-related issues, and the market recognizes it.
Rebuttals?
... you'll come away with your head spinning because there's just too damned many factors.
Consider the factor of giving generous paid maternity leave. Obviously a benefit. Except that a company won't want to hire or pay someone that may disappear like that. Except they are legally obligated to. Except these things can't really be legally obligated because there's always a way around it. And of course a certain percentage of women really do of their own free will choose not to come back, which is hard to put an economic value on for any interested party, but if you can't put a reasonably concrete objective value on both the value of having that choice, and the values of exercising that choice, how can you tell whether women are being shortchanged? Being guaranteed that you can return to your job after X months is still some sort of economic value, even if most of the X months is itself unpaid.
It isn't even necessarily that hard to find women getting paid more than men by some metrics now: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.... Note, I'm explicitly calling your attention to the various caveats and logic in the article, because this is an example of my real point about the complexity of the topic, not that one article proves anything about the "real question"; my point is exactly that nailing down the "real question" is very, very complicated, well beyond simply totalling up who makes what and looking at which number is larger.
At this point, given the very market forces that this article talks about, I am unconvinced there is a major systematic problem that comes from human bias; I think the variance caused by the non-zero-but-small-in-practice effect is dominated by the other various concerns that cause disparities. I'm sure there's sexism afoot but I suspect it's been pushed below the noise threshold. But I can't prove it.
This is might be a explanation for the decline of women in computing fields. What could be happening that there are now more other fields where the most competent can go and not get any hassle at all or even experience preferential treatment. Thus the only reserve of the cheap and competent labor in the field would be those who are drawn to computing from early age. For whatever cultural, biological or other reason, these are mostly men and so this would explain why programming field has become more and more male over the last twenty years.
I know that the proportion of blacks who teaching in inner city schools declined tremendously from, say 1965 to 1985 because the barriers to those black who attended college dropped down and many more went into industry instead of teaching.
If this is indeed the case, I'd be very interested in tapping into it.
The thumbnail sketch: Queries on the long tail of the keyword distribution frequently have no effective competition. A single page laser-targeted at the query with basic on-page optimization will likely rank for it (and, most probably, a basket of related keywords). I wrote bingo activities by hand for a while, saw success with the strategy, then wrote a CMS to semi-automate the process and hired a teacher to add content to the website through it. This is far and away my most effective marketing strategy, the ROI on it is stupendous (last time I ran the numbers it was $3k in costs over 4 years for $20k in sales in the trailing 12 months), and I have yet to encounter a software company in consulting that cannot make use of a spiritually similar idea.
The ladies come in at the stage where you need cheap freelancers to write hundreds or thousands of pieces of content. You can find them through Craigslist, related communities, or good old-fashioned networking. Find good ones, pay by the piece, treat them right, and as long as you have a monetization strategy for the content being produced you will practically print money.
I've implemented (or suggested) variations on this for consulting clients, too. The applicability goes way, way beyond bingo cards.
I very much doubt that I'd execute on this if it were dropped into my lap, but hypothetically supposing I saw a way to productize this, I would not need customers. It would be like inventing an AI which could successfully trade stocks in all market conditions. Sure, I suppose I could sell it for $99.95 on infomercials, but the more obvious path is to proceed directly to total world domination.
I would go raise capital, call in all of my favors with the witch kings of SEO, pull off Demand Media in parallel for as many niches as I could scale to (and if I productized this and had capital available, that number would be very high indeed), and sell out at a truly ridiculous multiple prior to the borg deciding my business model needed to be nuked from orbit.
Anyhow, good news for HN readers: the fact that this strategy is still done by bingo card makers and boutique SEO consultants and not a department dedicated to it at the New York Times means that you still have an opportunity to make a lot of money at it before your competitors with mega-brands, link juice flowing out their ears, and vast reserves of capital figure out how to exploit it.
Inequality of opportunity is part of what made the U.S. a 20th century powerhouse. Bright, educated women had two career choices pre-1965: nursing or teaching. (Even in 1960, the state school my mom went to did not accept women into engineering or architecture and she could only take higher science classes if she planned to teach.) All those bright women with no options boosted our educational system to great heights for little cost. Once they had choices, many women spread out into other better paying fields.
It's not surprising that a business could succeed by following the same blueprint.
It used to be that highly competent women often became teachers because that was the only thing available to them. Now women can be professors, work in business, etc.
Note: this is not an argument for restricting female choice or anything else. It's about diagnosing how one (good) thing can lead to unintended consequences.
Think "good enough."
Einstein didn't attend the American public school system, nor did Dyson, or many of the other great scientists of the early 20'th century. In the present day, Sergei Brin only spent 4 years in US public schools. Elon Musk didn't, nor did Max Levchin (Thiel's wikipedia page is ambiguous). Zuckerberg didn't go to a public high school either (don't know what he did before that).
You can't point to a country with massive contributions from immigrants, and then declare that services those immigrants didn't use (or used minimally) are the cause of prosperity. The logic just doesn't work.
It also ignores the armies of undergraduates and computers (the human kind, mostly public school educated women sitting at adding machines) that made most American discoveries and inventions possible. Individuals do make some leaps, but on the whole it's massive collaboration that advances science and technology.
I'm disputing the idea that the public school system made the US into a "20th century powerhouse". If you want to attribute all of a person's success to the school they pass through, be my guest. I can similarly say the IRS is the cause of the US being a "20'th century powerhouse" - after all, 100% of US businesses are taxed by the IRS.
But the fact is, the US is fairly unique in terms of innovation and growth. The education system is, by most measures I've seen, fairly mediocre [1]. And additionally, a fairly large amount of our workforce, particularly at the higher ends, didn't even use the public education system. It seems like an extraordinary claim to attribute the success of the US to our public schools. Yeah, we need public schools/indoor plumbing/electricity, but it would be similarly silly to claim we are a powerhouse as a result of those services.
[1] As far as I'm aware, this was always the case. I know that during the Cold War, we were deathly afraid of the Soviets with their high test scores gaining a scientific advantage over us.
PS: China and India both have huge public education systems.
All the best chefs are men, best professors I know are men too. And military requires more endurance that women normally have.
I don't see the link between "most good chefs are men" and "women should not be chefs". It's a bit like "no Black people ride at the front of the bus" and "Black people should not ride at the front of the bus" - you've conveniently assumed a level playing field where there likely is none, and you've also erroneously linked the current state of things to the ideal state of things.
As for the military - not being a military man I'm not sure I am qualified to comment... but are there not many more roles in the military that do not require the massive amounts of brawn that "only men" can provide?
my understanding (and experience) is that women tend to have better endurance than men. I remember a few years back I was running with a friend of mine, a girl who was probably 10" shorter than I am, who had a notably worse BMI than I did (at least, she did when we started running together. she improved significantly more than I did during the course of our efforts. Maybe she was just more motivated than I was?)
All along, I could out sprint her, but when it came to distance running, from day one, half way through the run she'd start leaving me in the dust. Oh man, it was so humiliating, getting left in the dust by a short fat girl. (It was good for both of us, I think, really;)
Now, if you loaded us both down with 100Lbs of equipment and had us do the same run? sure, I'd kick her ass. I don't think she could lift a pack of that size.
So yeah, men are nearly always stronger but that does not mean we have better endurance.
Endurance is simply how long you can use your muscles before they give out; it's not independent of how much muscle you have. If you are very weak, you will have terrible endurance.
Yes, there are things called fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers; the greater proportion of the latter, the better endurance you have. The greater proportion of the former, the faster you go.
There doesn't seem to be evidence of gender difference in the ratio, but Google could have failed me. There is, however, an argued difference along ethnic lines. (East Africans have a much higher slow twitch/fast twitch ratio than other ethnicities.)
Even if there were, though, a marathon is an endurance race. You rely primarily on your slow twitch muscles, except perhaps in the home stretch, if you have anything left. Men win the marathons.
weird, so I thought that the statistics backed up my anecdotes, but at least for pain tolerance, apparently the studies seem to show that men can tolerate more pain... which seems really weird to me. (Have you ever seen a woman give birth? I watched all five of my siblings being born, without any sort of anesthesia. I'm pretty sure that would kill me, or, at least, deter me from having more children.)
So yeah, the first couple pages of google results seem to show that you're right and I'm wrong, though, so eh, whatever. I guess I'm just a wuss.
Among those who run marathons, the top men put in better times than the top women. However, I know _far_ more female marathon runners than men. (OTOH, I know far more male distance cyclists, so I wouldn't jump to any particular conclusions from either data point.)
There are other things that go into it, obviously, like body shape. Women are 8 times more likely to tear their anterior cruciate ligament because their wider hips cause them to impact the ground at problematic angles. And boobs are a dead weight.
But yeah, this is something where the biology is very well understood.
In endurance events (real endurance, not wimpy things like 2-3 hour marathons) women are highly competitive with men, and there is some evidence they have an advantage.
For example, in the 235km Badwater Ultramarathon, women consistently finish top 5, despite representing only 5-10% of the field.
Long distance swimming is even worse for men. Shelly Taylor-Smith has held the record for the 48km Manhattan Island swim since 1995. Women are within 28 minutes of the outright English Channel swim crossing record (6:57 vs 7:25), and based on this older swim time list, women have 9 out of the top 20 times: http://www.channelswimming.com/solo-time-HTML.htm
I'm going to resort to quoting papers to you:
"When performing certain isometric exercises, the endurance of women is almost twice that of men performing the same exercise, according to results presented at a meeting of international scientists. Both sexes performed the exercises at the same percentage of their maximum strength. The study, conducted at the University of Colorado in the US, confirmed that women outlasted men by an average of 75 per cent and, importantly, showed that the reason women had longer endurance times was not due to differences in the motivation levels between men and women, or within the nervous system, but due to differences within muscle." http://www.mydr.com.au/sports-fitness/women-beat-men-on-musc...
"The negative slope and the X-axis intercept of this equation at 66 km supports the hypothesis that women ultramarathon runners have greater fatigue resistance than do equally trained men whose performances are superior up to the marathon distance." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9044230
And military requires more endurance that women normally have.
It also requires more endurance than most men have. But if an individual woman can legitimately meet that standard, why deny her the opportunity?
Looking back on my MIT undergraduate education (class of 1980), I'd say one of my best professors was a woman: Jeanne Bamberger.
I'm not saying that your conclusions are wrong, but "one of my best professors was a woman" is a very weak argument.
However, the first part of his statement (I firmly believe there are three areas women should not generally be part of: military, cooking and teaching) can be argued against quite effectively by showing a single counter example.
xentronium needs to either argue the counter example (ie, argue that Jeanne Bamberger is not a good teacher), or narrow down his argument (eg, argue that only women who's first name starts with "J" make good teachers). Both lines of response weaken his argument considerably.
I'm unsure about her cooking, but 2/3 ain't too bad.
Anecdotal, but fairly true in my experience; when I did water polo in high school, it was coed. We didn't have many women interested in putting in the effort to land on the varsity team, probably for social reasons, but the handful that did were terrifying. I would rather have gone up against any two other people on the team than play polo with one of the women, because as it turns out there are certain things that guys just won't do to each other.
Believe it or not, I deliberately didn't mention that I know there are areas where women are much better than men just for the sake of experimenting with HN public opinion.
Why? Because I feel the smallest glimpse of non-tolerable way of thinking is going to get downvoted. Unless it is coming from Zed or DHH. If I am right, I am going to be told I am wrong with a wording like: "It's not because you say what you think[, it's because you're troll without proofs]" (last part is optional because people don't want their opinion to have a tiniest trail of subjectivity).
Guess it's time to become one of them rockstars and have an ability to speak freely.
p.s. Bye, lol.
This is different from what you said; it implies that women are, on average, not as good at those things as men. For whatever reason. You seemed to be saying that there's such a huge difference between men and women in those fields that women might as well not even try, except for really exceptional cases -- a much less defensible statement.
A question for everybody: how would you have reacted to the statement above? Personally, I would have attacked it for rashly generalizing from a small sample without proper controls, but not for thinking Damned Thoughts.
Well, let's do some projection on the IT, because I think it's somewhat better known for most of us here.
How many good women programmers do you know? Do you remember them because they're exceptionally good or because they're women? If you believe my statement that they're "dramatically underrepresented in IT" (if you don't, I'll have to bring in some statistics like [1]), is it because they're:
a) less suitable for IT jobs (for whatever reason)
b) don't tend to like IT
c) b) because of a)
d) a) because of b)
e) strongly abused at IT work [2]
f) not their fault, employer's
There was an interesting insight on the subject of gender differences in [3] and some not-statistically-worthy-but-probably-scientifically-correct proof of the fact that women's brains are wired differently than men's.
Now back to military, cooking and teaching. There is a reason why women were "dramatically underrepresented" in military in Paleolithic era. If you pick most animal communities the male species are generally the defenders, the warriors, the aggressors. I believe that to be hard-wired to the brain. I admit that point about endurance is probably not valid, my bad, but women still can't run kilometers with full equipment on them. There was another point with totally anecdotal evidence: women-only teams work worse than men-only teams in my experience. Is it because males tend to be ultra-competitive and better team players? I think so.
Teaching. Now don't get me wrong, I admit that mothers have really great positive impact on their children, but I also think that in school and universities the teachers should be mostly men, at least for the "male audience". Boys need an authority, an example, a leader.
Cooking. I guess that's most controversial of three, because there shouldn't be any hard prerequisites for chef that women cannot meet. Yet they're "dramatically underrepresented" for one reason or other.
This is a long comment already, but the core idea is that in a good company you shouldn't be afraid to express your opinion, even if it doesn't have some fundamental research base behind it. There's nothing wrong in being wrong. It's wrong to be wrong and not admit it.
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Csbachelors.jp... -- data is somewhat old but it shows the proportion. Believe me, percentages are even worse for Russia (probably because Russia is overwhelmingly sexist)
[2] Which makes me think of http://asset.soup.io/asset/1056/5293_e98d_500.gif
Lawrence Summers? Is that you?
Business interest are violating rules of law by taking away people's homes and properties for the sake of commercial development. That is what happening in China. Or when companies keep polluting with no regard for people down the river and killing them with cancer. That is also another situation in China.
Now, I don't care about equality and stuff like that but I do care when people's lives are being run over. However, I do not care when people are taking dangerous job voluntary and improving their lives because of taking said job.
I don't even care about the whales unless people are starting to be affected by the damage of pollution and people are dying.
Now, there are tons of problems that people face everyday. There are not enough money to go around. People are not generous. But at least, we should get the problem right.
I'm sure they did.
The fact that it was multi-nationals doing the hiring is I think an important factor. "Foreigners" are often expected to behave eccentrically, and if they are hiring women managers, oh well. I think a native company doing the same thing would face a more uphill battle.
Still, very heartening, and perhaps enough to start a snowball effect in some countries.