The (Real) Hot Girl Effect and Networking
blog.shrewple.com
blog.shrewple.com
My 30-year-old uber lawyer buddy has a gorgeous blonde fiance. She's in med school and is crazy smart. She's awesome.
My buddy decided at 27 that he wanted to get into chess. He got really into it, hired a teacher and by 29 or so was moving his rating up pretty well.
As a newcomer though, he often finds himself competing against 13-15 year old boys at his weekend tournements. In fact he's often the only person over 18 playing in some of these tournaments.
He has a good sense of humor about it, but some of these kids, he says, are just total turds to the other kids they compete against.
When he learns he has to play against a kid who's mean to other kids, he calls in the Fiance and has her sit behind him while he plays, just reading whatever she has to read for med school. She'll spend a whole Saturday sitting there behind him while he plays, her nose stuck in a book.
It just destroys the kids. He catches them trying to steal glances at her all the time during the games. Just breaks their chess mojo.
For the cool kids, kids who are struggling to figure out women at that age, he introduces them to her and she knows to treat them like the coolest guys in the room. Meanwhile, the mean bully kids get ignored and seethe in the corner.
The idea that there's some truer "deep down" person vs what you see, is also crap. Sure there's potential in everybody, but your true, real self is what you show to everyone every day. That cool deep-down person you never show? That's the imaginary you, not the real you.
The flip side: when you are hanging out with the other geeks, realizing you're at yet another sausage fest, does this make you feel powerful, or not so much?
To paraphrase the opera Carmen: if you want any enterprise to succeed, be sure you have women along!
My favorite recent example of this: The scene in the Dark Knight when Bruce Wayne is shown sunning himself on the deck of his yacht alongside soloists from the Moscow Ballet.
edited: It was the Moscow Ballet, not the Gotham Ballet.
Excerpt from a book by Emily Gould (ex-Gawker blogger), talking about her real job at a publishing firm
"One of my tasks at my first job had been to stand at the locked doors near the elevator bank and lead guests inside. I would stand in the doorway and wait and, when I heard the ping of the elevator reaching the publishing house's floor, I'd start smiling. After shaking the guests' hands I would lead them into the little waiting area where there were two armchairs and a little table next to a rack of our newest shiny hardcovers, and I'd bring them coffee or tea or water and then go sit back at my desk. Then, when my boss was ready - he let some people wait longer than others - he'd tell me to go and get them, and I'd lead them through the maze of the office, chatting brightly over my shoulder. If the person or people walking behind me were men, I would be conscious of their eyes following the movement of my back, conscious always like the books displayed in the waiting area: an ornament that demonstrated the company's power."
Investor think: "If she's cool with these guys, they must be cool dudes."
What I find aggravating is needing to fight to get men to take me seriously and see me as an intelligent, capable, human being. As long as we have an environment like this thread, we won't have that many women in tech.
Carmen in the eponymous opera and Marissa Mayer at the early Google were each a part of the enterprise as more than mere decorations. Carmen is trading off her looks, but she is using them to manipulate men and not just being looked at. Unfortunately, her character inhabits an environment where women's opportunities are limited.
Tori Amos once claimed to be "The queen of the nerds" or something like that. I think there's tremendous opportunity for women in tech, precisely because there are fewer women. Yes, physical attributes matter. Short men have a disadvantage where social dominance comes into play. Such disadvantages can also be exploited.
The Russian gals on the other hand are definitely accessories though. That's sketchy. That said, more than a few will take advantage of their opportunity and do something great with it.
As a woman, what bothers me is that we have to constantly tow the line between being beautiful and not taken seriously or being average/butch/unattractive and judged to be too serious. It's a problem because even the most open-minded men are still heavily influenced my a woman's appearance and will make assumptions about her business acumen and character based on that alone.
If you worry about 'towing the line' between beautiful and anything else, maybe its your own priorities that are the issue? Why is 'being beautiful' even in the equation? Because you put it there. So you have to deal with it. But its absolutely not other peoples' problem.
I'll be in my terminal.
It's great to have SOs that try to dig what you are into (mine does, and after a while started writing up HTML and CSS for side cash; starting to get into JavaScript too), but honestly dude writing about using hot girls that barely know what rails is to get contacts at tech events certainly doesn't make us look like upstanding gentlemen. It makes it look like we look towards girls as if they are objects, rather than interesting people. The whole theme of putting yourself on a level playing ground with super rich guys because they just can't buy a smart hot girl is offsetting too.
But whatever, my original comments downvoted anyways, so I'm probably wrong and just being too touchy.
The people whom I spoke with were from a large advertising agency that use Rails developers internally. I don't see any reason to see why she shouldn't be the life and soul of a party, she is a very beautiful and very smart woman, an intoxicating combination!
I seem to have touched a nerve with you re this post. I apologise, I did not mean to cause any offence.
S
1. Woman are crazy discerning about the men they hang around. 2. Smart men recognize this. 3. Therefore, if you see a high-value woman identifying a man as someone she thinks is worth her time, and you know she is crazy discerning about who she hangs out with, it's a safe bet that person is worth your time.
However, I don't form business relationships based on reproductive fitness. Most people interested in building a successful enterprise don't, either.
I will allow exceptions for sperm banks and male escort services, though.
I had just found out a day or two ago that a family member was severely discriminated against at work (it's all good though, she resolved it herself before telling us. When you work in tech you can often "prove" yourself right, which she did), so you're right about the touching a nerve thing.
Anyways, cheers! I know you meant no offense.
I have a friend who works in the call center at a day trading firm in Chicago. He's a sailor and the owner/founder of the firm has a boat so he gets long stretches of unfiltered time with the guy outside of work. The guy regularly affirms that they intentionally try to hire only HRI's ("hot russian immigrants") when they hire women because it boosts morale, makes hiring ambitious men easier and apparently exploits a small dip in the local hiring pool where the the immigrant women have a slightly harder time getting jobs at most places than the non-immigrant hotties they go up against elsewhere. My friend's firm found that going the extra mile to help them with visa status stuff meant they could get better looking women on staff than their competition.
Really?
When I see any argument start with this sentence, I immediately mistrust it. I suspect that world works in mysterious, complex, and ever changing ways, and that I get to be a part of shaping it.
I prefer:
"That's how things seem to be going right now. If you don't like it, there are probably others out there who feel the same. You could work with them to make it a little better. As you're working folks will tell you to just deal with it. Smile politely, ignore their advice, and keep working."
a: make it so that ANYBODY can get a hot woman, which makes having lots of hot women about useless
b: flood the industry with women. This is happening slowly, but you can't force it. Of course, if the balance tips towards women, then we'll just have the opposite, and having hot powerful handsome men around will replace hot women.
c: (myriad of ridiculous examples about fundamentally changing our species and the nature of sexuality)
You have to remember this isn't about sexism. It may well be sexist, but all it's about is having what all of your peers want but can't have makes you look powerful. It just so happens the most common want-but-can't-have is attractive women. "making it better" can only be achieved my removing the want.
Still, I'd observe this is tied to basic human nature & sexuality. Unlike slavery, as best I can tell it cannot be done away with, short of making it illegal for a man to have a hot woman/entourage of women present (totally not a sexist law, btw)
I bring up the parallel, again, not because it's an equivalent situation, but to illustrate what I think is a common ethical trap we can fall into: what good is it to see an injustice and wave our hands, saying that it's just the way the things are?
You suggested that the grandposter is blindly optimistic for wanting to change the way men relate to women in the workplace (or something like that), but think about how much has changed culturally, that we can have this conversation in 2010 and have it be basically a given that human bondage is morally wrong? It took a law in 1865, and it was controversial at the time. Today you have to be on the fringe of society in order to believe that it was ever morally defensible, presumably. That's not a triumph of law, it's a triumph of active social change.
I believe this issue is fundamentally rooted in sexuality, and I am deeply, deeply fearful of the day we attempt to legislate the nature of sexuality.
As for the question of our fundamental nature, we'll just have to leave it up to the philosophers. I appreciate your good natured debate, nonetheless.
You: "Slavery is a terrible thing."
Yes, I agree with your statement, but it went way beyond anything we're actually talking with in order to elicit agreement from readers. You characterized the previous comment as being pro-slavery, hence creating a strawman argument.
To take a more modern example, the same is true about compulsory military service. Many people once believed and many still believe that conscription is simply way cheaper than voluntary military service. However, the people that are drafted into the military service could instead have been involved in the productive work in the regular economy, and paying taxes that may be used to pay volunteers.
In short, "pure economics" doesn't automatically go in favour of slavery.
Slavery was a sustainable institution not just because it was perceived as cost-efficient. It required general acceptance of the idea that it's OK to deny certain classes of people -- e.g., according to their origin -- their basic rights. And that is pretty much about racism.
I argued that it is a fact that if you walk into an event with a cute girl on your arm. You will be treated differently by men AND women than if you walk into the event without a cute girl on your arm. This is how the world works.
It's why some people are streaky daters. When they've been single for awhile, they're always walking into rooms alone. But when they get some momentum going, men and women take notice and show more interest in that person, which can lead to more dating opportunities.
Agreed. Many folks confuse sex/sexuality with sexism. Sex != Sexism. Just as "not liking to hang out with gays" is not (necessarily) homophobia. You can not like a thing, or think it's unhealthy, even if you don't think it's a morally wrong or evil thing. Important distinction that people trip on all the time.
I'm assuming that by great you mean better than men are of women. What evidence do you have for this, apart from the dubious[1] field of evolutionary psychology? Also, could you define your terms better? What aspects of men are women great at judging? They are, after all, not psychic.
[1] http://www.badscience.net/category/evolutionary-psychology/
What? Women are terrible judges of men. Probably even worse than men are.
i.e., it's about sexism. what is it about the subject that makes otherwise-logical people say things like this?
I guess if you're dating her that's one thing, but as a general strategy? Replace "girlfriend" with "hot secretary"(or "athletic looking black man", feel free to get creative here) – I honestly don't see how is this somehow more tolerable than pitching to a potential investor without getting to know them first.
Also using the help of someone you are dating someone is completely different to 'pitching to a potential investor without getting to know them first' or 'being a people user' and I object to that. One does what one can to help a SO, there are many ways in which favours are returned.
S
Do not approach this man cold. He is mobbed at every networking event being one of the more visible people in the valley. Try to find one of his zillion advisors in the valley, get them to know you, and make an intro. He's completely different if you've been introduced by someone he trusts. Case in point is my co-founder meeting him in Japan and having the best meeting ever.
Perhaps the baying crowds of nerds were in the author's mind.
With someone like McClure or Arrington, the people approaching them want something specific. Their businesses are on the line, and the unwritten protocol is that you walk up to one of these men, give them your elevator pitch, and they make or break you. (If you were desperate to keep the metaphor going- maybe they're prostitutes? By this, I mean that when you walk up to them, you know what you want and they know what you want: 5 minutes of their time. Sure, they may be a hot girl, but it doesn't matter because it's a business transaction.)
The CFO, on the other hand, is more like a girl you would potentially want a relationship with. Very little good will come from pitching the CFO (or a movie star, etc). An example for me is Tim Ferriss- a bunch of people were standing and watching him outside at a conference he spoke at. I walked up and introduced myself, and he was one of the nicest guys I've ever met. If Tim Ferriss could make or break peoples careers, he'd have been mobbed, too.
I find that this is much more the norm for how successful networking. No one's going to argue with the babe.
"Because in your talk you do nothing but lay commands on people, like young society beauties who are regular tyrants as long as they are young and good-looking. And perhaps you have found me out already; I can't resist the handsome!"
The notion of young beautiful women in our society as having less attention than certain less attractive ones is completely wrong. Socrates was calling these beautiful woman tyrants because all men around them were showering them with whatever they wanted. Nothing has changed in the last 2000 years. The only hope for men is to join arms and completely ignore women, but this will never happen, until then they will call the shots until they get old, then they will be married to you, and then they will still call the shots.
That makes zero sense to me. Everybody gets old, beautiful women too, and for all of us it is a rude awakening. The relative difference between being young and old and being beautiful and average is smaller for 'beautiful or average' than for being young or old.
Do you berate the young too for 'being in for a rude awakening'?
Whatever you've got use your body to the best of its abilities, you'll never be able to recover time that you've lost and don't begrudge others the bodies they've got, after all you could have been even worse off, possibly lots worse. It's just a giant lottery.
To berate people for attributes they did not choose is just another form of jealousy.
edit: parent has removed the quoted passage
Should people that are born in to money discard it so they can live an average life in order not to offend? Should those that are beautiful spend their lives in burlap sacks lest they give offense to those less fortunate (Burka's?).
People don't 'depend' on their good looks, people simply use the tools that they've got and beauty in a society so focused on beauty is a very powerful tool.
The interesting thing here is that everybody else makes it in to a powerful thing, not the person having it, they just use the power granted.
But maybe attractive people have better minds too? That's a possibility - however (IMHO) outward attractiveness is more to do with genetic fitness (in the procreation sense), than creative fitness (in the meme generation sense). The evolution of ideas is whether the action is now... (at least that's what I'd like to believe)
My brother-in-law's sister was in Heathrow airport. She was in the bathroom with a woman who was initially dressed in a burka. She says that the woman she saw was was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen in her lifetime.
Beauty can hide - if it hides, is it still beauty? Or not as political?
As you say, really it's no different than any other undeserving attribute that can disappear, it just needs to be used wisely and seen for what it is. Money, looks, power - it can all be a gift or a curse depending on how you handle it.
Here's a possibility: author feels especially confident when beautiful women are around him. This confidence/happiness projects to other people (via mirror neurons / the amygdala / etc.). People find him more enjoyable and approachable.
To clarify, I don't claim that being surrounded by bad chicks isn't going to make you feel better about yourself. I suspect that possessing other kinds of cultural capital can do the trick.
Dating an attractive woman certainly implies that you have something going for you. Social proof and all that.
Pics or it didn't happen.
Other than the "Pics or it didn't happen" meme, he is raising the issue that the article is hugely anecdotal even though it seems like common sense. That is a valid point.
Maybe they don't want HN to become Reddit; after all, we've already got one Reddit, we don't need another.