The Old Boys' Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap | Hacker News Reader

The Old Boys' Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap

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72 pointsDowwie93 comments

The study showed that men under men got promoted faster than men under women, but that women rose at the same rate under both genders. This could be explained by a male advantage under men, but it could also be explained by male disadvantage under women, or a combination of both. How can these cases be separated? (The study might address this, I only have access to the abstract.)

It looks to be available by clicking the Read Now button: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Cullen%20and...

It's 45 pages so I can't read it until later, but maybe someone else can.

It's an interesting question.

My purely anecdotal experience is that women (in both business and personal lives) are more likely to have protracted conflicts with other women at work than men.

I always wonder how that plays out / if it is even true.

Perhaps we just hear about it more. I know men that never got along, years of conflict. And the absolute worst, is when a man gets it into his head that he despises a women (usually for speaking up to him). There's no end to the retribution.

Yeah it very well could be a visibility issue where it seems more prevalent than it is.

Possibly the visibility is somehow seen by some as a negative.

> And the absolute worst, is when a man gets it into his head that he despises a women (usually for speaking up to him). There's no end to the retribution.

s/a woman/an employee/

I’ve seen more male careers hampered by vindictive bosses than female.

Of course. Since men outnumber women in pretty much any industry.

There are a lot of industries where men outnumber women, but it's very far from "pretty much any."

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm

Just by eyeballing this chart, I'd say that women outnumber men in at least a quarter of the categories, and I'd bet there are close to another quarter that are pretty close to 50/50, where inferences drawn from the behaviors of the genders wouldn't be wrong solely because of the distribution of men and women. And given that the total percentage of women employed is 46%, many of the male dominated fields have to be offset by female dominated fields or else it wouldn't be close to 50/50.

This isn't to say there is anything like perfect equality, but men outnumbering women in pretty much any industry is much too strong of a statement, in my opinion.

That chart shows the overwhelming number of occupations dominated by men. Are we reading the same chart? Retail sales, child care are mostly women (and the lowest paid), sure.

Joe, I don't mean any offense, but I think your view of what the current field of working people looks like is severely out of date. In my age group slightly more women work than men, industry aside.

Something like 50M American women work fulltime year-round jobs. That's something like 55% of the working-age women in America. Men of that age work at nearly 70%. So different, but not as much as I'd thought.

If we get into the level of jobs women work, it gets very different.

The study would suggest that if such conflicts occur at the institution in question and such conflicts have the gender bias of your experience, that they have no bearing on promotion.

My wife and some female co-workers have said something similar. They said that when they see men get in disagreements, it normally escalates very quickly, but once the conflict is resolved it's like it never happened. They said the opposite happens with female employees, where the "conflict" never gets as intense, but it can go on for years with both sides not wanting to help each other.

Might be related to how boys' play tends to be (I think) more often explicitly about selecting winners and losers, so most men are quite accustomed to defeat. Feminism, when it laments about how men are brought up into dominance roles, is conveniently ignoring all those men who did learn that lesson.

This is basically the most important single point tacitly ignored by the most vocal feminist activists. E.g. if there is psychopath male who is hurting people, he is hurting both males and females alike, although maybe in different ways. And there are are more male psychopaths and aggressive men than women. But this does NOT equal "women are the victims of men".

You can see it on children schools too.

I wonder if any culture has this differently.

it is a recuring observation in gender related articles, that crucial facts are left out when they are evidence of gender bias against men, ore even when they are just a piece of the puzzle that will prevent you from jumping to the "all men bad, women suffer" conclusion. when data or facts are obviously missing it is therefor good advice to assume they are left out for a reason and will probably go against the authors desired interpretation. alternatively one can conclude its just a bad study.

This is just part of the larger pattern of anti-male expression in the media. It's remarkably consistent.

If there's a study about differences between men and women, it will only be published if it can be spun such that the women are better.

In a sitcom, the husband will always be the dunce of the family, and the wife is always the steady, responsible one.

If there's a problem affecting genders differently, it'll always be presented as affecting the women more, while the men's suffering is simply ignored. This can reach absurd levels. E.g. Women's share of university degrees recently passed 60%. The media spin? "It's so terrible these women won't be able to find men educated enough to satisfy them."

The reason is simple. All these academics and journalists are under watch from cultural police. If any of them ever wrote something that indicated men were better in any way or context, or were victimized by women in any way, they'd be subjects to a brutal and likely cryptic personal destruction campaign by feminist activists.

>All these academics and journalists are under watch from cultural police. If any of them ever wrote something that indicated men were better in any way or context, or were victimized by women in any way, they'd be subjects to a brutal and likely cryptic personal destruction campaign by feminist activists

While this sentiment is true in extreme cases, I think the problem is more subtle. What we are seeing is the momentum of decades of institutional bias in soft science academia. The current status quo is propped up by activist researchers who believe in what they're doing and are either unaware of the bias in their research or believe it is acceptable in consideration of the greater good.

So if you attempt to publish a paper against the political grain of your discipline, you may not be attacked by Twitter feminists, but you will likely see support from colleagues in your department wane, and your academic career could suffer as a result. This implicitly keeps people "in line".

While I think you are largely correct, there's also a more general effect that contributes and magnifies this, the "women are wonderful" effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_are_wonderful_effect

Ironic that the talk page for that article shows these kinds of activists blindly (or with feigned ignorance) injecting the bias we've been discussing into what should be a short, objective wiki page.

once you start noticing these things, confirmation bias kicks in and you can never stop noticing them. it's important to be aware of the Chinese robber fallacy (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...)

in an era where news is constant and instantaneously accessible, it's easy to find an almost limitless source of examples to support basically any narrative - and humans have a tendency to prefer narratives in which their ingroup is the victim. the plural of anecdote often turns out to be a victim complex. I think it's important to try to avoid this tendency. Those who are truly intellectually honest know that there's no battle between the evil aggressors and the blameless victims, there's a bunch of shitty people and nice people doing nice things and shitty things and mostly responding to local incentives.

"In a sitcom, the husband will always be the dunce of the family, and the wife is always the steady, responsible one."

It is even way more outspoken in media programing aimed at children where positive male rolemodels are almost completely absent.

The entire study is not very interesting. They studied a single bank in Asia with "thousands of employees." They don't name the bank. They don't even name the country. They make no attempt to address cultural differences. They disclaim that the study is representative of the world, but then offer some mental gymnastics which imply without actually suggesting that it represents the US because of the country's similarity to the US in gender employment numbers and attitudes.

It is very common in social science research to anonymize participants by not revealing their location. This is an important ethical rule that is used to protect participants’ data. I believe that is why these authors were unclear about the bank.

That doesn't make their claim that their results for an Asian country are representative for the US any less suspect. Asian and Western cultures are very different. These are not anecdotal observations mind you - it's well documented that psychological/sociological experiment results differ by culture: https://www.psychologistworld.com/issues/cultural-difference...

It's quite bizarre - if they refuse to name the actual country where the study took place, then why compare it to the US? Why not to Russia or Brazil, or some other random country, drawn out of a hat?

Why even include "old boys' club", in the title, when that's a term mostly associated with the anglosphere? Wouldn't "Guanxi [1]: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap" be more appropriate, given that the study took place in Asia?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi

> The entire study is not very interesting.

The study still has value even if they didn't perfectly study 100% of the world. It provides a useful datapoint for other researchers to build upon.

You try doing a large-scale study at multiple companies on multiple continents at once, then. Your comment suggests you don't really understand the immense challenge of doing sociological work in a way that's both ethical and useful.

>Your comment suggests you don't really understand the immense challenge of doing sociological work in a way that's both ethical and useful.

The fact that something is immensely difficult doesn't make success more likely, it makes it less likely. The parent comment is saying that the study didn't achieve success, which is supported by your claim that sociological work is up against tremendous challenges.

An analogy would be if someone claimed to invent a perpetual motion machine, and then responded to someone who was saying that their machine didn't work with, "you try building one, then."

The study was very upfront about the limitations.

A better analogy would be someone trying to debunk the theory of relativity by claiming it doesn't cover perpetual motion machines.

> The study was very upfront about the limitations.

That's an overly generous interpretation of their comments. See deogeo's post with some questions about why many of these things are even mentioned in the paper. Where they were upfront has already been acknowledged--by me. My criticisms were where they implied, but did not support a comparison to US-based finance companies generally. Here they were 'upfront' but they shrank what should be several papers worth of arguments into a single word: 'similar'.

> A better analogy would be someone trying to debunk the theory of relativity by claiming it doesn't cover perpetual motion machines.

If you think this is a better analogy, you've missed the point entirely.

You're beginning to sound like a conspiracy nut. The paper is very upfront that more studies should be done in other countries:

"the data necessary for the analysis, such as paygrades, demographics and manager assignments, are probably available for most large organizations. We hope this methodology will be applied to other firms, countries, and industries, which will help to generalize the findings and identify where these biases are more or less problematic"

> You're beginning to sound like a conspiracy nut.

If I sound that way to you, it's probably because of your own biases.

> The paper is very upfront that more studies should be done in other countries:

You aren't even addressing the part of the paper I criticized. You haven't even acknowledged it exists, but you expect to, what, convince me or others that I'm wrong by throwing random quotes my way and calling me names?

The quote I provided shows that the authors want other people to study the US or other countries to see if the results apply in a general manner. The paper in no way attempts to generalize the US other than that large companies typically track the sorts of data which would make similar studies possible.

> The paper in no way attempts to generalize the US other than that large companies typically track the sorts of data which would make similar studies possible.

In the section 3.1 Institutional Context, the paper explicitly compares the bank and the country to firms in the United States and the United States respectively over a handful of values. There's no explanation given for why the United States specifically was compared against nor is rationale given for the selection or exclusion of points of comparison. A reader has to conclude that they felt these were the relevant points of comparison because these were the things likely to affect their results.

This necessarily implies generalization. Any other interpretation can only make sense if we disbelieve their results or find their comparison criteria between firms and countries lacking.

Also from that section "we do not want to claim that the evidence is representative of the world"

I acknowledged that disclaimer in my first post and in some of my subsequent posts. I really think you're arguing in bad faith here.

>They studied a single bank in Asia with "thousands of employees." [...] They make no attempt to address cultural differences. They disclaim that the study is representative of the world, but then offer some mental gymnastics which imply without actually suggesting that it represents the US because of the country's similarity to the US in gender employment numbers and attitudes.

>Your comment suggests you don't really understand the immense challenge of doing sociological work in a way that's both ethical and useful.

The fact that it is immensely challenging does not make the assumptions any less liable to be false. Please re-read GP's comment and refrain from attacking him/her on a personal level.

One of the reasons it is difficult to produce useful sociological work is because sociology itself has questionable foundations.

The "streetlight effect"[0] appears alive and well among sociologists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

Well its all relative but even the abstract starts to add more nuance than you've listed here.

>We show that these manager effects are present only if the employee works in close proximity to the manager.

If remote male managers are equivalent to local female managers, it seems natural to phrase it as they have done.

When I hear about studies like this (about hot issues) it always makes me wonder what sort of studies that go against the current social norms are not being published because they make some people uncomfortable. Most of the pop science these days seems to be about confirming existing biases/assumptions of the current zeitgeist.

The Journal of Controversial Ideas will hopefully address this somewhat:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/philosophers-...

Problem is that a big part of the incentivization structure of the scientific world relies on citation counts. Publishing anonymously doesn't give you any credits. This is part of the reason why experiments with negative results often never get published[1]. Writing a scientific paper takes time—which could be instead used to write the next high-impact paper.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias

For issues such as this, results in either direction will make some people uncomfortable or even angry. Some people will be enraged by the suggestion there is systemic bias against women, while other people will be enraged by the suggestion that there isn't. This is what makes the issue a "hot button" or flame bait issue.

Regardless of which side of the fence you're on, what's considered acceptable is just a matter of cultural norms within a given context or group of people at a specific time. If you don't agree with that cultural norm, then you're "the bad guy".

The real issue is people becoming “enraged” in response to reading something on the internet. We can hardly control what comes to our attention. By responding emotionally to anything that rises to our attention, we cede control of our emotions to outside actors.

Only if you don't consider bias an actual problem. If it is an actual problem then surely that would be the "the real issue", not the secondary effect of people getting angry about it?

Results in either direction will make some people angry, but the power differential in terms of who will actually punish dissenters is obvious. One of those sides gets you fired for arguing it respectfully in good faith (e.g. Damore) and the other doesn't.

More evidence is the asymmetry in your own statement:

>Some people will be enraged by the suggesting that there is systemic bias against women, while other people will be enraged by the suggestion that there isn't.

You never even acknowledge the possibility that someone could think there's a systemic bias against men.

There's one case I know of: stereotype threat. It was found that there was a significant amount of publication bias in favor of the stereotype threat being significant. Despite larger, better funded studies finding it to be barely anything to absolutely nothing, it is still being blamed for disparities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Publication_...

> We collaborated with a large commercial bank in Asia that has millions of customers, billions of dollars in assets and in revenues, and thousands of employees.

I don't know that using an Asian bank for the study is going to give you results that translate at all to the western world. Very different business and interpersonal cultures.

The study seems pretty biased from the get go. They claim that lack of female participation at the higher levels of the corporate food chain is due to discrimination without even talking about women dropping out of the workplace at a higher rate to have children (or any other conflicting points of view). Seems like junk "science".

> The claim that lack of female participation at the higher levels of the corporate food chain are due to discrimination without even talking about women dropping out of the workplace at a higher rate to have children (or any other conflicting points of view).

Is that not a form of discrimination? Men have kids and still get promoted.

If it's voluntary, it's not discrimination. Men have kids, but they don't quit their jobs to become stay at home dads at nearly the rate women do.

Well there's a difference between having kids and staying at home.

Even so, you can still point to the discrimination being traditional gender roles, where women are the ones who typically stay at home. Or even to the economy itself; we don't value raising kids as much as we value rising through the ranks of management at some cooperation.

> Even so, you can still point to the discrimination being traditional gender roles, where women are the ones who typically stay at home. Or even to the economy itself; we don't value raising kids as much as we value rising through the ranks of management at some cooperation.

Aren't these statements at odd with one another? When you value raising kids at or above office work, then it doesn't look like "discrimination" that women chose to stay at home to raise a family, it looks like a personal choice that's highly valued by many. I think being a CEO or being a grandparent can both be viewed as successful in our society, they shouldn't really be compared directly though.

> When you value raising kids at or above office work, then it doesn't look like "discrimination" that women chose to stay at home to raise a family, it looks like a personal choice that's highly valued by many.

Yeah exactly, the problem goes away. You don't make money being a stay at home mom though, so maybe that's why we consider it a problem, IDK.

I was just offering a couple of ways to look at it where it's still discriminatory. Not saying I agree with either. There has to be a reason somewhere that women aren't as represented in upper management, and when you find that reason you can call it discriminatory, if you think that being upper management is a desirable thing. If you don't then the discrimination isn't bad or you don't consider it discrimination, as you pointed out. Economically, being upper management is certainly good though. That's basically objective.

Also it's rather insulting to say that men progressing through their careers means they don't want to raise their children. I would say many, if not most, men rise strive for promotion for no other reason than to raise their children better...

I meant economically. We don't pay people to raise kids.

Surely a man who is successful in his career can support his children in many ways. This is undoubtedly important to many men.

But most men who strive for promotions surely have many reasons other than their children. Who doesn't want {appreciation, autonomy, status, money, ...} just for the sake of their own ego, identity, power, etc.?

It's not completely voluntary. Men are discouraged from leaving the workforce, due to societal norms, and receive less time off or accommodations for raising kids.

I think you missed the key difference where men don’t nearly as frequently drop out of the workplace to have them.

> Is that not a form of discrimination? Men have kids and still get promoted.

Worse than that, I fear that the old-fashioned stay-at-home wife and children is even an unspoken (and unconscious) promotion qualification in many organisations.

Sometimes it's even semi-formalized: a glass ceiling for people who never lived abroad on a company project assignment, combined with an informal policy to not send unmarried people because they get too distracted by the locals. The result is higher ranks uniformly filled with people with spouses that don't have a career of their own that they can't easily shift abroad (or put on hold) for the duration of the assignment.

Any time a business paper makes grand claims about the data they collected by referencing things that don't matter (billions of dollars?), it's a good sign the conclusion is BS.

> I don't know that using an Asian bank for the study is going to give you results that translate at all to the western world. Very different business and interpersonal cultures.

This is by the way how most online studies look when you’re not in the US. The incredible amount of studies done in the US but presented as general facts about humanity is staggering.

It’s of course because US researchers make a ton of valuable research, it still makes it super weird when Japanese magazine rely on US results for psychological studies for instance.

> They claim that lack of female participation at the higher levels of the corporate food chain is due to discrimination without even talking about women dropping out of the workplace at a higher rate to have children (or any other conflicting points of view). Seems like junk "science".

From the article:

> Female employees, on the contrary, have the same career progression regardless of the manager’s gender.

I read it as women who don’t drop careers are accounted and don’t disprove the point.

>based on the anecdotal evidence that employees who smoke tend to spend more time together. We find that when male employees who smoke switch to male managers who smoke, they spend more of their breaks with their managers and are promoted faster in the following years.

One possible subtext of this is that men are much more susceptible to promoting those that befriend them than anything else.

Sure punches a hole in the old (but not necessarily correct!) cultural adage that women are predominantly the approval-seeking gender.

Depending on what the interactions are like, it might fit well with the stereotype of men being extremely vulnerable to even blatant ego-stroking.

There is quite a difference between friendship and approval-seeking, in fact one of the quickest ways to end a friendship with a man is to keep seeking approval from them.

As a developer the traditional Old Boys clubs (Freemasons, Rotary, Golf club etc.) don't really appeal to me as they seem outdated or for traditional professions, are they still relevant?

Is there a freemasons equivalent for the tech scene?

Are there masons in Silicon Valley?

Maybe we could create a new society, the SiliconMasons, FreeBSDers? :P

Sad to say this, but if you have to ask, it's likely part of the reason you're not a member. The societies certainly still exist, and the relationships that are built there continue from higher education pedigree-ing to drive high-level capital allocation. You'll most closely see this in the management and leadership structure at large companies and venture capital firms.

Folks try with varying attempts to create powerful secret societies in today's highly digital age, but they continue to be successful for the same reasons they always were -- the patronage of the wealthy and powerful. The highly stratified economic classes in the tech scene ensure this would remain the case.

If you're not part of this class but want to look into collective action, what you're looking for may not be a masonic society but a union.

This would be to misunderstand what those organizations are and the purposes they serve.

I heartily recommend checking out one of those organizations in your area. By design it is quite difficult for dishonest men to get into them. Quite possibly, this is why they are dying out.

The "old boys" clubs you mentioned don't exist just for the sake of gaining power. The network just comes naturally as a side-effect of repeated contact with trustworthy people with similar altruistic goals.

For example, a stated goal of Freemasonry is "to make good men better." The stated motto of Rotary is "service above self" (and btw, Rotary accepts both men and women). Both organizations have a significant community service aspect, and if you showed zero interest in service and expressed desire to join solely for personal gain, you'd likely get rejected. Likewise with Lions Clubs.

Can't comment on golf clubs since I have zero experience with them.

I'm sure the comments will be awash with meta-discussion about social justice but I just want to point out the article does give evidence to some career advice I've always had.

Take a coffee break with your boss's smoke break. Daily, relaxed, and agenda free one on one meetings with your seniors/bosses will do wonders.

Outstanding advice. Now, how do I get my boss to start smoking?

In my first office job I remember thinking that I should take up smoking, not just because my coworkers were heading downstairs all the time to take breaks, but because the HR higher-ups were smokers too. My office-mates who smoked always had the latest office gossip and knew what was coming down the pike long before the rest of us!

Side point is that it's hard to believe that there isn't a group of women who got promoted or advanced because the men they worked under found them appealing or nice to be around (in a non sexual relationship way).

Non-smokers are being discriminated against! I call foul! ;-)

Looks like a business opportunity. Implement an organizational structure which corrects for socialization effects in promotion decisions and you will gain a competitive advantage over the majority of firms.

It's a business. I imagine people will optimize for social effects insted of trying to negate them. It might even be a better system.

Those businesses that do will lose market share. Efficiency is the only mediator of resource accumulation in an economy where market participants are free to choose among products offered and must bear the cost of their own market purchases.

>Efficiency is the only mediator of resource accumulation in an economy...

There are no completely free markets in existence though.

Are you claiming google will be destroyed because slightly fewer women are promoted. More likely their profit might be marginally lower. Which changes nothing

Things would slowly change on an economy-wide basis as firms start exploiting any governance method that results in superior promotion decisions. The natural monopolies like Google would be the slowest and hardest to change, but most of the economy doesn't consist of them.

How quaint. Let me describe a lesson patently obvious to anyone who has sat in on enterprise sales at a scaling B2B startup.

An economy "here market participants are free to choose among products offered and must bear the cost of their own market purchases" is certainly not the one that exists in the USA or the other largest nation-states by GDP. Here, as is there, a complex interplay of central and state-level government ensures monopolistic or monopsonistic consolidation occurs, drives, and many would say manipulates market motions. This isn't to say that efficiency doesn't mediate resource accumulation or allocation; far from it. But it's certainly not a rule for how contracts are decided and resources allocated.

Practices that help shy nerds contribute are very important in any tech company and those same practices (being nice, not yelling in meetings, asking everyone's opinion, and so on) are indistinguishable from the things that we're told to do to make women feel welcome. Obviously there are women out there that can shout down the best of them, but due to the relative prevalence of that personality style in each gender, shouting has gotten attached in the public consciousness to men, and being shy to women. That's why being nice in the workplace is considered a gender issue, even though there's nothing inherently gendered about it.

Easier said than done though. Such biases are typically not conscious, so everyone already think they are being unbiased in promotions.

Studies like this bring awareness that gives an opportunity for forward-thinking entrepeneurs and investors to gain a market edge.

And probably completely irrelevant if managers know the person to be promoted directly. You don't rely on biases, you rely on the info you have on that person. Maybe relevant in huge companies, but I would doubt that too.

> You don't rely on biases, you rely on the info you have on that person.

Well this is the crux of the problem. Do you really rely on an objective evaluation, or are you influenced by cues which you think indicates competency but actually just (say) indicate class or subculture background?

The bar is so much lower for men than for women. For a man to be promoted by another man all you have to do is enjoy going out for a beer (or as the article mentions a smoke). This is not some societal male backlash, it is actually how things work. The level of incompetence that a man can exhibit and still get promoted is astounding. Probably the reason why women promote men less frequently is that women have higher standards, since they themselves are held to higher standards.

That's not even remotely true.

Yeah, I definitely sense some saltiness in the parent comment. While he is right that it is totally possible to encounter such a workplace, i would argue that if you control for the gender disparity in the workplace, it becomes just as likely to encounter such a situation, but with genders switched. And even then, neither of those two scenarios are more likely than just straight up a regular workplace where a boss straight up doesn’t care about your gender and promotes based on the usual “business impact, performance, team impact” metrics.

I realize this is just an anecdote, but my previous team was over 50% women (the boss was a female as well), while my current team is much more male dominated, and i have noticed pretty much zero differences when it comes to promotions and the breakdown of those when it comes to gender. Talking about my old team, it had the typical subgroups, like high performers who got promoted fast, slightly slower performers, people who were temporarily in a performance rut (who eventually got out of it), etc. And I observed no anomalies in gender disparities between all those groups, as they were pretty gender balanced and (imo) very fair, given my knowledge.

A good reason why they had to make a throwaway. Comment was pure troll bait.

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