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Comment by byrneseyeview | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I suppose that if this is really true, and you're confident that women are systematically undervalued by employers and VCs, you can exploit that opportunity.

If you don't think this is true, but you still feel some kind of partisan attachment to the idea that men and women will achieve equal results in equivalent endeavors, you'll probably write a Huffpo article about it.

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I do.

Half my team is stay-at-home moms. The tech industry seems to believe that becoming parents has addled their brains. I'm pretty sure that engineering degrees from top colleges and a PhD in robotics from Oxford can survive formula and spit-up.

The stay-at-home part works even better. I think that most people only have about 4 hours of actual work in them -- the sort of serious analytical thinking required to write code. By working with stay-at-home parents, they happily give me 100% of that time every day, and I only compensate them for that much.

In contrast, most folks (myself included!) get paid 8h/day for only 4h of coding.

What's your point, again? Is it that the article was written in HuffPo, therefore it's wrong? Or is it that anyone who writes an article on gender imbalance must not really believe in it, because otherwise they'd be exploiting the problem, instead of wasting their time writing?

I'm just trying to figure out which logical fallacy you're advancing.

I think the point was something like "put up or shut up". If there's a lot of capable, motivated women out there who aren't getting the attention they deserve, then the best way to make the point is to go find them, hire or fund them, and make a lot of money which you can rub in the face of the people who ignored the female talent. (Similarly, one can tell people who bloviate about politics to go put money down on InTrade.)

That noone is doing such is weak evidence that, perhaps, the cause of the gender skew is not simply subtle endemic sexism as is often assumed. Note: This does not imply that the reason is something as trite as "women can't do technology", either.

That is: if it were true that expected talent/dollars is greater in women than in men, and this is widely known public knowledge, then why do no tech companies select for women over men in their own self interest?

Possible answers could include: 1) They do, but you realize it.

2) They do, but you don't know about it.

3) They don't, because the premise is false, because women are not undervalued.

3) They don't, because the premise is true, because women are not selected over men despite having a higher talent/dollar value.

4) They don't, because organizations of people are not rational economic decision machines, or values like "talent / dollar" are too vague to be pre-test predictive of individual productivity, or "self interest" is not necessarily defined by maximizing economic exchanges, or that men already in tech simply know other men better and so tend to work with other men.

If 4) is true, it's not equally true for every company. Meritocracy varies from one organization to another. And the more meritocratic organizations will tend to be more successful. So choice four is just choices one through three, delayed.

That's an obvious straw man, and it's an ad hominem too (you're suggesting that because the author hasn't done something about the problem, her argument must be wrong). What nonsense.

The author is a journalist, not a VC. What's she supposed to do? Fund female entrepreneurs herself? And the fact that she hasn't -- that she wrote this article "instead" -- that's supposed to indicate that she's wrong? And for that matter...how do you know that she hasn't started such a project? You don't.

In case you're unclear, you're suggesting that the first of the two logical fallacies I presented is correct. Rephrasing it doesn't make it more correct.

Is it that the article was written in HuffPo, therefore it's wrong?

No, but that there are very few opportunities best exploited by writing about them on Huffpo.

Or is it that anyone who writes an article on gender imbalance must not really believe in it, because otherwise they'd be exploiting the problem, instead of wasting their time writing?

Closer. In a free market, any legitimate complaint can be restated as a business plan. "This doesn't work as well as it should" = "I could do it better." "This is overpriced" = "I could dominate the market by selling it for less." "Women are underpaid" = "I could hire qualified women for less than you'd have to pay men."

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