6 ms·

RescueTime (YC 08) Data: Are Men more Productive than Women?

73 points by webwright 16y ago

snikolov 16y ago
more time working does not necessarily amount to more productivity.
hackermom 16y ago
I'm pretty sure all of this has a logical explanation to it, most likely involving the time women spend giving birth by the stove in the kitchen.
- hko 16y ago
  If there is a significant trend here, it would be better to explore it than to try to suppress exploration with dismissive witticisms.
btilly 16y ago
Given that people choose to install this because they think they have a problem, I'd be curious how much selection bias there is in their sample set.
- orborde 16y ago
  Yes, it seems quite plausible that RescueTime is best known among technology types, who tend to be male.
  - webwright 16y ago
    I can tell you that's not the case for THIS particular data set. There was data from 4,000 men and 4,000 women, randomly selected. But yeah, we do have a 5 to 1 male to female ratio and a geekier than average audience.
    - dmn001 16y ago
      I used RescueTime for a few weeks because I had a problem with time management, as soon as that phase was over I uninstalled it mainly due to privacy concerns. I wonder how many people have a usage pattern similar to this, and what the average usage time is?
    - iskander 16y ago
      Sampling from biased populations does not remove bias.
      - webwright 16y ago
        He said that our population tended to be male, I agreed and said that we selected an equal # of men/women. I'm not a statistics god, but doesn't that account for that particular bias? There are certainly others-- we'd be the last people to say that this represents a perfect cross-section of society. Given that we selected 4,000 man and 4,000 women (randomly), how does the preponderance of men in our broader dataset effect this particular analysis? Sorry if I'm being obtuse-- I didn't do the actual analysis and I'm really pretty rusty on my stats.
        nod 16y ago
        I think the parent probably meant the "they think they have a problem" bias. Though, that's not why I use RescueTime - I just love data. (And by the way, would love to download the fine-grained CSV for all of my activity for all time)
        btilly 16y ago
        If you have a product that is more attractive to men than women, then the women who find it attractive are unlikely to be typical for the larger population. So yes, you've adjusted for the tendency to have more men than women. But you still haven't wound up with a random sampling of people out there. To get that you'd have to select a random set of people, ask them to participate in your study, and go from there. Which would immediately hit you with the fact that over half of the USA is functionally illiterate and therefore does not use computers very much.
andreyf 16y ago
Why shopping and facebook? Both of those seem to favor women over men (in time spent, not in % who have accounts)... What about hacker news, prog.reddit, github, LtU, Lostpedia, porn, news.google.com, etc? Factor those in, and the numbers might come out quite different. What about programming projects that I happen to be reading/forking/coding which are unrelated to work? From my anecdotal experience (mostly in software development), women focus significantly better than men on the work-related tasks.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  From the article: "Men have their distractions, too. They spend about 15% more of their time reading the news than women." It would have been useful if the article indicated how much time is actually spent on news sites, rather than simply the relative differences.
  - webwright 16y ago
    To add to your response: we didn't put it in the post, but the stats on the "reference" category (where things like dictionaries and code resources live) were pretty close (7.41% for women, 7.15% for me).
jquery 16y ago
This is a doozy. I think this really deserves much, much more research.
- mynameishere 16y ago
  "Theory of gravity", "Theory of relativity", everything in between. Research complete.
d0mine 16y ago
Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do. Interestingly, the National Committee on Pay Equity found that women earn 77% of what their male counter parts do. </quote>
- FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
  I've always been interested in these kind of data. Are women earning only 77% of their male counterparts because a) They are primarily employed in occupations that pay less b) They take maternity leave and/or extended vacations/time off (taking care of children etc.) or c) Women are just paid less for the same work?
  - run4yourlives 16y ago
    I think the strong correlation presented in the parent comment suggests that women actually work 77% of the time that men do, period. Whether that is actually true, or - even better - relates in any way to productivity is out of scope here.
  - krschultz 16y ago
    A is the primary reason. B is true, but it is not so much that women take time off and are therefore paid less, it is that women take time off and miss out on a few rounds of promotions and get behind a bit. You only take 5 years out of a 40 year career, but you might take out two of the total promotions and that adds up to a lot. C happens but rarely in the US is it that a woman makes 77% of a man for exactly the same occupation, the difference might be 5-10% but not 23%.
    - webwright 16y ago
      That's a good point. I recall reading a study that men who take time off to be stay-at-home dads have a similar pay/promotion hit (not QUITE as much, but pretty close).
corruption 16y ago
Please could you publish the raw anonymised data, or at least give us estimates of the variation? Without that, the data are meaningless.
bfung 16y ago
A big thing missing is the context of the work. Perhaps not spending time at the computer and "socializing", distributing information, is actually more productive, or even a bullet point on the person's job description. I think a more accurate description for this blog post is "Men spend their time working on computers more than women".
- kpanghmc 16y ago
  This is a good point. If you're a marketing exec or advertiser for instance, being on Facebook or shopping sites may indeed be part of your job.
- webwright 16y ago
  Yaw... To be perfectly forthright there was some discussion around accurate titles versus titles that are clickworthy. Obviously, it's a hard discussion that happens at every blog and newspaper in the country that cares about traffic. We tried to qualify the heck out of the data (while still being provocative) in the body of the post... And even more in the comments of the post. I hope we did a good enough job!
  - bfung 16y ago
    From some of the heated discussions on this thread, i think you guys were successful at doing that. =)
wisty 16y ago
So men are generally (slightly) more productive at computer-related tasks, based on time working vs procrastination time. But computers are communication devices (in most cases), and women are generally more productive communicators. So they limited time they spent working on computers is probably more valuable.
krschultz 16y ago
Lies damn lies and statistics. 1) Does it surprise anyone that they have 5x as many men as women as users? I wonder if you broke down by occupation what percentage of their users are software developers and engineers compared to others? 2) It's not a random sample. While they say "The data for this report was compiled from 8,000 randomly selected men and women", it is not of all people, it is of their users. Those are two vastly different things. 3) "All this adds up to huge differences in the amount of knowledge work men get done compared to women. Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do. Interestingly, the National Committee on Pay Equity found that women earn 77% of what their male counter parts do." is one of the dumbest comments I have ever seen in my life. THEIR TOOL DOESN'T CATCH ALL WORK. I stopped using it because it is utterly useless if you step away from the computer and are productive in that time. They are saying "Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do. [in front of computers]" Dropping out the in front of computers part is huge. Is the President of the United States a knowledge worker? Because he doesn't have a computer on his desk and therefore would be 0% as productive as someone doing data entry according to this methodology. For that matter, me sitting in front of my computer all day with Eclipse open (no matter how much I actually commit) is more productive than my dad, a CEO, who spends a lot of his time with a pad of paper out talking to people. Hmmmmmm. I understand that this tool has its place, but to say something so outrageously false really casts the company as a whole in a bad light. Blogging this was poor judgement. At best it is just some dumb people who don't understand data, at worst it is offensive.
- webwright 16y ago
  I think you should re-read the post. The phrase "on his/her/their computers" is repeated 4 times in the (fairly short) post. I think it's pretty clear that this doesn't apply when comparing a pad/paper CEO and an engineer. And we very purposefully didn't draw any conclusions (though we did admittedly ask leading questions to fuel the conversation!). We say a few times in the comments that this could well be a reflection of the types of jobs that the 4000 women have compared to the 4000 men-- they may have more social jobs or more "afk" jobs. It'd be an interesting followup to grab 1000 female engineers and 1000 man engineers to see if the differences hold up. I don't know if it will, but what if it did? Would it be so horrible if women were less suited for multitasking and knowledge work? Because they sure as heck are better at a lot of other things. They're, on average, smarter than men. They have better reflexes. Check out "Is there anything good about men" - great essay: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm If they WERE less suited for it, it would be interesting to see how much culture and education influenced their suitability. i.e. Does the difference fade away if you correct for educational differences, etc. At the end of the day, it's just an interesting chunk of from a single web service that has a very strong bias towards geeky users.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
drawkbox 16y ago
Some people might misinterpret this but it is very interesting data. I think it is more fun than being damning. I put it in the same category as the studies that say what a mother and work at home mom do are worth 130k+. I personally love RescueTime and subscribe, it has helped me immensely in managing my own time better. So while some may get angry, I find the data useful and the service even more so. I think they were just trying to draw some traffic and get some more customers to help. The only people I have shown that don't like RescueTime are the ones that seem to figure out how little work they actually do once they start using it. It surely opens your eyes to your non productive time on the computer.
waxman 16y ago
3 observations: - Brilliant execution of two 37Signals principles/generally smart start-up strategies (advertise like a chef (give away your information), and pick a fight) - If this product doesn't "scratch an itch" / solve a real problem (people wasting time on computers) I don't know what does - RescueTime is awesome
danteembermage 16y ago
Do you have an embedded economist? I'm volunteering but if you really want to get a ton of PR out of this you might try some famous empirical micro guys (this article would make a great Freakonomics chapter) . Cold calling with "I have unique data" won't offend anyone.
Jd 16y ago
More data less commentary please.
robryan 16y ago
What would be useful, not that I have looked into this to much to know that it isn't possible. Would be to group the time spent on HN with the time spent on anything linked from HN. It's hard to know how much time I spend on HN/HN articles. Great tool though, RescueTime and DropBox are the two ycombinator companies which I could instantly see a use for in my everyday work.

73 points by webwright 16y ago

more time working does not necessarily amount to more productivity.

I'm pretty sure all of this has a logical explanation to it, most likely involving the time women spend giving birth by the stove in the kitchen.

hko 16y ago
If there is a significant trend here, it would be better to explore it than to try to suppress exploration with dismissive witticisms.

btilly 16y ago

Given that people choose to install this because they think they have a problem, I'd be curious how much selection bias there is in their sample set.

orborde 16y ago
Yes, it seems quite plausible that RescueTime is best known among technology types, who tend to be male.
- webwright 16y ago
  I can tell you that's not the case for THIS particular data set. There was data from 4,000 men and 4,000 women, randomly selected. But yeah, we do have a 5 to 1 male to female ratio and a geekier than average audience.
  - dmn001 16y ago
    I used RescueTime for a few weeks because I had a problem with time management, as soon as that phase was over I uninstalled it mainly due to privacy concerns. I wonder how many people have a usage pattern similar to this, and what the average usage time is?
  - iskander 16y ago
    Sampling from biased populations does not remove bias.
    - webwright 16y ago
      He said that our population tended to be male, I agreed and said that we selected an equal # of men/women. I'm not a statistics god, but doesn't that account for that particular bias? There are certainly others-- we'd be the last people to say that this represents a perfect cross-section of society. Given that we selected 4,000 man and 4,000 women (randomly), how does the preponderance of men in our broader dataset effect this particular analysis? Sorry if I'm being obtuse-- I didn't do the actual analysis and I'm really pretty rusty on my stats.
      - nod 16y ago
        I think the parent probably meant the "they think they have a problem" bias. Though, that's not why I use RescueTime - I just love data. (And by the way, would love to download the fine-grained CSV for all of my activity for all time)
      - btilly 16y ago
        If you have a product that is more attractive to men than women, then the women who find it attractive are unlikely to be typical for the larger population. So yes, you've adjusted for the tendency to have more men than women. But you still haven't wound up with a random sampling of people out there. To get that you'd have to select a random set of people, ask them to participate in your study, and go from there. Which would immediately hit you with the fact that over half of the USA is functionally illiterate and therefore does not use computers very much.

andreyf 16y ago

Why shopping and facebook? Both of those seem to favor women over men (in time spent, not in % who have accounts)... What about hacker news, prog.reddit, github, LtU, Lostpedia, porn, news.google.com, etc? Factor those in, and the numbers might come out quite different. What about programming projects that I happen to be reading/forking/coding which are unrelated to work? From my anecdotal experience (mostly in software development), women focus significantly better than men on the work-related tasks.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
From the article: "Men have their distractions, too. They spend about 15% more of their time reading the news than women." It would have been useful if the article indicated how much time is actually spent on news sites, rather than simply the relative differences.
- webwright 16y ago
  To add to your response: we didn't put it in the post, but the stats on the "reference" category (where things like dictionaries and code resources live) were pretty close (7.41% for women, 7.15% for me).

jquery 16y ago

This is a doozy. I think this really deserves much, much more research.

mynameishere 16y ago
"Theory of gravity", "Theory of relativity", everything in between. Research complete.

d0mine 16y ago

Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do. Interestingly, the National Committee on Pay Equity found that women earn 77% of what their male counter parts do. </quote>

FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
I've always been interested in these kind of data. Are women earning only 77% of their male counterparts because a) They are primarily employed in occupations that pay less b) They take maternity leave and/or extended vacations/time off (taking care of children etc.) or c) Women are just paid less for the same work?
- run4yourlives 16y ago
  I think the strong correlation presented in the parent comment suggests that women actually work 77% of the time that men do, period. Whether that is actually true, or - even better - relates in any way to productivity is out of scope here.
- krschultz 16y ago
  A is the primary reason. B is true, but it is not so much that women take time off and are therefore paid less, it is that women take time off and miss out on a few rounds of promotions and get behind a bit. You only take 5 years out of a 40 year career, but you might take out two of the total promotions and that adds up to a lot. C happens but rarely in the US is it that a woman makes 77% of a man for exactly the same occupation, the difference might be 5-10% but not 23%.
  - webwright 16y ago
    That's a good point. I recall reading a study that men who take time off to be stay-at-home dads have a similar pay/promotion hit (not QUITE as much, but pretty close).

corruption 16y ago

Please could you publish the raw anonymised data, or at least give us estimates of the variation? Without that, the data are meaningless.

bfung 16y ago

A big thing missing is the context of the work. Perhaps not spending time at the computer and "socializing", distributing information, is actually more productive, or even a bullet point on the person's job description. I think a more accurate description for this blog post is "Men spend their time working on computers more than women".

kpanghmc 16y ago
This is a good point. If you're a marketing exec or advertiser for instance, being on Facebook or shopping sites may indeed be part of your job.
webwright 16y ago
Yaw... To be perfectly forthright there was some discussion around accurate titles versus titles that are clickworthy. Obviously, it's a hard discussion that happens at every blog and newspaper in the country that cares about traffic. We tried to qualify the heck out of the data (while still being provocative) in the body of the post... And even more in the comments of the post. I hope we did a good enough job!
- bfung 16y ago
  From some of the heated discussions on this thread, i think you guys were successful at doing that. =)

wisty 16y ago

So men are generally (slightly) more productive at computer-related tasks, based on time working vs procrastination time. But computers are communication devices (in most cases), and women are generally more productive communicators. So they limited time they spent working on computers is probably more valuable.

krschultz 16y ago

Lies damn lies and statistics. 1) Does it surprise anyone that they have 5x as many men as women as users? I wonder if you broke down by occupation what percentage of their users are software developers and engineers compared to others? 2) It's not a random sample. While they say "The data for this report was compiled from 8,000 randomly selected men and women", it is not of all people, it is of their users. Those are two vastly different things. 3) "All this adds up to huge differences in the amount of knowledge work men get done compared to women. Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do. Interestingly, the National Committee on Pay Equity found that women earn 77% of what their male counter parts do." is one of the dumbest comments I have ever seen in my life. THEIR TOOL DOESN'T CATCH ALL WORK. I stopped using it because it is utterly useless if you step away from the computer and are productive in that time. They are saying "Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do. [in front of computers]" Dropping out the in front of computers part is huge. Is the President of the United States a knowledge worker? Because he doesn't have a computer on his desk and therefore would be 0% as productive as someone doing data entry according to this methodology. For that matter, me sitting in front of my computer all day with Eclipse open (no matter how much I actually commit) is more productive than my dad, a CEO, who spends a lot of his time with a pad of paper out talking to people. Hmmmmmm. I understand that this tool has its place, but to say something so outrageously false really casts the company as a whole in a bad light. Blogging this was poor judgement. At best it is just some dumb people who don't understand data, at worst it is offensive.

webwright 16y ago
I think you should re-read the post. The phrase "on his/her/their computers" is repeated 4 times in the (fairly short) post. I think it's pretty clear that this doesn't apply when comparing a pad/paper CEO and an engineer. And we very purposefully didn't draw any conclusions (though we did admittedly ask leading questions to fuel the conversation!). We say a few times in the comments that this could well be a reflection of the types of jobs that the 4000 women have compared to the 4000 men-- they may have more social jobs or more "afk" jobs. It'd be an interesting followup to grab 1000 female engineers and 1000 man engineers to see if the differences hold up. I don't know if it will, but what if it did? Would it be so horrible if women were less suited for multitasking and knowledge work? Because they sure as heck are better at a lot of other things. They're, on average, smarter than men. They have better reflexes. Check out "Is there anything good about men" - great essay: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm If they WERE less suited for it, it would be interesting to see how much culture and education influenced their suitability. i.e. Does the difference fade away if you correct for educational differences, etc. At the end of the day, it's just an interesting chunk of from a single web service that has a very strong bias towards geeky users.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

drawkbox 16y ago

Some people might misinterpret this but it is very interesting data. I think it is more fun than being damning. I put it in the same category as the studies that say what a mother and work at home mom do are worth 130k+. I personally love RescueTime and subscribe, it has helped me immensely in managing my own time better. So while some may get angry, I find the data useful and the service even more so. I think they were just trying to draw some traffic and get some more customers to help. The only people I have shown that don't like RescueTime are the ones that seem to figure out how little work they actually do once they start using it. It surely opens your eyes to your non productive time on the computer.

waxman 16y ago

3 observations: - Brilliant execution of two 37Signals principles/generally smart start-up strategies (advertise like a chef (give away your information), and pick a fight) - If this product doesn't "scratch an itch" / solve a real problem (people wasting time on computers) I don't know what does - RescueTime is awesome

danteembermage 16y ago

Do you have an embedded economist? I'm volunteering but if you really want to get a ton of PR out of this you might try some famous empirical micro guys (this article would make a great Freakonomics chapter) . Cold calling with "I have unique data" won't offend anyone.

Jd 16y ago

More data less commentary please.

robryan 16y ago

What would be useful, not that I have looked into this to much to know that it isn't possible. Would be to group the time spent on HN with the time spent on anything linked from HN. It's hard to know how much time I spend on HN/HN articles. Great tool though, RescueTime and DropBox are the two ycombinator companies which I could instantly see a use for in my everyday work.