13 ms·

It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won't

71 points by Concours 16y ago

poet 16y ago
Free market forces can definitely spure society towards equality and human rights. Unfortunately, there is a clear point (i.e. China) where business interests take over. So while I'm certainly happy that business interests and are aligned in this case, it certainly isn't the norm. The only example I'm aware of where a business fell clearly on the side of equality and human rights at the cost of business was when Google pulled out of China.
- kiba 16y ago
  As to opposed to what? Being a poorer pleasant farmer dying of various diseases and having no access to modern health care? 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.
danielnicollet 16y ago
Great article. Actually, you can do the same right here at home by hiring minorities, disabled employees, and people who would otherwise not find work. Many of them will be more motivated than the average employee and you also do society a service by doing what most employers still don't.
- tjarratt 16y ago
  This is a great point. Frequently, people look to hire individuals that will "match the culture" which is thinly veiled as "people that look, act, and talk like us". 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.
- mhb 16y ago
  That makes sense. But, based on the article, why couldn't you also conclude that women are better managers than men, in general, and not just because they are a better value due to cultural externalities?
  - tjarratt 16y ago
    Actually I would probably conclude that having a diverse culture makes better decisions than a monoculture. 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.
    - stonemetal 16y ago
      >Actually I would probably conclude that having a diverse culture makes better decisions than a monoculture. 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.
      - danielnicollet 16y ago
        Actually, I would argue that a varied culture is almost always better than a very homogeneous one if you are shooting for innovation and competitive advantage. New ideas come from the clash of various ways of thinking not from the confirmation of thought paradigms. 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?
jtbigwoo 16y ago
It may be OT, but it made me think of something: 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.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Why do you feel that our educational system achieved "great heights", and why do you believe these heights made the US a "20th century powerhouse"?
  - CapitalistCartr 16y ago
    The United States is about 5% of the World's population, and produces about 25% of the World's economic output. This has been true for about the last 60 years. The USA and Western Europe have had the most expensive labor, focusing on high-quality products and services that require more education, but justify the higher labor cost.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - thelabyrinth 16y ago
      I'd say that the educational system is uneven: elementary and high schools are just "good enough" to not completely screw the country. The university system, though, is really good: http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp . Think "good enough."
  - jtbigwoo 16y ago
    I think it's generally agreed that the U.S. was the world's foremost economy and the home of many of the major innovations of the 20th century. I'm contending that our public education system was a major enabler of that creativity and productivity.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
pandafood 16y ago
It seems like this article is trying too hard to justify something that actually has a pretty easy explanation: if women are under-hired relative to their skill level, then a skilled woman is cheaper to hire than an equally skilled man.
mahmud 16y ago
This is well understood in the middle-east. Within a company or a government office, the bureaucratic wild goose-chase stops the moment you're sent to a woman's desk. They just get it done. 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.
- commanda 16y ago
  This is awesome. When I was growing up, in Saudi Arabia, I never once saw a Saudi woman at a desk. I've read that King Abdul Aziz University actively recruits women professors and students, and that's such a wonderful thing to hear.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    KSA is the least influential in the region, culturally. Anything Saudi is synonymous with inflexibility. Even religious extremists go to Kuwait, UAE and the UK for their meetings. King Abdul Aziz University is a good thing, but KAUST blows it out of the water! I was skeptical at first then did a little research. KAUST is not exactly the MIT of the middle-east, but it's up there with Cornell and CMU. Not only is it the second co-ed institution in Saudi Arabia (the first is the Ka'bah in Mecca, where Muslims go for pilgrimage, side-by-side, but you already knew that ;-) but it's also a place with a strong theoretical bias. 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.
billybob 16y ago
If I wanted to be sexist, I would say: that should work here. If there's a glass ceiling, then corporations that don't have it should out-compete those that do, because they'll be drawing from a bigger talent pool. 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?
- patio11 16y ago
  I think there is a huge opportunity for exploiting the fact that the market clearing price of 1 hour from someone with a graduate school degree is currently zero if she is also a stay-at-home mother. I do it on small scale. Demand Media does it industrial scale. Both of us put together can't absorb even a sizable fraction of the woman-hours available for sale in a single Midwestern town.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Could you elaborate on this? If this is indeed the case, I'd be very interested in tapping into it.
    - patio11 16y ago
      I've talked about this extensively on my blog -- go to the Greatest Hits section and look up Content Creation. (http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits) 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.
frossie 16y ago
Some executives interviewed for the study worried that this bias would hurt their business 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.
commanda 16y ago
Intuitively, this makes sense. If your company has walled itself off from hiring 1/2 of the population, of course you will be passing over some highly skilled applicants who are in the sector you've walled yourself off from. By broadening your search, you will get a larger pool of talented applicants.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mhill 16y ago
A corollary: hiring older developers would have a distinct competitive advantage.
- dgabriel 16y ago
  It would be an interesting experiment.
- Dylanlacey 16y ago
  With the caveat that they'd need to older, but not old-fashioned. Mental inflexability is too damaging, especially when coupled with an easy defense like "Oh, but you're younger and not as wise".
- nandemo 16y ago
  Maybe, but women's salaries are about the same as and often lower than men's, while older developers tend to get paid much more than junior developers.
mbubb 16y ago
In 1996 I helped startup a branch of a company in Seoul. We had a number of help wanted ads for office staff that got a lukewarm response until we put the phrase "married women welcome to apply". Seemingly overnight we got very talented applicants who became the backbone of the office and of the company as we opened more offices in country.

71 points by Concours 16y ago

poet 16y ago

Free market forces can definitely spure society towards equality and human rights. Unfortunately, there is a clear point (i.e. China) where business interests take over. So while I'm certainly happy that business interests and are aligned in this case, it certainly isn't the norm. The only example I'm aware of where a business fell clearly on the side of equality and human rights at the cost of business was when Google pulled out of China.

kiba 16y ago
As to opposed to what? Being a poorer pleasant farmer dying of various diseases and having no access to modern health care? 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.

danielnicollet 16y ago

Great article. Actually, you can do the same right here at home by hiring minorities, disabled employees, and people who would otherwise not find work. Many of them will be more motivated than the average employee and you also do society a service by doing what most employers still don't.

tjarratt 16y ago
This is a great point. Frequently, people look to hire individuals that will "match the culture" which is thinly veiled as "people that look, act, and talk like us". 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.
mhb 16y ago
That makes sense. But, based on the article, why couldn't you also conclude that women are better managers than men, in general, and not just because they are a better value due to cultural externalities?
- tjarratt 16y ago
  Actually I would probably conclude that having a diverse culture makes better decisions than a monoculture. 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.
  - stonemetal 16y ago
    >Actually I would probably conclude that having a diverse culture makes better decisions than a monoculture. 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.
    - danielnicollet 16y ago
      Actually, I would argue that a varied culture is almost always better than a very homogeneous one if you are shooting for innovation and competitive advantage. New ideas come from the clash of various ways of thinking not from the confirmation of thought paradigms. 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?

jtbigwoo 16y ago

It may be OT, but it made me think of something: 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.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
Why do you feel that our educational system achieved "great heights", and why do you believe these heights made the US a "20th century powerhouse"?
- CapitalistCartr 16y ago
  The United States is about 5% of the World's population, and produces about 25% of the World's economic output. This has been true for about the last 60 years. The USA and Western Europe have had the most expensive labor, focusing on high-quality products and services that require more education, but justify the higher labor cost.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - thelabyrinth 16y ago
    I'd say that the educational system is uneven: elementary and high schools are just "good enough" to not completely screw the country. The university system, though, is really good: http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp . Think "good enough."
- jtbigwoo 16y ago
  I think it's generally agreed that the U.S. was the world's foremost economy and the home of many of the major innovations of the 20th century. I'm contending that our public education system was a major enabler of that creativity and productivity.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

pandafood 16y ago

It seems like this article is trying too hard to justify something that actually has a pretty easy explanation: if women are under-hired relative to their skill level, then a skilled woman is cheaper to hire than an equally skilled man.

mahmud 16y ago

This is well understood in the middle-east. Within a company or a government office, the bureaucratic wild goose-chase stops the moment you're sent to a woman's desk. They just get it done. 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.

commanda 16y ago
This is awesome. When I was growing up, in Saudi Arabia, I never once saw a Saudi woman at a desk. I've read that King Abdul Aziz University actively recruits women professors and students, and that's such a wonderful thing to hear.
- mahmud 16y ago
  KSA is the least influential in the region, culturally. Anything Saudi is synonymous with inflexibility. Even religious extremists go to Kuwait, UAE and the UK for their meetings. King Abdul Aziz University is a good thing, but KAUST blows it out of the water! I was skeptical at first then did a little research. KAUST is not exactly the MIT of the middle-east, but it's up there with Cornell and CMU. Not only is it the second co-ed institution in Saudi Arabia (the first is the Ka'bah in Mecca, where Muslims go for pilgrimage, side-by-side, but you already knew that ;-) but it's also a place with a strong theoretical bias. 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.

billybob 16y ago

If I wanted to be sexist, I would say: that should work here. If there's a glass ceiling, then corporations that don't have it should out-compete those that do, because they'll be drawing from a bigger talent pool. 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?

patio11 16y ago
I think there is a huge opportunity for exploiting the fact that the market clearing price of 1 hour from someone with a graduate school degree is currently zero if she is also a stay-at-home mother. I do it on small scale. Demand Media does it industrial scale. Both of us put together can't absorb even a sizable fraction of the woman-hours available for sale in a single Midwestern town.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Could you elaborate on this? If this is indeed the case, I'd be very interested in tapping into it.
  - patio11 16y ago
    I've talked about this extensively on my blog -- go to the Greatest Hits section and look up Content Creation. (http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits) 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.

frossie 16y ago

Some executives interviewed for the study worried that this bias would hurt their business 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.

commanda 16y ago

Intuitively, this makes sense. If your company has walled itself off from hiring 1/2 of the population, of course you will be passing over some highly skilled applicants who are in the sector you've walled yourself off from. By broadening your search, you will get a larger pool of talented applicants.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mhill 16y ago

A corollary: hiring older developers would have a distinct competitive advantage.

dgabriel 16y ago
It would be an interesting experiment.
Dylanlacey 16y ago
With the caveat that they'd need to older, but not old-fashioned. Mental inflexability is too damaging, especially when coupled with an easy defense like "Oh, but you're younger and not as wise".
nandemo 16y ago
Maybe, but women's salaries are about the same as and often lower than men's, while older developers tend to get paid much more than junior developers.

mbubb 16y ago

In 1996 I helped startup a branch of a company in Seoul. We had a number of help wanted ads for office staff that got a lukewarm response until we put the phrase "married women welcome to apply". Seemingly overnight we got very talented applicants who became the backbone of the office and of the company as we opened more offices in country.