4 ms·

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,

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.
    - shawndrost 16y ago
      Would you please make a product of your method? I would like to be your customer.
      - patio11 16y ago
        The same has been mentioned to me before. I very much doubt that I'd execute on this if it were dropped into my lap, but hypothetically supposing I saw a way to productize this, I would not need customers. It would be like inventing an AI which could successfully trade stocks in all market conditions. Sure, I suppose I could sell it for $99.95 on infomercials, but the more obvious path is to proceed directly to total world domination. I would go raise capital, call in all of my favors with the witch kings of SEO, pull off Demand Media in parallel for as many niches as I could scale to (and if I productized this and had capital available, that number would be very high indeed), and sell out at a truly ridiculous multiple prior to the borg deciding my business model needed to be nuked from orbit. Anyhow, good news for HN readers: the fact that this strategy is still done by bingo card makers and boutique SEO consultants and not a department dedicated to it at the New York Times means that you still have an opportunity to make a lot of money at it before your competitors with mega-brands, link juice flowing out their ears, and vast reserves of capital figure out how to exploit it.
emmett 16y ago
What if other companies discriminate against you for hiring women at very high levels? Or if sexist men within a company react badly to having women promoted above them? Then there really is a gap in worker value, but only due to sexism.
jerf 16y ago
When you look at the situation in the United States, and try to take all the factors into account to figure out whether or not women are being discriminated against... ... you'll come away with your head spinning because there's just too damned many factors. Consider the factor of giving generous paid maternity leave. Obviously a benefit. Except that a company won't want to hire or pay someone that may disappear like that. Except they are legally obligated to. Except these things can't really be legally obligated because there's always a way around it. And of course a certain percentage of women really do of their own free will choose not to come back, which is hard to put an economic value on for any interested party, but if you can't put a reasonably concrete objective value on both the value of having that choice, and the values of exercising that choice, how can you tell whether women are being shortchanged? Being guaranteed that you can return to your job after X months is still some sort of economic value, even if most of the X months is itself unpaid. It isn't even necessarily that hard to find women getting paid more than men by some metrics now: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.... Note, I'm explicitly calling your attention to the various caveats and logic in the article, because this is an example of my real point about the complexity of the topic, not that one article proves anything about the "real question"; my point is exactly that nailing down the "real question" is very, very complicated, well beyond simply totalling up who makes what and looking at which number is larger. At this point, given the very market forces that this article talks about, I am unconvinced there is a major systematic problem that comes from human bias; I think the variance caused by the non-zero-but-small-in-practice effect is dominated by the other various concerns that cause disparities. I'm sure there's sexism afoot but I suspect it's been pushed below the noise threshold. But I can't prove it.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Yes, men's versus women's opportunities are complex in the US. Whether they are exactly equal doesn't matter. They are close enough that the most competent, skill women have good opportunities - which means that there's less of a reserve of the cheap and competent women's labor out there. This is might be a explanation for the decline of women in computing fields. What could be happening that there are now more other fields where the most competent can go and not get any hassle at all or even experience preferential treatment. Thus the only reserve of the cheap and competent labor in the field would be those who are drawn to computing from early age. For whatever cultural, biological or other reason, these are mostly men and so this would explain why programming field has become more and more male over the last twenty years. I know that the proportion of blacks who teaching in inner city schools declined tremendously from, say 1965 to 1985 because the barriers to those black who attended college dropped down and many more went into industry instead of teaching.

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.
  - shawndrost 16y ago
    Would you please make a product of your method? I would like to be your customer.
    - patio11 16y ago
      The same has been mentioned to me before. I very much doubt that I'd execute on this if it were dropped into my lap, but hypothetically supposing I saw a way to productize this, I would not need customers. It would be like inventing an AI which could successfully trade stocks in all market conditions. Sure, I suppose I could sell it for $99.95 on infomercials, but the more obvious path is to proceed directly to total world domination. I would go raise capital, call in all of my favors with the witch kings of SEO, pull off Demand Media in parallel for as many niches as I could scale to (and if I productized this and had capital available, that number would be very high indeed), and sell out at a truly ridiculous multiple prior to the borg deciding my business model needed to be nuked from orbit. Anyhow, good news for HN readers: the fact that this strategy is still done by bingo card makers and boutique SEO consultants and not a department dedicated to it at the New York Times means that you still have an opportunity to make a lot of money at it before your competitors with mega-brands, link juice flowing out their ears, and vast reserves of capital figure out how to exploit it.

emmett 16y ago

What if other companies discriminate against you for hiring women at very high levels? Or if sexist men within a company react badly to having women promoted above them? Then there really is a gap in worker value, but only due to sexism.

jerf 16y ago

When you look at the situation in the United States, and try to take all the factors into account to figure out whether or not women are being discriminated against... ... you'll come away with your head spinning because there's just too damned many factors. Consider the factor of giving generous paid maternity leave. Obviously a benefit. Except that a company won't want to hire or pay someone that may disappear like that. Except they are legally obligated to. Except these things can't really be legally obligated because there's always a way around it. And of course a certain percentage of women really do of their own free will choose not to come back, which is hard to put an economic value on for any interested party, but if you can't put a reasonably concrete objective value on both the value of having that choice, and the values of exercising that choice, how can you tell whether women are being shortchanged? Being guaranteed that you can return to your job after X months is still some sort of economic value, even if most of the X months is itself unpaid. It isn't even necessarily that hard to find women getting paid more than men by some metrics now: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.... Note, I'm explicitly calling your attention to the various caveats and logic in the article, because this is an example of my real point about the complexity of the topic, not that one article proves anything about the "real question"; my point is exactly that nailing down the "real question" is very, very complicated, well beyond simply totalling up who makes what and looking at which number is larger. At this point, given the very market forces that this article talks about, I am unconvinced there is a major systematic problem that comes from human bias; I think the variance caused by the non-zero-but-small-in-practice effect is dominated by the other various concerns that cause disparities. I'm sure there's sexism afoot but I suspect it's been pushed below the noise threshold. But I can't prove it.

joe_the_user 16y ago
Yes, men's versus women's opportunities are complex in the US. Whether they are exactly equal doesn't matter. They are close enough that the most competent, skill women have good opportunities - which means that there's less of a reserve of the cheap and competent women's labor out there. This is might be a explanation for the decline of women in computing fields. What could be happening that there are now more other fields where the most competent can go and not get any hassle at all or even experience preferential treatment. Thus the only reserve of the cheap and competent labor in the field would be those who are drawn to computing from early age. For whatever cultural, biological or other reason, these are mostly men and so this would explain why programming field has become more and more male over the last twenty years. I know that the proportion of blacks who teaching in inner city schools declined tremendously from, say 1965 to 1985 because the barriers to those black who attended college dropped down and many more went into industry instead of teaching.