8 ms·
Dear Marissa: Think Different
- realize 14y ago"What if Marissa made it known that Yahoo would be the best tech company in the world for hiring women execs, putting women in leadership positions, and advancing the opportunities for women in the workplace (as Sheryl Sandberg is so well-known for promoting at Facebook)?" Sounds discriminatory to me.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoThat part would likely be legally risky, but the essence of his post is an interesting idea. And the hiring lots of women in leadership roles part may simply follow naturally from pursuing such a course, rather than being an explicit policy.
- Cushman 14y agoThis presupposes that the industry-wide preference for male employees is not discriminatory, which scarcely goes without saying.
- d5tryr 14y agoAgreed, given the overwhelming discrimination that demonstrably exists in IT sectors it would be nigh on impossible to prove that hiring a lot of women was an act of discrimination as opposed to a natural result of not discriminating.
- toomuchcoffee 14y agoA covert, indirect bias is one thing; an explicit codified bias, quite another.
- oh_sigh 14y agoYou suppose that there is an "industry-wide preference for male employees". Just like I suppose there is an "industry-wide preference for female employees" in K-6 education.
- Cushman 14y agoThat there is a preference is a statistical fact; the controversial question is what is the cause for the preference. Incidentally, even if we were to pretend to compare the industries of "technology" and "education of children between the ages of 6 and 12", your quip fails the test: A majority of teachers may be female, but there is no such majority among those in "leadership positions" (administrators, principals and superintendants).
- DeepDuh 14y agoIs it? Preference would mean that for a woman in IT seeking a job it is harder than for a man, right? Given that high female employment percentages look good in an IT manager's report I doubt that this is the case but if you have some relevant statistics please share.
- svdad 14y agoNo, "preference" implies intention and active choice. A preference does not exist in the absence of a human actor to have it. That there is a majority is a statistical fact. Whether anyone has a preference for male employees is the controversial question you refer to.
- cellularmitosis 14y agoI think I misunderstand what you mean by "preference". Take as example a company where 90% of the programmer applicants are male. As I understand the word "preference", a resulting workforce of 90% males would indicate no preference one way or the other (assuming the men and women were equally skilled). Further, a 91% male workforce would be evidence of a male preference, while an 89% male workforce evidence of a female preference. Is that what you mean by "preference"?
- Cushman 14y agoYeah, obviously a lot of people misunderstood that. I apologize for the confusion. I was using "preference" in a more generic complex-systems-analysis sense. We begin with a potential workforce, at birth, of half men and half women. Over time, the further you go into the industry, you see more and more men and fewer and fewer women. The women are being rejected, the men are being selected for, this demonstrates a preference. Again, not imputing any consciousness here, it's just what the system is doing. The claim we are asked to accept is that this reflects a something real and measurable, such as my transportation preference for cars over horses, rather than something subjective and arbitrary, such as my berry preference for blueberries over strawberries.
- philwelch 14y agoThe industry doesn't prefer male employees; male employees prefer the industry.
- iand 14y agoMale employees prefer the industry because the industry prefers male employees.
- cheez 14y agoGive me an effing break. My family is a computer family, through and through. Surprise, surprise, my sister is in software too. Don't attribute malice where there is none. Quite simply, women are not encouraged to be scientists by OTHER WOMEN. Not men. Men LOVE women who love science.
- jaems33 14y agoIndeed. It's funny because I would argue that Asian men represent a notable minority in U.S. tech companies but have very little representation in executive positions at tech companies.
- sp332 14y agoThis is an interesting idea, but the title is dangerous. As has been pointed out a lot lately, making something "pink" doesn't mean you can sell it to women. :) Edit: Just noticed that Gina Trapani helped forge the headline... It's probably OK ;)
- modarts 14y agoI don't think that Dave was going for a literal interpretation.
- sp332 14y agoYou're probably right, but it worries me a bit after Nokia sent women tech journalists a box with pink lipstick as part of an ad campaign for the pink Lumia 900. As well as all of this: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/03/does-this-smartphone-make-me-look-stupid-meet-the-ladyphones/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/03/does-this-smartphone-...
- d5tryr 14y agoInteresting episode of QI(G07) points out that prior to the 20th century the colours pink & blue for boys & girls were reversed.. http://youtu.be/2f7urmRaRxY?t=2m12s http://youtu.be/2f7urmRaRxY?t=2m12s
- Cushman 14y agoI'd be more worried about the fact that without the line break it reads like "Pink is the new purple, dear Marisa" which sounds pretty condescending.
- lobotryas 14y agoWhy not? Pandering to a demographic is an old and common tactic to sell more goods. Want to sell auto and power tools to women? Just change the style a bit: http://www.tomboytools.com/ http://www.tomboytools.com/
- sp332 14y agoPandering to a demographic is fine as long as you actually respect the people in that demographic. Too often (especially in tech) people make something pink and assume that women will buy it, regardless of how good it actually is.
- ericabiz 14y agoAs one of the few women on Hacker News, I'm going to come right out and say it: I think this is a fantastic idea, and Marissa Mayer would do well to take it to heart. Imagine if Yahoo made a serious bid for Pinterest, and then Marissa went really crazy and made their homepage into a Pinterest-like site. Not only would it cause a great sensational uproar in the press, but it would make Yahoo a serious contender again. P.S. Not offended by the fact that Dave said "pink".
- paulsutter 14y agoI love it just because it's an actual strategy (in the Michael Porter sense), which Yahoo has been missing all along. Michael Porter defines strategy as how you are different from your competitors. Strategy means saying no, whereas Yahoo has always said yes. Southwest has a strategy (one class of service, only 737s, no reserved seats, no hub/spoke...) whereas United and American Airlines do not. Yahoo has been a tech version of a conglomerate. With no clear way to decide what projects are off strategy, all projects survive and the company has no focus. Yes its a concern that yahoo's strengths (sports, finance) may not fit that direction. But this is the first time, ever, tht I've heard an actual strategy of any kind proposed for Yahoo. And that's cool because I was skeptical there could be one.
- dave1619 14y agoYahoo acquiring Pinterest would definitely be interesting. I don't know though how affordable Pinterest would be.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kmfrk 14y agoThoughtful, inspiring article. What's up with the spelling of the last line, though?
- toomuchcoffee 14y agoWhat if Yahoo went back to its vision for media and entertainment, i.e. what a lot of people think has been wrong with Yahoo for a long, long time now.
- kyro 14y agoDave, just curious, did you properly capitalize and punctuate this or did Svbtle do that for you?
- davemc500hats 14y agonope that was me, not svbtle. just occasional change of pace, maybe give the trolls less to blather on about (altho seems like i got plenty of shit for using too much pink). personally, i think proper grammar is mostly a waste of time... as has happened previously, its use will be eroded by pop culture and mainstream behaviors rather quickly. also, for some reason i think capitalizing the word 'I' is somehow king of arrogant. don't know why that is, but just seems that way to me.
- patio11 14y agoOn the spectrum of adherence to an arbitrary standard of Proper Written English (TM), there's counter-signaling, a great region of "You just can't write well", a region where one writes very well with errors, and then things bifurcate at the top where a) you write perfectly like the New York Times and this signals status or b) you use non-standard grammar, and that is OK, because you're a better writer than any English teacher and everyone knows it. Just a bit of literary criticism here, take it or leave it: when I read the classic articles on your site, with the ransom-note formatting, the presentation often overwhelmed the content. I mean, anyone drawing that much attention to their rejection of social norms must mean that to be the primary purpose of the performance. I often slogged through -- and it was a slog -- to get at the meaty arguments hidden somewhere in the pink/green/etc text. I'm totally on-board with grammar being essentially arbitrary and fluid (this is a True Statement about material reality), but given that this is true, the Dave-maximizing approach is probably not to say "stufz da grammerz!!1" but rather to write well-enough-to-be-understood and not care about the occasional transgression or three. (There are other writers who make the stylistic choice to be near-perfect paragons of English grammar -- that totally works, too. It communicates something a wee bit different, for example that one is really going for university professor levels of erudition, but that works for some people. PG's writing style, for example, causes me to pull out a dictionary if I see a spelling mistake because it means there is probably a word I haven't learned yet. On the other hand, I generally tend to aim for about a 98% on the mechanics of standard English, don't sweat the last 2% all that much, and frequently break the rules for comedic/dramatic/etc effect. It's much more noticeable when you aren't breaking the rules all of the time.) This is entirely compatible with continuing the iconoclastic Dave McClure branding, because that branding is a consequence of thinking fairly radical thoughts and articulating them, rather than being entirely a consequence of the packaging of thoughts that are under the surface exactly the same as every other VC's.
- _pius 14y agoThis would almost certainly be a winning strategy.
- mikeleeorg 14y agoJust an FYI: two of Yahoo's stronger properties are Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance, both of whom haven't historically had a large female audience. The other properties that might attract a female audience haven't done as well. That's not to say Yahoo can't sell these and purchase the properties Dave mentions, of course. It's just that Yahoo currently doesn't have a core strength in targeting women and would need to reach out a lot to build that competency.
- dtran 14y agoI remember when I interned at Yahoo! several years ago, Yahoo! Shine, their women's lifestyle portal, had a fairly large audience. According to Alexa, it's still one of their larger web properties: mail.yahoo.com 48.76% login.yahoo.com 29.14% yahoo.com 24.39% search.yahoo.com 19.22% answers.yahoo.com 16.42% news.yahoo.com 15.16% sports.yahoo.com 6.35% finance.yahoo.com 6.25% omg.yahoo.com 5.86% my.yahoo.com 4.71% in.yahoo.com 4.67% tw.yahoo.com 3.39% docs.yahoo.com 2.78% movies.yahoo.com 2.75% shine.yahoo.com 2.59%
- joering2 14y agojust went there now and were visually raped by a huge background-ad by Disney and Verizon. Don't recall seeing those for a while now; thought horizontal background ads were a thing of a past. Learnt something new today, but definitely won't go back there in next couple years.
- ericabiz 14y agoPlease don't use the word "raped" in that context--as there are some people on here for whom that word conjures up a much worse image.
- danilocampos 14y agoI hate the shitheads here who down voted you for pointing that out.
- joshfraser 14y agoI think this is a huge opportunity for companies in general. Let's face it, most companies are run by dudes and we're largely clueless when it comes to understanding what women want. I think there's a massive opportunity for any company that chooses to focus on women right now, whether that's Yahoo or a brand new startup.
- andymurd 14y agoI agree that women are under-served by technology companies, but I'd argue that it's vital to break the demographic down to actually provide anything useful. Tech firms don't build sites with the stated aim of being "for men", they make sites that provide finance news, sports scores, gadget reviews etc. To redress the gender bias, we should be looking to find what the smart/wealthy/interesting women are doing and build sites that they love.
- shpoonj 14y agoThe entire post is discriminatory... claiming that content and services such as Pinterest and Martha Stewart are specifically feminine. I wouldn't know how to cook an omelet if it weren't for Martha Stewart, and I know plenty of males, not to mention the non binary gendered, Pinterest users.
- gojomo 14y agoInteresting thoughts. Creepy stalker collage!
- djt 14y agoErr, Yahoo is making less profit, but it's still making $1B profit on the bottom line last year. Why is everyone acting like it's on it's beyond redemption? Sure, Yahoo and Microsoft are boring, but they're still profitable. http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/financials.asp?ticker=YHOO:US http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials...
- recoiledsnake 14y agoMicrosoft is making so much hand over fist that they don't know what to do with it. Lumping together Yahoo and Microsoft doesn't make any sense.
- drgath 14y ago> Why is everyone acting like it's on it's beyond redemption? Because the only things that get attention in SV are products with growth. Yahoo is a very profitable company and has billions in the bank, so it'll be around for a while, with or without a rebound.
- nkohari 14y agoWho cares about attention in the valley when you're netting $1B?
- mkramlich 14y agoI'm not a woman, but I agree this is a great strategy to consider. I think one of the reasons that both Pinterest and Instagram caught so many of the startup & wantrepreneur crowd off-guard was that their success, to a large extent, came from a predominantly female user base, and typically feminine interests. Google, for all it's strengths, is mostly run by intelligent but geeky male nerds. Same for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. I don't think a "pink strategy" alone will save Yahoo -- I do think they need to import more of the cultural strengths of Google, Apple and Facebook -- but it can be a competitive advantage. There's one potential negative to the "pink" strategy, however. Regardless of how some might like it to be, the overwhelming majority of hackers do seem to be male. If you evolve your company to be female oriented in their product suite, you may make the company less attractive when recruiting and retaining male hackers. And ultimately having talent on staff is the bottleneck. But there may be a way to pursue a balanced path which gives the advantages of a pink strategy while not being too bitten by the negative, so you come out ahead. I also wish they'd drop the "!". Just "Yahoo". Much cleaner.
- Evbn 14y agoI don't know that stereotypically dateless men would shy away from working on a product women love.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- evolve2k 14y ago'If you evolve your company to be female oriented in their product suite, you may make the company less attractive when recruiting and retaining male hackers.' I think those currently working at companies like Pinterest and Etsy would disagree. I greatly admire those companies and as a developer seek teams with a good culture that grt stuff done anf create great products. I would argue that the market focus of a company is not the key determinate in attracting developers but rather your reputation for valuing devs and being a great place to work.
- nostromo 14y agoMy favorite success story of marketing towards the under-served gender is Dyson. Before Dyson vacuums were marketed to women exclusively. If you suggested marketing a vacuum to men before Dyson, you'd be laughed out of the boardroom. Dyson threw that all out the window and entered the market with a vacuum that actually looks like a sci-fi weapon, and to great success.
- alanh 14y agoSays the guy with a username of the ship in the sci-fi movie Alien! (Just observing a humorous juxtaposition.) Anyway, your point is noted. One of my favorite tweets ever was one by Amy Jane Gruber, to the effect of: Boys say “If we get a dog, I’ll clean up after it,” and men say, “If we get a Dyson, I’ll vacuum!”
- lexarchy 14y agoI admire Dave McClure for being willing to comment on this subject. No matter what you say on a gender-sensitive issue, someone is bound to accuse you of sexism. (It helps, of course, that he makes some good points along the way.)
- halayli 14y agoI don't think a gender focus, or discrimination should be part of any strategy.
- podperson 14y agoDepends on whether you differentiate between implicit gender focus (we mostly hire guys, guys make most of our decisions, but we don't FOCUS on guys) and expliciy (we need to appeal more to guys). It seems to me that it's almost always better for a strategy to be explicit rather than implicit. Plenty of successful strategies are gender focused, so you're opting for some kind of ideological purity over possible success. But I tend to agree with you on discrimination in the bad sense ("discrimination" just means telling things apart, but I assume you mean "bias").
- lwhi 14y agoIMO this isn't doing much to advance the cause of women in technology. Suggesting the highest ranking woman CEO in the tech sector should concentrate on serving women, is slightly sexist. Both men and women use Yahoo. Demographic splits aren't necessarily as gender specific as the author assumes. We're not living in the 1950s.
- Tycho 14y agoThe thing is, Yahoo is a really good portal site. Probably the best. It turns out that being a portal isn't as lucrative as people thought it would be 15 years ago, but there's definitely still a demand for them. Yahoo just need to focus on being the beat portal on the internet, IMO. It's a sound long term strategy.