

It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won't - Concours
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6498.html?wknews=101210

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mahmud
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.

~~~
jmtame
I'm not sure what the article is suggesting as the reason for the increase in
revenue. It seems from comments on here that people are implying that women
are simply more productive when given an opportunity where they usually would
be denied one.

This has been documented in the U.S. and is pretty core to advertising
agencies today who have a goal of generating revenue from minority groups: you
need to hire the minority groups into your companies because people tend not
to buy where they cannot work (DBWYCW, or "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" is
a popular acronym in the early 20th century from the United States). Don't
read this the wrong way as "they only use minority groups to generate
revenue," this is a marketing goal to do business with minority groups (it's
not a bad or "evil" thing).

Revenue increases when you do this. There's a correlation there, but I really
doubt that the cause is a supposed increase in productivity simply by giving
people an opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have had. I think the key
indicator is to look at the media and see if these people have boycotted
against companies who refuse to hire members of their group (women and African
Americans were the two major groups during the Great Depression who practiced
this).

It was also suggested that women for example are cheaper, although if you have
a company doing programming (just a random example) and you're hiring women
for secretary jobs (another example), your revenues are going to be discounted
by the fact that you have less programmers. I'm not sure what type of jobs
they're filling, but I'm a bit skeptic about this although it at least sounds
intuitive.

~~~
kscaldef
> I'm not sure what the article is suggesting as the reason for the increase
> in revenue.

The typical economic argument is a variation on the general principle that
when other people are making irrational decisions (e.g. not hiring the best
candidate because of their gender), you can do better / take advantage of
them.

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danielnicollet
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.

~~~
mhb
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
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
>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
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?

~~~
stonemetal
Is that what is going on in America? I am not so sure. Just because I have a
group that is mixed race and gender doesn't mean they are multicultural. They
could have all grown up in Dallas and gone to SMU. Most of the
multiculturalism in the US seems to be the Chinese restaurant verity. So
changed from its origins that you couldn't find it in China.

~~~
danielnicollet
Of course not. That's what you see on the surface but dig in a little bit and
you'll find that there are still lots of 1st generation and 2nd generation
immigrants with a wealth of unique cultural identities. I lived for years
abroad in Europe and Asia and I can tell you that the US, Australia and parts
of Latin america are definitely unique in that way. the rest of the world (the
old world) is much more culturally homogeneous. And who is talking about race
here other than Stonemetal, here? Culture has a lot more attributes than those
related to gender and race.

~~~
stonemetal
_And who is talking about race here other than Stonemetal, here?_

Uh, that would appear to be you.

 _Actually, you can do the same right here at home by hiring minorities_

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billybob
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?

~~~
jerf
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....](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html)
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.

~~~
dgabriel
In the United States, maternity leave is rarely generous, and only _kind of_
mandated. There are many, many loopholes and exceptions.

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mbubb
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.

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pandafood
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.

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jtbigwoo
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.

~~~
xentronium
Call me sexist, but I firmly believe there are three areas women should not
generally be part of: military, cooking and teaching.

All the best chefs are men, best professors I know are men too. And military
requires more endurance that women normally have.

~~~
lsc
>military requires more endurance that women normally have.

my understanding (and experience) is that women tend to have better endurance
than men. I remember a few years back I was running with a friend of mine, a
girl who was probably 10" shorter than I am, who had a notably worse BMI than
I did (at least, she did when we started running together. she improved
significantly more than I did during the course of our efforts. Maybe she was
just more motivated than I was?)

All along, I could out sprint her, but when it came to distance running, from
day one, half way through the run she'd start leaving me in the dust. Oh man,
it was so humiliating, getting left in the dust by a short fat girl. (It was
good for both of us, I think, really;)

Now, if you loaded us both down with 100Lbs of equipment and had us do the
same run? sure, I'd kick her ass. I don't think she could lift a pack of that
size.

So yeah, men are nearly always _stronger_ but that does not mean we have
better endurance.

~~~
araneae
Anecdotal evidence. You are simply on the low end of the bell curve for men.

Endurance is simply how long you can use your muscles before they give out;
it's not independent of how much muscle you have. If you are very weak, you
will have terrible endurance.

Yes, there are things called fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers; the
greater proportion of the latter, the better endurance you have. The greater
proportion of the former, the faster you go.

There doesn't seem to be evidence of gender difference in the ratio, but
Google could have failed me. There is, however, an argued difference along
ethnic lines. (East Africans have a much higher slow twitch/fast twitch ratio
than other ethnicities.)

Even if there were, though, a marathon is an endurance race. You rely
primarily on your slow twitch muscles, except perhaps in the home stretch, if
you have anything left. Men win the marathons.

~~~
kscaldef
> Men win the marathons

Among those who run marathons, the top men put in better times than the top
women. However, I know _far_ more female marathon runners than men. (OTOH, I
know far more male distance cyclists, so I wouldn't jump to any particular
conclusions from either data point.)

~~~
araneae
Really? Are we arguing about this? The males in all mammal species are better
at physical tasks. It's called testosterone. It allows you to build more
muscle mass. If women take it, they also build more muscle mass. So do female
bunny rabbits.

There are other things that go into it, obviously, like body shape. Women are
8 times more likely to tear their anterior cruciate ligament because their
wider hips cause them to impact the ground at problematic angles. And boobs
are a dead weight.

But yeah, this is something where the biology is _very_ well understood.

~~~
nl
Yes, it is _very_ well understood. Muscle mass has little relationship to
endurance.

In endurance events ( _real_ endurance, not wimpy things like 2-3 hour
marathons) women are highly competitive with men, and there is some evidence
they have an advantage.

For example, in the 235km Badwater Ultramarathon, women consistently finish
top 5, despite representing only 5-10% of the field.

Long distance swimming is even worse for men. Shelly Taylor-Smith has held the
record for the 48km Manhattan Island swim since _1995_. Women are within 28
minutes of the outright English Channel swim crossing record (6:57 vs 7:25),
and based on this older swim time list, women have 9 out of the top 20 times:
<http://www.channelswimming.com/solo-time-HTML.htm>

I'm going to resort to quoting papers to you:

"When performing certain isometric exercises, the endurance of women is almost
twice that of men performing the same exercise, according to results presented
at a meeting of international scientists. Both sexes performed the exercises
at the same percentage of their maximum strength. The study, conducted at the
University of Colorado in the US, confirmed that women outlasted men by an
average of 75 per cent and, importantly, showed that the reason women had
longer endurance times was not due to differences in the motivation levels
between men and women, or within the nervous system, but due to differences
within muscle." [http://www.mydr.com.au/sports-fitness/women-beat-men-on-
musc...](http://www.mydr.com.au/sports-fitness/women-beat-men-on-muscle-
endurance)

"The negative slope and the X-axis intercept of this equation at 66 km
supports the hypothesis that women ultramarathon runners have greater fatigue
resistance than do equally trained men whose performances are superior up to
the marathon distance." <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9044230>

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commanda
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.

------
poet
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
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.

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frossie
_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.

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

~~~
nandemo
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.

