

RescueTime (YC 08) Data: Are Men more Productive than Women?  - webwright
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2010/05/04/startling-data-are-men-32-more-productive-than-women/

======
krschultz
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
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>

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.

~~~
krschultz
At the end of the day, you flung up some crap on your company's offical blog
that is both horribly misinformed from a statistical perspective and about the
subject you are posting on.

Is that professional? Is that good for your company? If I were an investor I'd
be PISSED. If I hadn't canned my account to your site about 6 weeks after I
made it (cool tool by the way, just missed too much of my work since I don't
spend all day on my computer), I'd be canceling it today. And I sure as hell
won't ever be trying it again. And I'll specifically be recommending against
it.

At my startup we had a discussion about using data from our users to draw
attention the way you are trying to here (and Mint.com has very successfully
done in the past as just one example). The problem is you have to recognize
where the mine fields are.

Replace every single place you used the word "women" and replace it with
"black people" and see if it is offensive to you yet.

~~~
webwright
I'm sorry that you're angry.

For what it's worth, we worked pretty hard to make this as statistically solid
as we could with the dataset that we had. The subject we're posting on is "How
4,000 men differ from 4,000 women in RescueTime". While the data might lead to
some interesting questions, I don't think anyone would assume that this is
necessarily a reflection of a broader population (any more than Mint's data
was).

I think your "black people" example is interesting. If we were comparing
designers to developers, would you be so incensed? Yours is literally the
first actually angry response all day. Is it possible that you're
overreacting?

In terms of business effect, signups today have been abnormally high and
cancellations have been slightly to the low side.

It was meant to be provocative, but so far this hasn't ended up being a mine
field. Again, sorry that we've upset you.

~~~
araneae
I have to agree that the post wasn't written very sensitively.

Here are the following red flag passages, for me, at least:

"From what I can tell, the 23rd chromosome has a pretty amazing impact on the
way people use computers." -Drawing a conclusion from data you admit has large
sampling issues.

"Women spend more time socializing and shopping" \- You did not mention any
comparative "frivolous" activities that men might take part in more than
women; say, gaming.

"Evidently, there’s a reason they are called “man” hours." - Using a limited
data set to large conclusions about female working habits in all contexts

Generally, the whole thing was both hyperbolic and quite inflammatory.

~~~
staunch
The only part I cringed on was the "man hours" line. Just does not work in
text.

------
btilly
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
Yes, it seems quite plausible that RescueTime is best known among technology
types, who tend to be male.

~~~
webwright
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.

~~~
iskander
Sampling from biased populations does not remove bias.

~~~
webwright
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.

~~~
krschultz
My god, you are the one who wrote this and you don't understand why your
sample is so biased? No wonder it is so horrible.

How many teachers are in your sample? How many nurses? (extremely few - how
would the tool capture that?)

Or more insiduously compare the number of engineers to the number of people in
marketing. Both are "knowledge workers", but they have a very different gender
breakdown. And they also have a very different day. Someone in engineering is
on their computer all day, someone in marketing or sales probably not. If you
are making sales calls all day instead of looking at an IDE, you can be vastly
more _productive_ than an engineer staring at a blank screen, but that doesn't
show up in RescueTime at all. It's one thing one you are on a team and can
account for that, it is another when you make a generalization about the
population.

All of your data can be explained with other rational besides "men are more
productive than women". Your company approaches the world from the view of
engineers to begin with, and then slaps that bias on top of a faulty set of
data. You should be careful with this or you are going to have NOW breathing
down your neck (I guess all press is good press, but do you really want to
make your product piss of women to that extent?).

~~~
Retric
Read what he wrote not what you think he wrote.

He said picking an even sample of male and female removes the male/female
bias, but only that bias.

Edit: Granted, that's not strictly sufficient because the human population is
not 50:50 M/F, but that's a side issue.

~~~
whyenot
I think you are missing krschultz's point. There is probably an interaction
effect between occupation and gender. Sampling equally from each gender
doesn't necessarily remove gender bias.

~~~
Retric
I think your both (+the people that up voted you) are confusing occupation
bias with gender bias.

AKA, if the gender bias was caused by an occupation bias fixing the gender
bias does not fix the occupation bias.

~~~
whyenot
No offense, but you are repeating exactly what I said. It's likely that gender
and occupation are not independent variables.

------
danteembermage
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.

------
andreyf
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
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
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).

------
d0mine
_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
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?

~~~
krschultz
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
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).

------
drawkbox
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
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

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

~~~
mynameishere
"Theory of gravity", "Theory of relativity", everything in between.

Research complete.

------
bfung
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".

~~~
webwright
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
From some of the heated discussions on this thread, i think you guys were
successful at doing that. =)

------
robryan
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.

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

------
hackermom
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
If there is a significant trend here, it would be better to explore it than to
try to suppress exploration with dismissive witticisms.

------
snikolov
more time working does not necessarily amount to more productivity.

------
Jd
More data less commentary please.

------
wisty
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.

