It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won't

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6498.html?wknews=101210

by Concours • 16 years ago

71 74 16 years ago

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poet• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

danielnicollet3• 16 years 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.

tjarratt2• 16 years 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.

mhb2• 16 years 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?

tjarratt2• 16 years 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.

ultrasaurus• 16 years ago

I wonder how much of the benefit (in technical jobs at least) can be had by actually sticking to the scoring system you decided on before the interviews (let's say X% technical questions, Y% resume, Z% fit) rather than going through the whole process and then just fudging it to go with your gut feeling.

That said, this article specifically mentions "a setting where it was clear that companies were not just hiring women for PR reasons" whereas I've been on hiring committees with specific instructions to favor non-white or non-male applicants here, so the arbitrage opportunity is likely less.

jtbigwoo3• 16 years 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.

yummyfajitas6• 16 years 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"?

CapitalistCartr2• 16 years 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.

jtbigwoo3• 16 years 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.

xentronium3• 16 years ago

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.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

I know of many female chefs of great repute and talent - and I know some very good female professors.

I don't see the link between "most good chefs are men" and "women should not be chefs". It's a bit like "no Black people ride at the front of the bus" and "Black people should not ride at the front of the bus" - you've conveniently assumed a level playing field where there likely is none, and you've also erroneously linked the current state of things to the ideal state of things.

As for the military - not being a military man I'm not sure I am qualified to comment... but are there not many more roles in the military that do not require the massive amounts of brawn that "only men" can provide?

jtbigwoo3• 16 years ago

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

Lawrence Summers? Is that you?

orangecat• 16 years ago

I don't see how that follows. Most chess grandmasters are men; should women not play? If you accept the hypothesis that males have greater genetic variability than females, it shouldn't be surprising to see men overrepresented at the very top (and bottom) of just about everything.

And military requires more endurance that women normally have.

It also requires more endurance than most men have. But if an individual woman can legitimately meet that standard, why deny her the opportunity?

ScottBurson• 16 years ago

Okay: you're sexist.

Looking back on my MIT undergraduate education (class of 1980), I'd say one of my best professors was a woman: Jeanne Bamberger.

JoeAltmaier2• 16 years ago

You're sexist.

lsc2• 16 years ago

>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.

gchpaco• 16 years ago

Yup, you're sexist.

Anecdotal, but fairly true in my experience; when I did water polo in high school, it was coed. We didn't have many women interested in putting in the effort to land on the varsity team, probably for social reasons, but the handful that did were terrifying. I would rather have gone up against any two other people on the team than play polo with one of the women, because as it turns out there are certain things that guys just won't do to each other.

nl4• 16 years ago

Counter example: Grace Hopper. That would be Rear-Admiral Grace Hopper to you.

I'm unsure about her cooking, but 2/3 ain't too bad.

thelabyrinth2• 16 years ago

If you haven't read SuperFreakonomics and you're interested in this comment, get a copy of the book: the first chapter is about how the "decline" of the education system is linked to rising professional opportunities for women.

It used to be that highly competent women often became teachers because that was the only thing available to them. Now women can be professors, work in business, etc.

Note: this is not an argument for restricting female choice or anything else. It's about diagnosing how one (good) thing can lead to unintended consequences.

code_duck• 16 years ago

What this really indicates is that teachers need to be paid more, and the working environment improved. Then the profession will become more attractive to talented who are currently choosing other careers.

pandafood• 16 years 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.

mahmud2• 16 years 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.

commanda2• 16 years 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.

mahmud2• 16 years 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.

jmtame• 16 years ago

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.

nl4• 16 years ago

I think that the article was implying that it in some countries it is easier to hire better (more qualified and possibly more talented) women than men. Eg - in Korea there are a large number of women with advanced university degrees in relevant fields who have more trouble than men finding work.

The article also said the researchers were speculating that women made better decisions because they were traditionally in charge of household spending and therefor understood the consumer better.

kscaldef3• 16 years ago

> 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.

billybob• 16 years 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?

patio113• 16 years 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.

yummyfajitas6• 16 years ago

Could you elaborate on this?

If this is indeed the case, I'd be very interested in tapping into it.

emmett• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.... 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• 16 years 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.

dgabriel2• 16 years ago

In the United States, maternity leave is rarely generous, and only kind of mandated. There are many, many loopholes and exceptions.

frossie• 16 years 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.

commanda2• 16 years 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.

mhill• 16 years ago

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

dgabriel2• 16 years ago

It would be an interesting experiment.

Dylanlacey• 16 years 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• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won't

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