It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won't

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?

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.

I wasn't saying college negated the value of public education at all. I was pointing out that a huge number of the people who contributed to US prosperity did not attend US public schools.

Einstein didn't attend the American public school system, nor did Dyson, or many of the other great scientists of the early 20'th century. In the present day, Sergei Brin only spent 4 years in US public schools. Elon Musk didn't, nor did Max Levchin (Thiel's wikipedia page is ambiguous). Zuckerberg didn't go to a public high school either (don't know what he did before that).

You can't point to a country with massive contributions from immigrants, and then declare that services those immigrants didn't use (or used minimally) are the cause of prosperity. The logic just doesn't work.

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)

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.

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