It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won't

The same has been mentioned to me before.

I very much doubt that I'd execute on this if it were dropped into my lap, but hypothetically supposing I saw a way to productize this, I would not need customers. It would be like inventing an AI which could successfully trade stocks in all market conditions. Sure, I suppose I could sell it for $99.95 on infomercials, but the more obvious path is to proceed directly to total world domination.

I would go raise capital, call in all of my favors with the witch kings of SEO, pull off Demand Media in parallel for as many niches as I could scale to (and if I productized this and had capital available, that number would be very high indeed), and sell out at a truly ridiculous multiple prior to the borg deciding my business model needed to be nuked from orbit.

Anyhow, good news for HN readers: the fact that this strategy is still done by bingo card makers and boutique SEO consultants and not a department dedicated to it at the New York Times means that you still have an opportunity to make a lot of money at it before your competitors with mega-brands, link juice flowing out their ears, and vast reserves of capital figure out how to exploit it.

The original assertion (All the best chefs are men, best professors I know are men too) is unprovable, because none of us are xentronium and the professor part of his assertion was based on personal experience ("I know").

However, the first part of his statement (I firmly believe there are three areas women should not generally be part of: military, cooking and teaching) can be argued against quite effectively by showing a single counter example.

xentronium needs to either argue the counter example (ie, argue that Jeanne Bamberger is not a good teacher), or narrow down his argument (eg, argue that only women who's first name starts with "J" make good teachers). Both lines of response weaken his argument considerably.

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...

"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

Good point.

Well, let's do some projection on the IT, because I think it's somewhat better known for most of us here.

How many good women programmers do you know? Do you remember them because they're exceptionally good or because they're women? If you believe my statement that they're "dramatically underrepresented in IT" (if you don't, I'll have to bring in some statistics like [1]), is it because they're:

    a) less suitable for IT jobs (for whatever reason)
    b) don't tend to like IT 
    c) b) because of a)
    d) a) because of b)
    e) strongly abused at IT work [2]
    f) not their fault, employer's

Given that I don't believe that IT guys are aggressive towards women, I am left with five options. f) is probable but I thought USA was an example of sex tolerance and stuff. So I am left with statements a) to d) with d) being my argument of choice.

There was an interesting insight on the subject of gender differences in [3] and some not-statistically-worthy-but-probably-scientifically-correct proof of the fact that women's brains are wired differently than men's.

Now back to military, cooking and teaching. There is a reason why women were "dramatically underrepresented" in military in Paleolithic era. If you pick most animal communities the male species are generally the defenders, the warriors, the aggressors. I believe that to be hard-wired to the brain. I admit that point about endurance is probably not valid, my bad, but women still can't run kilometers with full equipment on them. There was another point with totally anecdotal evidence: women-only teams work worse than men-only teams in my experience. Is it because males tend to be ultra-competitive and better team players? I think so.

Teaching. Now don't get me wrong, I admit that mothers have really great positive impact on their children, but I also think that in school and universities the teachers should be mostly men, at least for the "male audience". Boys need an authority, an example, a leader.

Cooking. I guess that's most controversial of three, because there shouldn't be any hard prerequisites for chef that women cannot meet. Yet they're "dramatically underrepresented" for one reason or other.

This is a long comment already, but the core idea is that in a good company you shouldn't be afraid to express your opinion, even if it doesn't have some fundamental research base behind it. There's nothing wrong in being wrong. It's wrong to be wrong and not admit it.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Csbachelors.jp... -- data is somewhat old but it shows the proportion. Believe me, percentages are even worse for Russia (probably because Russia is overwhelmingly sexist)

[2] Which makes me think of http://asset.soup.io/asset/1056/5293_e98d_500.gif

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646105

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.