Search Results for: ellen pao

A Hillary- and Sheryl-supporting Facebook friend posted the following:

Let’s let everyone talk about it – open up the HR files and voices. Women have higher IQs, more college degrees, higher grades, but when they join the workplace they are blocked from advancement, wages, credit, and impact… And the millennials according to several studies are far worse in accepting female tech talent than the baby boomers that are now over 65. Studies have shown that millennial men can’t fairly assess female talent. For example this HBR study.

The cited Harvard Business Review article:

The researchers found that male students systematically overestimated the knowledge of the men in their [college biology] classes in comparison with the women. Moreover, as the academic term progressed, the men’s faulty appraisal of their classmates’ abilities increased despite clear evidence of the women’s superior class performance. In every biology class examined, a man was considered the most renowned student — even when a woman had far better grades. In contrast, the female students surveyed did not show bias, accurately evaluating their fellow students based on performance.

In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.)

If women have “higher IQs, more college degrees, higher grades” and these things can translate into effective higher performance at work, why don’t working-age men recognize this?

Could it be that the women with the highest IQs are not in the workforce at all? “Why Women Are Leaving the Workforce in Record Numbers,” (Fiscal Times, April 17, 2013):

A recent study by Joni Hersch, professor at Vanderbilt Law School, makes that case. She looks at female graduates of our top universities – those presumably who have the best shot at shattering the glass ceiling – and finds that once they have children, they are more likely to quit their jobs than are women who graduated from less selective schools. … Perhaps most astonishing is that only 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time, compared to 66 percent from second-tier schools.”

If we assume that high IQ+good grades leads to “top school,” it would seem that the women who do best in school are the least attached to the U.S. labor force. So men could have a low opinion of women in the workplace because the best women have figured out  “The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentle[wo]man … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.” (Cicero) But this can’t explain why men underestimate the performance of their female peers in biology classes.

What about changes in public policy? The HBR study compares men over 65 with their Millennial brothers. Men over 65 grew up in an Equal Opportunity (no discrimination) legal environment. Millennials grew up in an Affirmative Action (“positive discrimination”) environment.

How about changes in media coverage? Men over 65 weren’t exposed to a lot of articles celebrating women for simple achievements (see Are women the new children?). Maybe all of the do-gooders trying to help women by cheerleading are convincing men that women are actually intellectually inferior? Millennials have grown up in an environment where adult women are regularly celebrated for things that 12-year-old boys can do. Wouldn’t this tend to give them the idea that adult women aren’t competitive with adult men?

What about simple organized resistance by privileged white males? They recognize that women are superior and therefore, to preserve their unearned dominance, collude to exclude women from the workplace. This seems tough to square with the fact that the privileged white males welcomed Asian male coworkers (for example, Google, the “Uber standard” of chauvinism, has an Indian CEO). Why would white men allow themselves to be unseated by non-white men but object to being unseated by white non-men?

Idea to test this last theory: do partnerships and male-owned closely held companies hire and promote women at a higher rate than do public corporations and government? A prejudiced manager at a big company or government agency, for example, can preferentially hire less qualified people without suffering any immediate personal reduction in pay. A prejudiced partner or business owner, however, has to pay for any prejudiced hiring decision with lower earnings. (Ellen Pao, of course, was alleging that the Kleiner Perkins partners wanted to make themselves poorer by discriminating against her due to her gender ID.)

[Anecdotal data: As an owner-manager of a small software company I promoted a higher percentage of the female developers to management. I found that the women were more likely to listen to customers and end-users and work toward meeting customer needs as opposed to doing stuff that a programmer might consider “cool,” but that a customer or end-user wouldn’t be able to notice. The women were not necessarily the most experienced, productive, or accomplished software developers per se, but they were, in my opinion at the time, more likely to be effective in the management role than their male peers.]

Readers: How to explain the fact that younger men, who’ve been exposed to a lot more gender equality propaganda, have a lower opinion of women than do older men?

[Separately, I think the post shows at least one gender difference. James Damore, who identifies as a man (as far as I know), cited social science suggesting that men might be more likely to be attracted to the dreary solitary coding jobs that Silicon Valley offers. He was ostracized for his heresy. My Facebook friend, who identifies as a woman, cited social science suggesting that women are more intelligent than men, better educated, and thus better suited to almost every kind of job. Her posting garnered roughly 50 “likes”.]

Related (Department of “The Science is Settled”):

• Women in 4 out of 5 countries surveyed out-score men by 0.5 to 1.5 points (Psychology Today, July 2012)
• “Why Women Are Smarter Than Men” (Forbes, June 2016); women have equal IQs but much higher emotional intelligence. [Just imagine how likely Forbes would have been to publish this piece if the author’s conclusion had been “Despite equal IQs, men are smarter than women overall.”]
• Professor Dimitri van der Linden, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said: “We found that the average IQ of men was about four points above that of women. (Express, July 2, 2017)

The Times story that I thought was interesting for what it revealed about how Americans think with numbers seems to have struck a nerve.

Here’s a Facebook post by Jason Pontin, former editor of MIT’s alumni magazine, Technology Review:

It should go without saying (but obviously does not) that the behavior described in the article is unacceptable at every level. This is not the culture that technology needs if it’s to really serve humanity. Megan Smith has often told me, “You play the whole team” when you attack a really big problem. But a significant number of powerful men were harassing the team.

I responded with

If I ask people to contact me if they love Michael Bolton as much as I do, and 24 people from Silicon Valley respond that they enjoyed listening to “When a Man Loves a Woman” while relaxing with VC friends, will you be convinced that a significant number of the Silicon Valley “powerful” are huge Michael Bolton fans?

Owen Linderholm, whose LinkedIn describes him as a “Senior Content Strategist at WePay” and living in the Bay Area:

If 24 people were murdered by men in silicon valley would that be a significant enough number for you? It’s significant because what they did is significant not because it is statistically significant with a large enough p-value.

I took the bait:

The NYT article describes conduct going back to 2009. So that’s an 8-year period. There were certainly a lot more than 24 murders in Silicon Valley during those 8 years (just one year). …  can we infer from these data that part of Silicon Valley “culture” is murder? You would probably try to figure out the population so that you could turn the total number into a rate and then you would compare the murder rate in these cities and towns to murder rates nationally.

Owen and then Jason:

You really are deliberately obtuse aren’t you. Were those murders by silicon valley luminaries?

I mean, some of these people are a). Very well known; b). Have spent the last decade piously positioning themselves as “allies” to women entrepreneurs and feminism in general.

My response:

Now you sound like the Women’s Studies major who is shocked to learn that one of the guys in her college dorm was feigning interest in feminism when really what interested him was her body.

There was another sub-thread spawned by Steve Atlas, linking to a Fortune article:

“You Won’t Believe How Many Women in Tech Say They’ve Faced Sexual Harassment”

Trae Vassallo took the stand during Ellen Pao‘s discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins … Afterwards, she says an “overwhelming number” of women approached her to share their own stories of harassment. … The survey includes just over 200 women—most of whom have at least 10 years of tech experience—sourced from Vassallo and Madansky’s networks. … A whopping 60% of the women who participated reported experiencing unwanted sexual advances.

[Actually, Vassallo and Pao’s stories suggest that Kleiner Perkins did not use sex as a basis for promotion. Vassallo’s testimony at the trial was that a Kleiner partner tried to have sex with her, but she refused. She was not promoted to “senior partner.” Pao testified at trial that the same Kleiner partner, who happened to be married, tried to have sex with her and she agreed. Pao also was not promoted to “senior partner.” So the two women (maybe inadvertently) participated in a controlled experiment.]

My response:

Here’s my survey. Me and this guy that I know surveyed 200 people from our networks. We discovered that 100 of them are FAA-certificated pilots, 70 of them with airplane ratings, 30 with helicopter ratings, 20 dual-rated, and 12 type-rated for at least one turbojet-powered aircraft. From this I infer that roughly 50 percent of Americans have FAA pilot certificates and that about 15 percent of Americans enjoy flying helicopters.

That Fortune would publish this article without the journalist or editor noticing the absurd methodological flaws that would be plain to a middle school student in Singapore explains why America needs H-1Bs. Just imagine how much money you could lose hiring anyone associated with this survey or the people who couldn’t see the flaws.

I then linked to a couple of articles about the Gates Foundation wasting $1.7 billion on “small high schools” due to incompetence with math/statistics:

• “How to Avoid Bill Gates’ Billion Dollar Mistake”
• “The Small Schools Myth”

Jason Pontin came back:

I’ve deleted the modifier “significant” but you’re fooling yourself if you think this isn’t a problem. You’re like those fools who think it matters that the police are as statistically likely to shoot an unarmed black man – when African Americans are stopped far more often. So, too, I’ve never talked with a female entrepreneur who doesn’t have a story like this.

So it all ties back to Black Lives Matter? I checked in with a neighbor who has raised about $50 million in the venture capital world (two startups plus a fund). It turned out that she had never been approached for sex by a VC, but that she had been approached for sex by her boss when working at a large bank (she said “no”). Of course, this is the Boston-area VC world so things might be different in Silicon Valley, but Pontin was Boston-based when editing Technology Review.

One Facebooker reasonably asked “So many women bail out of high tech. Why?”

Could the answer be “Most women were never dumb enough to be in high tech in the first place and the smart ones certainly wouldn’t be taking startup risk.”

At a party on Saturday night a graphic artist/designer for a Boston-area financial services firm described programming as “dull and unpleasant.” Her theory for why most of the coders at her employer were from India with “They need a population of more than 1 billion before they can find enough people who only care about money and don’t care how dull and unpleasant a job is.”

“We know Silicon Valley is broken, so let’s fix it” (CNBC) describes a couple of women as “industry leaders.” One is GM lifer Mary Barra, who never tried to raise VC money or work in high-tech. The other is Sheryl Sandberg, who never tried to raise VC money or work at a small high-tech company (Sandberg joined Google when it was already hugely successful and Facebook in 2008 when it was already worth at least $15 billion (October 2007 value)). [Separately, the article has a subhead of “Silicon Valley’s moral high ground belies its rampant problems with sexism.” Moral high ground? The journalist and editors are convinced by some anecdotes of “rampant problems with sexism” in an area where total employment is 1.5 million?]

A friend recently attended a wedding. The bride was marrying an already-rich guy. My friend and his wife shared a table with three Harvard MBA women. None of them were working. All had married already-rich guys. (See “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for references to the effect of marriage and family law on women’s labor force participation, e.g., “only 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time”.)

If Silicon Valley has truly developed a culture in which women regularly have sex with VCs in order to get funding or jobs (and the subset of the sisterhood that refuses to participate in this quid pro quo is therefore disadvantaged), why are we only hearing about it now? A friend’s private message:

this is the time for sexual beta-males to come out and pounce on alpha males in groups

Since I don’t live or work in Silicon Valley it is tough for me to offer an opinion on what the “culture” might be, other than people try to make money so that they can afford $5 million starter homes. But I remain fascinated that major newspapers and magazines, people whose job seemingly depends on being smart, and college-educated Americans all uncritically accept inferences made about a sizable industry (at least 23,000 startups in Silicon Valley as of 2016) based on 24 anecdotal reports where the journalists had to reach back through 8 years to gather enough material for one article.

Related:

• Silicon Valley’s latest whipping boy was passionate about women
• Fun with statistics, American-style

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez complements the New York Times coverage of Ellen Pao and similar.

How do men and women (or “employees who currently identify as men” and “employees who currently identify as women”) get along at Facebook?

Picture the Facebook corporate scene for a moment: buildings full of young, emotionally inept male geeks, and sprinkled throughout them, maybe a 10 percent population of young women. What could possibly go wrong? Rather than harshly regulate every step of this sexual-legal minefield, Facebook preferred to lay down basic guidelines. Delicately, but unambiguously, our HR Man stated that we could ask a coworker out once, but no meant no, and you had no more lets after that. After one ask, you were done, and anything beyond that was subject to sanction. So you get one shot on goal, do you? I thought. Better use that one shot wisely.

An idle mind is the devil’s playground, as the saying goes, so in the meantime I got down to the serious business, as some product managers do, of trying to bang my product marketing manager. PMMess, as we’ll call her, was composed of alternating Bézier curves from top to bottom: convex, then concave, and then convex again, in a vertical undulation you couldn’t take your eyes off of. Unlike most women at Facebook (or in the Bay Area, really) she knew how to dress; forties-style, form-fitting dresses from neck to knee were her mainstay. Her blond hair was offset by olive skin, and bright blue eyes shone like headlights from her neotenic face. She had a charming perfectionism around email orthography and usage, despite the generally rushed illiteracy that reigned in Facebook corporate communication. We traded flirtarious barbs around whether CPM was an initialism or an abbreviation, and whether a needlessly flowery formulation of mine, written in response to some insipid corporate conversation, was a metonym or a metaphor. Like me, PMMess would lose herself in bouts of louche, ethanolic self-destruction that typically ended in some disinhibited act of carnality. A couple of times already, such behavior had involved me, though only at a relatively PG-rated level of barside making out.

What are employers missing by having more male employees than female employees? [Remember the question of “Should the SEC make it illegal for public companies to employ men?”] Martinez differs from Hillary Clinton here:

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

What about after hours?

The runway for its accelerated particles travels alongside Sand Hill Road, under Interstate 280, and into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, which define the western border of Silicon Valley. Lastly, there’s a high-class brothel: the Rosewood Sand Hill, a posh restaurant and hotel complex wedged in between SLAC and the Sand Hill–Interstate 280 intersection. Thursday nights at Sand Hill are famous for serving as “cougar nights,” where older, lonely women (and younger ones explicitly on the clock) congregate to ensnare Sand Hill’s wealthy denizens.

Martinez chronicles his close association with one particular woman, whom he refers to as “British Trader” due to her former career as an oil trader:

The contemporary honeymoon of a several-week fuck-fest, consummated at the start of a new romantic liaison, played itself out comme il faut. No surprises really, other than British Trader’s taste for being physically dominated in bed, a bit of a surprise given her alpha-female exterior. To a woman, every girlfriend of mine has been intelligent, ambitious, and independent. Until very recently, all were vastly more successful and wealthier than me. And yet, come the pressing hour of physical need, so unfolded the countless boudoir scenes recalling Fragonard’s Le Verrou: a ravished chambermaid, half resisting and half yielding, violently seized in the arms of her predatory lover, who slams shut the bolt on the bedroom door.

She gets pregnant while they are dating and decides to have the child:

I invite anyone with a philosophical bent to witness a human birth and observe as unstoppable forces meet immovable objects, with neither yielding. Modern medicine does little to resolve this paradox made flesh. The only real differences between the bloody, screaming tableau before me and that of, say, my grandmother’s birth a century ago in rural northern Spain by candlelight, were the little plastic packets of mineral oil, like the salad dressing at a Denny’s, that nurses would regularly crack open and pour over the heaving, tumescent mass down south. It was a sweaty, white-knuckle affair shattered by piercing shrieks of pain that resonated across the maternity ward, and which the heavy institutional doors the nurses slammed shut did little to stifle. I quietly entertained bouts of Mad Men–esque nostalgia for a time when men simply paced nervously and smoked in some other room while the dirty business was completed. … After two hours of battle, old flesh yielded bloodily to new, and Zoë Ayala came into the world.

Martinez does not enjoy domestic life:

By the time AdGrok [a Y Combinator-funded startup] had managed to free itself from the existential crisis, my relationship with British Trader was suffering under stress and our mutual friction. I was done with her imperious hectoring and stiff upper lip. Living with her en concubinage with Zoë resembled less some bohemian family sitcom, and more a stint in the Queen’s army. … British Trader’s desire to be absolute captain of the ship was fine, but there’s only one captain of a ship or company. If she wanted the role, she could maintain the house herself.

Right around when the Adchemy drama was winding down to its victorious conclusion in late 2010, I decided I had had enough of the British barracks room I was living in, and announced I was leaving the household, and British Trader.

Out of nowhere British Trader informs me she is once again pregnant; the calendar math takes us right back to my move-out imbroglio in December, our last tryst after a breakup desert of nonintimacy. After a brief debate, British Trader confirms her desire to keep the child, whatever my thoughts on the matter.

It occurred to me that perhaps this most recent experiment in fertility—and the first—had been planned on British Trader’s part, her back up against the menopause wall, a professional woman with every means at her disposal except a willing male partner—in which case I had been snookered into fatherhood via warm smiles and pliant thighs, the oldest tricks in the book.

Perhaps due to the California child support guidelines extending to infinite levels of income and being applied rigidly by judges, the biological parents avoid litigation. Consistent with “Parental Responses to Child Support Obligations” (Rossin-Slater and Wust, 2016), based on Danish data, as the mother’s profits from child-ownership are increased the father’s non-financial investment in the child is decreased:

Informally, British Trader and I worked out a payment schedule that complied with recommended California state child-support levels. Like the Civil War draft, in which the wealthy could pay a commoner to take their spot on the firing line, I paid my way out of fatherhood, mostly out of fear of the compromise to freedom it represented. I retained visitation rights, but those would be conditional on my always rocky relationship with British Trader. It would suck, but I was ambiguous about my suitability as a father anyhow (as was British Trader).

Martinez fits this into a more comprehensive theory:

What’s my big beef with capitalism? That it desacralizes everything, robs the world of wonder, and leaves it as nothing more than a vulgar market. The fastest way to cheapen anything—be it a woman, a favor, or a work of art—is to put a price tag on it. And that’s what capitalism is, a busy greengrocer going through his store with a price-sticker machine—ka-CHUNK! ka-CHUNK!—$4.10 for eggs, $5 for coffee at Sightglass, $5,000 per month for a run-down one-bedroom in the Mission. … That’s the smoldering ambition of every entrepreneur: to one day create an organization that society deems worthy of a price tag. … These are the only real values we have left in the twilight of history, the tired dead end of liberal democratic capitalism, at least here in the California fringes of Western civilization. Clap at the clever people getting rich, and hope you’re among them. … Is it a wonder that the inhabitants of such a world clamor for contrived rituals of artificial significance like Burning Man, given the utter bankruptcy of meaning in their corporatized culture?

[What would the price tag actually have been for the use of British Trader’s body and her services as a mother? Martinez says that she was out of the oil game and earning only a standard MBA’s salary ($250,000/year?). Martinez discloses that his own pre-tax compensation during his best years was close to $1 million (mostly in Facebook stock). If we plug those numbers into the California child support calculator, using the default of 20 percent time with the father, British Trader gets $97,248 per year, tax-free. ADP Paycheck calculator shows that she would have earned $149,945 after taxes. Thus if her pre-tax salary had been $250,000 per year, by obtaining custody of two children British Trader increased her after-tax spending power by 65 percent.]

Martinez is gracious regarding at least two women in the end-credits:

Thanks to British Trader, who not only bore most of the burden of raising our children but also provided invaluable counsel during the most trying times. Shame that a household, like a ship, admits only one captain. Thanks to Israeli Psychologist, my long-suffering mate during the Facebook half of this book, without whose warm ministrations I’d never have survived that infernal experience. As your people once wrote: “A woman of valour, who can find? For her price is far above rubies. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and the law of kindness is on her tongue.” Your endless kindness deserved a worthier target.

More: read Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

On another posting, PN said

I apologize if this is terribly off-topic, but can we get some legal analysis on the following story:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/entertainment/johnny-depp-amber-heard-divorce/

Johnny Depp — worth $400M — is being divorced by his actress wife of 15 months. No pre-nup. Does she get half?

Given that the other posting was about an avionics fire in an Airbus A320, I think PN should get an award for “most off topic question ever”! (Though a lot of American divorce plaintiffs do bring a violence angle to their litigation.)

The cited CNN article is interesting for its euphemistic language. She is a lawsuit plaintiff trying to get money out of a defendant (see a California judge’s perspective in “Divorce Litigation”). But the journalist does not write “Amber Heard sues Johnny Depp for divorce, alimony, cash, and her attorney’s fees” which would be an accurate way to describe the “petition” (“complaint” in many other states), whose full text is available at TMZ.

Under California’s community property law, in theory Depp’s premarital savings should be off limits to a divorce plaintiff. If Heard had gotten pregnant during the marriage she would be on track for 18 years of profitable (unlimited in California; see the Ellen Pao analysis) child support (see Scenario 4 in this chapter for a similar fact pattern).

Everything can be litigated, though, and spousal support (alimony) that she is suing for is discretionary with the judge. Lawyers told us that judges like to make sure that women get paid for having sex and within the divorce industry it is common to refer to the length of the marriage as “time served” by a female plaintiff. So Heard could probably count on a larger profit from this encounter with Depp than what she would have earned by going to college and working for a lifetime at the median college graduate wage. On the other hand it will probably be nowhere near $200 million. The lawyers will make out handsomely due to the fact that all of Depp’s assets can be examined, at an hourly fee, to determine which are community property and which are not (Heard’s lawsuit explicitly contemplates her lawyers figuring out what she might have a claim to). To calculate spousal support there needs to be a thorough examination of Heard’s need for alimony and Depp’s ability to pay (see the statute), so everything that each spends can be investigated by lawyers charging close to $1000/hour. They can also litigate the question of who pays for legal fees.

My prediction: When the dust settles the lawyers will have gotten paid a fortune, but Heard won’t net much more from her acquaintance with Depp than what she could have obtained by having quiet one-night encounters with a couple of successful married radiologists and collecting 23 years of child support under Massachusetts law. Heard has no incentive to try to reduce the cost or complexity of this lawsuit because she presumably expects the court to order Depp to pay all of her legal fees (i.e., the defendant will pay for the lawyers on both sides and thus the plaintiff is under no pressure to settle for less than the very maximum she thinks that she might be able to obtain at a trial).

My work as an expert witness (mostly in software patent cases) occasionally takes me to absurdly lavish offices of the world’s largest law firms. Perhaps partly due to the rent that they pay, the fees are breathtaking even when the stakes are pretty small, e.g., because the accused product does not generate much revenue. A partner at a small firm, which, at least in his opinion, can do work of comparable quality, explained that companies, especially public ones, aren’t very price-sensitive because the decision regarding which law firm to hire is made by Board members rather than the shareholder-owners who will have to pay said breathtaking fees. “If the firm loses the case the Board members are completely protected if they can say that they hired the biggest and best firm. There is no potential for liability if they spend 2-4X more than they needed to. But they can be sued and/or suffer a loss of personal reputation if it becomes known that they approved the hiring of a no-name firm.”

Related:

• Will the New York Times like their own plaintiff as much as they liked Ellen Pao?

Ellen Pao is the gift that keeps on giving for this blog. She is part of the team at Project Include. These folks purport to tell companies how to build diversity. Some excerpts from Pao’s new site:

Research has quantified the financial benefits of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. Despite this, we have yet to see significant improvement in diversity numbers. [i.e., business owners don’t want to be richer]

We want to provide our perspectives, recommendations, materials, and tools to help CEOs and their teams build meaningful inclusion. We know how hard change is from our own experiences. [Yet Pao’s husband managed to change from homosexual to heterosexual. Are there changes that happen in cubicle farms that are more difficult?]

We are focusing our efforts on CEOs and management of early to mid-stage tech startups, where we believe change is possible and can have a broad impact on the industry and beyond.

We want the girls, people of color, and other underrepresented groups that we are encouraging to pursue STEM educations and future tech jobs to have real opportunities to succeed. [As noted in “Women in Science,” academic success in science may not constitute “success” using a financial or career flexibility yardstick.]

Making a few inferences from photos, names, and biographies on the site, it would seem that this is a group of people who (a) all identify as women, and (b) all but one identify as under age 50. This homogeneous group purports to be expert in achieving diversity. Yet if diversity is a guaranteed path to success, shouldn’t Project Include bring in (“include”) at least one more aged fossil (i.e., a Silicon Valley-dweller over 50)? Or some employees who identify as men? Or encourage some of their current team members to change gender ID to “male”?

[Separately, let’s look at the Project Include team to see if their biographies will inspire “girls, people of color, and other underrepresented groups” to go into STEM. The wealthiest member of the group it would seem is Freada Kapor Klein. Her Wikipedia page indicates no training in STEM and all of her wealth is a result of marrying Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus. This is about as inspiring as the Harvard undergrad who said “I used to think that I wanted to be an investment banker, but then I realized that I could just marry an investment banker.” (if she had been a little more educated about U.S. family law, she might not have included the marriage part in her plan) Y-Vonne Hutchinson has done some awesome stuff, e.g., “worked with foreign governments, the U.S. Department of State, and the UN” and is affiliated with Harvard Law School. She is trained as a lawyer, however, not in STEM. Ellen Pao herself, of course, also has a law background and did not work at a technical job. Erica Joy Baker is described as “a seasoned software engineer” yet is being paid to spend “20 percent of her time at Slack advocating for diversity and inclusion, both within and outside of the company.” If she were a great programmer, why would the company want her to write code only 80-percent time?]

“MIT built its own Ellen Pao before the Ivy League did: Gretchen Kalonji” covers a UC chancellor who arranged a sinecure for her lover and ran up $600,000 in renovation bills before it all ended in suicide and litigation.

Today’s nytimes has “University of California, Davis, Chancellor Is Removed From Post” about Linda Katehi and “questions about the campus’s employment and compensation of some of the chancellor’s immediate family members.”

Do they really need to have someone in this position if it is so prone to nepotism?

Raymond Moore lost his job running a big tennis tournament for saying that female professional tennis players “ride on the coattails of the men.” (CBS News)

I attended the March 31, 2016 Miami Open and explored the issue a little.

Here are photographs of the stadium during the final set of a women’s singles match and a men’s singles match. The women’s match was a more important semifinal event while the men’s match was just a quarterfinal. On the other hand the men’s match was slightly later in the day so could be attended by people who were stuck at work later. (On the third hand, tickets were kind of expensive and it seemed that nearly everyone with a 1 pm “day ticket” showed up pretty close to 1 pm and was at least somewhere within the grounds (there are multiple courts as well as restaurants, shops, etc..))

Here are photographs of the stadium during the women’s and men’s matches. Readers with great eyesight can try to estimate which match was better attended.

I then queried the folks sitting around me (Section 423, which gets afternoon shade!). An extended family had come from Mexico and was staying at the J.W. Marriott downtown for the entire event. Both sexes within the family preferred to watch the men’s game, would have come to a male-only tournament and would not have invested the time and money to come to a female-only tournament. On my left was a family from Guatemala with a 10-year-old tennis-playing son. They were staying in a different Marriott on the beach. The wife was an expert tennis player and said that she preferred watching the men’s game. The Guatemalans said that they wouldn’t have come to see an all-female tournament but would come to watch only men. Behind me was a Japanese national who had come to see Kei Nishikori.

A financial executive friend says that women are on average paid more than men in practice because (a) women get maternity leave while men generally don’t (or don’t take it), and (b) women get the right to sue their employer for discrimination and that right has a cash value even if only a fraction of women actually do sue and/or get paid (see Ellen Pao).

Readers: What do you think about women tennis players getting paid the same in cash compensation as men? Plainly in this day-and-age they are not going to suffer a pay cut. Is this disgraced Moore guy right, though, that they should at least be a little grateful that the men show up to the same tournaments?

[Separately, as my co-spectators were from countries that are often characterized as “corrupt” by American media, I asked them what they thought about U.S. politics versus Mexican and Guatemalan politics. The consensus among the Latin Americans was that local politics in the U.S. is cleaner, but that national politics is at least as corrupt. “When the Clintons can get money from private companies and foreign governments after leaving office and before taking office again, that’s as corrupt as anything anywhere in the world.” (One of my Millennial Facebook friends, who might be expected to support Hillary due to holding a government job (schoolteacher), recently wrote “I’m just gonna say it: You have to be pretty ignorant to vote for Hillary. Who cares if she would be the first woman president, she’s a corrupt bitch, only in it for power and money.”)]

Who has predictions for 2016 to share? I’ll go first…

Software: the iPhone will continue moving in the direction of Android and Windows. More capability, but also more crashes and unpredictable behavior such as slow response time.

Hardware: the beginning of the end of Intel’s dominance? As the desktop continues to die and the newest chips aren’t that much faster than the old chips (just more cores), why should anyone know or care what the CPU is inside a tablet or notebook computer?

Televisions: the premature death of OLED? Could it be that LCDs with higher dynamic range and/or ridiculously low prices will strangle OLED in its crib?

Politics: Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election by the same margin that Barack Obama had in 2012. Does it matter who is unfortunate enough to win the booby prize of the Republican nomination (previous posting on the unwinnability of this one for Republicans)? I don’t think so, but I will guess that it will be Ted Cruz based on the fact that he is a professional politician, unlike Donald Trump. With government spending now at roughly 50 percent of GDP, the election is important. As the government has grown (chart) people are more passionate about getting on the right side of this rich entity. The vote should basically come down to people who benefit from a big government (either they collect welfare, free housing, etc., work for the government, or have a close family member who works for the government, or work for a government contractor or crony (e.g., health care)) versus people who are economically disadvantaged by the government growing larger (e.g., people who pay taxes but don’t have an obvious way to collect a lot of benefits in return).

Economics: As predicted by Mancur Olson, the U.S. economy continues its stagnation, with per-capita GDP growing only slightly (of course the total GDP can still grow robustly if the U.S. population grows larger, e.g., through immigration). If we model the half of the U.S. economy that is now centrally planned by government as being like the former Soviet Union, we would expect half the economy to grow at an annual rate of between 0 and 0.75 percent. If we model the other half as being like a modern high-income free-market economy, such as Singapore or Hong Kong, that half could grow at a 3-4 percent rate (maybe at the higher end of this range due to the dead cat bounce that we’re probably still in following the Collapse of 2008). That leads to a maximum potential long-term average per capita GDP growth of about 2.4 percent, but let’s assume that the tangle of regulations imposed by the planned portion of the economy drags this down to 1-1.5 percent. If you live in one of the handful of desirable cities in the U.S. the result of this “growth” will be a reduction in your spending power due to (a) higher taxes, and (b) inflation in the cost of housing and services.

Work: The growth of the American welfare state will continue with higher minimum wages and other regulations discouraging companies from hiring the least-able Americans (see also “Can Puerto Rico be a laboratory for the future of the rest of the U.S.?” and “unemployed = 21st century draft horse?”). Higher tax rates and more lucrative child support guidelines in some states (e.g., Kansas), plus the message from politicians and meida to women that they can’t get fairly compensated in the workforce, will contribute to a continuation of the 15-year slide in the labor force participation rate of women. An increasing percentage of young women will be primarily stay-at-home wives (The inquisitive gender studies student and Sheryl Sandberg) or profit from their fertility without being married (chart showing a peak shortly after the Federal mandate for states to develop guidelines that made it easy to calculate the profits from a casual sexual encounter or short-term marriage (History); see also divorce litigators’ analysis of Ellen Pao’s career options)).

Leisure: With fewer people working and higher costs for employers making hotel rates grow faster than official inflation there will be a lot of demand for fun stuff that Americans can do from home, e.g., streaming video, video games, etc. I predict that the first virtual reality headsets will arrive in 2016 as planned but that consumers will be slow to adopt these innovations.

Health care: With no changes in financial incentives, I expect no changes in this sector (nearly 20 percent) of the U.S. economy. Due to the fact that viruses are smarter than humans, I expect no major breakthroughs in treatments.

Government: More outsourcing to cronies. From a bureaucrat’s point of view, a contract with a crony provides a great way to say “no” to the public. Instead of “We don’t want to give you that service,” a bureaucrat can say “We contracted out that function for five years to Vendor X and the contract doesn’t require them to give you that service. It is a great idea, though, and I’m sorry that they aren’t doing it.”

Businesses: Big companies will manage to work around new regulations and taxes. The keys to continued profits will include a combination of purchasing political influence, turning U.S. operations into a subsidiary of a foreign corporation headquartered in a country with lower tax rates (e.g., via an inversion), and expanding in growing markets overseas. Operating a small company in the U.S. will be increasingly untenable, unless it is a startup that can expect to be acquired fairly quickly. “Go big or go home” will continue be the message, e.g., communicated with double the effective tax rates on small corporations compared to large ones with their crews of full-time tax attorneys, offshore subsidiaries holding patents, etc.

Stocks: Due to the above, the S&P 500 should continue to grow in after-tax value at the same rate as world GDP (about 3 percent), even if the U.S. economy stagnates. (i.e., I am predicting that the S&P 500 will be approximately 60 points higher a year from now.)

Education: Mediocrity will continue to be accepted by Americans at all levels of the educational system. The U.S. will continue to spend more on this sector than all but a handful of countries (OECD chart), but most people in the education industry won’t have any incentive to achieve high performance. Incumbent nonprofit colleges will keep fighting back against for-profit colleges and increase their share of government handouts.

Cars: Innovations in self-driving and electric-powered cars will be significant and heavily publicized, but hard to deliver. Thus by the end of 2016 consumers will try to avoid buying a new car and/or enter into short-term leases in hopes that by 2017 or 2018 there will be mass-market cars with dramatic innovations.

Internet: Continued slide in readership and participation for anything that isn’t Facebook.

Income Inequality: Will continue to widen. Politicians who get a boost from complaining about income/wealth inequality will open the doors to a lot of immigrants with zero income and zero wealth, thus immediately worsening the statistics. Population growth from this immigration combined with the obstacles to building in the U.S. will favor existing owners of real property (i.e., Americans who are richer than the median). Increased complexity from regulations, taxes, and tax differentials from place to place and from company to company (e.g., depending on political connections) will favor the cleverest and best-educated (i.e., Americans who are probably richer than the median).

ISIS prediction: We won’t hear too much about ISIS in Syria by the end of 2016. Backed by the Russian military (will they trademark the phrase “What a real ally looks like”?), the Syrian government should be able to get its territory back under control. So ISIS will contract to almost nothing in Syria and grow in Iraq.

Migration into Europe: Every current migrant will tell 10 friends or family members about how well it is working out. Roughly one third of the friends/family will act on the advice. Thus there will be approximately three times as many migrants coming into the EU at the end of 2016 compared to now.

Readers: Your turn now!

Atlantic magazine has an article on a professor to whom the University of Illinois revoked a job offer back in August 2014. A linked-to piece says that the employer spent roughly $850,000 in legal fees  and paid $275,000 in legal fees to the plaintiff (plus $600,000 in damages). Unlike in the Ellen Pao case, the lawyers didn’t have to sift through years of work-related documents because the plaintiff had never started work.

Thus, even if the employer had beaten the rap it would have been out at least $2-3 million by the time a trial rolled around.

Related:

• a detailed report from a committee, which includes an offer of tenure and an $85,000 salary for nine months of work. [How does this compare to the revenue from a one-night sexual encounter in Chicago? The tenured faculty salary is $59,922/year after taxes (ADP), an amount that could be obtained through the Illinois child support system by suing a co-parent earning $299,610 after tax or by suing two co-parents each of whom earned $149,805 after tax.]