4th May 2021. Waste | Men
Where stuff goes to die; the cost of male over-confidence
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#1: Where stuff goes to die
(Photo: via The Straits Times)
What do you see when you look at this picture? Take a moment. Look hard; and don’t cheat. In setting this little puzzle I’m copying exactly what Kai Brach did in a recent edition of his Dense Discovery newsletter in a recent short post on waste.
And the answer is here: it is an aerial shot of Chinese bicycles as a result of failed bikeshare businesses. As he puts it, this is “the material manifestation of reckless entrepreneurialism”. As he also says in the post, the problem isn’t the idea of bike-sharing, which is definitely a good thing (more on that later this week).
The problem is in assuming that mass transport services are best delivered through the medium of competition between lots of fragmented businesses:
instead of a properly researched city planning approach that involved communities, we did it the Silicon Valley way: a boardroom of tech bros decided what is good for us. Flashy colours and it comes with an app – it must be InNoVaTion!
In the Chinese case, Irene DB on Twitter points to an article in Foreign Policy that describes a classic tech sector bubble: investors scrambling to become the market leader, with a completely unsustainable business model, which they planned to fix by harvesting user data. The incentive structures are all wrong
And none of these businesses pay the full cost of their failure in terms of wasted materials and resources.
Bicycles, as it happens, are not the biggest problem here. From the Global E-waste Monitor:
Last year’s e-waste weighed substantially more than all the adults in Europe, or as much as 350 cruise ships the size of the Queen Mary 2, enough to form a line 125 km long.
There’s more on the bike graveyard at the Straits Times.
#2: The cost of male over-confidence
It’s generally assumed that men are over-confident about their abilities; fake it until you make it, and all that. A Medium post by David Sumpter describes how some Stanford University researchers set out to test this hypothesis:
Adina Sterling and her colleagues at Stanford started by looking at how ‘self-efficacy’ of men and women in comparison with their University grades. Self-efficacy was measured by asking study participants how confident they are in their ability to develop products; build prototypes and mathematical models; and construct technological systems.
And it turns out that self efficacy isn’t related to university grades. But it is directly related to gender.
(Source: Adina Sterling et al, [www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010269117])
It gets worse. It turns out that self-efficacy is a good guide to starting salary, and that the men in the study were paid $4000 more in starting salary than the women:
It gets worse. It turns out that self-efficacy is a good guide to starting salary, and that the men in the study were paid $4000 more in starting salary than the women:
And there is reason to believe that pay differences are self-reinforcing: the fact that these over-confident young men are paid more will lead them to become even more confident that they are worth more. While more research is required to know exactly how these initial differences play out in the long run, the differences in males and female salaries are large.
Ignore the clickbait headline (“Stanford researchers find that male over-confidence might be costing the tech industry billions”). The cost to the tech industry is the least of the problems here. There’s also a link to the academic article, which looks to be open access.
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