One person's discrimination is another's business opportunity

A little note in an obituary this week:

Mary Coombs, pioneering woman programmer on LEO, the world's first business computer – obituary

She joined the computing team at J Lyons in 1952 when there were just three programmers, all men, and went on to write payroll programs

The little note itself:

Family commitments meant that she ceased full-time programming in 1964, but continued to work part-time editing computer manuals

That’s the way it was done back then. Married women with children tended not to work. No, not entirely and wholly the gross sexism of the patriarchy. Household technology was still undeveloped back then and it did take the full time labour of one person to run a household. The sexism was that it was the woman who did so, not that someone had to.

It’s also possible to note that Gary Becker was right about discrimination. If skilled labour is being kept out of the workplace for unreasonable reasons then that’s an opportunity for someone else to gain that labour on the cheap. Which is exactly what Dame Steve Shirley did. (Her TED talk more than makes up for the pompous foolishness of most of the rest of said TED talks.) Deliberately and specifically went off to hire those skilled programmers now stuck at home with the toddlers. Did very well too, making a fortune and also programming Concorde’s black box for example.

One person’s discrimination can be, as Becker said, someone else’s business opportunity.

It’s also possible - and profitable as a logical exercise - to run this back the other way. There are many claims about discrimination today. But if we do not find people deliberately seeking out this discriminated against and therefore cheap labour perhaps it’s not in fact taste discrimination, but rational discrimination that is the issue? In fact, we tend to use this as a filter of such claims ourselves. When such a claim is made we ask, well, where are the people attempting to hire? And if there aren’t any, why not?