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Female founders who've had a great 2016

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Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#71

Post by matthewmacleod »

jimmywanger wrote: post #62

> We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance?

The teaching and nursing industries both talk about gender imbalance in their own industry communication channels. The fact that tech receives all the attention in tech-oriented news outlets should be no surprise.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#72

Post by belorn »

tptacek wrote: post #47
cbeach wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way. Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait? Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" compet…

We don't. We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession, and are happy to acknowledge anything that might suggest a countervailing trend.

Since Sweden has this handy institution that provide statistics, I have taken a nice look at different professions (recorded as part of tax collections) and their gender distribution.

How do you support the rather extraordinary claim that the technology professions have markedly larger gender imbalance compared to other cognitive non-routine professions? From the data I saw, 2014 numbers placed technology professions around the 70%-30% gender distribution which puts it directly into the majority of professions of any kind.

The two extremes: Fair distribution (40%-60% or closer to 50%/50%) has as group a rather poor 10% of all employed people. Unsurprising, it has about the same number of women and men that works in those professions.

The second extreme are those with 90%-10% or higher, and if I remember right about the top professions in that list, it was topping with midwife nurse (99.7%), nurse with dentist specialization (99.4%) and carpenters that construct floors (99%). Going down from that you got several other specializations of nurses, mechanics, midwifes, construction workers, and kindergarten teachers (94%). You have to travel really far into the list to reach professions with as high gender equality as 70%-30%. To name a few cognitive non-routine professions at the 80%-20%, we got professions like veterinarian, psychologist, librarian, and teacher, all with worse gender distribution than technology professions.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#73

Post by droidist2 »

tomlock wrote: post #69
234dd57d2c8db wrote: post #66

I'm waiting for the list of successful female garbage collectors and sewer technicians. There's a place gender balance is even worse, virtually _100%_ men, but I don't see any big pushes to diversify those fields. Those two jobs also make a surprising amount of $$$ too.

Is there a ycombinator style site for sewer technicians you regularly check?

There are plenty of non-programmer/startup articles posted regularly on HN, often about societal and demographic trends, politics, and history. Even on the topic of sewers and plumbing:

The sewer men who changed the war: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021971

Why Copenhagen Has Almost Perfect Water: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10790058

The Nano Membrane Toilet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895347

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#74

Post by tomlock »

droidist2 wrote: post #73
tomlock wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a ycombinator style site for sewer technicians you regularly check?

There are plenty of non-programmer/startup articles posted regularly on HN, often about societal and demographic trends, politics, and history. Even on the topic of sewers and plumbing: The sewer men who changed the war: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021971 Why Copenhagen Has Almost Perfect Water: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10790058 The Nano Membrane Toilet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108…

I'm not sure its representative of the interests of sewer technicians, or the contemporary issues they are concerned about, though. Op is "waiting for a list".

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#75

Post by tomlock »

facepalm wrote: post #61
parennoob wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country Unfortunately, very few efforts seem to focus on immediately applicable solutions like this that solve the problem (if there is one) fundamentally. None of the Big Tech companies for example (Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft come to mind) currently do appl…

There has also been a study showing tech interviews went less favorable for women when their voices were masked as male voices. As for "Girls Who Code" as PR - does it increase the popularity of these firms with male coders, too? My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

>>My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

I can't think of many scenarios that would give you that impression. Did google personally reject you for being a man?

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#76

Post by matt4077 »

facepalm wrote: post #60
Joeboy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure about the proportionality of the 20th "No, seriously, Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible terrible person!" - article. Out of interest I googled the hits on HN for Holmes and 2016's other medical industry bête noir, Martin Shkreli. Holmes wins by 325 to 141, although I'd personally be hard pressed to say which of them was more terrible.

Not the same kind of story at all. Holmes first became famous (As a unicorn), then fell from grace. Shkreli never was admired, or was he? He was just scorned right from the start.

While that's factually true fail to see the causality. It's like: "These are completely different stories, she was born in Canada and he is an excellent tennis player".

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#77

Post by matt4077 »

parennoob wrote: post #55
matt4077 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be more necessary than usual – I got the feeling that women were overrepresented in the "Founder-does-something-terrible" articles, at least on HN. Some was certainly deserved, although I'm not sure about the proportionality of the 20th "No, seriously, Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible terrible person!" - article. Some was offensive, misogynistic, backwards bullshit that I can only hope is highly correlated with the…

> as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country Unfortunately, very few efforts seem to focus on immediately applicable solutions like this that solve the problem (if there is one) fundamentally. None of the Big Tech companies for example (Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft come to mind) currently do appl…

Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.

But if I had to guess, I'd say these large companies are actually quite fair in their hiring processes. Discrimination at that step in the process seems to be more common at smaller or older companies. The worst, most blatant actual case I have seen was the IT dept at a medium-sized bank.

At FB and Google I'd guess "career advancement" is more susceptible to biases. As company tries to create "shallow hierarchies", the risk of competition devolving into the law of the jungle increases (but, as I said, only guessing. Have no experience with them).

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#78

Post by chongli »

closeparen wrote: post #70
rubicon33 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really skeptical that the financial aid you speak of is as accessible as you think it is. Speaking completely anecdotally, someone very close to me chose not to go to Stanford, simply because her family couldn't afford it. And that was with a scholarship. I've never asked her about financial aid, and if she investigated it. My guess is though that she fell into the category of middle class... aka, too rich to qua…

Upper middle class, maybe. This can happen when your household income is $200k. Not $55k (national median) and certainly not below. Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only th…

Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class.

They've got this thing nailed down to a T. Upper/middle kids can't go because their parents can't afford it. For a variety of reasons, lower income kids can't get the marks to get in to these schools so they never reach the point where financial aid would matter.

This lets these schools preserve their elite enrolment while providing nominally generous support.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#79

Post by megablast »

cbeach wrote: post #42
danso wrote: post #22

I support these kinds of lists. Like #BlackLivesMatter, the focus on a purportedly disenfranchised group doesn't mean that the "main" group doesn't matter -- but it's an acknowledgement that we see plenty of representation of the main group -- in this case, men -- by default. Unless you believe that there really are no barriers specific to women (and it doesn't necessarily have to be sexism) and that women just are t…

I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way. Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait? Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" compet…

> Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?

No, it is more like giving them separate awards, like the mens 400m and the womens 400m.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#80

Post by megablast »

jimmywanger wrote: post #62

> We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance?

> Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance?

It isn't, they are, and have been for many years. Maybe you should read more nursing or teaching sites?

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