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Reflections on Being a Female Founder

tracy.posthaven.com

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Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#211

Post by wutbrodo »

pm90 wrote: post #178
BurningFrog wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think SFs hostility to children is largely independent of tech. It's about not building housing for 40 years, and running a terrible school system, etc.

Correct. Make decent homes and childcare affordable and you will see more kids. It’s not that hard. BTW, most tech workers in SF still work at bigger firms (Ie non startups) so the argument that startup culture is what holds people back from childbearing doesn’t seem to hold water.

Yea, a big tech co might be one of the most family-friendly jobs you can get, afaict.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#212

Post by Moru »

dpoochieni wrote: post #111
roenxi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be even worse and note that this is a story that is fundamentally about a woman achieving reproductive success - and it sounds pretty miserable. The male version of this story is something like how much easier it is to sleep with an attractive women because a CEO title is perceived as high status. Most people shape their lives around having a family - the incentives here are not favourable for females seeking ou…

This so much! I had a girlfriend, now friend, which is terribly successful and attractive and she regrets it all saying maybe it would have been better to focus on a family early on. She still has a very good chance in doing so, but clearly thinks it would have been better to use her 20s doing that and didn't do it because of the pressure to be a career woman in her circles and educational experiences.

On the other hand she has enough experience and skin on the nose to be a great and stable mother now.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#213

Post by aptwebapps »

rapsey wrote: post #188
kmonsen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the trend towards better? I used to think so but the stories I heard in my time in Google was really, really depressing. The problem is that getting worse can be a self-reinforcing thing. Once a few women get badly treated and leaves the gender imbalance gets worse and the bad behavior gets normalized.

There is always at least one guy in any group more then a handful of people. It is terrible what kind of bullshit women have to go through in this industry.

The first time I read this comment I failed to parse what you meant by 'one guy' and thought you were being sarcastic.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#214

Post by atq2119 »

jmchuster wrote: post #159
mrkurt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. We glamorize "management" in every way, even going so far as to label devs "individual contributors". As if they only contribute 1x while managers contribute multiples. I have this gut wrenching feeling that tech companies just can't be fixed. There's way too much that has to change and the powerful people don't have much incentive to do the work.

Compare your best manager and your best engineer, and the manager _does_ contribute multiples more than the engineer does. You take this to the extreme, and the best CEOs in history have added additional billions in value to the companies that they've helmed.

This is more of a function of the person's role than their individual contributions though.

A CEO's decisions generally have far wider-ranging impact than an individual contributor's, but it's not a directly productive impact in the literal production sense. The CEO didn't personally add those billions of value, they enabled others to add that value.

Ultimately, a CEO's decisions don't come out of a vacuum. The available options are created by ICs and percolate through management. The point of the CEO is to act as a sort of tie-breaker to ensure that decisions are actually made by choosing some of the options.

At least that's the case in large established companies. Obviously the dynamics are different in a small startup where the CEO is also the founder, but if the startup is successful it'll eventually transition to the "large established company" case, even if the founder stays on as CEO.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#215

Post by drobert »

We had gender roles because it was the most effective way to survive and raise a family. The cost was that women were assigned rather basic responsibilities. Because tech and services have evolved families can outsource some of the chors done by women in the past like cooking, cleaning. In the case of making babies the the technology is still in development but we will get there. Artificial wombs will be an option in the next decades. Still the baby requires for the normal emotional development close contact with the mother. In the end the fundamental role of the mother to bond with the baby cannot be outsourced and I do not think that's desirable. Will there always be differences between men and women in the workplace? I think the answer to the question is yes, at least for women who chose to raise a family.

Fundamentaly that is a life choice. But now with more freedom for women there is more pressure for them to achieve.

Creating a company is hard, very hard. Raising a kid at the same time I believe it requires super human effort. I profoundly respect the author, she is a real fighter. But few women when given the choice would choose to do what she did. Feeding a baby in the car while doing research seems far from desirable for most women I presume. Then the question is why she did it? I will be interested to know her view, but I presume she really cared about her company and it was beyond money.

This is the price to pay for creating a company, Musk works crazy hours to keep his two companies alive. Female founders with a kid are under the same pressure. There is nothing we can do here to make it easier: the world of businesses is a race, a competition, nobody cares about you're personal problems: a kid, cancer, etc.

> I want to see a world where men and women, who make up equal halves of humanity, also make up equal halves of leadership. When that happens, I wholeheartedly believe that the entire world will benefit.

The push towards equality of outcomes is a dangerous ones as it creates expectations that are not realistic to be met. Given our biological makeup and the roles that derive from that I believe this is the not realistic. While I totally agree that women who want to lead and are willing to make the sacrifices required are making the world a better place, it is not for everyone and we should accept and respect that.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#216

Post by jacquesm »

yomly wrote: post #169
divbzero wrote: post #114

> On some days, I would park my car on a sleepy street in Palo Alto and pump milk with a silicone hand pump in front of someone’s nice house, reading profiles of the investors in my next meeting from my iPhone. Occasionally someone would drive up, or a jogger would run by, and I would feel completely humiliated. This is just a small bit of everything Tracy wrote. But I would love to see this stigma changed. There sho…

Taking a step back from her story, I find it so weird that we stigmatise some of the most universal human experiences. Essentially every person will piss burp fart and poop. And almost every person has one of two genitals. (EDIT and our biological parents will have one of each). And almost every mother will feed their baby with their breasts. And yet we have become so detached from the animal part of our identity and…

This is much more of a thing in the United States than elsewhere in the world.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#217

Post by jacquesm »

hinkley wrote: post #48
belorn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times in the article she perceive male founders as stoic machines that regardless of health or mental state would go to work and operate as if nothing is wrong, and then goes to copy that. That is a stereotype that is hurting both men and women, and removing that would resolve a lot of the hardship.

Postmortems often happen because someone ignored a pain point prior to the failure, rather than taking stock and doing some preventative work. The general pattern of pretending everything is ok is one of my least favorite things about tech culture. I was going to say 'tech people' but it's clear that there are people who don't like this pattern either. They tend to self-identify (sometimes privately) when I buck the…

> The general pattern of pretending everything is ok is one of my least favorite things about tech culture.

This goes way beyond tech. It is permeating the business world in general and society at large as well. "How are you? Fine!" -> I'm stable and we can do business.

VS: "How are you? Well, to be honest I'm having a lousy day, I've been ill for the last three weeks and three of my customers have left." -> This customer moves somewhere else as well. Besides the fact that most people really aren't all that interested in how you feel, they simply exchange these words as some kind of ritual formula.

People are pretending things are better than they are all the time because society sees anything less as weakness and weakness will result in things getting even worse for the person displaying that weakness. We are continuously conditioning each other to pretend that things are better than they really are.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#218

Post by jacquesm »

globular-toast wrote: post #54
_pzdn wrote: post #23

This was an interesting read. I found it well written and kind of sad, if optimistic and hopeful. Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent between the two genders, so why are almost all coders I've worked with male?

> Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. See there you betray a rather sinister idea. If you had said that you want to see any unfair barriers to entry removed, or that you want to ensure equal exposure and opportunity across all people and all fields then I could support it. But instead you made your desires quite clear: you just want female developers. That means the gender, physical appearan…

I think your comment says more about you than about the OP.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#219

Post by Cthulhu_ »

belorn wrote: post #42
satyrnein wrote: post #38

I wish there were a clear bad guy here, but most of the hardship seems to have been caused by more diffuse social pressures. What could we have done as an industry to improve the author's experience? Maybe just having more female founders around in general (by removing any barriers) would make some of these circumstances more commonplace.

Many times in the article she perceive male founders as stoic machines that regardless of health or mental state would go to work and operate as if nothing is wrong, and then goes to copy that. That is a stereotype that is hurting both men and women, and removing that would resolve a lot of the hardship.

Honestly though, I feel like some of the higher-up men have serious psychopathic issues; if they do show empathy, it comes across as pretended, as a trained tactic to pursue their goals. I've worked with driven managers who didn't have this and in the high-pressure environment they operated in (mostly high pressure to sell and make money, it was in software dev consultancy) ended up overworked and lost 6-12 months of their professional life because of it, plus whatever long term issues they developed because of it.

Have people like Zucc, Bezos, or Trump ever taken an extended period of time off because of stress or giving too much of a shit? No, they just fuck off to their resorts, private islands and yachts, do some cocaine or whatever vice they have and shrug it off. And those are the public figures; behind them are the more shady characters that have a lot of money and power without the personality and fame. It's the investors that tell a good-willing CEO or founder that they need to sack people, to make the hard decisions, while they reap the rewards, earning ridiculous money without doing the work for it or having to deal with the emotional or moral consequences of their decisions / votes themselves.

TL;DR I think people who care cannot reach the 'heights' that the super-rich, super-successful do. I also believe a trait / condition of psychopathy is a lot more prevalent in men. I believe this is a big factor in the gender representation in the upper echelons.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#220

Post by bhubert »

drobert wrote: post #215

We had gender roles because it was the most effective way to survive and raise a family. The cost was that women were assigned rather basic responsibilities. Because tech and services have evolved families can outsource some of the chors done by women in the past like cooking, cleaning. In the case of making babies the the technology is still in development but we will get there. Artificial wombs will be an option in…

I know I'm a little lateto the party, but I want to make the point that I don't actually think that there being few women in leading roles is the problem. I think it is a symptom.

I think it is a symptom of a real underlying hidden problem that is the discourse of todays society is biasing the interests of our children differently based on gender.

A lot of places we're strongly associating the color blue with boys and the color pink with girls. We force these colors upon them while they're such a young age that they might grow the same associations. I think this also happens with attributes other than favorite color, attributes such as behavioral patterns. I'm bot saying there's not also a biological aspect to this, but noone I've read has any idea of how much is nurture and how much is nature, but it seems to me that when looking at our (as a society) practices with our small ones, there is certainly room for a great deal being nurture.

In short I don't think that the problem is that there are few women in leading roles, I think the problem is that we are raising our boys to want to be leaders and our girls to not.

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