"Not a lot is written about being a female founder and CEO"
Maybe this is just a Scandinavian perspective, but I feel like there is in fact quite a lot written about this.
Reflections on Being a Female Founder
241–250 of 311 posts
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, this is an issue in every company on the planet, not sure why you single out tech. If anything large tech companies have the best IC paths out there.
This is true. Many other industries are absolute cesspools of corruption, nepotism, outright harassment and just all in all hellholes to work in, but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech.
>> but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech
I don't think so. Hollywood has certainly had a lot of issues in the press...
Perhaps it's that you read more tech-focused media? Or the founders/CEOs of big tech companies have massively high profiles and that can work against them when there is bad news to report about them or their companies.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#243Earlier 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…
Yes! This is spot-on. This is a social construct and a good example why I think we should focus more on male gender roles in order to achieve better equality. Males have strict roles, expectations and reward structures in society, just like we all do. Equality movements have expected men to step down without giving them an alternative way of achieving self-worth. They still have the same pressures applied, but are ex…
Men aren't pushed to extremes to achieve status. High achievers push themselves to extremes, where extremes are directly defined as places where other people don't push as hard.
I know we shouldn't confuse is with ought, but men in particular are very competitive in their youth, and whatever you think you can do to replace the status game will itself become a status game. Cultural wars to redefine status games are especially susceptible to becoming the new status game, because there's so much at stake; completely redefining the meaning of success, and unbalancing all the previously successful people.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#244Reflections on being a trans founder: Nobody cares. Prepare to be misgendered a fair amount. Know that you will have to go to bat for your employees which may limit your options when it comes to going to bat for yourself. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
What do you mean by "nobody cares"? As in they don't care which gender you identify as and treat you normally (or not)?
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are many good reasons for wanting more women developers, IMO. are there any bad reasons for wanting such? this is not a flip comment. if it causes a laugh i dont see a problem with that but it is honestly not intended to denigrate anyone, but bring people into, well, software, which is probably the greatest thing in existence. diversity is generally considered a good thing in evolution. i dont know if that appl…
People like you are destroying this field. I just can't believe how sheltered and naïve you all are. It's like you've been raised in a bubble, never learnt anything that children are supposed to learn, and now you're an adult earning money, still living in that bubble. It's plain as day that you're lonely. You lack female companionship and the only thing you understand is the bubble so naturally you think the solutio…
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Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#246I'm convinced that the best thing we as society can do for gender equality right now is to abandon the corporate roles that cater unreasonably much to the stereotypical macho male gender role. These are roles which in principle require you to abandon your private life and spend all your mental energy on the company. Why do we even have these roles? Well, according to behavioural psychology males fight for status, and…
Never have worked with a single engineer that worked for status. Not once. Especially softies know their place and have mostly other interests. They evidently exist, but they have to be a rare kind. Perhaps a specialty in certain industries.
There is of course the usual bickering about who has the longest... best solution, but that is another thing and certainly not restricted to men. Much more prevalent is the stuff from the other side that reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N10-G8JaE5s
Far more common behavior. It isn't even close.
I don't think there are any rigid roles to be honest. Maybe just the ones you subject yourself to. There is the usual office psychology that is borderline pathological, but that is indeed a gender neutral phenomenon.
> work environment more egalitarian
what does that mean to you exactly?
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cus…
To be honest, I hate that. It is indeed women who do this more, but not exclusively.
"Hi raxxorrax! How are you? Had a good morning? Want some cookies?" - Completely normal within my circle of friends as an honest question, but I don't like colleagues asking me constantly. You get nothing done if you always start small talk. The people asking you this are mostly not interested in an answer anyway. That is just the reality of it.
And then you do that with people that you might not even like. There is much value in some distance in a business setting. The most abusive work relations are probably prevalent if you get too close to every other employee.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely. In most of Europe things are more normal: it's normal for women to be prime ministers or presidents, it's OK to breastfeed your child in public, and at least among my programmer peers, women are regarded with more respect than men (since there are so few of them in IT). In Poland, the catholic church and the "conservatives" still work hard at enforcing the old barbaric gender stereotypes, but they get lit…
In Poland sexism in IT is still strong among some academic types. Not only sexism, but bags of other prejudices as well. I’d call it the „frustrated elitism syndrome”.
Really? I have no experience with academia, but in commercial settings I don't see any of it.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#249This 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?
This has been discussed once or twice... What did your search engine tell you?
I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent.
That might be a practice to do away with.
But to be literal, I asked because I wanted to talk about it and not just read about. However that may have been a mistake on my part; this article, found through my search engine, was pretty good: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are...
Points raised in the article:
1. Inherent differences between genders, if they exist, are tiny, and vary considerably from region to region
2. Starting in the 80s computers were marketed towards males
3. Computers were often in the male sibling's bedroom and not their own, according to interviews with some female CMU students in the 90s
4. Self-bias "For instance, girls tend to score worse on a test if they are told their maths skills are being assessed than when they are told they are taking part in a study investigating how people solve problems."
5. Hostile work environments: articles about why women should not be in the workplace, sexual harassment and illegal discrimination
6. May not be a worse gender gap than other industries such as finance or media
7. Cultural: women can (physically) start a family by having children; men cannot; there is an cost to staying in a work environment with regard to starting a family, and there is a "risk-taking" in the tech industry (to be honest, I've always found it very a secure line of work, but that is what the article says)
8. Tech may be well placed to bring more females into the workplace
9. Startups where someone is encouraged to spend a lot of time at the workplace are not doable for primary caregivers (which is often mothers)
10. Algorithmic biases being implicitly developed by a mostly male workforce (e.g. voice recognition trained and tested solely by men)
Final line from the article, and why I posted my root post to begin with: “Computing is too important to be left to men.”
So there is a whole host of reasons.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have kids? Are you speaking from experience? A kid of 2 is not able to look after him/herself. Kids that young need lots of attention. I am speaking from experience, by the way.
I have kids. Including a one and a half year old. He wants a lot of attention, and he gets it, especially in these covid times. But wanting attention and needing it are different things.
It's both. When I hear that "kids don't demand that much attention" it feels terribly insulting, plus it opens the door for terrible job practices, demanding from parents and telling them "don't use your kids as an excuse, they don't actually demand too much".
The notion that a 2 year old can take care of him/herself is ridiculous. No-one who has a 2 year old will actually say that. That's why I asked the parent poster (and they didn't reply...)
This, for example, is deeply problematic:
> Kids will be fine on their own, and I don't think it's a problem for both parents to work for full-time, on a start-up or otherwise.
This flies in the face of evidence, plus it opens the door for terrible demands to be asked of employees who are parents.