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JL on Female Founders

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Re: JL on Female Founders

#31

Post by mhartl »

sanj wrote: post #15

No one's going to even suggest sexism? Or the fact that many, many people (men and women) look at any woman between 25 and 40 and expect them to leave to have a baby and raise a family?

Women have stormed the academy in most fields, and around half of new medical doctors are female. I think it's time to retire knee-jerk sexism as the main explanation for the lack of women in tech.

While I'm confident that women face more barriers than men, it's dubious that sexism is sufficient to explain such extreme numbers. The same goes for math professors, Wall Street traders, and the NBA for that matter.

More smart women choose to become doctors or lawyers, it seems, than to study physics or to roll the dice on a startup. And a lot of those 25-to-40 year old women want to have a baby and raise a family, even if it means a less resume-impressive career. (My sister, an M.D. who specifically chose a family-friendly ophthalmology specialty, is one of them.) And what's wrong with that?

Re: JL on Female Founders

#32

Post by jkent »

akd wrote: post #28
jnovek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That implies that women have a greater biological imperative to reproduce than men. I don't know that that's true. Honestly, I see my "grad school clock" as an equally big, if not bigger, problem than anyone's biological clock. When you do a startup, you have to choose your priorities -- the implication is that neither kids nor grad school are amongst them.

Women certainly do have a greater biological imperative to reproduce than men. It's for the very simple reason that a woman's fertility starts declining in her early 20's and bottoms out around age 40 -- a man's fertility erodes very slightly and is usually in perfectly serviceable condition at age 60.

That was the point I tried and failed to make.

Re: JL on Female Founders

#33

Post by whacked_new »

sanj wrote: post #15

No one's going to even suggest sexism? Or the fact that many, many people (men and women) look at any woman between 25 and 40 and expect them to leave to have a baby and raise a family?

Traditionally speaking, don't most people have (their own) kids and raise families? If so, then post-menopausal women have significantly less "value," whereas a childless man hitting jackpot at age 70 can still build a new one from scratch.

If having a family fits into one's life equation, the strategies involved are much different, sexism or not.

Re: JL on Female Founders

#34

Post by whacked_new »

aasarava wrote: post #20
mixmax wrote: post #5

I think that natural selection might explain it. What characrerises reproductively successful men? Or, to put it another way, what qualities do women seek in a mate? Women tend to prefer dominant men of high status with lots of money, and there is little reason to believe that their ancestors differed. For much of human history male status came from being a skilled hunter and warrior and from the ability to influence…

While that makes for a neatly packaged Darwinian theory, it's important to remember that genetic selection is not the only force that affects our decisions. Medicine, culture, technology, and many other factors affect, and even override, what our genes may steer us toward if they could "act in a vacuum." Not convinced? By the same theory, one would think that men in today's society would be highly encouraged to have…

There is a difference between acknowledging a difference exists, and acting on that difference in a discriminatory manner.

Women and men are wired differently. That much is a fact. The obvious, those of reproductive organs, are visible and nobody would deny them. Those in the head, are invisible and so somehow made into a sensitive issue, but significant differences exist. Women have a larger corpus callosum than men; one could suppose then, that their hemispheres talk faster with each other: efficient multitasking. There is nothing wrong with this step: it is the same kind of reasoning that you apply to saying that giraffes have long necks to eat food in trees.

The problem about discrimination is what happens after this step: a man is unable to multitask. A giraffe is unable to eat food that is not in trees.

But these are two things. And most knee-jerk antidiscriminationist rhetoric lumps them into one. Also, I am not calling you one :)

Re: JL on Female Founders

#36

Post by DaniFong »

whacked_new wrote: post #30
DaniFong wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, your explanation does not go the whole way. Consider the evolution of biological genes: a) Men and women share mostly the same genes (the y chromosome is a desolate wasteland), and there are few (if any) known mechanisms by which gene merging is different for male and female humans. b) Dominant, decisive, intelligent, women are likely to share similar evolutionary advantages to men. Note that I leave h…

Yes. The reference to cultural memes is a chicken an egg argument; by claiming "complete domination" you essentially overlook the origin of said memes. I'm not armed with sources, but I daresay that nature has given everything specialization, so much so that applying the same ideas to the sexes is not the slightest bit strange. More strongly said, there is nothing surprising when one sex exhibits traits much more ost…

you essentially overlook the origin of said memes.

I don't overlook the origin. Your thrust seems to be that culture only magnifies innate difference. Perhaps this is true in simple cases, but I think that there are particular examples where culture takes on a mind of its own.

I point out that existing cultural bias might be due to biological bias interacting with environmental factors long extinct. This bias is encoded and preserved, unlike almost everything else in the animal kingdom, in human culture, which can be perpetuated and passed on. Existing cultural bias might just be a carry over from prehistoric times, entirely irrelevant to whether or not there are now meaningful differences in aptitude, in this, the present.

it actually seems more unnatural to claim equality on things like attitudes towards risk and attribute difference to culture.

I never claimed equality, I simply pointed out that the differences you'd expect due to biological selection are smaller in magnitude than those due to cultural selection, and so therefore born-attitudes towards things like risk should be largely outweighed by cultural ones.

My mind wouldn't scream inconsistency if I heard that women, on average, were intrinsically, say, 30% less likely to take big risks. That kind of difference seems reasonable. But the data on entrepreneurship implies a difference many dozens of times that.

I don't think this magnitude is consistent with other risky behaviors -- many women do risky things as well, like dating strange men in remote places, running away from home, abusing hard drugs, or keeping a pregnancy in ill-health. This difference in magnitude may be explained by cultural factors, because men have greater cultural support when projecting high-status creating cultural memes (especially those encouraging risky behavior).

this argument is usually the convenient one

Perhaps I was unclear. This is a very different argument than the one typically given, because it uses the very same mathematics that the evolutionary biologists use, only applied to culture. And what you find is that the factors in culture -- the influence of the same kind of mathematics, is much stronger.

the sperm of a high-status males, whom are shown to produce more offspring, still hold good chance to yield daughters.

Can you explain the relevance of this?

Re: JL on Female Founders

#37

Post by bootload »

"... By nature, startups are very non-discriminatory ..."

I don't know about that, maybe in a homogeneous ideal Startup.

Startups by nature tend to be a blended team soup of testosterone, technology and immaturity. Of the three I don't know which is worse. Testosterone is vital because it gives drive and competition. But has the downside of cruelty and bullying. Technology circles also tend to attract a certain cloistered male culture (online or in meat-space). Hostile to difference and eager to argue. The nastiness occurs in arguments over technology is in part due to the makeup of Startup founders, Homo logicus. There is a Coding Horror article discussing Coopers observations if you are interested ~ http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000091.html The last of the Startup ingredients is "immaturity". There's a reason the term "grown-up" is bandied jokingly around Startup-up culture. It has less to do with "Age" and more to do with understanding how the "real world" works and how to deal with it. Put the founder team under enough stresses, let them get tired (because they are working hard) and put before them a decision that has to be made, now! Now place any male founder in this environment and tell me if "discrimination" of some sort will not happen. Let alone a female.

It's no co-incidence that a question in the application asks how long the founders have know and presumably worked together. Because this is a sort of heuristic of future success. It's interesting that Mitch Kapor discussed the issue of poor behaviour in Startups (but not specifically with founders). Behaviour that would never be tolerated in big business at StartupSchool '07 ~ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-StartupSchool/~3/... [ approx 20Mb] Kapor was most proud of the culture created where good behaviour resulted in a non-discriminatory workplace. It must be easier to do this when you build a 1000 employee company and have a Business background and wide experience.

Re: JL on Female Founders

#38

Post by DaniFong »

johnrob wrote: post #2

I'd have to think that making a start up succeed is so hard that any gender barrier, whether perceived or real, would seem minor in comparison.

One of the principles that YC is founded on is that many of the very best founders were sitting on the fence. So even if there's some minor force pushing one group of people backwards instead of forwards, you'll discover a big difference in the number of people on each side.

Re: JL on Female Founders

#39

Post by axod »

If you want to make a startup, you do it. If you want to raise money, then sure, you do run the risk of not being able to. I think that could be for many reasons.

These days though bootstrapping is well within most peoples reach, male or female. There are no excuses.

Re: JL on Female Founders

#40

Post by DaniFong »

vaksel wrote: post #35
DaniFong wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think that being a curiosity helps much.

hey if it gets you in the door to give a presentation to a VC, more power to you

Presentations are a cost. If they won't lead to funding, they give information to the VCs, they waste your time, and they get your hopes up and then slowly disappoint you.

If being a curiosity gives a negative first impression, this likely outweighs any additional time to speak.

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