Stop Telling Women To Do Startups

Now please excuse Thomas while he repeatedly hits refresh on his EVERYTHING stats until he gets his daily dose of narcissism.

All comments Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2011 Thomas H. Ptacek, All Rights Reserved.

I think the cleanest experiments here would be those having to do with stereotype threat. For example, women asked to write down their gender (even just with a checkbox) before a math test at the GRE level score significantly worse. Asian women asked to also write down their race are inoculated against this effect. These women are "primed" with their stereotypes and it dramatically influences performance. Even asking people to think about being a professor increases their performance!

I don't know if there are any related experiments with priming subjects with the concepts of "mother" or "feminine" or what-have-you, but it's a good place to start.

Maybe priming women with a reading comprehension test involving a passage with Marie Curie? Or Lynn Margulis? Or Sophie Germaine...

Also, this is indirect, but the study of highly talented women and men here: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/Ferriman2009.pdf

...shows a strong pull toward shorter hours/working from home for women over men, and it gets stronger as women age from 25 to 35.

I think this indicates some of the pressures of motherhood.

To this end, I think it might be a good idea to have mixed age Montessori schools at places of business. Since it's an exploratory learning model, and the place is set up to be a cool place to learn and play and be anyway, and one of the biggest recruiting draws and factors in the choice of workplace is often the school district, and a single teacher can handle the mixed-age children of a small-mid sized company because they largely teach themselves/each other, and because that's less expensive than private school and the parents could participate more in their kids lives if they were physically close to work, I think it could be a huge benefit to forward thinking companies. Don't know, but it could help both men and women.

Bonus:

Check out the graph on page 477 here:

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/SexDiffs.pdf

It plots surveyed personal importance for various issues, like "Developing my intellectual interests" to "Part time career for a limited time". You'll notice that the male and female responses almost entirely match, with the few exceptions, and there it doesn't deviate by much!

I've been doing startups since I was 18 years old, for over 15 years, and so my social circle is reasonably well populated with other startup people --- mostly men, for obvious reasons --- and this sentiment is so not gender specific that it's hard to see how it's even germane.

Everyone gets ground down by trying to get small companies off the ground. I don't know many people at all who think 90(!) hour weeks and death marches are a good idea, even at launch time.

Stop smoking, though. It's really bad for you.

Why doesn't her advice apply to men? Why isn't the title of her article, "Stop encouraging young bright males interested in SW from doing startups"?

It's just interesting that it's fine to push men into potentially lucrative careers, but do the same for women and then there's tons of controversy.

She tries to offer a counterargument w/ what she's thinks is absurd: "Men could change the world by staying home with their kids and parenting them. Men would provide a totally different perspective as the lunchroom parent. They would ask for totally different after-school programming. Men would hire different babysitters and different SAT tutors. Because men are different than women."

As a father who does do a lot of this (although not a stay-at-home dad), actually we can have huge impact in these types of settings. I've literally had several other parents saying they wish there were more people like me involved as deeply as I am. I've single-handled been able to change the tone and attitudes of lot of interactions apparently. And based on the poor behavior I've seen from a lot of children of "executive" dad stay-at-home mom parents -- something clearly isn't working with their model.

People are pretty good at making choices for themselves.

With all due respect to the author, that's not consistent with reality. If that were the case I wouldn't have so much feedback in code reviews. We wouldn't have child protective services, the incarceration rates we have, poverty, high HS drop out rates (and not just for the Thiel money), etc.... People are generally really bad at making decisions w/o guidance. No one is saying hand hold, but provide some basic guidance so that people can see all potentially avenues.

There are a lot of hidden prejudices both in this article and in the entire discussion around women in technology and the startup world.

I have a startup. I love startups. So should everybody else love startups too? Not at all.

A more direct question: roughly 50% of people are females. Should 50% of startup founders be female?

I don't think so, but I find it difficult to continue the conversation past this conclusion. The reason I don't think so is that I know that my judgment on how cool startups are doesn't extend to everybody else. I intuitively feel that being a founder involves complex traits and personal decisions that I cannot fathom. To simply say the ratio should be the same sounds wrong. It sounds like the same kind of mental error that makes me want to believe everybody should be in startups. Likewise to say that women should not be in startups sounds wrong also. Or to say startups should have more women in them than men. Each possible conclusion is undefendable.

You could try to attack this problem by taking it the level of personal choices: assuming women are rational actors making informed choices, why do so many choose not to be in startups? Is it the environment? The difference in the sexes? Chemicals in the water?

Of course, that doesn't work, because once you try to start making general assumptions about the behaviors of millions of people you're going to start stereotyping and using guesswork. It can't be helped.

So at the end of the day I understand that other people don't want to be founders. And I accept that. Heck, for all I know the people who are not in startups are the smart ones, and I'm the guy who has something wrong with him. Not only am I not sure how to reasonably investigate this issue, I'm not even sure I have my head screwed on well enough to know what a good or bad outcome is.

I think it's one of those things that you can endlessly argue about, and I choose not to. If folks want to discuss why Person A made her personal decision not to stay in the startup or tech world, we could do that. But when generalizing to all women, and to all startups, in my opinion it's just too much abstraction to be a tractable issue.