Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success? • Hacker News Board

Re: Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

#41

Post by btilly » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 6:41 AM UTC

Jun8 wrote: post #39

btilly wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I know it is cool to throw the word Bayesian around. But it is a lot cooler when it is done by someone who actually knows enough about statistics to be making sense. You clearly don't. Adding your comments about the sloppiness of others makes it just ridiculous. First of all 50/50 "better", "equal" is not a valid Bayesian prior. Here is a simple litmus test to demonstrate that. If you have a valid prior, then y…

So, by throwing big words around and pretending to be an expert I gained a few karma points, fan tas tic. Please don't get so worked up about sloppy posts and "attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" :-) The 0.5 prior thing was an irrelevant use of the principle of indifference. What I really had in mind was a situation with the null hypothesis that having early women on board has no effe…

First of all, you were the one who started off on a high horse. Don't be surprised if people come back in kind.

Now what you're now admitting is that your real prior isn't 50/50 or anything close. You're starting from the assumption that it is incredibly unlikely that women can make much of a difference, and therefore you really do require extraordinary evidence before you'll even consider the possibility that hiring women could help. In short your mind is so made up that your actual prior can fairly be described as fact resistant.

But is that a reasonable theory to have? Independent estimates are that women make an estimated 85% of all consumer purchases. If having women at the top of your company helps you figure out how to talk to that group, there is a clear potential connection between success and having women involved.

You don't like where this is leading? Well try something a little less biased on for size. If the vast majority of startups do not have women at a high level, but ability is equally divided between women and men, does that mean that startups with women involved early likely have an advantage getting better people?

I'm seeing lots of reasons to see that it could be plausible that having women involved early is beneficial for your startup. (Not necessarily true, only reasonably plausible.) My advice to you is therefore to not be so fast in setting preconceptions that let you reject data out of hand, sight unseen.

Re: Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

#42

Post by jineris » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 6:55 AM UTC

As a feminist management theorist and geek, study conclusions like this always frustrate me. Obviously, the study sheds little light on the actual cause of the correlation, but my guess based on my personal experiences with leadership strategy is this:

The choice to hire diversely is symptomatic of certain types of thinking: 1) Open / wide / flexible thinking. Someone who hires diversely is more likely to find it easier to conceptualize worldviews farther from their own as still relevant. 2) Civic responsiblity / empathy. A desire to be a part of the solution to gender imbalance rather than a part of the imbalance. 3) Long term thinking. Having people who are more different from you on the team is a more effective solution in the long run, because you're likely to cover more bases.

This means that leaders who make the choice to hire diversely are more likely to also be leaders who plan slightly further ahead, are more dextrous in the different ways they could see problems, and able to focus on non-top-down perspectives on the business, such as what the customer might be thinking. (All of this is correlative of course, not a->b.) As a result, leaders who hire diversely are more likely to be already be leaders who are better at running a successful company.

Ie, diversity is a litmus, not a direct cause.

I would be very, very surprised to find if, someday when women run 50% of companies and are in workforce balance, companies with women executives are still more likely to be successful.

EDIT: I do, however, think there is also an edge to leadership that can sometimes come simply from being in a minority, whatever the minority is. Not because there's anything wrong with white men, but simply because there's a unique perspective on problems and indirect causality that you get from being at a cultural disadvantage that, if you manage not to get weighed down by it, ends up being pretty useful in business.

Re: Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

#43

Post by wildgift » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 7:01 AM UTC

Maybe female executives tend to choose to work in start-ups that are more likely to succeed. At least that's somewhat implied by the content of the generally sexist blog post at WSJ.

So the question is really: what kinds of startups have appeal to women?

Re: Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

#44

Post by therealarmen » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 8:10 AM UTC

programminggeek wrote: post #16

Not to sound like a guy, but here goes. No. Do male executives drive start-up success? No. Do smart people drive start-up success? No. Do great coders drive start-up success? No. Do great salesman drive start-up success? No. Does great funding drive start-up success? No. Any or all of the above could in certain situations, but not all situations. If you could mathematically model startup success, you'd probably end u…

If someone could reliably define that you need so much of X, Y, Z factors to be the next Facebook, Google, Dropbox, or even Instagram, they would build a factory to build companies that print money.

Pretty much YC in a nutshell.