Has anyone considered that women just aren't as interested in tech entrepreneurship as men are?
Not by this wide a margin, no.
So what are you saying? YC is sexist and isn't accepting women into Startup School?
Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#12I think there were only 1% women at the event. Whatever the cause, this gender gap is ripe for disruption!
Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#13Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#14I was not there but as an older male, who doesn't drink, I am constantly reminded of how young and alcohol obsessed "entrepreneurs" seem to be. David Rusenko (Weebly) was still in college when he and his buds started. So to me it seems like college boys dominate. And the kinds of technically oriented women that would be interested in Startup School aren't as interested in hanging around with a bunch of drunk college…
If my college days are anything to go by, the presence of drunk college kids has never deterred women before.
Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#15I was not there but as an older male, who doesn't drink, I am constantly reminded of how young and alcohol obsessed "entrepreneurs" seem to be. David Rusenko (Weebly) was still in college when he and his buds started. So to me it seems like college boys dominate. And the kinds of technically oriented women that would be interested in Startup School aren't as interested in hanging around with a bunch of drunk college…
If my college days are anything to go by, the presence of drunk college kids has never deterred women before.
That's why I qualified with "technically oriented women that would be interested in Startup School"
Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#16Women in general take less risk than men. Women in programming/hacking are far less compared to men. Women who are married/with children find it hard to get themselves around startup scene.
I do not have any source to back all that, just my personal view. I see things are changing and see more women in hackathons, programming meetups etc. But it will take at least a decade to bring balance.
Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#17Having been to a number of "geeky" conferences, I was surprised at how large the number of women there were at the conference.
We should also keep in mind that this community has always been aligned more with the engineering side of entrepreneurship and less on the all the other equally important functions, which tends to make the community somewhat insular and under-represented.
Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#18I was there, and the #1 thing I noticed was that of 11 presenters, exactly one was a woman; and of the CEOs telling stories, zero were women. It was, uh, not exactly an experience full of female role models. The 'fewer than one in ten' ratio may be true of startups in general, but the way to balance out the gender divide is to provide more role models, not to magnify the status quo: I was pretty unhappy to see such an exclusionist panel.
In general, if I were a woman, I would have felt pretty unwelcome at the event, in general: of my small amount of wandering around during the breaks, I saw one attendee wearing a shirt with the text: "SELECT * FROM girls WHERE free_sex=TRUE;". More distressingly, I saw a speaker (Ben Horowitz [1]) wearing a shirt with the text "No bitch-ass-ness" on it; I suspect that this may have been a cultural reference that I missed, but that sure does seem as unwelcoming as a shirt that would say 'man up and do it' might.
The content was, in general, high quality. I wish that the experience, however, had been designed to avoid shutting out half of the population. A good start for making Startup School more inclusive would be to adopt something along the lines of the Conference Anti-Harassment Policy [2]; I hope that Y Combinator will do something along those lines next year.
[1] Yes, I know. This is part of Horowitz's persona: he wants to come off as 'edgy', compared to, for instance, Ron Conway; he wants to show that he's hip and with it. For instance, as I recall, he used the word 'fuck' a few times during his speech. This is fine; now we get it! You're one of us! You can be edgy without being a dickhead.
[2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassmen...
Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#19Has anyone considered that women just aren't as interested in tech entrepreneurship as men are?
The problem with that attitude is thus:
People think "women aren't interested in this", which leads them to think "well, since women aren't interested, we don't have to try to be inclusive at all", which leads to them behaving in ways that mean women don't feel welcome and hence aren't interested in participating.
I'm not saying you're guilty of that process - but the "women aren't interested" trope can be rather pernicious.
Re: Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?
#20I agree that the exposure to female role models is key. At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, we introduced a short course about 6 years ago called "Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Women." Each year, over a 2 week period, we bring in 25 women entrepreneurs and investors. The impact has been meaningful; in <5 years, women have gone from representing just 12% of the entrepreneurs in a given class to over 25% (remember, women are only 40% of the entire class).
YC can do better than this. Anyone from YC out reading this? I'll even offer to help you!