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Female Founders

paulgraham.com

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Re: Female Founders

#31

Post by the_watcher »

Jd wrote: post #12

I'm glad it that he doesn't go into depth about the core and controversial statement re: why 13 year old girls don't flock to programming in the way that nerdy 13 year old boys do. I'm also glad YC is being proactive here. It's always clear that certain biases exist, and the only way to overcome them is by addressing them specifically. Deep cognitive biases (against young people for example) can only be overcome by a…

He never made that statement. He just said that the best founder-hackers start hacking around age 13, and that admitting female founders who did not do that wouldn't address what he sees as the biggest bottleneck to female founder-hackers.

Re: Female Founders

#32

Post by wellboy »

Good article.

Key learnings:

1. Being an above 25y founder was viewed as advantageous and below 25y founder was viewed a disadvantageous before YC/2005. YC made being 25y founders as disadvantegous.

2. YC making young founders succeed inspires the older founders, plus other young founders.

3. They tried the same for female founders. However, acquiring the skills to do a startup requires decade-long exposure to tech and business of a decade, sometimes even it requires exposure for a whole generation. For that reason, it is not as easy to what YC did with women as with young founders

4. Prgrammers here, stereotypes there, it ALL goes back to getting young girls to do their own projects in their teens to acquire the business acumen, hard programming skills and understanding of how to build a product that people will want. That is the solution and nothing else will help more than this.

Re: Female Founders

#33

Post by the_watcher »

git-pull wrote: post #25
temuze wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he destroyed the idea that young whippersnappers need "adult supervision".

To cut to the point, how many leg ups did Zuckerberg get between luck and connections? What part of his success was environment, what part was his own will and power? Where does he stand as an engineer, at founding and then? Is he just a face, a legend, or does is he a real decision maker?

He controls 57% of the Facebook voting stock (may be less after his secondary offering). He's one of the most powerful founder CEO's in the world. Zuck definitely got some advantage in connections and upbringing, but there have been countless other founders with the same advantage who didn't win the war PG is talking about.

Re: Female Founders

#34

Post by camelite »

herbig wrote: post #11
_bfhp wrote: post #4

"It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself." No matter how the rest of the essay is, this honestly doesn't mean jack and insults the intelligence of his critics, no matter how off-the-mark they were. He goes on to note other, more meaningful statistics, which is great, but this sentence alone is kind of laughable.

Yeah, I agree. The rest of the points make a convincing argument, but the "I can't be racist, look at all my black friends" argument doesn't fly.

A racist is less likely to have black friends than a non-racist. I'd suggest that a racist is even less likely to have black co-founders than a non-racist.

edited to add: The reason the "look at my black friends" argument is mocked is that in many cases the friends referred to are not friends in the true sense of the word. There's no such distinction possible when talking about a co-founder. One either is or is not a co-founder.

Re: Female Founders

#35

Post by Spooky23 »

_bfhp wrote: post #4

"It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself." No matter how the rest of the essay is, this honestly doesn't mean jack and insults the intelligence of his critics, no matter how off-the-mark they were. He goes on to note other, more meaningful statistics, which is great, but this sentence alone is kind of laughable.

If you accuse someone of a specific business misbehavior, and that person's actual behavior in the conduct of his business bucks that, it's a relevant statement. It's not Archie Bunker saying "I don't have a problem with those people".

In my professional life, of the the managers working for me was formally accused of racist conduct by an employee he supervised. The core argument was that he was unpleasant and unfair to him based on his race. A major part of his defense was his family (his wife happened to be of the same race), his children, and the extensive work that he did in that community mentoring people.

Bias is a state of mind. Facts/statistics alone do not tell the story.

Re: Female Founders

#36

Post by greatdox »

I just found this blog on the myth of females not being allowed in STEM: http://blastar.in/gossipgirl/?p=24

I think it addresses the issues better as being of education, certification, professionalism, skills, talents, and abilities that one needs to get started in STEM roles regardless of gender, et al. I really think GG hits the nail on the head with that post. Don't let a few jerks or douchebags who are not 99.9999% of the industry make you think that all of the industry are just like them.

Re: Female Founders

#37

Post by vezzy-fnord »

parfe wrote: post #26

I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad. He comes closest to saying anything of substance with the paragraph: So how would you cause there to be more female programmers? Th…

How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)?

Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? The reason sexism-related stories fall down is not because of lack of interest or due to prejudice, but quite the contrary: too much interest, causing an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, and a subsequent sinking.

This is HN. Come on, we should know better.

Re: Female Founders

#38

Post by the_watcher »

wellboy wrote: post #32

Good article. Key learnings: 1. Being an above 25y founder was viewed as advantageous and below 25y founder was viewed a disadvantageous before YC/2005. YC made being 25y founders as disadvantegous. 2. YC making young founders succeed inspires the older founders, plus other young founders. 3. They tried the same for female founders. However, acquiring the skills to do a startup requires decade-long exposure to tech a…

>>YC made changed that into being a >25y founder disadvantegous.

Disagree with this point, unless you mean relative to pre-2005. I'd argue that it brought the age range of founders closer to the optimal spread, rather than bias against founders above 25. It just made investors admit that there's not an age at which you suddenly become "founder" material.

Re: Female Founders

#39

Post by [deleted] »

the_watcher wrote: post #29
johnrob wrote: post #23

Another explanation of why girls don't start companies: maybe they are smarter? The median outcome of a startup is a loss of time and money.

PG would tell you that you shouldn't start a startup based on the median outcome.

[deleted]

Re: Female Founders

#40

Post by pg »

parfe wrote: post #26

I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad. He comes closest to saying anything of substance with the paragraph: So how would you cause there to be more female programmers? Th…

The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"

Actually by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black." And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.

And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch. The reason I didn't go into detail about it is that I'm not an expert on the topic. I wasn't going to write about something other people understand so much better than me just to send the message that I care.

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