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Female Founders

paulgraham.com

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Re: Female Founders

#101

Post by jl »

pshin45 wrote: post #63
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…

(Posted on behalf of a friend) "PG, of the three female partners you mentioned, one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations. How many full-time or part-time YC partners actually advise companies on business strategy?"

This comment makes me so angry that it is difficult to remain calm, but I will try. You have this wrong. All three of us are in charge of so much more than you suggest here. We all participate in investment decisions and advise the companies on many different matters-- including business strategy. Since we started YC, there has not been one important decision we've made that I have not been a part of.

Re: Female Founders

#102

Post by ef4 »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #7

I don't know about female founders, but I always thought that given the readership, pseudocode problems placed as job adverts in some of the puzzle magazines would get a lot of interesting candidates, many of them middle aged women who have been solving a variety of logic puzzles daily for decades, entirely for their own amusement. I bet some of them could code like demons, if given the impetus.

That doesn't address the major obstacle I see when trying to introduce programming to beginners.

Finding smart people who can think abstractly isn't actually that hard -- lots of people can do it. But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.

The layers of abstraction go very deep, and every layer leaks a bit.

Re: Female Founders

#103

Post by moocowduckquack »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #61
cjbprime wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.

I guess you could . Although I'm not sure how exactly an algorithm can be inherently prejudiced, that sounds rather postmodern. You can make one that is inefficient or apply one that isn't suitable to a given data set, and end up with skewed results. But an algorithm promoting prejudice by itself? I don't know. I always thought mathematics was neutral. Either way, it absolutely does not apply here. HN's algorithms si…

Although I'm not sure how exactly an algorithm can be inherently prejudiced, that sounds rather postmodern.

All known halting program/input pairs are inherently a little bit prejudiced.

Re: Female Founders

#104

Post by johnrob »

Tycho wrote: post #100
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.

It would be smart to recognise that startup returns aren't normally distributed.

The expected monetary return on a startup is positive, because the giant win at the end of the tail more than pays for the losses.

However, the expected happiness is probably negative (unless people like failing). The guy at the end of the tail is not 10,000X happier than the average person.

Re: Female Founders

#105

Post by DanBC »

cjbprime wrote: post #70
chadwickthebold wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't upvotes a measure of interest? I would argue that the lack of upvotes on sexism-related posts indicates a lack of interest in discussing these issues on the part of the general population of HN. What you get is a small group of vocal people eager to discuss the topic while everyone else simply avoids the post. This is similar behavior to what is seen in a flamewar, but could we agree that there might possibly…

> Aren't upvotes a measure of interest? I would argue that the lack of upvotes on sexism-related posts indicates a lack of interest in discussing these issues on the part of the general population of HN. The sexism-related posts have a large number of upvotes, yet they are penalized anyway by the controversial algorithm under discussion.

Or maybe those threads are flagged by many people?

Re: Female Founders

#106

Post by dictum »

daleharvey wrote: post #84
jiggy2011 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those threads always turn into flamewars that spill out into other threads.

Whereas the latest NSA disclosure, facebook privacy setting etc etc leads to a rational though provoking discussion that stays on topic and within its own thread?

If they get more comments than upvotes in a window of time (IANpg but last I heard, it was the first 30-45 minutes after submission), they'll suffer the same fate as submissions about sexism in tech.

Re: Female Founders

#107

Post by MrZongle2 »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #64
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.

“Smarter” is too blunt a point. Your average young woman is probably more risk-averse than your average young man.

Or perhaps a sizeable number of women simply don't find the idea of starting a business as interesting as other endeavors.

Less than 10% of nurses in the United States are male.

Why isn't there a hue and cry about this gender imbalance? Is it even a real problem?

And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it?

Could women in technology be the flip side of that coin, when sexism by bosses and coworkers is eliminated?

Re: Female Founders

#108

Post by lancewiggs »

zorpner wrote: post #65
pg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gir…

> 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. That... is not an argument? There's ample evidence to show that members of underrepresented groups within individual companies/industries experience unconscious biases in hiring/ranking/etc, even towards groups of which they're a member.

In this case are clearly not under represented if you reflect that PG also says they wield genuine power at YC.

Re: Female Founders

#109

Post by jasallen »

I think Paul nails it. And I think there are a lot of really misguided social engineers in these comments.

Treat people well and fairly, all along and throughout life, and let nature take it's course. Are things imbalanced right now? Absolutely. Is it because of unfairness in the past? Absolutely.

Can we speed things to being better by being unfair the other way now? Absolutely not. We create a Frankenstein of a 'better culture'.

I believe it is analogous (pun) to running pure sound through one equalizer that distorts it and then through another that tries to bring the sound back to true by using your ear. It sounds plausible, but it can never work.

Re: Female Founders

#110

Post by dragonwriter »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #78
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!"' Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends? Or is it up to the mob to define what "friendship" is?

> Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends?

No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X. Finding specific people of group X meet your bar from friendship, no matter how high that bar is, does not mean that you don't have a bias -- even potentially a very strong bias -- against people of group X, it just means that if you do some people have other characteristics that have weighed sufficiently in your favor to outweigh any general bias you have.

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