Female Founders • Hacker News Board

Re: Female Founders

#171

Post by jedmeyers » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:53 PM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #96

zorpner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Arguments are for little people. When you're at the upper end of the power structure, you give statements , because they're fact . Because you said so.

Care to provide some arguments to support your statement?

Re: Female Founders

#172

Post by Helianthus » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:54 PM UTC

oskarth wrote: post #145

Helianthus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, this is a posture piece: it's about your reputation, and only about the issue at hand insomuch as it is important to give that issue its due. I mean that ('posture piece') as neutrally, perhaps, as it is possible to mean it. >come away with the idea that YC is somehow sexist. And you can say, with a straight face, that YC is not sexist? That it's just the tech environment, and you're on the 'right sid…

Or perhaps he want women to apply because it's good for YC, you know, business-wise. You seem to be looking at this through a lens of hate. May I ask why?

Not hate, cynicism. Talk's cheap and tends to benefit the speaker.

The rhetorical arc of the piece is public self-exoneration. I don't think you can reasonably argue otherwise.

PG isn't required to give a deposition of his thoughts on the matter. He could remain silent and continue working on what's important to him.

Or more interestingly, he could launch YC initiatives to get girls coding, shift resources towards some meaningful contribution, something more tangible. Possibly he's done that, and combined with aforementioned silence he might be cruising quite comfortably.

Instead he writes a piece designed to keep the 'more moderate people' from thinking YC sexist, a piece that changes nothing (the flame war abounds) except public perception.

See above, "working on what's important to him," with a certain wry taste.

Re: Female Founders

#173

Post by VladRussian2 » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

MrZongle2 wrote: post #107

evincarofautumn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

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

Nursing would be among the worst professions for me. It requires a lot of simultaneous attention to wide variety of details - the cost of missing something is somebody's pain, injury, life... I can focus really deep on one thing at a time - suited me well in Math before and in programming now - while any situation requiring attention to a several different details in parallel or quick sequence just exhausts me.

Related to it is the perfection level required. Take the simplest thing - inserting needle into a vein. Doing it a 1000 times, you need to do it perfectly a 1000 times. In my mentality - it is much more efficient/faster to do something not perfectly, thus getting it right, say, 9 times out of 10 and apply additional effort to correct the 1 out of 10 mistake. The same about following a multi-item checklist (or multi-step procedures) - i immediately filter out "unnecessary/unimportant" items. Obviously, such mentality have no place in nursing :)

Re: Female Founders

#174

Post by derefr » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

MrZongle2 wrote: post #99

krstck wrote: post #76

I find the outrage over this so disingenuous. It looks to me like it's more about punishing someone for being a high-profile member of a hated, perceived-oppressor group than actually caring about women being programmers. To think that pg actually believes that there are no female programmers was the least charitable possible interpretation, and the only reason to have picked that one in particular was to confirm you…

Note that there is no similar hand-wringing about the lack of women in the fields of sanitation, construction, plumbing or cartooning. Likewise, not much hubbub about the gender imbalance in the fashion industry. Could it possibly be that men and women think differently, and those minor differences are reflected in their career preferences? Could it be that these preferences play a bigger role in gender imbalances in…

I think a major argument against this, in the field of programming in particular, is that most of those other field-related imbalances are culture-neutral. You'll find more male sanitation workers, construction workers, plumbers, etc. everywhere from the US, to Brazil, to China, to Russia, to Pakistan. (Controlling, of course, for the more general inequities in employment-by-gender that those cultures face.)

But the "no female programmers" thing is specific to western culture. There are plenty of female programmers in India, and in Russia. So this is likely something about western culture, that has caused this difference.

Re: Female Founders

#175

Post by Crito » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

xanados wrote: post #157

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!" It bothers me unduly much that it has become a common meme that saying this amounts to saying "I am a racist!" That may be convenient pattern-matching, but if someone has friends that are black, that is definitely some evidence that they aren't racists. I think this really comes down to pattern-matching and goalpost shifting…

> Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what.

In some limited cases, even being a member of the group that you are accused of being biased against is not enough to save you from the accusations.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew

" "Within the logic of the concept, those who accuse others of being self-hating Jews may themselves be self-hating Jews."[14] Gilman says "the ubiquitousness of self-hatred cannot be denied. And it has shaped the self-awareness of those treated as different perhaps more than they themselves have been aware."[5]"

That is some 'next level shit' right there.

Re: Female Founders

#176

Post by jlees » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:56 PM UTC

SloughFeg wrote: post #97

It's interesting that neither this article or Paul's related December article ever address the most basic and seminal question about this in the first place: why is this a problem? Why is it a big deal if there are less female founders than male? It seems like this whole discussion has been nothing but a bunch of posturing and vague half-solutions about an issue that I'm not sure even exists.

Lemma: Women-led companies are desirable.

Vivek Wadhwa is doing a bunch of research into the data. I don't have his report at my fingertips but fundamentally, not investing in women is not a rational move. Here's the media headline version:

"Women-led private technology companies are more capital-efficient, achieve 35 percent higher return on investment, and, when venture-backed, bring in 12 percent higher revenue than male-owned tech companies."

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-20/women-who-ru...

Conclusion: Women earn over 50% of degrees but start fewer than 3% of companies. If we accept that women-led companies do well, as per the data -- and yes, there are certainly caveats -- then this gap clearly shows there is a problem, in terms of inefficient use of investment if nothing else.

Re: Female Founders

#177

Post by frandroid » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:57 PM UTC

johnrob wrote: post #104

Tycho wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People do more than win and fail at startups. They mostly spend their time trying, and there are great personal rewards for that. For entrepreneurs, failing is just another step towards success.

Re: Female Founders

#178

Post by krstck » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:57 PM UTC

MrZongle2 wrote: post #140

krstck wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a couple thoughts. 1. It is possible that men and women do think differently and therefore have different career preferences, so the optimal gender ratio is not 1:1. 2. Just because the optimal gender ratio may not be 1:1 does not mean that the current expression is the optimal one . I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women. I don't think we'll ever see 50% participation, but I don't…

'I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women.' And I completely agree. I guess my point is: how much of this outrage is manufactured? Is the gender imbalance truly a "crisis" or is it an artifact of something else entirely?

Certain parties like to fuel the outrage flame because they make money on clickbait. There are also just people with an axe to grind that get off on starting fights. Then you have people that will swear up and down that there is no gender problem in tech, nothing wrong with 'brogrammer' culture, etc. The reasonable people in the middle all think they are arguing against the extreme views, but just end up fighting each other because they misunderstand each others' view points. You have people that have directly experienced sexism in tech thinking they are arguing with the deniers when in actuality they are arguing with people who think their interlocutors are just the angry people looking for a fight.

Messy. And no women are persuaded to learn programming, and no one wins but those websites making money on advertising. Everyone comes away angry.

Re: Female Founders

#179

Post by jlees » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:59 PM UTC

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.

Funny you should say that. I got my first real programming job from a puzzle in MENSA magazine.

Re: Female Founders

#180

Post by Helianthus » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 9:59 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #149

Helianthus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, this is a posture piece: it's about your reputation, and only about the issue at hand insomuch as it is important to give that issue its due. I mean that ('posture piece') as neutrally, perhaps, as it is possible to mean it. >come away with the idea that YC is somehow sexist. And you can say, with a straight face, that YC is not sexist? That it's just the tech environment, and you're on the 'right sid…

What are you driving at? Have some guts and stop beating about the bush.

I dunno, I thought I was being direct. The tech sector has sexism problems, and YC, as part of that sector, is not going to be immune to them.

This piece does nothing but puff up YC in an effort to distance YC from the tech sector's sexism, which will only work to a point.

The target audience is the section of moderate feminists that are inherently sympathetic to YC; the concerns of those outside that layer, even the valid ones, are simply not important to PG.

To reiterate: this is a posturing move, in the most neutral sense possible.