I really want to ask pg why he even thinks there is a need to defend himself on these sensitive topics ? Is he really worried about his reputation that much ? I mean everyone knows what pg is known for: startups and innovations. Who cares about a misinterpretation of what he said or meant ? Honestly, every time he has to write a blog on what he meant, it kinda fuels the trolls and haters to counter argue. Why not just focus on what you do best i.e. help create startups.
Female Founders
211–220 of 634 posts
Re: Female Founders
#212Lesser men would have gone into a shell and "put this behind them" by letting people forget. I commend what PG is doing here. Taking this head on and not worrying about people picking apart sentences in isolation and ultimately still talking to folks who matter - female founders.
Re: Female Founders
#213My main takeaway from reading this article and the comments here is: The awareness of this problem is still very nascent and more & more solutions are emerging, as are criticisms of people who are beginning to acknowledge this problem.
To hopefully steer this in another direction, and because I have a little girl, what are some resources you all have seen that can help girls become interested and go into technical disciplines?
Here are a few of which I am aware. I highlight some companies started by women because they both teach technical skills and can serve as role models.
http://www.goldieblox.com/ - Construction toy sets aimed at girls.
http://www.roominatetoy.com/ - Electronic DIY kit aimed at girls.
http://littlebits.cc/ - Electronic DIY kit started by a female entrepreneur.
https://www.gethopscotch.com/ - An iPad app to teach kids how to program, started by female entrepeneurs
http://pbskids.org/scigirls/ - Various activities and videos to teach grade school girls about technology and science.
http://www.girlswhocode.com/ - Summer school to teach high school girls how to program.
http://www.tech-girls.org/ - Workshops to teach high school girls how to program.
http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ - Workshops to teach black grade school to high school girls how to program.
http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/ - Workshops to teach adult women how to program.
http://www.girldevelopit.com/ - Workshops to teach adult women how to program.
There are a few others that I'll add later. Do you know of more too?
Re: Female Founders
#214Earlier 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.
I also still can't reconcile how a month and a half ago pg apparently believed that Silicon Valley is a near perfect meritocracy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795606 ) and now he's been working hard(er than average) to address systemic inequalities. For the record though; I thoroughly applaud his efforts on improving gender equality and I very much appreciate the first baby steps he's taking here on behalf…
In general, meritocracy's tend to have market inefficiencies. It's one of their traits that allows those who should rise based on merit but may be held back by other factors to thrive: by exploiting those inefficiencies. Female founders may currently be the market inefficiency that will be corrected next, the same way young founders were when YC was founded. It's not a perfect analogy, but the Rays and A's have been able to be some of the most successful franchises in baseball simply by targeting those inefficiencies. Hopefully something similar happens in the founder world soon.
Also, a bit unrelated but since Billy Beane became GM, the A's have never won less that 74 games. It seems like exploiting market inefficiencies is extraordinarily effective at minimizing downside risk.
Re: Female Founders
#215I 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…
There's also this gem.
PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true."
John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."
I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.
Re: Female Founders
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you not root for your country's athletes at the Olympics, and wish that more people would enroll in X so that your country would have a shot at a gold medal?
I don't think that's a scalable analogy. Programmers aren't an elite, really, among professionals. Anyone smart enough to be an accountant or a doctor or a civil engineer is smart enough for 99% of programming jobs, and many of them, for any programming job. Even someone who ended up as a journalist could probably handle the helpdesk or doing QA or websites.
So if it's not so difficult, and there are already a lot of women as doctors and lawyers, it's normal for women to say that they wish that the social barriers that prevent women from getting in the field from an early age would should be broken. It's not a question of bandwagon, it's a question of equity.
Re: Female Founders
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely however that sort of defense against specific manifestations of bigotry can be evidence (assuming proof is practically unobtainable). For instance, if I were accused of hiring practices that are biased against black people, pointing out that I have only hired black people would be evidence (if not proof, in this hypothetical and silly black and white example...) that the accusations are false.
> For instance, if I were accused of hiring practices that are biased against black people, pointing out that I have only hired black people would be evidence [...] that the accusations are false. Without information about the external constraints on your hiring, I'm not sure it would really constitute meaningful evidence (e.g., if the entire available employment pool was black, hiring only blacks wouldn't be evidenc…
I suppose my hangup here is what I perceive to be the difference between evidence and proof.
It is entirely possible to find evidence of things that turn out to be false. For example, you could take the seemingly chaotic retrograde motion of the planets in the night sky as evidence of the existence of gods with self-determination. We know know that isn't true, we have better explanations for that phenomenon (notably the notion of heliocentricity).
The planets moving differently from the stars was never proof that there were gods up there, but evidence? Sure, it was evidence. Evidence can be of various qualities, evidence of thins has to be judged critically, and weighed against the alternatives.
Re: Female Founders
#218I 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…
I think you're reaching. Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist. He's not saying HE has women FRIENDS he's saying YC is actually RUN in a large degree by women, one woman in particular - the co-founder of Y-Combinator Jessica Livingston. Not to minimize the other women involved, but it's just particularly relevant that the founder of YC could as much be said to b…
>Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist.
The first three sentences of his post disagree.
Re: Female Founders
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Oppressed minorities have historically been excluded from highly desirable fields. As a consequence even today you see few black people in, say, Princeton or investment banking. This is most certainly not because black people (or women) think differently. The status quo just takes a long time to improve, especially when people pigheadedly deny there's a societal problem.
I can't speak to investment banking, but Princeton student demographic data is available at http://www.princeton.edu/pub/profile/admission/undergraduate... and the numbers actually surprised me a bit.
Looking at the hard data from 2012-13, we have 10.7% international students. So of the US students, 7.4/.897 = 8.2% identified as African American.
It's true that this is under-represented compared to the 12.2% of the US population for that demographic cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat... and in fact the ratio of the two percentages is about 0.67, so you could argue that about 33% of African American students who ought to be at Princeton if the student body were strictly proportional to population are missing.
If we look at the corresponding numbers of non-Hispanic whites, we see 72.4% of the population, and 56.7% (100 - 10.7 - 38.4)/.897 of Princeton's student body. The ratio is .78, which is definitely higher than 0.67, but not nearly as much higher as I was expecting when I saw the Princeton numbers. For one thing, I recalled the US as being 15-16% African American, but it looks like in the last 20-some years the demographics have shifted markedly... The upshot is that you see fewer black people in Princeton than you might expect based on general population but way more than you used to even in the recent past.
It would be interesting to see what US demographics for college-age folks look like, though; they may be significantly different from overall demographics.
For comparison with the above numbers, American Indian students are underrepresented at Princeton by a factor of 4 or so, and Pacific Islanders by a factor of 1.8. Hispanics are presumably underrepresented by a factor of 2 or so, but it's hard to tell with the complexities of the classifications there. Asian Americans are overrepresented by a factor of 4.
I'm not actually sure I have a point here, other than attempting to quantify "few"...
Re: Female Founders
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
PG would tell you that you shouldn't start a startup based on the median outcome.
In all seriousness, why would that be the case? I assume you mean that you should start a startup if you believe that you can outperform the median, although presumably all (or most) founders believe that of themselves. I guess gambling based on your confidence in your ability is preferable to gambling on something else with poor performance at the median, like the lottery.
No, he would say you should start a startup because you want to start one. Your reading of it as "I should only start a startup if I think I am above median" is probably even more risk averse than he would advise, since he thinks many more people can start companies than do.