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Female Founders

paulgraham.com

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Re: Female Founders

#231

Post by reallyseriously »

jl wrote: post #101
pshin45 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

"there has not been one important decision we've made that I have not been a part of."

Careful, you're not fitting the narrative these people want believe. But seriously, disappointed pg even wrote this. Just engaging with these people is losing.

http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s

Re: Female Founders

#232

Post by tomasien »

parfe wrote: post #218
tomasien wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll give you this: "It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself" is a weak sentence. Yes, you having a female co-founder is strong evidence, but if you do sexist things then it doesn't make it any harder for me to argue you're sexist. The "it's hard to argue" part doesn't belong there, it belongs after he's not only explained who he chose to start YC with, but how YC and he have acted in relation to others in the industry, which stacks up extremely favorably.

Re: Female Founders

#233

Post by cynicalkane »

Zikes wrote: post #146

Judging by the comments on this article, it would appear that once you've been labeled a sexist it is downright impossible to dispel. I'm not sure what people expect, exactly. Is pg supposed to give up all his worldly goals and possessions and live as some sort of equality monk? Should he know of and contribute to every one of the many groups and organizations involved in gender equality? And what exactly is wrong wi…

This is the shallowness of that kind of P.C. bullying--Paul Graham has done much more for women in technology than any Internet bully, but he will continue to be attacked because it is possible to assign uncharitable interpretations to a few things he said once. When one realizes that this whole kerfuffle is not about being pro-woman, it's about posturing such that one appears to be pro-woman, then the attackers' views make more sense.

If you look at the comments below, the anti-PG crowd seems either to a) not care about YC's contributions to women in tech, or b) adopt a "so what" attitude. So what that YC has a disproportionate amount of women in high places and funds a disproportionate amount of female founders? I don't care, instead I'm gonna pick out some logical flaws in his arguments. (As an aside, there's few things more tedious than a nerd on the Internet concerned with "logical flaws" in peoples' "arguments".)

Re: Female Founders

#234

Post by mafribe »

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…

I can imagine that one reason "sexism related stories get flagged" is because they are rarely interesting, innovative or well though out.

Such articles mostly repeat feminist/misandric boiler-plate amounting to little more than defending female privilege (e.g. no draft, longer life, many more opportunities to avoid having to work, better medical care, earlier retirement, more lenient sentencing for equal crimes etc, more social services, etc). I think a common term for this is "privilege blindness". Why would a thinking person want to read this again and again?

Re: Female Founders

#235

Post by anthuswilliams »

baddox wrote: post #159
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.

As far as I can tell, it's a big deal because a lot of people hold as a normative axiom that the proportional representation of people groups (genders, nationalities, ethnicities, etc.) in organizations (businesses, governments, YC classes, etc.) ought to match their proportions in the general population. I suspect this is either an axiom, or a close conclusion from a broader axiom like egalitarianism. As an axiom, t…

I think this axiom only applies to inclusion in desirable groups or roles. It's hard to imagine even the most egalitarian thinker working to improve the male:female ratio among death row inmates, for example.

Re: Female Founders

#236

Post by CCs »

mikeleeorg wrote: post #213

My 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 di…

Thanks Mike!

Re: Female Founders

#237

Post by Mikeb85 »

The comments here are ridiculous. Should PG fund women/minorities just because they're part of X group?

Affirmative action isn't good for anyone, because it encourages lower standards and hurts deserving people.

Equality isn't about having an equal proportion of men/women in every occupation, it's about treating everyone fairly as an individual, regardless of sex/race/age/etc...

No one complains that women are under-represented in the garbage collection field... Or that labourers on construction sites are overwhelmingly men. Or that most of the dangerous and undesirable occupations in our society are done by men...

Re: Female Founders

#239

Post by cfield »

jl wrote: post #101
pshin45 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

I contemplated a response to the question from pshin45's friend, but decided it might be a fool's errand because the question itself suggested a deep misunderstanding of YC. I am hard pressed to imagine a more incorrect characterization of the role Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica play in YC than "one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations". I certainly understand why Jessica's initial reaction to the question would be anger.

I would estimate that, collectively, I have worked with Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica for upwards of 500 hours over the past 2 1/2 years. And I would estimate that 80-90% of that time has been on product development, business development, sales, customer acquisition, fundraising assistance ... I could go on.

Outside of our company, there is nobody who has been more involved with our "business strategy" than Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica. There is not one part of our business that they have not been critically and deeply involved with.

(minor edit for grammar)

Re: Female Founders

#240

Post by thenomad »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #162
MrZongle2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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? There is, but you're probably not that exposed to it often by dint of (presumably) not being part of that industry. But if you look into it, there's concern about the lack of male nurses and a concerted effort to improve diversity (the same for other professions with traditional…

Really? That's very good news, and I hadn't heard about it at all.

Do you have some links to orgs working to get more men into female-skewed professions? I'd be very interested to read them.

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