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Female Founders

paulgraham.com

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Re: Female Founders

#291

Post by micv »

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?"

Y'know, for a company that deals with funding founders to do their work, founder relations sounds like a pretty important job to me. Someone has to keep an eye on where that money's going. Maybe that's just naïve on my part but it sounds like it should matter a whole lot to keeping the enterprise going.

Re: Female Founders

#292

Post by ReadEvalPost »

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…

For role models, Limor Fried (owner of http://www.adafruit.com/) and Vi Hart (http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart) are both super awesome!

Re: Female Founders

#293

Post by alecdbrooks »

crassus wrote: post #273
alecdbrooks wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And what exactly is wrong with the "I have black friends" defense? Are you trying to say that pg is friends with someone in spite of his supposed hateful nature? That he's somehow looked past the person's "shortcomings"? The critics I've read aren't saying pg has a hateful nature. They're saying that he hasn't fully accounted for his unconscious biases. Given that everyone's friends have actual shortcomings, it does…

Nobody can ever account for all unconscious bias. It's the original sin doctrine of the social justice warrior community.

"Nobody can ever account for all bugs. It's the original sin doctrine of the programming community."

I'm not saying Graham should drop everything until every last bias is gone. I'm saying he shouldn't act as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator just because the percentage of female founders is up and it has women as partners.

Re: Female Founders

#294

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #113
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. While I don't agree (really, I know virtually nothing about those women and haven't met them), I think you would find that many of your critics from the original controversy do think they are sexist and would say it to their faces.

[deleted]

Re: Female Founders

#295

Post by 001sky »

Crito wrote: post #190
zorpner wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not judging particular people (I have no opinion on the individuals mentioned), and I honestly haven't kept up with this whole narrative so there are certainly no statistics I can cite. I'm saying that stating that someone belongs to a class is entirely insufficient to demonstrate the assertion that they are not biased against that class, particularly in a context where that class is systemically biased against.

PG is asserting that these particular women, Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn, are not sexists. Responding with statistics about women in general, rather than relevant information about those particular women, is problematic.

Crito - Your confusing statistics with Logic.

Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.

None of this is relevant to the discussion at hand.

The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]. None of the men overlap in expertise with the positions held by the women. None of the women overlap in expertise with the positions held by the men. The "model" person the firm likes to do business with is a caricature of only of the sub-sets of staff. Because there is no gender overlap in these two sets, this is "strucurally" sexist...at least arguably...regardless of which sub-set does the selection [2,3].

[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant.

[1] The rest of the staff are all Hackers or Designers.

[2] The allocation actually doesn't matter. Only the stratification.

[3] Note, however that the "model" personality type is de-facto gendered [male]. This is not a logical necessity. It could be the case that the roles are reversed--either all of the hackers were/are women, etc...or the target Founders could be Hr/ops-legal-accounting...etc.

Re: Female Founders

#296

Post by hrkristian »

zaroth wrote: post #276

I wish I could contribute to conversations on sexism in tech, but I'm always too afraid of being burned at the stake for saying something the Internet doesn't like.

I wish more people did not write out knee-jerk responses every time this topic shows up on HN. When people are typing out a dissertation in a matter of minutes, quality takes the full force of the blow.

There are currently more comments than there are upvotes, it's ridiculous. Yes, I see the irony of myself posting ;)

Re: Female Founders

#297

Post by [deleted] »

pyrocat wrote: post #72
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…

I'd say it's more like "I'm not racist! I adopted a black kid." The second paragraph was mostly fine but it did come off a little... unhumble. And humility is usually the tone you want when talking about how your company is doing good for X cause, but it could be doing more.

[deleted]

Re: Female Founders

#298

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Female Founders

#299

Post by mcantelon »

Karunamon wrote: post #290
mcantelon wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying you're anti-leftist, simply quoting someone's take on the psychology behind P.C. bullying. Not everything has to involve left/right-wing tribalism.

You say as you post a paragraph from a (whoops: not dead) terrorist's tirade against liberals. I don't think you could have possibly picked a worse example to hold up as not involving tribalism...

I don't see how the example is tribalist. Ted Kaczynski, in my understanding, was a loner that was neither left or right wing. And I'm not sure why the fact he's a terrorist is relevant to his analysis.

Re: Female Founders

#300

Post by stephp »

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…

To add my own experiential insight as a female who started coding at 11 (without the aid or encouragment of a parent like you!)...

Reflecting on my thought processes at that age, I remember it being entirely about 2 things:

1. Expression. Nothing could have sounded more dull than building aimlessly-- I wanted to DESIGN. (My definition of this being "carrying out a specific communicative purpose through look and function.") I wanted to make a website that demonstrated my tastes and values to my friends. (Which is likely why I went straight to websites and not desktop software.)

2. Social dynamics. Similar but different to the aforementioned point, I wanted to actually affect other people with what I was making. As a young girl, that typically meant impressing potential friends and boyfriends. I had a poetry site at one point. I made sites for a fake band my girl friends and I talked about forming. I had tons of blogs. I really should have segued into games at that time, as that would have fallen in the same category, but sadly I did not.

While I know every human being is different, I was what you'd consider a "girly girl." So I believe the difference between myself and a young boy was quite pronounced in a stereotypically feminine direction-- which is where one should be investigating a subject like this, in my opinion.

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