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Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

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Re: Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

#41

Post by wiwillia »

I refer to myself as the non-technical co-founder all the time. I'm a male, and the CEO of our company. In my personal experience, I've never heard anyone equate "non-technical co-founder" to a term used only by female founders.

I also find that many of the entrepreneurs and founders I meet are incredibly humble (disarmingly so - the founders of Dropbox and Airbnb have zero ego). I don't know if there's any YC alumn who would say that Jessica is anything less than essential within YC.

Re: Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

#44

Post by acjohnson55 »

pron wrote: post #21

This kind of article shows why we need more women in tech. Many, many more. Critical and insightful but also respectful and modest. One thing that was missing, though, was politics. Politics in the true sense of the word, namely, the power struggles in the tech society which give rise to the current status quo. Also, she says, "No one pretended tech was a meritocracy". The thing is, tech is a meritocracy, and that's…

Also, she says, "No one pretended tech was a meritocracy". The thing is, tech is a meritocracy, and that's part of the politics of tech. Meritocracy, of course, is a joke. It is not a desirable state of affairs, because it should be obvious that "merit" is a false currency used to justify what is, rather than work toward what should be. It is the quintessential naturalistic fallacy.

I wish I could upvote this so many more times.

It honestly had never occurred to me that meritocracy could be a bad thing until I read Twilight of the Elites by Chris Hayes (yep, the same MSNBC host guy) [1], recommended to me by a friend. But after reading that book, which is one of the best written and edited books on econ/policy I've ever read, I'm fairly well convinced. He builds very much upon Michael Young's work, which he mentions many times, applying it to all sorts of examples of meritocratic failure in the modern day.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Elites-America-After-Meritocr...

Re: Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

#45

Post by Crake »

nawitus wrote: post #22

" and deal with the boys" Well.. that started out pretty sexist.

Saying "and deal with the girls" would get a lot of guys in trouble these days. Women too if you're on the internet where your gender is indeterminate, since feminists will get mad at you and assume you're an Oppressive Male.

Re: Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

#46

Post by jlehman »

First thing that surprised me about the Female Founder’s Conference is that it was all women.

I find this whole line of reasoning a little off, given the stats mentioned in YC's blog here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/highlights-from-ycs-first-female...

The first paragraph mentions:

We’d originally planned to host the event at our office, which could fit about 150 attendees. 1,200 impressive applications later, we decided to move the event to the Computer History Museum where we could accommodate three times the people.

Given that all 450 accepted attendees were women, I can assume that some women were rejected. Would it have made sense to reject qualified women to this event in place of qualified men? Personally, I think not.

Re: Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

#48

Post by wellboy »

001sky wrote: post #40
thatthatis wrote: post #4

It occurred to me recently that if the goal is to eventually get to gender equality, female focused tech groups should set the proportion of their tickets available at x% female, y% male where x and y are the inverse of their proportions at some equivalent male dominated group. Over time, this policy should pull men and women together instead of apart. What good is it if women only know other women and men only know…

Nothing is wrong with your point, but you are applying a 1->N scaling strategy to a 0->1 problem. That is to say, this type of event is brings people together because n=small, and the act of concentration brings more scaling effects that a larger act of dispersion. Over time, this will shift...and your preferred methods will make more sense in a context where dispersion is more important than concentration. But it is…

Very technical analysis, but it actually makes sense! :)

Re: Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

#49

Post by bertil »

zaidf wrote: post #32
bertil wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I remember, those describe themselves as ‘the business guy’ or ‘the marketing guy’ but give advice, mainly about the attitude to have to fellow ‘non-technical co-founders’, assuming often openly that they do have a needed skill-set, that happens not to be code.

The precise word that is used to describe your role in specific situations matters a lot less than knowing what it encompasses in whole. No one is saying anywhere that you should go out of your way to tell investors that your duties include cleaning the toilet and ordering food. No, to investors you are in charge of keeping lights on; in a meeting to discuss a partnership you assume charge of user growth; when it's t…

> The precise word that is used to describe your role in specific situations matters a lot less

The main point made by people studying career imbalance between genders seems to be that it tends to do at a statistical level.

Re: Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference

#50

Post by pron »

lexcorvus wrote: post #39
pron wrote: post #21

This kind of article shows why we need more women in tech. Many, many more. Critical and insightful but also respectful and modest. One thing that was missing, though, was politics. Politics in the true sense of the word, namely, the power struggles in the tech society which give rise to the current status quo. Also, she says, "No one pretended tech was a meritocracy". The thing is, tech is a meritocracy, and that's…

work toward what should be Ay, there's the rub: what should we work toward? This issue almost never gets discussed, except by implication. We hear over and over how we "need more women in tech". But even if everyone agreed that we do, how much more is enough? Should we stop after reaching 33% women? 50%? 60%? Often we hear the vague assertion that the percentage of women in tech should be close to the percentage of w…

Ay, there's the rub: what should we work toward?

The first thing is, as always, to think about the current situation, and analyze its politics. See who the parties are. What their interests are. Whether their interests are authentic, or merely a result of many years of social pressure. What power is in question? Who has it? Who doesn't? Why? Once you understand the politics (which isn't easy because we often confuse politics with authentic will, merely because we've been subject to that politics for so long that we don't know anything else), then you can have people argue over values and how they believe things should be.

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