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An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

jenniferaldoretta.com

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Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#11

Post by joshuapants »

lisa_henderson wrote: post #7
chaostheory wrote: post #5

"I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university." Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high pre…

Women tend to focus on those jobs where the need for the job seems solid. If we focus, for a moment, on those jobs that are available to those who have college degrees, many women become teachers, but teaching is not high prestige. There is little risk that the USA will outsource all the hospitals to China, so women go into medicine. There is little risk that the USA will outsource all the lawyers to China, so women…

>many women become teachers, but teaching is not high prestige

If you give weight to the McKinsey study, almost half of US public school teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes. This suggests that the best and brightest women are not opting to be teachers instead of engineers, they are choosing other jobs.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#12

Post by spcoll »

chaostheory wrote: post #5

"I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university." Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high pre…

HN's casual nerd misogyny showing up again...

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#13

Post by itsdrewmiller »

xtrumanx wrote: post #2

Not quite what I was expecting with a post that begins with "An Open Letter to...". I've been trained to expect any such letters would be someone's way to make their grievances about some entity public. Now I need to go reflect on why I feel disappointed it was so positive. Haha, only serious.

I had to reread it like 3 times to make sure I wasn't just missing the "call out" part of the letter. I think I am happy about it, though!

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#14

Post by fallinghawks »

chaostheory wrote: post #5

"I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university." Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high pre…

This is the first time I've heard engineering called low prestige.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#15

Post by pconner »

xtrumanx wrote: post #2

Not quite what I was expecting with a post that begins with "An Open Letter to...". I've been trained to expect any such letters would be someone's way to make their grievances about some entity public. Now I need to go reflect on why I feel disappointed it was so positive. Haha, only serious.

I like it. It's a nice change of pace. Not that there's anything wrong with negative open letters, but as you said, that seems to make up a majority of them.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#16

Post by rimantas »

intortus wrote: post #10
chaostheory wrote: post #5

"I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university." Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high pre…

You don't think it could have anything to do with attitudes toward women in each respective field?

You don't think there can be other reasons except attitude?

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#17

Post by malandrew »

joshuapants wrote: post #11
lisa_henderson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women tend to focus on those jobs where the need for the job seems solid. If we focus, for a moment, on those jobs that are available to those who have college degrees, many women become teachers, but teaching is not high prestige. There is little risk that the USA will outsource all the hospitals to China, so women go into medicine. There is little risk that the USA will outsource all the lawyers to China, so women…

>many women become teachers, but teaching is not high prestige If you give weight to the McKinsey study, almost half of US public school teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes. This suggests that the best and brightest women are not opting to be teachers instead of engineers, they are choosing other jobs.

Interesting. I'd love to know what professions are chosen by the women in the top third of their college class.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#18

Post by garrisondmr »

I watched the FFC live and what struck me was that it was the same as any other founder conference except that it was a girl on stage instead of a dude. If we want to stop making gender a big deal then we need to stop making gender a big deal. There is no Male Founder Conference right?

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#19

Post by lambda »

chaostheory wrote: post #5

"I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university." Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high pre…

Well, when I looked around a bit I found this article " rel="nofollow">http://readwrite.com/2014/09/02/women-in-computer-science-wh... which links to this study: " rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/11/220748057/why-wome... which indicates that rather than being based on prestige, it appears that the disparity can be broken down based on more rewarding but lower paying, vs. more purely mercenary jobs.

I wouldn't call being a teacher more prestigious than being an engineer, nor a social worker, but there are still a lot of women who are more interested in going into those fields than into engineering disciplines.

Other studies also point to other reasons; in computer science especially, there's a very strong effect of computers being seen as boys toys, so men come into the major with more experience and more interest in the field just to begin with: " rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/s...

The gender gap in engineering disciplines, as a complex social phenomenon, is likely to have many interrelated causes. Between lower encouragement of computers as girls toys at younger ages, the fact that there is still a bit of an expectation that men will be the primary breadwinner in the family and thus women can get these lower paying but more rewarding jobs, the fact that the large existing gender gap makes it less comfortable for women in the major, in the workplace, and so on, it's unlikely that there's going to be one single cause for it.

So, in summary, while from what I found it looks like it's not prestige but how rewarding the job is perceived to be that makes more of the difference, but that's not to say that your hypothesis is wrong, just that I found some evidence to support a different effect that at least appears to be stronger than the effect you describe.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#20

Post by malandrew »

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #8
chaostheory wrote: post #5

"I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university." Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high pre…

Yeah, top jobs where women dominate are all super high prestige, elementary school teachers, nursing/health aides, secretarial, retail, food service... :)

You failed to include all the blue collar low-prestige jobs where men are far more common, like construction, factory jobs and warehouse work. For every profession that is low prestige and largely female, there is another profession that low prestige and largely male.
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