An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by BSousa » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #41

lambda wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jo…

You can't compare being a teacher with a career in "law, medicine, politics, or finance" or a programmer. The latter all require very high intellectual aptitude, either logical/mathematical (programming, finance), memory (medicine, law) or social intelligence (finance, politics). In contrast, mostly everybody can be a teacher (and according to comment [1], teachers usually come from the bottom of their class). [1] ht…

Like anyone can be a lawyers or a programmer. There are good and bad ones, and a good teacher will require a lot of skills and 'logical' aptitude as well as empathy. AFAIK, you can't take a 4 week bootcamp and teach high-school math, but you can get a job at a startup after a rails bootcamp.

Can we stop with the 'we are so special/intelligent' arrogance?

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

#92

Post by spcoll » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:41 PM UTC

birdsareweird wrote: post #84

spcoll wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As opposed to the special snowflake club ignoring the politically inconvenient research done in the last 20 years on gender equality? Differences in in-group bias, differences in headline coverage as victims, differences in court judgments, ... Let's keep rewriting history so that white men are to blame. It's not like they do things like land probes on comets or anything.

People like you (and you are the majority here) are the reason why HN is a toxic boy's club rampant with crass misogyny and racism.

These past few threads about the FFC have been full of both full-on sexism disparaging the courageous women in our industry, and passive-aggressive remarks from sexually frustrated males. It's sickening.

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

#93

Post by BSousa » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:46 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #87

tomp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's now low prestige, it's just lower prestige than e.g. medicine, law or "investment banking".

> It's now low prestige, it's just lower prestige than e.g. medicine, law or "investment banking". Software developer and data scientist are both at the top of the list of best careers in America right now, and more people aspire to be startup CEOs than movie stars or pro athletes.

Have data for that startup CEO's? Because unless you are talking about a very narrow group of people, it hasn't been my experience at all (sure, if you ask 20-30 years old, they will say startup CEO, mostly because that is the only thing they believe they still can be, but ask 12-16 year olds and the results). Also, most people don't know what a startup CEO's really does and just expect a lot of money and ruling over the company while meeting clients at a golf course while most startup CEO's are partly broke and work 12 hours a day

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

#94

Post by fallinghawks » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:46 PM UTC

practicalpants wrote: post #83

fallinghawks wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow... really? It's absolutely viewed as low prestige in my experience. I mean our culture has an ingrained stereotype of the socially awkward, maladjusted engineer, that's definitely out there. The jocks, "cool kids," extroverts, your typical fraternity member etc. are supposed to be in finance or striving to be an executive or something. I think it's generational to some extend. IMO the baby boomers are particularl…

Maybe it's because I'm Asian ;) Perhaps engineering isn't glamorous, but it's highly skilled respectable work.

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

#95

Post by spcoll » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:47 PM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #24

spcoll wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How is this misogyny? I didn't say that it was skill or talent that was keeping women from our fields.

A sweeping statement like "women only care about social validation, and that's why there aren't many in tech" is sexist.

First, that's like saying "men only care about money": it's not backed by any real evidence and it is disparaging to an entire gender.

Second, that's sweeping under the rug the constant discrimination against women that is keeping them out of our industry. You are making women responsible for not choosing tech as a career, whereas they are being excluded from tech by the sort of casual sexism on display on HN (and most SV tech companies).

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

#96

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:48 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #85

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which explains why politics - which by definition is full of people who have enough status to set national policy - is full of engineers, while the lawyers are left discussing the finer technical points of voir dire on Lawyer News.

Not that I'm saying you constructed it this way intentionally, but this argument is the rhetorical equivalent of one of those Highlights For Children "How Many Things Can You Spot Wrong With This Picture" puzzles; including, at least: * The notion that politicians occupy high-status careers * The notion that it's the status held by politicians that is the reason they're allowed to set national policy * The notion tha…

Your primary failure was confusing personal popularity with social popularity with status/agency/influence. You're - mostly - continuing to make the same mistake.

Of course status is defined by caste power and social agency. What else would it be defined by? Facebook likes?

The fact that no one much likes lawyers is irrelevant. So is the fact that lawyers individually may fail to make a living from lawyering, or even that a few outliers have a social conscience.

Let me know when an engineer becomes president of the US and we can talk about the other details.

>not because the top echelons of law are disproportionately well compensated, or because those people make decades-long careers out of making connections with businesses and power brokers

This confuses cause and effect. The point of becoming a certain kind of lawyer is exactly because it's the best way to gain status and self-serving influence through that kind of activity.

Writing a compiler will never get you that kind of status, no matter what gender you are.

Nor will making a cool app.

Becoming a billionaire might. But tech billionaires tend to become billionaires because they act in aggressively self-serving ways in business and/or are well-connected, not because they're rewarded purely for being brilliant engineers.

Engineering brilliance on its own will get you GitHub stars and conferences and maybe a job or two. But no more than that.

Still don't believe me? Ask a few thousand people outside tech who their favourite engineer is.

That's how high-status engineering is.

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

#97

Post by jsprogrammer » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:50 PM UTC

wallflower wrote: post #35

I watched most of the FFC. Like Marc Andreesen has said, software is eating the world. YC is getting such critical mass now that entrepreneurs and idealists/pragmatists with world-affecting ideas are now applying for YC. Not necessarily because they'd heard of YC - but because someone they know who cares about them had heard about YC. YC, in my opinion, is getting to a point where it can help incubate world-changing…

YC is still stuck in a world of ideas based on controlling others through the creation of debt and claiming lifetime ownership of others' work. That they are stuck there is not entirely unsurprising, nor is it unsurprising that there is a forming gender-class that is trying to emulate the functioning of that world. To me, continuing to carry out these decade[century, millennium?]-long ideas is not very world-changing. It may be progressive enhancement, but that has slowly been happening for awhile.

The anecdote that you shared about the bar in NYC smacks of this old-world thinking:

>the gutsy idea to ask the bouncer to make everyone who came into the bar have to vote for

I'm still not quite sure if this is slavery or just tribal exculsivism. I don't know, maybe it's both?

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

#98

Post by voltagex_ » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:54 PM UTC

jsprogrammer wrote: post #97

wallflower wrote: post #35

I watched most of the FFC. Like Marc Andreesen has said, software is eating the world. YC is getting such critical mass now that entrepreneurs and idealists/pragmatists with world-affecting ideas are now applying for YC. Not necessarily because they'd heard of YC - but because someone they know who cares about them had heard about YC. YC, in my opinion, is getting to a point where it can help incubate world-changing…

YC is still stuck in a world of ideas based on controlling others through the creation of debt and claiming lifetime ownership of others' work. That they are stuck there is not entirely unsurprising, nor is it unsurprising that there is a forming gender-class that is trying to emulate the functioning of that world. To me, continuing to carry out these decade[century, millennium?]-long ideas is not very world-changing…

> I'm still not quite sure if this is slavery or just tribal exculsivism. I don't know, maybe it's both?

The fuck? It's a nice anecdote about winning some money for what is ostensibly a charity!

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

#99

Post by ed_blackburn » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:55 PM UTC

I nearly didn't read because so often Open Letters are public complaints, usually passive aggressive in nature and almost always divisive.

So Jennifer. Thank you. Thank you for restoring my faith in open letters. Or rather making me think hard before I pass judgement on something I've not even read.

Saunters off, with tail firmly between legs.

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

#100

Post by emcarey » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 10:03 PM UTC

The female founders conference is probably one of the best days of the year. I saw so many friends, women I know on the Internet, and I cried tears of joy three times during the speeches. It's hard to be what you can't see. Jessica and Kat have done an AMAZING job of putting female founders in front of us so we can look and say, hey you know, Kathryn Minshew did YC, I CAN DO IT TO.

Even though our startup didn't make it into the last YC batch, we're applying again. We love the community, we love the yc philosophy and approach to building products and we want to inspire other women just like us to apply.

Thank you for writing this letter and sharing what we all think, yesterday was incredible.