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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

#121

Post by analog31 »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #107
ffn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical engineering graduate (and 2nd rate programmer) here. And I completely agree, this major is a sinkhole. Maybe 50 years ago when we were still building rockets, planes, and cars to stop the Soviets or what have you, ME was a great major (and maybe 40 years from now when fusion, Mars, and warp drive are all real it will be again). But today in an age of electronics and software, ME is an awful choice for anyo…

That's an interesting point of view. I've had multiple people tell me they wish they could find a 'traditional mechanical engineer' that knew heat transfer, knew fluids, could build a gear train, and knew some kinematics. I think MEs that graduated 20-30 years ago are in high demand. Extremely watered down versions of those courses are in my curriculum. Fluid mechanics is nearly all Bernoulli's Equation and Linear Mo…

I've had multiple people tell me they wish they could find a 'traditional mechanical engineer' that knew heat transfer, knew fluids, could build a gear train, and knew some kinematics. I think MEs that graduated 20-30 years ago are in high demand.

In my view, a similar lament cuts across disciplines. I wish I could find an electrical engineer who understood low noise design. Most engineers forget most of their math and theory within a few years of graduating, and most design work is done by trial and error.

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

#122

Post by tomp »

ameister14 wrote: post #104
tomp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't have to be that smart to be a programmer, and it takes less schooling than being a teacher requires.

Maybe not smart, but you have to have the ability to do a certain kind of abstract thinking. Like translating concepts into sequences of very precise steps (i.e. algorithms).

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

#123

Post by nitrogen »

3pt14159 wrote: post #88

Before you write a comment about why women are or aren't enrolled in STEM fields, please read the Wikipedia article on it. Every time someone says a generalization like "they just choose safer employment" or "high status something, something" without first reviewing a summary of the body of research into the matter, it's kinda pointless. It's like someone saying "here's why I think computers crash" but they've never…

You wouldn't read a book on HTML to know why computers crash. A book on advanced C, maybe.

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

#124

Post by tptacek »

ameister14 wrote: post #117
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hoover was a mining engineer, so there's one.

  Obama - Law
  Bush - Business 
  Clinton - Law
  Bush - Business
  Reagan - Actor
  Carter - Nuclear Engineer & Farmer
  Ford - Law
  Nixon - Law
  LBJ - HS Teacher
  JFK - Econ 
  Ike - Military
  Truman - No degree
  FDR - Law
  Hoover - Engineer
  Coolidge - Law
  Harding - Journalist
  Wilson - Law Prof
  Taft - Law
  Teddy Roosevelt - History & Politics
Law is clearly the modal occupation for presidents, but there's some diversity.

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

#125

Post by tomp »

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.

Maybe they are "best careers" (although I highly doubt it - e.g. traders are way better careers), but we're talking about "prestige" here - the wow factor when you tell people what you do. When I say I'm a programmer, many roll their eyes (while acknowledging that it's easy for me to get a job). Granted I'm not a lawyer or a doctor, but let me know when they start making series about programmers like they did about lawyers (Boston Legal) or doctors (House, Grey's Anatomy).

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

#126

Post by TeMPOraL »

rndn wrote: post #114
Mz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a woman. I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta in the 11th grade, a college level math honor society. I didn't take any math my senior year in high school because I would have had to go to school an hour earlier to take the class they made available to the three people who qualified for it (the other two students did opt to go in early -- but I have serious health problems that had not yet been identified). So I got…

You may find this interesting: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required... (I haven't read it yet though, only one of the linked articles in the third paragraph.)

I read it and I second the recommendation. It's a very good post.

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

#127

Post by yawaramin »

WalterSear wrote: post #120
yawaramin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, the difference in living standards explains it perfectly. If you're in a poor country, pragmatism forces you to drop your 'social expectations'. It's either earn enough to eat or hold on to your prejudices. In that environment, people lose their prejudices fast.

This hypothesis holds no water in any 3rd world country I can think of.

Sorry, but what planet are you from? Every day we're bombarded with stories and images from the developing world of men, women and children trying to make a living. Villagers migrate to cities seeking work. People work in factories and make a better wage than they could anywhere else without education. Women take micro-credit to start up little businesses like mobile phone call booths, or charging booths, and finance their childrens' education. (Women are seen as better clients for credit because they're less likely to spend the money on drinking and gambling.)

Look at the tech sectors in Europe and India and Asia--they don't have all these hang-ups and prejudices and misconceptions about how women's brains 'work differently' or what the biological differences might be or all that pseudo-scientific bull-crap. They just do the work.

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

#128

Post by frabcus »

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…

This isn't true - the core skill of controlling classes is pretty hard. It's not an intellectual skill, but a social intelligence one.

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

#129

Post by jsprogrammer »

efuquen wrote: post #119
jsprogrammer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I didn't hear the original anecdote. I'm only going off of the words in the post I responded to, but making people take an action to better your financial position is slavery. From the description, the people being coerced could presumably choose not to take the action, but would then be denied entry to the bar. That is explicit tribalism and creates a situation where you either join along with the groupt…

> making people take an action to better your financial position is slavery. "What is Watsi? Watsi is a global crowdfunding platform that enables anyone to donate as little as $5 to directly fund life-changing healthcare for people in need. Watsi is a registered U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit organization (EIN: 45-3236734)." https://watsi.org/faq If these were the actions of a CEO for a for profit business your statements…

I'm not sure what US Codes or Officer status has to do with my assessment. A CEO is not entitled, by position, to any business profits. They are strictly reserved for stock-owners. Those points are irrelevant to mine.

I just took a look Watsi's Transparency Report. It's commendable that they seem to be going much further than many other organizations do in opening up their financial information. However, while I found lots of patient details, I was unable to find a breakout of salaries and other payments to employees, officers, or other, only an aggregate monthly salary line item of ~66k. If their about page is accurate and there are currently 6 employees, that's about $132k/year/person. Not Jamie Dimon salaries, but still more than double US median household earnings.

Edit: Also, I'm not ragging on Watsi. I'm not familiar with them other than what I just shared above. My beef is with the behavior in the anecdote (which may or may not be accurate to what actually happened at that NYC bar) that was shared, but more importantly with the culture that people seem to be trying to emulate.

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

#130

Post by tomp »

frabcus wrote: post #128
tomp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This isn't true - the core skill of controlling classes is pretty hard. It's not an intellectual skill, but a social intelligence one.

The difference is that you only see you're bad at it when you're already a teacher, teaching a class. If you suck at programming, you see it in the introductory course of first semester of college.
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