Reflections on Being a Female Founder • Hacker News Board

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#221

Post by strictfp » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:56 AM UTC

I'm convinced that the best thing we as society can do for gender equality right now is to abandon the corporate roles that cater unreasonably much to the stereotypical macho male gender role.

These are roles which in principle require you to abandon your private life and spend all your mental energy on the company.

Why do we even have these roles? Well, according to behavioural psychology males fight for status, and the ultimate sacrifice gives the ultimate status.

No wonder that no sane person wants a role like this.

What is holding these roles in place then? Well, I think the business sector and legislation is largely to blame.

Laws stipulate corporate structures, and business schools teach corporate structure perfectly in tune with the last industrial revolution.

If there is anything we can do to make the work environment more egalitarian, it's to change corporate structures and create roles which aren't unreasonable and/or customized to old-fashion gender roles.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#222

Post by jwr » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:56 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #216

yomly wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking a step back from her story, I find it so weird that we stigmatise some of the most universal human experiences. Essentially every person will piss burp fart and poop. And almost every person has one of two genitals. (EDIT and our biological parents will have one of each). And almost every mother will feed their baby with their breasts. And yet we have become so detached from the animal part of our identity and…

This is much more of a thing in the United States than elsewhere in the world.

Definitely. In most of Europe things are more normal: it's normal for women to be prime ministers or presidents, it's OK to breastfeed your child in public, and at least among my programmer peers, women are regarded with more respect than men (since there are so few of them in IT).

In Poland, the catholic church and the "conservatives" still work hard at enforcing the old barbaric gender stereotypes, but they get little traction among the educated population.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#223

Post by Cthulhu_ » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:06 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #51

_pzdn wrote: post #23

This was an interesting read. I found it well written and kind of sad, if optimistic and hopeful. Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent between the two genders, so why are almost all coders I've worked with male?

One thing that bugs me: Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall. I find blind technical interviewing easy because I…

As a male I've also noticed a pressure to move upwards from a 'regular' dev to e.g. tech lead or architect, but that said, I've been fortunate to have spent a lot of time working for a company where that was mainly people's own ambitions; they got rid of or raised the wage ceiling for 'regular' developers at some point.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#224

Post by strictfp » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:10 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #83

satyrnein wrote: post #38

I wish there were a clear bad guy here, but most of the hardship seems to have been caused by more diffuse social pressures. What could we have done as an industry to improve the author's experience? Maybe just having more female founders around in general (by removing any barriers) would make some of these circumstances more commonplace.

I'll be even worse and note that this is a story that is fundamentally about a woman achieving reproductive success - and it sounds pretty miserable. The male version of this story is something like how much easier it is to sleep with an attractive women because a CEO title is perceived as high status. Most people shape their lives around having a family - the incentives here are not favourable for females seeking ou…

Yes! This is spot-on. This is a social construct and a good example why I think we should focus more on male gender roles in order to achieve better equality.

Males have strict roles, expectations and reward structures in society, just like we all do. Equality movements have expected men to step down without giving them an alternative way of achieving self-worth. They still have the same pressures applied, but are expected to ignore them.

I think we should abandon the traditional work roles which cater so obviously to traditional male power and status, and also find a way to liberate men, so that they aren't pushed to such extremes to achieve status.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#225

Post by Cthulhu_ » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #179

ifokiedoke wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own personal experience as a female software developer is that there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent. Others have mentioned that it might be because of perceived superior communication skills (good?), or perceived lack of "good-enough" technical skills (bad?)... both of these add to the problem, but I've also experienced that diversity-awar…

> there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent As a guy, I keep fighting this pressure a lot too. I think it comes from organizations who don’t have enough technical challenges and they’re afraid top talent will leave out of boredom. There’s always managerial challenges.

Said managerial challenges are often self-imposed though; I think a lot of people will know of companies with too many managers, who don't do a lot of work (that we're aware of) and spend a lot of effort looking important and busy (and rich).

Mind you, for my previous employer (consultancy) I felt like there was too little management and hierarchy; every department had a management team consisting of one or two managers and one or two sales, with other non-core-business tasks (admin) handled by the parent company. But said managers had to do everything; sales, account management, hiring, personnel management & reviews, conflict resolution, and oftentimes they came "from the trenches" so there was often an attempt to help out directly in projects as well. I think they should've spread out the roles a bit more.

Mind you, by default both sales + management there would ALWAYS earn more than the developers; what they could have done is hire junior managers that took some of the work without the exorbitant pay check.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#226

Post by Cthulhu_ » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:16 AM UTC

umvi wrote: post #87

vmception wrote: post #66

> I think I was scared of what others might think of me as a new mother and CEO, maybe because of my own insecurities, maybe because of the societal norms ingrained in me. I see this so much from corporate career ladder focused women. People literally feeling guilty for wanting some aspect of motherhood, or going through some aspect of motherhood. (and then ironically apologizing about that, despite the core of their…

Personally, when I hear that a woman (or man) with kids is running a startup, I think "that kid isn't going to have the full attention of that parent..." Especially when I read stuff like: > I pressured myself into proving that I was as dedicated to PlanGrid as I always have been. I interpret that phrase as "...at the expense of dedication to my kid". I personally think it's okay to "be less dedicated" to work in ord…

Not even with people running a startup; in my country there's a LOT of parents who have kids, take up their parental leave (and then some if possible) but then go back to work, leaving their kids with the grandparents or day care. Part of that is because living here (esp. the big cities) is too expensive, but the other part is that people like their careers, they don't want to have to give that up to raise a family. Not all families, etc, but there's quite a few that do. And the government is actually supporting it, subsidizing daycare for lower incomes.

I'm not judging it; I wouldn't want to switch careers to become a full-time parent, I don't like kids.

OTOH, if my girlfriend were to get a well paying job and I had the opportunity to work less to pursue other things, I'd probably take it.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#227

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:20 AM UTC

jwr wrote: post #222

jacquesm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is much more of a thing in the United States than elsewhere in the world.

Definitely. In most of Europe things are more normal: it's normal for women to be prime ministers or presidents, it's OK to breastfeed your child in public, and at least among my programmer peers, women are regarded with more respect than men (since there are so few of them in IT). In Poland, the catholic church and the "conservatives" still work hard at enforcing the old barbaric gender stereotypes, but they get lit…

In Poland sexism in IT is still strong among some academic types. Not only sexism, but bags of other prejudices as well. I’d call it the „frustrated elitism syndrome”.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#228

Post by globular-toast » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:22 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #218

globular-toast wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. See there you betray a rather sinister idea. If you had said that you want to see any unfair barriers to entry removed, or that you want to ensure equal exposure and opportunity across all people and all fields then I could support it. But instead you made your desires quite clear: you just want female developers. That means the gender, physical appearan…

I think your comment says more about you than about the OP.

I think your comment says more about you than about me.

This is useful.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#229

Post by jmchuster » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:41 AM UTC

atq2119 wrote: post #214

jmchuster wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare your best manager and your best engineer, and the manager _does_ contribute multiples more than the engineer does. You take this to the extreme, and the best CEOs in history have added additional billions in value to the companies that they've helmed.

This is more of a function of the person's role than their individual contributions though. A CEO's decisions generally have far wider-ranging impact than an individual contributor's, but it's not a directly productive impact in the literal production sense. The CEO didn't personally add those billions of value, they enabled others to add that value. Ultimately, a CEO's decisions don't come out of a vacuum. The avail…

Of course it's the role? Your generated value is always your individual contribution multiplied by the task that you chose to apply that effort to.

If you replaced an excellent CEO with a mediocre CEO or with a bad CEO, then you might see, from some baseline, doubling of the company's a value, or erasing it to nothing, based on which direction you decide to set the company and its culture. If you're the CTO for the company, your choice of team structure and how you choose to influence technical architecture could lead to productive happy teams or slow miserable ones. If you're the engineer in charge of writing a service, you could set your team up for tons of technical debt down the road, or a smooth running service that's easily and safely extensible. If you're doing a bugfix, you could spend the time to truly understand and solve the issue, or throw another if loop to the pile that the next person will find and have to understand before they can make their own patch to the code.

So, if you have the ability to spend a day on a single effort, one which will improve the life of one developer, or one that would improve the life of all developers, or one that would improve the life of all employees, there's obviously a preference from the company's perspective. And then you can consider things like, improving the life of people who don't even work at your company, but that's generally done on your own time, unless the company thinks that the reputation that they gain is worth giving you the time.

Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder

#230

Post by Siira » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

strictfp wrote: post #221

I'm convinced that the best thing we as society can do for gender equality right now is to abandon the corporate roles that cater unreasonably much to the stereotypical macho male gender role. These are roles which in principle require you to abandon your private life and spend all your mental energy on the company. Why do we even have these roles? Well, according to behavioural psychology males fight for status, and…

Perhaps the current situation is completely okay? Some people sacrifice their leisure to work for something they care about. These tend to be men because of heightened competition. Who are you to dictate their life to satisfy your statistical egalitarianism? This is just bullying.