Serious question. Where are the highly capable females that are being locked out of opporunity because of sex?
All of the highly capable women I know seem to be exceling.
Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
671–680 of 1001 posts
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won’t even pretend to know enough to be able to solve this problem. But does your social circle not include other female friends that you could discuss the optics of this situation with? Or better yet, be honest with the female friend that you wanted to advice, pointing out what she had done before and expressing your apprehension in providing critical feedback?
"But does your social circle not include other female friends that you could discuss the optics of this situation with?" Respectfully, this shouldn't be on the person from whom advice is being sought, but on the asker. "Or better yet, be honest with the female friend that you wanted to advice, pointing out what she had done before and expressing your apprehension in providing critical feedback?" If someone asked me t…
>If someone asked me this, I'd probably think they used hashtags like #redpill or were into bashing Ellen Pao or something. It comes across as, "you can't say anything these days without being offensive, men in tech are soooo mistreated."
Wise moderates don't even join the conversation on social media. A wise decision for an individual, but it's harmful to all of us collectively. One negative side effect is people assume that everyone is an extremist of one stripe or another.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#673There's a dark irony to the idea that the defenses against sexism (standing up and calling people out) are also causing an unintended secondary sexism by discouraging equal treatment out of fear of accusations. I've held the belief that if a someone can't recognize and clearly identify the differences between criticism based on merits and criticism based on bias, then there is no point attempting to do "what they wan…
There's no irony here. If your plan to make society better is to infantilise group X because you view them as too weak to handle corrective feedback (or compete against group Y) they (as a group) will soon start to lose the benefits of success-selection that come with competition and correcting your course when you get feedback.
> you view them as too weak to handle corrective feedback
The article says they don't get corrective feedback not because they're seen as too weak, but because it's too risky to give criticism, since it can be misinterpreted (or misrepresented) as sexism.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are better and worse ways to communicate, sure. But fundamentally, you cannot control how people interpret the words that you say.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to be sure you're communicating thoughtfully.
In general, but the risk-reward ration is now way off, as the author of the article mentions, so why risk it if you potentially face harsh repercussions.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#675The payout matrix for "give honest advice / don't give honest advice" has changed, radically. Then some people noticed that, and then their behavior changed to match. It isn't punishing anyone, it's adaptation to a new risk. The "Pence Fence" is a defensive strategem and it didn't arise in a vacuum. It is a costly defense, too, so it being kept up is likely worth the cost to mitigate the risk. Most of what comes afte…
It is almost always no reward, so we can fully expect people not actually doing it.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#676A female founder acquaintance of mine (who's quite smart and capable) went on a Twitter screed a couple weeks ago. As it turns out, someone else had copied her idea, and her startup now had a competitor. The competitor was also able to raise a solid amount of money despite her being first to market and her having more relevant knowledge of the problem space (by her own estimation). So, this scenario isn't exactly unc…
So, this scenario isn't exactly uncommon in the startup world. It happens all the time. But because she's a minority female and her competitor is a white man, it suddenly becomes an example of white supremacy and the patriarchy conspiring to oppress her. Doesn't this sort of thinking basically make these notions into a conspiracy theory? Every piece of evidence interpreted in a way that it supports the chosen narrati…
You have to be careful not to confuse a misuse of an idea for the whole idea itself.
When life sucks and things go wrong we often look for something to blame on days when we're not at our best.
People who have experienced mistreatment because of some general characteristic have an easier time finding targets to blame "racists!" "sexists!" "-phobes!" unreasonably for their problems. We're all unreasonable sometimes.
If I'm having a shitty day day and I'm not a racist myself... I don't really have easy generalizations to blame for my problems so I have to find more nuanced ways to be unreasonable. (and yes, I have had bad days full of unreasonable accusations to blame for my problems, they just weren't towards some hot topic issue).
There is this issue where movements to empower and unify have a tendency to shit to blame and divide. It's a tough situation.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#677> I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up. This is more of a public service announcement than anything else. Is there a solution, though? How do we work around this? I think most of us would like to reach a point where none of this is a concern, and we can just get on with working—yet the prospect of a future without sexism almost seems hopelessly optimistic. Is this just one of those pr…
The problem isn't sexism/racism/etc per-se, and more the current culture of airing dirty laundry in public, amplified by hungry mobs and social media companies who profit off the resulting dumpster fire ("engagement" as they call it). Furthermore, beyond the media (whether social media or traditional media - print, TV, etc) industry profiting off it, some people's careers are entirely based on this problem persisting…
I'm gonna guess you're a person who was never the subject of discrimination and racism and sexism and now you're complaining that the subjects are that are being offended.
Was that a right guess?
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#678Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are better and worse ways to communicate, sure. But fundamentally, you cannot control how people interpret the words that you say.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to be sure you're communicating thoughtfully.
When I say “there are better and worse ways to communicate”, that is what I’m implying. Of course you should try. But the way in which we adjudicate these matters should take into account the fact that perfection is impossible. We have no silver bullets here.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#679I increasingly find myself on the axis of "dont" for a lot of reasons:
* Age (why do older people always assume their prior experience in stone-age computers informs modern age computing? Sometimes it does, but often it doesn't)
The contra case is: amazingly large number of truisms found in the 50s 60s and 70s hold true today as well.
* Experience (why do experienced people always assume you can explain things to inexperienced people? Some things have to be experienced to be understood)
The contra case is that some uplifts can be done, and don't have to be experienced. But how to decide which ones?
So this men clamming up thing can be at least two other reasons for holding schtum: Maybe its not about mars/venus but is about age and experience concerns?
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is described in the article isn't sexism - it's fear. Fear of being labeled as a sexist.
It’s probably both. The men are assuming based on the female founder’s gender _alone_ that she might accuse him of sexism. Regardless of how rational this fear is, they are stereotyping new female founders they’re meeting for the first time based on what an X% of other female founder’s have done in the past. For the men, it’s probably a risk/reward calculation. Keep your head down and be polite and have ~0% chance of…
The men are assuming based on the female founder’s gender _alone_ that she might accuse him of sexism.
Are they, necessarily? This could be entirely up to expected value and cost/benefit. Right now, current day, on average, the amount of power and attention wielded by a woman making an accusation of sexism is far larger than that which would be wielded by a man. This gender skew in outcome causes the cost/benefit calculations made by advice givers to also be gender-skewed. As a result, women get one cost/benefit calc, and men get another.
The problem is precisely systemic societal inequality and sexism. It's sexist to automatically value the word of one gender over that of another. However that is essentially what our society does in this context, made worse through social media's amplification of the mob mentality. It's this amplified societal gender skew which is the problem.
The way out of this is to value and respect evidence. The way out of this is due process and the concept of innocent until proven guilty. The way out is through principles which we know can counteract the evils and dysfunction of the mob, which we have known and codified, and whose value has been borne out by history, since nearly a millennium ago. Only this time, let's apply these gender neutrally.