Female founders who've had a great 2016 • Hacker News Board

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#81

Post by jimmywanger » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 2:48 AM UTC

megablast wrote: post #80

jimmywanger wrote: post #62

> We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance?

> Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance? It isn't, they are, and have been for many years. Maybe you should read more nursing or teaching sites?

The lack of female engineers has made it into mainstream media. Why hasn't the lack of male educators or nurses?

Doing a google search for "top 50 female tech*" returns many results. The same for male teachers or male nurses returns crickets.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#82

Post by cbeach » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 3:29 AM UTC

megablast wrote: post #79

cbeach wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way. Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait? Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" compet…

> Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead? No, it is more like giving them separate awards, like the mens 400m and the womens 400m.

Your analogy breaks down due to the lack of a "men's 400m" event in technology.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#83

Post by tptacek » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 3:46 AM UTC

facepalm wrote: post #57

tptacek wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't. We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession, and are happy to acknowledge anything that might suggest a countervailing trend.

So would you say sexism is the only thing that differentiates technology professions from other "cognitive non-routine professions", or is that criterion ("cognitive non-routine") perhaps handpicked to frame tech as anti-women?

"Cognitive non-routine" isn't a term I made up. It's one of four broad classes of labor, one way economists use to divide up the working world.

It's so broad a classification I'd have trouble seeing how it created biased framing. It's just a more precise way of saying "the professions" (in the traditional sense of medicine, the law, accounting, and engineering).

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#84

Post by morgante » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 4:07 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #78

closeparen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upper middle class, maybe. This can happen when your household income is $200k. Not $55k (national median) and certainly not below. Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only th…

Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class. They've got this thing nailed down to a T. Upper/middle kids can't go because their parents…

> For a variety of reasons, lower income kids can't get the marks to get in to these schools so they never reach the point where financial aid would matter.

Again with the sweeping generalizations which are completely incorrect.

Because all low income kids are too stupid to get good marks, right?

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#85

Post by tzs » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 4:41 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #78

closeparen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upper middle class, maybe. This can happen when your household income is $200k. Not $55k (national median) and certainly not below. Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only th…

Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class. They've got this thing nailed down to a T. Upper/middle kids can't go because their parents…

The income distribution at Harvard doesn't fit your theory: http://features.thecrimson.com/2013/frosh-survey/admissions....

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#86

Post by parennoob » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 5:15 AM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #77

parennoob wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country Unfortunately, very few efforts seem to focus on immediately applicable solutions like this that solve the problem (if there is one) fundamentally. None of the Big Tech companies for example (Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft come to mind) currently do appl…

Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them. But if I had to guess, I'd say these large companies are actually quite fair in their hiring processes. Discrimination at that step in the process seems to be more common at smaller or older companies. The worst, most blatant actual case I have seen was the IT dept at a medium-size…

> Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.

How about blinding during resume screening? Replace female or male names with a number or made up names. Phone screening even maybe, using some kind of audio processing. I have never heard of these companies using any such process.

Edit: Looks interviewing.io did such a process, here are the results – https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#87

Post by dang » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 6:46 AM UTC

facepalm wrote: post #51

"we see plenty of representation of the main group -- in this case, men -- by default." So where is the list of male founders who kicked it in 2016? I would be less bothered by such lists without the undertone of "we need such lists because of sexism".

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 and the links there.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#88

Post by dang » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 6:46 AM UTC

awt wrote: post #63

Would you say men have plenty of representation in K-12 education? Or in University, where more women than men attend? Or white men in the NBA? What about men being overrepresened in successful suicide attempts?

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#89

Post by dang » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 6:51 AM UTC

234dd57d2c8db wrote: post #66

I'm waiting for the list of successful female garbage collectors and sewer technicians. There's a place gender balance is even worse, virtually _100%_ men, but I don't see any big pushes to diversify those fields. Those two jobs also make a surprising amount of $$$ too.

Sorry, but rehashing this for the 10,000th time is seriously off topic here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873

Classic flamewar tedium doesn't belong on this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#90

Post by dang » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 6:54 AM UTC

cbeach wrote: post #43

Joeboy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thoroughly agree about some of these (artisanal tampons, eyebrow pomade), but Open Bionics is a great thing and some of the others definitely look like worthwhile ventures.

To claim Samantha was the founder of Open Bionics does a massive disservice to the CEO, Joel, who is the guy that actually came up with the concept (before Sam joined as a "bizdev" person). It's Joel who had been making bionic hands since his teens, and who spoke at the Hacker News London conference about his work. But hey ho - I suppose we have important social engineering to do...

> But hey ho - I suppose we have important social engineering to do...

Please drop the ideological vitriol from your comments here. It breaks the rules, poisons the discourse, and discredits the substantive point you were making.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html