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Female founders who've had a great 2016

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Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#91

Post by statictype »

tptacek wrote: post #53
cbeach wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to suggest women are encouraged into our industry by this kind of tokenisation? And not discouraged by it?

I don't accept the premise of your question, that noting female founders in the tech industry is "tokenization". A token is someone selected in order to represent a cohort of people. But that's not what this list is: presumably any successful female founder would be on it.

His question is still valid if you remove that word and replace it with something more accurate.

FWIW, I think it's a great idea and a good way to encourage women to join a field that they perceive as not being welcoming to them but I don't have any hard data to support this (and don't think I need any)

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#92

Post by DanBC »

dang wrote: post #37
exstudent2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extra annoying that they've co-opted the Rosie the Riveter iconography. As if these people know anything about blue collar labor (male or female). The people on this list, Techcrunch publishing the list, and it showing up on the HN front-page basically sums up why I (and others) view "women in tech" as little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard.

> little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard There's obviously a good point to be made about class here, but when you optimize for provocation rather than exploration, that's ideological battle. Not only is that not thoughtful discussion in its own right, it damages that possibility for the rest of us. In other words, comments like this are actively destructive to Hack…

> and asked you to stop abusing HN this way.

> There are other comments in this thread making a similar point about class but more in the form of inchoate rage. Obviously, inchoate rage is not thoughtful discussion

You've warned those accounts before too, fwiw.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#93

Post by belorn »

xkiwi wrote: post #14
closeparen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Where is the Male only founder conference? TechCrunch Disrupt? [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-diver...

There is a big differences between "Not enough" and "Female Only". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diadksUjDm4

A bit of side note, but in the video the organizer give a few examples of profession that the girls can become from studying science and the first one they mention is veterinarian. When asking the girls themselves, they too say veterinarian as the reason to study science.

Veterinarian is a profession which got around 90% women and only 10% men, with a trend that predict all women and no men in a few years. Kind of ironic example of gender equality activism.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#94

Post by facepalm »

matt4077 wrote: post #76
facepalm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same kind of story at all. Holmes first became famous (As a unicorn), then fell from grace. Shkreli never was admired, or was he? He was just scorned right from the start.

While that's factually true fail to see the causality. It's like: "These are completely different stories, she was born in Canada and he is an excellent tennis player".

One grabs peoples anttention more than the other. The original claim was because they are both in pharma, they should receive the same attention. But being in pharma is not the only aspect of their stories.

It's like arguing apples should be the same as oranges because they are both fruits.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#95

Post by facepalm »

tptacek wrote: post #83
facepalm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If it is such a broad classification, maybe it is not very meaningful then to say "tech has less women than any other non-routine cognitive profession".

Why use the classification at all, if it so broad? If you use "all professions", you get perhaps things like garbage men and miners who are worse than tech? So you can always select a filter that makes tech look worst.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#96

Post by facepalm »

dang wrote: post #87
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.

Why do you make me off-topic and not the comment I replied to who started it by claiming over representation of men? Anyway, have it your way...

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#97

Post by facepalm »

tomlock wrote: post #75
facepalm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has also been a study showing tech interviews went less favorable for women when their voices were masked as male voices. As for "Girls Who Code" as PR - does it increase the popularity of these firms with male coders, too? My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

>>My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore... I can't think of many scenarios that would give you that impression. Did google personally reject you for being a man?

For the last two years I have only seen ads with exclusively female engineers from Google, for example the "I look like an engineer" series.

I haven't seen any effort to attract male talent. Of course having more women on the team will probably make a company more attractive to men, but I doubt that is the only thing they should bank on to attract men.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#98

Post by chongli »

tzs wrote: post #85
chongli wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

About 14 percent of the incoming freshman said their families earn above $500,000

Sure it does. If everybody in the US had equal access to primary and secondary education and Harvard had income-blind admissions, do you really think that number would be so high?

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#99

Post by tptacek »

facepalm wrote: post #95
tptacek wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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).

If it is such a broad classification, maybe it is not very meaningful then to say "tech has less women than any other non-routine cognitive profession". Why use the classification at all, if it so broad? If you use "all professions", you get perhaps things like garbage men and miners who are worse than tech? So you can always select a filter that makes tech look worst.

I don't understand the premise of your objection. The point of the comparison is that tech is uniquely unbalanced among the professions. I'm also disinclined to try to rebut an argument that seesaws like yours now is --- first the comparison is so idiosyncratic that it must be biased, then so broad as to be meaningless. If you object to the classification of labor as "cognitive" or "manual" and "routine" or "nonroutine", you should probably take that argument up with r/badeconomics.

Re: Female founders who've had a great 2016

#100

Post by UncleMeat »

throwaway4891a wrote: post #59
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…

There's a happier, less-dramatic sane-area leaving out overt misogyny and social-justice warrior cry-bully behavior. Also, in hiring there needs to be process removal of as many cognitive biases (ie blinding resume names/personal details) as possible to foster as fair of a messy ordeal as humanly possible. Another issue is the promulgation and veneration of taboo, protected groups as being automatically special propo…

Note: the word "neoliberal" has nothing to do with social justice or even modern left wing movements and activism. It describes an economic policy that discourages regulation and government oversight.
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