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Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School?

18 points by jlees ↗ HN
I was one of the female attendees at Startup School and I was floored by the gender ratio - being in tech, I'm used to being a minority, but this was possibly the most extreme balance I've seen.

I'm genuinely interested in whether people have theories about why this might be, and whether any women considered attending but decided not to? Or is this simply a real life manifestation of the HN community?

25 comments

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sgoyal360
Really enjoyed Startup School but I agree. I've never felt the tech gender ratio as much as I did today.
truebecomefalse
Has anyone considered that women just aren't as interested in tech entrepreneurship as men are?
saiko-chriskun
Not by this wide a margin, no.
antonID
So what are you saying? YC is sexist and isn't accepting women into Startup School?
ruby_on_rails
YC is sexist and isn't providing enough kitchen space for more women to attend.
matthewowen
The problem with that attitude is thus:

People think "women aren't interested in this", which leads them to think "well, since women aren't interested, we don't have to try to be inclusive at all", which leads to them behaving in ways that mean women don't feel welcome and hence aren't interested in participating.

I'm not saying you're guilty of that process - but the "women aren't interested" trope can be rather pernicious.

KMinshew
Totally agree with matthewowen's comment above. Also, as a woman in tech, I hear all the time that "women just aren't as interested in computer science as men are," yet in my experience that's not at all the case. In India (where CS is not seen as something that predominantly boys do) 55% of CS degrees go to women. In the 1960s people said, "women just aren't as good at playing instruments as men because they don't have the lung power;" when blind auditions were introduced the number of women accepted into major orchestras tripled overnight. There are a lot of examples of people assuming women "just aren't interested" and that changing very rapidly when cultural barriers and discrimination is removed.
jlees
It's an intersection of (people interested in tech) & (people interested in entrepreneurship), both are male dominant though one could argue for a close to equal balance in the latter if you consider any side business entrepreneurship - many women silently start lifestyle businesses and never get recognition for doing so the way rockstar CEOs do.

Thinking about it YC's focus on hacker-founders adds another % into the mix too, the percentage of women programmers - I think it's simply math, multiply through and you get the absurd weighting seen at SUS.

perfectbeauty
i highly disagree that women aren't "as interested". I, myself with many of my girlfriends, read techcrunch, hackernews, pandodaily, etc. consistently and find us fascinated with this information. However, it's hard to "fit in" with a group of hacker guys. It's like writing with your left hand if you're right handed. Is it doable? yes. but everything feels more awkward and uncomfortable because the community isn't what you're used to. i'm not sure what it's going to take for women to feel more welcome, but understand, that women control more than 1/2 of the purse strings in families, are the social media addicts, and generally like to shop. if you don't create products that cater towards this population, you are missing out on a great market.

but it's not different from being a minority in any other situation. you're going to have to work twice as hard to prove yourself, and there's going to be twice as much pressure to be that 'role model' for others.

rachelbythebay
I saw it too, and I wish I had an answer. It definitely prompts feelings of "what am I even doing here?" that merely participating on the site does not.

The whole ethnicity balance was pretty far out there, too. Considering it was held in Silly Valley, I would have expected to see far more of a mix, but that didn't seem to happen, either.

I wonder, are both observations the same effect in action or something else entirely?

cpt1138
I was not there but as an older male, who doesn't drink, I am constantly reminded of how young and alcohol obsessed "entrepreneurs" seem to be. David Rusenko (Weebly) was still in college when he and his buds started. So to me it seems like college boys dominate. And the kinds of technically oriented women that would be interested in Startup School aren't as interested in hanging around with a bunch of drunk college kids where there are not that many women.

Id be curious if the gap was smaller watching the webcasts?

fearless
If my college days are anything to go by, the presence of drunk college kids has never deterred women before.
cpt1138
That's why I qualified with "technically oriented women that would be interested in Startup School"
notdrunkatall
Women tend to be less interested in taking risks than men.
31reasons
I think there were only 1% women at the event. Whatever the cause, this gender gap is ripe for disruption!
xoail
Women in general take less risk than men. Women in programming/hacking are far less compared to men. Women who are married/with children find it hard to get themselves around startup scene. I do not have any source to back all that, just my personal view. I see things are changing and see more women in hackathons, programming meetups etc. But it will take at least a decade to bring balance.
marquis
>I do not have any source to back all that, just my personal view

Your view is welcome but please take care with comments such as 'women in general take less risk than men'. The second statement you make may be a fact but your first statement comes across as a cause for this fact, and there is no data that suggests this. My personal experience, as a woman, would be quite the opposite: women make more risks than men. Would that because of my gender bias and who I spend time with talking about such things as risk, on a deep enough level to for to consider it substantial? Quite probably, which is why I would never make such a statement to back up a fact.

kkshin
Having been to a number of "geeky" conferences, I was surprised at how large the number of women there were at the conference.

We should also keep in mind that this community has always been aligned more with the engineering side of entrepreneurship and less on the all the other equally important functions, which tends to make the community somewhat insular and under-represented.

jwise0
I was there, and the #1 thing I noticed was that of 11 presenters, exactly one was a woman; and of the CEOs telling stories, zero were women. It was, uh, not exactly an experience full of female role models. The 'fewer than one in ten' ratio may be true of startups in general, but the way to balance out the gender divide is to provide more role models, not to magnify the status quo: I was pretty unhappy to see such an exclusionist panel.

In general, if I were a woman, I would have felt pretty unwelcome at the event, in general: of my small amount of wandering around during the breaks, I saw one attendee wearing a shirt with the text: "SELECT * FROM girls WHERE free_sex=TRUE;". More distressingly, I saw a speaker (Ben Horowitz [1]) wearing a shirt with the text "No bitch-ass-ness" on it; I suspect that this may have been a cultural reference that I missed, but that sure does seem as unwelcoming as a shirt that would say 'man up and do it' might.

The content was, in general, high quality. I wish that the experience, however, had been designed to avoid shutting out half of the population. A good start for making Startup School more inclusive would be to adopt something along the lines of the Conference Anti-Harassment Policy [2]; I hope that Y Combinator will do something along those lines next year.

[1] Yes, I know. This is part of Horowitz's persona: he wants to come off as 'edgy', compared to, for instance, Ron Conway; he wants to show that he's hip and with it. For instance, as I recall, he used the word 'fuck' a few times during his speech. This is fine; now we get it! You're one of us! You can be edgy without being a dickhead.

[2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassmen...

jlees
I wasn't offended by ben's shirt - I thought he had the best presentation of the day, and content outweighs slogans.

The issue with role models is a great point though. But how to fix? If there are no female YC alumni with great stories about working all nighters, how to get someone on stage without risking positive selection?

lisasweeney
I agree that the exposure to female role models is key. At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, we introduced a short course about 6 years ago called "Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Women." Each year, over a 2 week period, we bring in 25 women entrepreneurs and investors. The impact has been meaningful; in <5 years, women have gone from representing just 12% of the entrepreneurs in a given class to over 25% (remember, women are only 40% of the entire class). YC can do better than this. Anyone from YC out reading this? I'll even offer to help you!
HelenaP
We have a chance to change that! This is a shout-out to all the women out there who are working on startups-- apply to YC!!