I apologize. I took it on faith that when The Information said they were running a "complete interview" with you, that it was in fact both complete and an actual interview. It seems very clear how this piece misrepresented you; the entire elided question you cite is particularly damning. I retain some of my misgivings (which have much more to do with the industry than with YC), but the "interview" clearly wasn't a good lens through which to consider them. I was nevertheless ready to do that too quickly, so the fault is as much mine as the magazine's.
It's a little scary how powerful newspapers are at shaping public opinion. At least their reputation will be irreversibly damaged by breaking people's trust.
I don't think it's so much about shaping public opinion as it is playing up people's fears. The threat of discrimination is still present in our society and is a very important topic across multiple demographics. You can't blame someone for feeling strongly about something they fear. However, journalists who write in a blaming tone to play to these fears should be blamed for mislaying trust instead of being lauded for raising awareness.
Nitasha Tiku made several negative blaming statements in her story. The one that stuck out to me as an obvious tell of a blaming statement was "That archetype, of course, is usually attached to a penis." In all fairness, I don't think that anyone wants to be addressed via 'being attached' to their private parts.
What everyone should, once again, learn from this is that you cannot take anything you read or hear at face value. Not even from people you trust, because things may be misrepresented by accident. Often it doesn't really matter, but if you get emotional about a subject and wish to comment on it, you should better be sure you have the facts straight and always temper your responses based on the possibility you don't know everything.
I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting… Their page states:
The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham. We covered a wide range of topics including “mass producing” startups, Mr. Graham’s controversial statements on founder accents, his wife and YC's secret weapon Jessica Livingston (link) and some little-known stories about YC alum Airbnb.
…which implies that it was a formal interview. I don't have a subscription but something still doesn't quite mesh there. If I were PG I would be writing to them to demand that they change that lead-in to the story.
edit: Another part of this saga that stands out to me is how very few people commenting on it actually have a subscription to the supposedly first hand source at The Information. It was a bit strange that we had a scandal caused by a news report about a news report that most people don't have access to.
> I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting
The only differences between The Information and The Register [1] are that the latter acknowledges its tabloid nature, and lacks the breathtaking presumption to peddle its tripe for four hundred dollars a year.
I'm really pleased to see someone make an apology. No idea what you personally said, I'm sure it was very far from the worst, but I clicked on this thread with my comment already formulated, questioning whether anyone would actually apologise and, well, was pleasantly surprised given how these things usually go.
I want to echo what tptacek is saying here, though I didn't write much here on HN about the issue. I have been talking with colleagues and friends and the comments in the article seemed well intentioned but a little tone deaf. I am relieved to hear not only that they were false, but also that PG and YC are actively working at some of the misgivings I share concerning our industry.
I wonder why pg did an interview for a site that was going to go behind an (expensive) paywall and was going to be edited. I know that "fixing journalism" is something pg would like to see[1], and (pg, sorry to put words in your mouth here) maybe he felt a for-pay site aiming for quality journalism was the answer? But it still seems weird he did this interview.
EDIT: I did read the article and know he was allegedly tricked, but my questions still stand. It was a long interview to just be a background about Jessica, and it was for a profile using the YC name to get $400 subscriptions. If they lied about the reasoning and then edited his words to say something completely different, I would have thought he'd be more outraged.
If you read his essay, he states that this wasn't an "interview", the reporter was doing background for another story on Jessica. It was never intended to be an interview.
Which makes the fact that the material was published as if it had been an interview, without any explanation of the actual circumstances, particularly bothersome IMO.
Publishing anything that's not presented in a "this is blatantly on the record" or "this is blatantly in public and observable/reportable by anyone" context is unethical. Unfortunately, this happens all the time because it generates a lot of buzz for the outlet, just as happened here. In fact, there are outlets whose entire business is made up of publishing "off the record" stuff, like tabloids.
Publishing remarks made as background when you make it clear that they were made as background and that they weren't part of an actual interview is not unethical--though it is still unfair to the person being quoted, IMO, for reasons which are well explained by pg in his article.
Publishing remarks made as part of background for a completely different topic, in such a way as to make it seem as though they were made during an actual interview on the topic quoted, is unethical, IMO. And since that's what happened, I stand by my remark.
Publishing remarks made as background when you make it clear that they were made as background and that they weren't part of an actual interview is not unethical
So, you're just wrong about this. Filed under: Ethics - Human Sources: "'On background' is a kind of limited license to print what the source gives you without using the source's name."
I didn't actually use the specific phrase "on background", but perhaps I should have said "given as background on a different topic" or words to that effect to make myself clearer. I don't think pg was saying that he made his remarks with an understanding that they would not be printed as coming from him; I think he was just saying that he thought he was giving background information for a profile on Jessica Livingston, not answering questions as part of a formal interview on the topic of women startup founders.
I'm sure he's unhappy about it, and feels betrayed. What good would it do for him to make an expression of that a major component of his response? Wouldn't that just result in another witch hunt like the one PG is trying to quell with this piece? He can handle his personal resentment in a more quiet context and save everyone else the chaos.
Paul talked to the reporter about me (for the profile being written) before The Information had launched. Neither of us knew it would be behind a paywall.
Are you still going to write about women founders? I 100% take you on your word about all of this, but that I still think a lot of the things you said were off the mark in understandable but important ways[1]. You're obviously well meaning and thoughtful and I think it would be great to read more about your thoughts, although I know you'd prefer to avoid the shitstorm that would follow (no matter how well reasoned your arguments would be)
1 - Most notably, as a gatekeeper in startup culture (<- this seems to be causing confusion: not a gatekeeper to doing a startup, but a gatekeeper to YC which can often be important in succeeding as a startup in my and many other people's opinions), it seems pretty willfully ignorant to assume that you'd know if you were biased against female founders because if you missed some you'd know. If women are a group that starts on the outside to, as a gatekeeper you'd need more than that to know if you're keeping the gates properly, since we it'd be pretty hard to argue the system as a whole isn't a boys club.
There are no gatekeepers in the startup culture. How would that even work? Would pg deny you a business license? Stop you from getting a VPS? Remotely invalidate your copy of The Art of Computer Programming?
Not PG specifically, but unless you operate on the premise that getting into YC does nothing to help your startup OR that YC's acceptance processes are flawless (two assertions I'm 100% certain PG would not make) then there is a layer of gatekeeperdome inherit in what YC does.
I would personally argue it's a large one, but it certainly IS one.
1. That's what YC almost always does, invest as the first and only investor in their own round where they take 7%-ish equity in exchange for a bit of money and all the other things they do. There are rare occasions where that's not what happens, but that's the norm. There's also a follow up from the YC fund that is convertible debt of some kind and always comes from the investors, but that's still 100% based on YC's decision
2. Gatekeeper might not be the perfect term, but it's darn close. YC is a gate, they are the keepers of the gate, and it's an important gate. Not the gate TO doing a startup but a gate IN startupdome.
Edited original comment to be more clear, I can see how the insinuation the being in YC is a gate you must cross to do a startup would cause confusion.
If you think like this, even a little, I think you can find a way to see everything in life as having a gate. Can't get on TV, radio, on some blog, etc. ... gatekeeper present. That's the wrong mindset to have IMO.
Um, yeah - gatekeepers are WAY more present in TV, radio, and blogs than even at YC. At least at YC there are lots of partners, in those examples it's usually one person who decides to have you on. Patriarchy is a way bigger problem in those places.
It's not about an attitude about life - I don't worry about gatekeepers at because practically you can't. You've got to give gatekeepers no choice - give YC no choice but to accept you, Techcrunch no choice but to write about you, etc. etc. But as a matter or discussing how our SOCIETY should work, gatekeepers need to examine their biases, strongly and often.
This seems naive. There are those with power, who not only make decisions based on their own work but also by setting precedent. If you look at other accelerators and how many of them follow the practicies and forms put down first by YC then its obvious that the impact from YC is large, both in the large number of startups they directly touch (especially in the last several years) and the number of industry wide practicies they influence from the use of convertible notes and now SAFES, to the preference for coder-founders.
No official gatekeepers, but there are certainly some things that can help/hurt you exponentially.
If Google drops you from search-results, game over!
If YC accepts you, game on!
Neither one of those are official gatekeepers, but they're something to be concerned about. I signed up with coinbase.com because I tend to trust companies that are YC-backed. The fact that they're in SF and I can walk right into their office on my lunch-break if my money disappears also helps.
It is a confusing sentence, but I think it's correct. I think it would be clearer if it said "whether we could, in effect, accept women (who are not hackers) we would have accepted if they had been hackers"
The stuff I added in brackets is implied. The main question is accepting women who are not hackers, as if they were, given the (challenged) assumption that you can turn them into hackers in YC.
At the heart of the matter is that witch-burnings are popular (turn into clicks) and that Gawker has a witch quota to keep up.
I'm glad to see such a thorough, intelligent reply from PG. He is extremely careful and precise in his language, without coming across as robotic or inhuman. It's impressive.
But this kind of thing is going to continue to happen. There is no market for taking an honest man at his word without reading subtext into it. The opinion ecosystem is a cesspool of the worst pieces of humanity. "Reporting" on Silicon Valley from the east coast would be hubristic and a folly if the organs involved had any intention of doing so honestly.
PG is fortunate that he is self-employed which provides some barrier against the power of the easily-offended. Somehow the talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. We live in a time when a person lower in an organization could easily find himself out of a job for an off-handed remark.
Teddy Roosevelt most eloquently described what is wrong with Gawker:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
> The talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. Somehow critics have grown in power to be able to extract punishment and concessions from people actually on the ground.
Agreed, although I don't think it's the talkers vs. the doers; it's the talkers' audiences vs. the doers.
Here's your "somehow": The lack of critical thinking skills in the general population (not new), combined with the power of instant global communication (new).
The lack of critical thinking skills leads people to seek absolutes, simplicity, and swift action in areas where shades of gray, nuance, and care should be called for. Again, nothing new here: mob justice is a well-understood, if regrettable, characteristic of human society.
Instant global communication much more swiftly connects 1) the easily-manipulated with 2) those who lack experience and maturity but who nevertheless possess the gift of persuasion.
In short, I blame the listeners, not the talkers. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if people were generally more skeptical of everything they heard and read, and even better if they knew how to ask the right questions to resolve that skepticism. It would make it harder for unworthy critics to hold power, and easier for worthy ones to be heard.
Here's another quote, from Joseph de Maistre: "Every nation gets the government it deserves." A similar thing could be said for culture and civil society.
I blame both. The listeners for not exercising critical thinking, as you say, and the talkers for spending their time and effort (not to mention sucking in the time and effort of many other people) on these useless witch hunts instead of adding actual value.
To blame the listeners is one step short of accepting things as they are. In this case, it is most certainly the talkers, since it is they who immediately profit from their deeds. Don't forget that every listener is also a talker (I bet there is a Nietzsche quote about it somewhere).
> To blame the listeners is one step short of accepting things as they are.
I disagree:
- If the talkers are the problem, then the solution is... less speech? Muzzling/censorship? I'll pass, thanks. Better to have the frenzied finger-pointers grow hoarse blathering to a crowd that's ignoring them, than to give them the very attention that they crave and that drives their fortunes.
- I didn't mention solutions to the problem because my post was already long enough.
Solutions would involve (at least):
- Persuading people to take their media viewership and loyalty away from the worst offenders (MSNBC, Fox News, etc.). Hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. Do this by pointing out the emperor's nakedness.
- Persuading people to give their media viewership to sources and outlets that don't pander to them (not quite the opposite of the first point). This gives influence (money) to media voices who, eventually, can credibly call our leaders to task for their race-to-the-bottom mentality.
- Improved critical thinking curricula in formal education at all levels.
The above improvements would have gradual second-order effects on civic life, e.g. you might eventually end up with real town hall meetings instead of staged, scripted tripe. It really wouldn't take much overt change to see results -- you don't have to boil the ocean.
No one is talking about Soviet-style suppression of free speech. To see my direction, compare media-enabled witch-hunts and mob politics to an immune reaction of an organism. A small, appropriate dose of it is good for the body. A disproportionate immune reaction (like what we're seeing here), is an inflammation, and should probably call for administration of cortisone (while a Soviet-style reaction would be cutting out the whole inflamed tissue and harming everything in the process). It gets worse. If left unchecked, we can have an auto-immune disease. Someone has to be watching the watchers.
Truly unfortunate all around. PG getting slammed from every direction. Jessica Lessin's new venture gets a black eye for shoddy journalistic standards. Lots of invective going around for what appears to be liberties of interpretation. And of all of this, I am not sure this really does anything to address the very serious topic on the imbalance of men to women in technology jobs.
That's my biggest problem with this whole thing. I care deeply about trying to fix the gender imbalance, but these sorts of dishonest shenanigans make the whole movement look bad. At the risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts, rather than making people doubt them and the views they claim to hold.
"Equality" movements are doomed to fail. I don't believe that in a perfectly fair world, men and women would equally participate in every profession. If you focus too much on outcome you are taking on an impossible task.
What's important is fairness and equality of opportunity.
Well, not really. There are plenty of equality movements that have been quite successful.
But the real point is that if we believe that jobs will be more technical in nature and that deeper knowledge of technology and coding will be required, maybe we should be concerned with the current ratio. Thus we not only create a skills divide, but one that grows into an economic divide as the better paying jobs are technology jobs. Maybe this is an "equality" movement worth putting some energy into.
I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts,
I think that kind of is No True Scotsman, because it's an unreasonable conflation of two attributes ('really caring about x' and 'being careful with sourcing in debate/arguments'). I know lots of people who care deeply about various causes but are terrible about research, sourcing and verification in general. And some people might care deeply about a cause but do damage to it by being involved (deeply unpleasant so that nobody wants to work with them and the volunteer group falls apart, that kind of thing). Level of caring is not, in my opinion, strongly correlated with a person's value as an advocate :)
every time i've ever dealt with "journalists" i've always come away with the unmistakable conclusion that most of them are complete and utter scumbags.
For those curious, here's a chart of the proportion of female founders funded by Y Combinator in the last 4 years, which correlates with YC's intention to add more female founders: http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg
Thank you for this. Is there data on applicants? It would be useful to compare the ratios of male founders applied-to-accepted vs female founders applied-to-accepted.
How does this correlate to the general, non-YC population of female founders? More, less, or same as average? That's an important data calibrator. Without that, it's hard to judge if YC is better than, worse than, or average, good intentions or not. Without having any real data, I'm guessing maybe marginally better than average given that it's probably in the single digits on average?
I didn't find any of the quotes that I read, even if they were out of context, remotely offensive. But I can see how someone who makes it a point to be offended by things might deliberately interpret it in a bad way, and convince other people that that is in fact what was meant by it.
For example, you say that you don't know how you'd convince 13 year old girls to be interested in programming. The normal interpretation is, 'Clearly 13 year old girls are very rarely interested in programming, and Paul Graham doesn't know how to change that.' The nasty interpretation is 'Paul Graham thinks that girls are intrinsically incapable of being interested in programming'.
It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible.
As a woman in this industry that has been programming since I was ~8, I wasn't offended in the slightest. In my opinion he said there was a problem that he'd have to think about before offering a solution.
"It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible."
Personally, this sort of behavior affects my career. When I first started at my current job people were afraid to speak to me because they expected me to get offended at the slightest thing. I want people to treat me equally, but I don't want people to be afraid to come to work because I might sue them for looking at me. That's not what I'm about at all but unfortunately I'm pre-judged to lash out at people when I see something I don't like.
I want everyone to come to work and get fair treatment/compensation/etc. but I feel that incidents like this set all of us back. The discrimination is different now. People don't see me as incapable of STEM, they see me as incapable of working with other people. It sucks. A lot.
It is undeniably the case that men are more...cautious about what they say and how they behave around women, particularly in the workplace. As a man, I'd have to say that such caution has precedent - you may be an exception, but (this incident being a great example) in my experience women are much more easily offended.
And I could see how that could make things less enjoyable for women who aren't so up tight; women who are easy going and just want to get along with their co-workers and share a laugh and get good work done.
You're exactly the sort of person I'm talking about. People like you are afraid to be comfortable in a work environment for fear that they'll be fired for saying or doing the wrong thing. Provided you aren't a sexist/rapist, I see no reason why you need to be walking on eggshells all the time at a place where you spend a large percentage of your day. It makes me sad that my presence would make you uncomfortable when I haven't said or done anything to you. While you and you alone have the power to change your behavior (and it would be awesome if you gave women the benefit of the doubt because we're not all this way...promise), I really can't place 100% of the blame on you either. Events like this are conditioning people to be afraid of these issues, not solve them.
I just want to come to work, maybe draw stupid things on a white board, make cool shit, and go home. I'd really love it if my vagina wasn't the deciding factor in whether or not I was capable of STEM or whether or not I was capable of working around other human beings.
> While you and you alone have the power to change your behavior (and it would be awesome if you gave women the benefit of the doubt because we're not all this way...promise), I really can't place 100% of the blame on you either.
Yet this seems to imply that you place most of the blame on him... though it seems that you are both (potential) victims here.
I apologize if it came off this way. I actually allocate blame 50% to him and 50% to the people that do this sort of thing. This is a circular problem to me. Some people seem quick to be angry about things and they lash out at people. Then the people being lashed are like "These people are CRAZY. I'd better steer clear of them." The ones lashing out may have been on the receiving end of something *ist and read into things that people say/do. This issue seems to be feeding itself. What it comes down to is this: Everyone needs to stop judging everyone based on the actions of a few people who make great waves. The tech industry isn't the only place this could be beneficial, either.
WRT calling him out on his behavior, all I was trying to say is that I disagree and wish he would consider changing his mentality going forward. I'm not mad at him for it, I'm sad that the actions of a few have caused him to think this. At the same time I was hoping to imply that I won't twist his arm because I see where he's coming from. No malice intended!
Things like this can ruin lives (this according to you), yet you seem to write about this as if it is a simple attitude problem, in need of a "change in mentality" like being more reflected and aware of one's biases, and not (also) a matter of self preservation on his part.
> No, I recognized that this is a self-preservation tactic and (thought) I implied I wished it weren't needed.
This seems to contradict when you previously wrote that it is up to him, and him alone, to change his behavior, when here it seems to be actually a needed tactic bourn of forces outside of his control. Allocating 50% blame doesn't seem terribly sympathetic, either.
But never mind, I have probably nitpicked more than my fair share for today.
Well, at the end of the day he really is the only one who can change his behavior. I'm not saying I'll be mad if he doesn't, it was simply my way of saying "Don't give up on us because we're not all bitches."
I didn't feel that this warranted more or less blame on anyone's part. He seems like he might assume a woman is up tight based on his experiences -- I can't change how he feels about that. Unfortunately I also can't change the women that caused him to feel that way. All I can do is try my hardest to not be like the women he speaks of and ask him to reconsider his position.
I appreciate the nitpicking fwiw. I think you misinterpreted what I said, possibly due to the fact that I sometimes suck with words.
>>Provided you aren't a sexist/rapist, I see no reason why you need to be walking on eggshells all the time at a place where you spend a large percentage of your day.
It's been my experience that when men feel like they're walking on eggshells around women in the workplace it's because they're normally comfortable making sexists/rape jokes and/or have sexist beliefs. The feeling of eggshell walking is them trying to cover that up. I say this as a guy who has seen other male coworkers' behavior when there are no women around and how difficult it is for them to clean up their act when there is a lady in the room.
Or, we're concerned about being misinterpreted and that misinterpretation being escalated instead of discussed with us so we can clear it up. But yeah, it's easier to just label us as sexists that like to joke about rape, right?
I'm not. I'm more worried that people, regardless of gender, will escalate said misunderstanding rather than talk to me about it, which is training I'm receiving from observing these folks on Twitter. I realize now my earlier comments made the unintended implication that I was painting solely women with this brush and that's my bad, and not what I meant. In context with your comment it looks that way but I lament this behavior regardless of gender or creed.
I see a LOT more drama surrounding the things that men have said/done. If I were a man I would absolutely be more concerned about my interactions with female coworkers over male ones.
Don't take this to mean that I think I can say/do whatever I want in this industry on account of being female -- no one is bulletproof. It just seems men are vilified more than women when it comes to these sorts of things. Maybe that's just my world view.
Hmm, so let's see. If this kind of stuff is going on with gender relations, does it exist with race too? Orientation?
For the tech-world, I guess a black lesbian would be a triple-concern? I would say that is a problem. Not sure how to fix it, but that's a problem. I personally don't have to change my behavior or speech when a lady is in the room. But then again, I'm probably unique in that... I never, ever use profanity and never make jokes that wouldn't be safe on the Disney channel. I don't know anyone who can claim that besides me.
But, I will say compared to my time at at&t... the men there seemed to be less frat-housey than the SV-startup-culture. The men at at&t seemed to be more "gentlemanly", more socially acceptable. SV-startup-culture I think allows the frat-house/bro-grammer attitude to grow thus making it more difficult to the men who are use to that to clean up when a lady is around. At least, that's what I've seen.
I'll agree with you partially. This sort of thing is definitely going down based on race/orientation as well, but I see less of that and more men vs women sorts of discussions.
It's not just a tech problem either. This stuff is going on all around the world. I don't claim to have solutions to these problems, but I would appreciate it if the public shaming and witch hunts would stop. I'm tired, SV. So very tired.
I've never worked at AT&T but I'd wager the same stuff went on. Perhaps you experienced the same sort of thing I did where people assumed you wouldn't appreciate their words/actions and elected to avoid you?
I can't really imagine a man complaining about (percieved) sexism being taken very seriously. (But maybe we're talking more broadly than about sexism in particular.)
That hasn't been my experience. After I settled in here people eventually approached me and said they were afraid to talk to me about anything not work-related out of fear that I'd take something the wrong way.
I think men are less concerned about their ability to tell rape jokes and more concerned that anything can be blown out of proportion and taken to social media. This sort of stuff can ruin lives and I think THAT is why many men walk on eggshells. In this case, people went after pg without even hearing his side of things, and a quick browse of Twitter leads me to believe that even though he's stated his side of things people are still unwilling to change their stance on this. Instead, they'd rather be pissed off and label him as part of the problem.
In some cases what you said is probably true, but based on what I've seen they seem to be a minority. I don't think your average person honestly thinks that rape is okay, even if they find humor in rape jokes.
> "It's been my experience that when men feel like they're walking on eggshells around women in the workplace it's because they're normally comfortable making sexists/rape jokes and/or have sexist beliefs."
translated - "If you're afraid of being labeled a witch, you're probably a witch."
You can thank people like Adria Richards and the Ada Initiative for this. They taught us that you can get fired and become internet infamous for joking about dongles.
Well, rapist is easy. But me and you may have very different ideas as what constitutes a "sexist". That's the crux of the problem; that's what causes men to walk on eggshells.
>it would be awesome if you gave women the benefit of the doubt because we're not all this way
Most people are not willing to risk their job to find out.
"Most people are not willing to risk their job to find out."
And that's the part that makes me sad about all of this. People are all about "Consider the woman's feelings here!" but no one wants to consider how men feel about it because they're "privileged."
Work on Wall Street. It's one of the last bastions of political incorrectness that you're likely to find in the USA. (I mean that in a complimentary way - people tend to take your words with a grain of salt, don't get butthurt unnecessarily, and if they are offended, they tell you off and then you put it behind you.)
Funny, that's also the industry where my sister had to literally campaign to get the office porn collection off the walls when she became the first female trader at her company in 2008. I think if this 'over-sensitivity' that men in tech say they are suffering from actually exists in a large percentage of developers, then it's a healthy backlash from such behaviour as Wall St, and eventually we'll find an equilibrium.
Porn on the walls is going a bit far, especially for 2008.
I'm talking more about the tone of jokes (non-individually directed) and things like that. Stuff that you don't need to remember to hide when clients or the Board of Directors come to the office, and that doesn't turn up in an email log that will be reviewed later on by regulators. Stuff that you can switch off right away when you need to go in to "serious professional mode".
Exactly my thoughts. Reading all the quotes on Gawker, I fail to see how they arrived at the conclusion that PG's implying that one needs to be male in order to be a good programer.
I see a few points being made ("out of context"):
- You want to start programming at 13 to be a hacker.
- 13 year old girls are not interested in programming.
- PG doesn't know how to make programming more attractive to this group.
As far as I can tell these are neutral observations and opinions. Even if his statement is plainly incorrect, simply being wrong doesn't make it offensive.
There are things in the edited version of the interview that are problematic - not offensive, and PG also points this out. The very first incorrect quote - "We can't make women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years." is problematic because it says women are NOT hackers. Given the number of women who are founders of YC companies, or are engineers, this is patently false and therefore problematic.
I for one care about when problematic or false things are said not because I am offended, but because falsehoods make it harder to accurately deal with problems like the low number of women in STEM careers, including tech startups.
That's a quote that, when I read it the first time, I tried to interpret charitably. It's one that I read as, 'Women generally (but with exceptions) don't start hacking at the age of 13, and there's nothing we can do to make these women see the world through hacker eyes.'
Rather than, 'There's no such thing as a woman who's hacked since she was 13, and thus no woman can see the world through hacker eyes.'
Saying the quote is 'problematic' and that it needs clarifying -- I have no problem with that, and in fact I totally agree. What I don't like is how large swaths of the blog-o-sphere didn't even consider the first interpretation; they talk as if the second interpretation is just clearly without qualifiers what he must have meant.
Any interaction with the press is terrifying in almost any circumstance because you never know and really have no control over whether the outlet is going to pull something like this. I always have the impulse to refuse media interaction unless I can get final approval on the published piece, which, of course, no one will ever give you.
It's important for all of us to remember that the incentives of the media and their subjects are not necessarily aligned, and that bombastic distortions such as this are common.
These sort of outrage inducing misquotes by the press seem to be becoming more and more common. There is no way to know if it was on purpose, but phony outrage certainly generates more clicks (or subscriptions in the case of The Information).
At what point does misquotation become libel? As much as I hate the idea of suing the press, lawsuits seem like the only defense. Real and lasting damage was done to pg's reputation here. Even with yc as his personal loudspeaker, I doubt pg will be able to set the record strait.
Jakob Kaplan Moss owes PG a public apology for his behavior. The witch hunt tweets that were coming out of him without getting the facts straight are downright disheartening.
I'm of mixed opinions about him. On the one hand, he's been influential in making Pycon more friendly to women, which I support[1]. On the other hand, he appears to have swallowed the feminist kool-aid without reflection. He has a knee-jerk reaction whenever an alleged case of "sexism" comes up - he is inclined to take the side of the "oppressed" group and facts be damned. He takes a guilty until proven innocent standard for people with a Y chromosome.
[1] The anti-harassment policies of Pycon are a gold-standard for the industry
He was part of pronoun-gate? That was one of the stupidest, most counter-productive brouhahas of all time. Something tells me that purging your best devs for being insufficiently progressive is not going to attract more females.
Alex Gaynor was the catalyst for pronoun-gate, and reflects a prevailing attitude among a large number of the founding and old-school Django developers. I had the privilege to meet them and spend some social time with them at a past PyCon and I saw some of the attitudes firsthand, but they were remarkably more muted and respectable in person. Online, well...
That's why the "disheartening". He's obviously very smart and compassionate. I add a Code of Conduct to all my sites now, largely because of his example. The way he flew off the handle so quickly without taking the time to understand first really bothered me.
So he's a flawed human being who makes mistakes just pg and the rest of us. What really is scary to me is the group dynamic that has come out of this "social justice" movement in that it seems to fueled by very loud public commentary about very small events. The pronoun incident with libuv really just took this to level of absurdism.
I blame it on universal college education. At least I ran into this stuff in college for the first time. SJW stuff is too alien and strange for most people to believe without indoctrination. But now there is an audience demanding burning of sexists and racists, the definitions of which have been expanded to include any person of a non-protected class that mentions sex or race.
After reading his tweets, my opinion of Jacob Kaplan Moss is more unmixed. I would never want to work with him on anything, even something as small as a lemonade stand. Keep that SJW BS out of tech and in English departments on the East Coast, where it belongs.
Is it really deserving of the level of vitriol heaped on the issue? Even as printed it would only be mildly controversial, and even then not nearly noteworthy. It strikes me as me as offhanded comment from the first time I heard it.
I took a few minutes to catch up on what JKB is saying and
A) His primary concern seem to be to promote all of the work he's done for women in IT and to make himself seem like a victim because of the backlash from his ramblings about PG.
B) he's completely ignoring PG's side of the story and continuing to promote the ideas mentioned in A.
I'm so sick of the insanity surrounding the issue of the lack of women in IT. Yes, it's a real problem and steps should be taken to fix it but the tsunami of hate that is aimed at anyone who is portrayed as remotely uncaring / oblivious to the issue is beyond disgusting. This is not how to make things better.
So far seems he hasn't; he's explained why, and all the more power to him.
BTW, I'm disappointed that only "witch hunt" (terrorism against women) is used in this particular thread so far. Where's "lynch mob" and "McCarthyism", to round out the irony trifecta? (Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to women, whites to blacks, and capitalists to communists.)
I seem to remember hearing that the final score in Salem being nineteen women and one man. Given this data, trivial statistical analysis tells us that the use of "witch hunt" in this context is 95% sexist, a value well within the margin of error.
Citizen, surely you need no reminding that so-called "gender neutrality" is merely a sexist excuse for the ongoing structural oppression of women and gender-fluid individuals.
Only if you ignore all witch hunts outside Salem. That would be incredibly US-centric.
Bertrand Guilladot and Louis Debaraz come to mind.
Anyhow, that completely misses the point - that witch trials were based on a presumption of guilt against which no defense could be made. Much like the way certain media sites attack people.
Literature review and meta-analysis seemed out of scope, considering the comment to which I replied. (And I seem to've fallen into the HN trap of being too straight-faced about a smart-assed comment.)
I've found @jacobian's statement on the matter [1] eminently reasonable and even-handed.
As for the trifecta, I can't help you out on "lynch mob", I'm afraid, but how about this for McCarthyism?
"The [tech industry] is infested with [sexists]. I have here in my hand [2] a list of [102] -- a list of [user]names that were made known to the [Github administrators] as being members of the [sexist majority] and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the [tech industry]." [3]
(This link points to Google's cache of @ashedryden's tweet, because the tweet as originally hosted on Twitter has been deleted since I saw it last. I hope you'll agree that Google's cache is an acceptably authoritative source for what used to be hosted at that Twitter URL. The replies are more interesting than the original tweet, anyway.)
You don't have idea about what is a "witch hunt" and using that metaphor to describe some tweets is very insensitive and softens the absolute horror of people killed in real witch hunting.
This is a witch hunt: a woman was accused of being witch and _burned alive_, do you think that is even comparable with the tweets of Jacob Kaplan Moss?
I cannot tell if you are being serious or sarcastic, but in either case, and with all due respect^, fuck off with this bullshit.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about a literal witch hunt, as an allegory for McCarthyism. Do you think that he thought that blacklisting actors was literally as bad as crushing somebody to death with stones over several days?
Of course he didn't. It was fucking allegorical. Do you really not understand the basic premise of a metaphor? I think you do. I think you are trolling.
At least the most notable woman and YC founder in the django community, Leah Culver, hasn't backed Jacob in any of his witch hunts. I think this says a lot about how the women in his community feel about his actions.
I think Jacob's and Alex's criticisms and attacks on other communities/companies would be more relevant and credible if their own Django community would start being more inclusive, I only see one woman committer: https://github.com/django?tab=members
In 8 years they have got 1 woman involved in a core capacity to their community. I'm not asking for immediate results, I'm just asking for them to lead by example and to stop criticizing people who are doing a much better job at being inclusive than they are. They have a 3% rate, YC has a 15% rate of women.
FWIW, The Information's piece definitely crossed the "too indignation-inducing to be true" threshold for me. And I for one, would enjoy an essay about such topic as it would be very relevant to the HN community that is often just as eager as journalists to see certain individuals or startups fail for whatever reason.
As a female founder, I think this is a well-thought-out, articulate response, and I appreciate pg stepping up to say something about women in tech.
In a similar vein, I'd love to see YC take on one or both of the following:
1) Do at least one application cycle completely blind. How could you accomplish this? Much like in the concert auditions where this was first tried, put people behind a curtain--and then use technology to change their voices so every voice sounds the same. I think it would be a really cool experiment to see if different types of companies or a more diverse founder set would get funded.
2) Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc. Of course, I'd fully expect that this would be "opt-in" from the founders as well--i.e. each set of founders would need to agree as part of the application to have their data anonymously shared. You could also share data on % who opted to not have their data shared. (Techstars is doing some great stuff with their stats here: http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/ )
I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house" (I told one of the YC partners that personally when he asked me to apply.) I decided to not apply to YC and instead was in the first Techstars Austin cohort, which was a fantastic program overall. Techstars definitely seemed more welcoming to women from my perspective as a geek-turned-tech-entrepreneur.
I'm hoping this is the start of breaking down the "frat house" reputation around YC and getting more women actively involved with it.
Part of the interview is to see how the founders interact with each other and the investors. Taking that away by masking their appearance/voice would have a pretty big impact on the interview process I think.
Blind applications would be great if they were possible, but I suspect they would be as helpful as a blind audition for concert conductors -- i.e., not at all.
When you evaluate a team, you need to be able to judge their confidence, see how they interact with each other, get a feel for the trustworthiness, the way they look at you when they answer a question, and so on. If you can't see them, and their voice is distorted, then you might as well just ask for a slide deck and forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem like a good idea.
That's a plausible hypothesis, but it'd be interesting if someone were willing to test it experimentally. Some evidence for the hypothesis could be found if a "blind" YC batch did much worse than a typical YC batch, measured say 3 or 5 years in the future. Of course, with relatively small sample sizes nothing is likely to be proved beyond doubt, but it'd be interesting to know, and the amount of money needed to test it wouldn't be huge, since YC isn't making VC-level investments. Of course, it's not free or risk-free either, so I could see if they weren't willing to test it.
I've long wanted to see in general some more experimental testing of selection variations. What if YC (or some other funder's) candidates were just selected completely randomly from the applications? What if they were selected solely according to some dumb criterion, like take everyone with the most degrees, or the longest CV, or the most GitHub LoC? What if they were selected purely based on the applications (without the dumb-criterion requirement) but without interviews? For a few tens of thousands of $$, someone willing to try those kinds of things out could get some pretty interesting information on how reliable different selection methods are.
My own hypothesis is a negative one: that beyond screening out a few obviously-bad candidates and taking a few obviously-good candidates, the bulk of the YC selection process is randomly related to outcomes, and the YC mentoring/contacts/press/etc., rather than predictive value of the selection process, is the main driver of their generally strong outcomes. But I can't prove that. :)
While that might be worth experimenting, there's a high cost to it. Having high selection standards makes the network (YC's or any other) exponentially more valuable to those already in it. If you add a few not-so-good apples by mistake, there's no going back.
Also, you have to consider how much quantitative and qualitative experience YC has accumulated, the partners are pretty good at telling in a couple minutes conversation if you're a strong founder. This advantage would be lost with blind interviews.
> the partners are pretty good at telling in a couple minutes conversation if you're a strong founder
This is the part I doubt, though, if by "strong founder" you mean "statistically more likely to exit successfully than people selected according to much simpler 'dumb' criteria". These kinds of claims to predictive ability based on un-quantified holistic properties like "experience" rarely hold up under scientific scrutiny.
1.)The fact the female founders are asking for this, tells you that they don't feel on par with the way things are being done today.
2.) Paul has admitted to being susceptible to the Mark Zuckeberg effect, at least he was honest about that and should be respected for the fact that he realizes that. Most VC's i believe also fall into this trap but don't admit it.
3.) Now what are we going to do about this? Shrug our shoulders and just say this or that won't work or get to trying solutions and iterating on that?
And I'm here to tell you it's not silly, it's very appropriate to do cheap but possibly flawed research first, before diving into an expensive "science" experiment that would cost some multiple of 1/2 a year of many people's lives.
> Blind applications would be great if they were possible, but I suspect they would be as helpful as a blind audition for concert conductors -- i.e., not at all.
While I agree that blind applications would be somewhat tough for startup founders, conducting seems like a bad example. You could fairly easily judge the resulting music without being able to see the conductor.
I'm going to assume you don't have a lot of familiarity with conducting. It often takes an entire season to rehearse with a group in order to produce music that could accurately be 'judged'. And a conductor is about far more than the music -- how is their rapport with the orchestra? What are they like to work with? What kind of an artistic vision do they have for the group, and how do they communicate that? Ultimately, what kind of a leader are they going to be, along 20-odd different dimensions?
Even with world-class orchestras, where performances are regularly put on with guest conductors after only a few hours of rehearsal time, no permanent conductor would ever be hired on the basis of merely listening to their music. It's a leadership position. (Unlike orchestra players, where it really is more directly about musical proficiency.)
Guest conductors are hardly unheard of, but you're right that it's not a perfect analogy. Still - it'd potentially make for a decent first go to narrow things down, I'd imagine.
"forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem like a good idea"
I would disagree strongly in that YC has a measurable financial risk of excluding potentially profitable founders solely for meaningless cultural woo woo reasons. For example if some Finnish dudes conduct perfectly normal business transactions nude in the sauna, a prudish American who refuses to participate has an obvious measurable economic loss solely because of irrational cultural woo woo. Now extend that far out example into female communication style.
Now what would work, or at least would be interesting, is having a female partner interview female founders separately from the male partners then study the female partner's impression vs male partner impression. I don't suspect there would be a huge difference; but at least this would be a somewhat more effective way to test the proposed effect. For my ridiculous made up example, you'd need a Finnish partner; probably easier to run this test on the somewhat easier to acquire and categorize male vs female test subjects.
Time and time again, studies have shown that people attribute more positive attributes like kindness and honesty to people who are more physically attractive, irrelevant of sex. This holds even when people are explicitly warned beforehand and told to keep their bias in check.
One thing that nobody is mentioning is that many "fratty" companies have been wildly successful. That's why VCs aren't cracking down on startups to make them more professional. (Although it is a good idea to become more professional as your startup grows, for cultural appeal to the median tech worker)
This fratty culture certainly drives away slightly older founders (by that, I mean 25+!) and others who don't appreciate the atmosphere. Ultimately, I expect differentiation in the ecosystem, with different incubators forming to attract talent from different pools of talent.
Creating an atmosphere where your founders feel like they belong is a competitive advantage for an incubator. But no one incubator can make an atmosphere that appeals to everybody. If you make an atmosphere to appeal to 40-year-old females, someone else will lure the 19-year-old males away with beer pong, dorm living, and video game breaks.
lol.....25+ is considered old? This is why most of the big startups of this year are social like snapchat, tumblr, etc. The opportunities where customers are willing to spend shitloads of money like enterprise, hardware are not funded anywhere near as well as social. This is beacuse 19yr olds dont know much about HR or disrupting the Investment Banking software industry. This requires some exposure to the problems firsthand, which require being around the block. We are totally overextended on social, techcrunch is like replaying the same movie over and over.
The truly break-out companies founded in markets where customers are willing to pay, are started by entrepreneurs over 28. Age is not a hard rule but we talking about averages here. Steve blanks spoke well about how he started up his companies while still managing family life. Check quora for famous tech founders over 30 and their take on it.
An example about how a person over 30 starts a business from Quora:
Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners
We did it by starting with a profitable service line.
I was 34 when I founded Arcstone. We had three young kids (we now have four). I was coming off a VC salary of ~$250K, and yet didn't have much savings to speak of. I started Arcstone with $18K borrowed from my brother-in-law, and a couple credit cards to service revolving debt.
We started a service business targeting a specific, relevant pain point, which has a quick sales cycle. We became profitable immediately; with our profits we both fed ourselves and invested in technology and infrastructure. We were careful not to overbuild on our way up, though some expenditures (like our 5-year lease) were taken with a leap of faith.
Three+ years on, we are a nationally respected financial services firm (primarily in the valuation niche) with a healthy top (and bottom) line, and a very happy and dedicated team of seven.
Getting out of the Silicon Valley mindset -- Seed/A/B/C/Exit -- has been incredibly liberating.
I didn't say that I think it is limited to the young.
I said that I think that people interested in fratty culture tend to be young.
Beanbag chairs and a constantly flowing keg are not meant to attract older talent. Certainly there are some older people who are attracted to that type of climate, but that really is not the target audience.
The book is "When Genius Failed", and though it's been a a while since I've read it, I don't recall either of the Nobel Prize winners (nor Merriwhether, for that matter) participating in any "frat-like" behaviour.
Not everyone who works at a hedge fund comes from the cast of Boiler Room. Talk about painting people with the same brush...
I read the book, read the part about the way they carried on at Salomon Brothers, very frat like without the wild parties & shots. Nobody labelled the Hedge Fund industry as boiler room types, especially since i spent 4yrs in the industry on the stat arb side.
Meriwether apparently deserves all the scorn you can muster, but Merton and Scholes don't according to my recollection of the book (and from people who had actually been there)
I observed an incubator program where there was an early-20s founder who was very fratty, taking shots in the office with his team to celebrate releases and stuff like that. That team all lived together. As founders age into their late 20s, they seem to become less enamored of that lifestyle.
As another female founder I concur: blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying to funds in general, not just YC. As an audio processing geek, getting male and female voices to sound the same is actually pretty hard without losing diction, but at least having the application have a separate cover-sheet for the founder's names and any information that might give away identifiers about gender, race and nationality would be a good start, so applications could be read 'blind'.
Blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying.
A lot of this has to do with impostor syndrome which is why the idea of a blind applications would, in my opinion, help many other talented founders think of applying.
Thanks for your comment on empathy. That is something that makes me feel really welcome to comment here.
There is no age limit for going to college either, but I have seen many people feel reluctant to begin/return to college later in life, for many reasons - they think they won't fit in with other students and hence will miss out on shared experiences, they think it's "too late" to get any use out of the degree by the time they finish, they think other people will think they are slow/stupid for being in college at their age, they think that colleges might not want to admit older people, they aren't sure if they can afford to support their family while being in college (not a concern for the traditional student), etc. I think that most of these fears are unfounded, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. One way to reassure them is often to give them specific examples of 'x went back to college to be a doctor when he was 33, and has had a long and successful career since then that totally let him pay off his student loans even though they were so huge!' or 'z did a degree in Mathematics in her 40s, and she said sure nobody invited her to keggers, but she was able to find partners for her group projects easily'. Are any of the older previous alumni open to being known as 'the guy who did YC in his 30s', or to being contacted by prospective entrants, to provide similar success stories?
I agree that people fear to do something if they think they might fail or have that the something might have a bias against them.
However, I would argue YCom graduates are people who do a thing even if THEY ARE TERRIFIED.
Being afraid of failure is not a justification for not trying, it is in fact a thing any healthy person has.
The successful among us are the ones who operate even though they are afraid of failure. Otherwise only the people that were born with a perfect hand dealt to them would ever succeed.
That mindset could justify any arbitrary barrier to y combinator, but I don't see pg instituting a mandatory cliff dive as part of the application even though startup founders need to be able to show courage and deal with unexpected and crazy obstacles.
That's true!
However, another quote that I thought was relevant to this same way of thinking: (this was just posted today on HN, and I thought, exactly!)
“Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you.
“You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same, but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does.”
When I read this, it exactly encapsulated what I was trying to say. You are allowed to fear everything, but if you let fear control you or decide what you will or will not do you will not become great. You may even regret bitterly not taking the jump off the cliff.
Well, you might. But I think you're either having a different discussion to 'is it a good thing for arbitrary barriers exist to entering YC?', or else you're conflating heroism and entrepreneurship in a way I find a little overblown.
This. Although there is no age limit on YC applications, there appears to be a natural bias towards younger candidates. Women, however, tend to move into being an entrepreneur later in life, when they have more experience.
This raises a good point, but informal inferences about age, ethnicity, and sex can be made from other parts of the application. Statistics on the discrimination of Ivy league schools show that (east) Asian face a stacked deck in college applications at "selective" schools[0]. Its plausible that much of this is inferred from ethnic names. To the extent it impacts the short-lists for interviews (ie, before candidates are seen in person), it's obviously detrimental.
Which brings up another point: it would be interesting to see a YC batch where the colleges/universities' names were redacted from the screening process.[1] Again, I don;t think this will ever happen...but as a thought experiment I would likely be of equal interest in terms of "opening" access. At some stage, business is as much about trading favours as it is about measuring "competence". There are some good game-theoretic reasons for this (ie, establishing trust in sequential repeated games), but there is more to the story than that.[2]
[1] Even if this was replaced by a sort of rating system, eg. that placed X schools into N buckets. This could be done so that the information was recorded but never made visible (say by online application). And the data could still be verified later prior as part of due-dilligence/ affadavit to avoid a problem with gaming the system.
Your comments on school history etc are completely valid in the context of inference.
I'd like to think that we could genuinely make a fairly well balanced system for meritocratic selection. Yes, it's a lot of work and there is always room for error however I'd like to think that ultimately the STEM industry favours these kinds of methods and they could be improved on so we'd see some kind of futuristic system that we saw in the Starship Troopers narrative (as a crazy example that in the movie at least, no-one complained about). Maybe we just need a ton more data to be able to make better predictions. But I also think that face-to-face interviews are ultimately needed as others have mentioned: cultural fit is important to a degree as well.
On that note it reminds me of the Declara article I read (about the founder Ramona Pierson), where data is working to pair relevant people.
The last time I was hiring, I wished I could easily review resumes without seeing the names, email addresses, physical addresses, school names, or even telephone numbers as I felt that I was bringing in my arbitrary bias.
Telephone numbers? I found that I identified a lot more with area code 206 than 425 or 253, just as I identify a lot more with an @gmail.com address than @hotmail.com or @aol.com.
It wouldn't be hiding biases, it would be making them inconsequential. That's pretty much the best you can hope for, once you admit the possibility that there's no such state as bias-free.
- who graduated from WSU (the rival of my alma matter)
- who has a 253 area code (my least favorite suburb)
- who uses Papyrus for headings (my least favorite font)
- with the email address belieber69@aol.com (triple yuck)
I would want to get that person in for an interview and explicitly check the subtle biases of me and other people who are making hiring decisions.
True story: when I was in college I had a classmate in my database class who was so good-looking it kind of hurt to look at her. I never once explicitly thought that she was a dumb blonde, but I was surprised when I found out that she was just brilliant. Similarly, I worked on a group project with a few prototypical "frat boys" with their Abercrombie sweaters and backwards baseball caps, and found myself surprised that they were smart as hell, too.
I just want to give people an honest chance to be brilliant and not have their resumes passed over for bullshit reasons, even subconsciously.
I would like to think that I could do both. I really want to believe that the playing field is level no matter if your first name is Paul or Venkatesh or Bambi or LaTonya, but I don't have absolute trust in that. The "screen" is a tool in helping with that.
> "Statistics on the discrimination of Ivy league schools show that (east) Asian face a stacked deck in college applications at "selective" schools[0]. Its plausible that much of this is inferred from ethnic names."
I wonder how a surname like "Lang" would fair. It is either Germanic of Asian, though it seems to be primarily Germanic in practice but seems strongly Asian to people who are not familiar with it[0]. If there is discrimination keyed off of "Asian-ish sounding" names then it might be apparent when looking at these sorts of names.
[0] I know a germanic "Lang". Apparently he gets asked how his family got that name a lot.
Can I ask you to go one deeper there? Do you think age is more critical here than sex? Would you rather be a 25 year old female applying or a 38 year old male?
I'd rather have been me, 10 years ago (i.e. 25yr female) applying to an accelerator. Looking back however, that me needed an incredible amount of guidance regardless of talent and I'd think it's a million times easier to get productive work out of a me-now. In that sense I don't need an accelerator like YC at this point, more guidance and mentorship on how to get past the post-startup phase. And that's perfect for a 38 year-old anyone.
Why not apply to YC? Worst case, you'll spend a couple of hours answering questions on the application, then get a rejection email. On the bright side, simply answering the questions can help hone your idea and execution. If you do get an interview, great! Then you have an opportunity to meet some YC partners, applicants, and alumni. If you're turned down at that point, feedback from the partners will be personalized, and you'll have gained experience interacting with investors. If things go well and you get an offer, then you can accept or refuse based on the information gleaned from the whole process.
If you're unsure about applying, I recommend doing so. No matter what happens, you stand to benefit.
"I appreciate pg stepping up to say something about women in tech."
"Do at least one application cycle completely blind."
Sorry but this comes off as insulting (I know that wasn't your intention), you applaud and agree with him then turn around and pull a "but I still don't trust you". As if PG can't be trusted, or you think that he's secretly sexist and want him to change his successful interview process just to prove himself to you.
I'm positive that women get discriminated in many fields, I've heard my mother's own stories. There's something about seeing a strong woman succeed that makes men feel weak. But this assumption that women are absent or less represented at Y-combinator simply because they are subconsciously discriminated against by Paul and Jessica Livingston just seems absurd. Especially seeing has how politically correct everyone's trying to be now a days. Many people (especially those running Tech Crunch events) are purposely looking for that unicorn female developer to rid themselves of male guilt. The one that's worked on algorithms, programmed since a kid, and coded up numerous apps.
Rather than focus on discrimination ask yourself this: How many times have we seen a female coder's blog? How many frameworks/api/apps have we seen created by females? Is it discrimination or lack of ambition? Take a look at the 10 industries that women rule http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/01/26/10-industries-where-.... Are men being discriminated against (one can argue the day care industry) or do they lack the desire and ambition to get into these industries?
I can't wait for "[citation needed]" comments with zero content to fall out of favor, along with other low-effort "you're wrong but I don't have the time to prove you wrong" shots. There are many things I don't like about Wikipedia, some fairly, some unfairly, but that contribution to our discourse is one reason in my mind to burn it all down.
Certainly "I'm right but I don't have the time to prove I'm right" comments are just as bad, if not worse because, at least the "you're wrong" comments give us a healthy dose of scepticism?
Perhaps you would prefer that I say something like this:
"You assert that these studies exist, but you don't bother to identify them for those of us who are not au courant with the journals in which they presumably appear. Would you care to link at least a representative example of the studies to which you refer, so that those of us who are unimpressed by argument from authority may examine them for ourselves?"
The semantic value of these two rather long sentences being identical with that of the two words I actually posted, the only apparent reason to choose the former over the latter would be an interest in pandering to your prejudices. I harbor no such interest, and therefore feel no urge to replace what I did post with what you seem to prefer I post.
All that aside, the request stands. Do you intend to cite a representative sample, &c., or do you prefer to settle for the bare-faced argument from authority you've made so far, without even bothering, as I gather is customary in the use of that fallacy, to name the authority from whom you are arguing? "Studies suggest," after all, is rather weak tea.
Finally, there's probably a name for the fallacy inherent in tossing out an unsupported assertion followed by " -- now prove me wrong!", the way you're also doing; I can't be bothered to look it up, though. Between trying to find the studies to which you cannot possibly have referred more vaguely, and trying to do the impossible by proving a negative, I've got too much on my plate already; you'll just have to find the name for that fallacy yourself, I'm afraid.
I'd prefer if you noticed that you pointed your vitriol cannon at a third party to your conversation who was simply remarking upon your comment. Suggest you check usernames before replying.
You seem perfectly willing to stand in loco auctoris for the poster to whom I replied in such fashion as to draw your ire, so I don't really find your latest plaint particularly compelling; given your clear failure to recognize the problem with "-- prove me wrong!", I can't see how you could possibly wriggle out of more than one of those four paragraphs. (But don't let me stop you from trying.)
Actually, I didn't even read the comment to which you left "[citation needed]", and I'm not interested in trying to wriggle out of anything. Thanks, though, and I wish you best of luck finding someone to fight with over your perspective.
I was under the impression that this was pretty much common knowledge, but sure, I can point you in the right direction.
One interesting place to start is Harvard's "Project Implicit". They have a massive publication list[1] and you can even test your own implicit reactions[2].
There are plenty of other scientists testing things like whether people judge women as less competent. A quick google search pulled up a PNAS paper where they did an experiment on women in science, for example.[3]
This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. There is a whole host of related work, testing other sorts of biases and using other methodologies. I'd suggest a search on your favorite academic search engine for "implicit bias".
I'm a programmer, not a psychologist. I have, however, some slight familiarity with IATs as a purported measure of unconscious bias; they have never impressed me as being particularly reliable as such, given what seems to be their questionable repeatability, not to mention the ease with which they are manipulated, and the way most of the results so obtained tend to hover just outside the margin of error. I won't even talk about the tendentious nature of the investigations themselves, because experience suggests there's no point in so doing.
You disappoint me, sir. I had such hopes of finding something new and interesting, only to discover that your mere vagueness led me astray.
So even if we arbitrarily exclude a perfectly valid psychological technique because it "doesn't impress you", there's still the matter of my third link. Didja click it?
EDIT: The most surprising part of the PNAS study, to me, is that people who agreed with statements like "Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States" were statistically more affected by implicit gender bias.
I fail to see how questioning the validity of the technique constitutes "goal-post movement". I requested citations and you supplied them, which I appreciate. I fail to see how said exchange requires that I respond "oh, hey, there sure are a lot of papers, you must be right!"
On the other hand, I must concede that I previously failed to look closely enough on first inspection at your third link. In my opinion, it does a great deal more to substantiate your statement than the IAT stuff does. I'd like to see similar studies with much higher n, but it's hard to argue with the analysis.
You asked for a citation. That's the original position of the goal post. When you were provided with multiple citations, you decided that wasn't good enough, and so started complaining about the veracity of studies in general and finished by ignoring those citations and claiming "vagueness." That's the second position of the goal post. Those two positions are different. Therefor, the goal post has moved.
Your response was filled with bitterness, like someone who was flustered at having been proved wrong. It sounded just like a child crossing their arms and yelling, "Well citations are stupid anyway!"
This doesn't have to be about assumption of guilt, as it's not a binary "person X is or is not sexist/racist/ageist/whateverist" distinction.
We all have some biases, and taking reasonable efforts to mitigate them has worked very well in other fields, the typical example being the screen for orchestra auditions.
There are many studies showing that nearly everyone has unconscious biases including minorities. This is normal. I assume it's true of you and I assume it's true of me. It's a sensible prior, not an insult.
THAT is a really good point. Thank you for bringing it up. Even after considering your evidence as truth I still have one question left.
1. Isn't a woman, Jessica Livingston (Paul Graham's wife) on the interviewer panel and a part of the application process? It's not just Paul Graham himself.
I'm quick to defend Paul in the same way others are quick to blame him. It seems we as a diverse society are so conditioned to enforcing equal extremism that any time we don't see an industry, a workforce, or a group equally divided between male/female, black/white, gay/straight we immediately sound off the alarm and go on a witch hunt. All of this without considering that certain groups of people are better at something than others. For instance, African Americans make up only 12-14% of the population but over 60% of the NFL. Jewish people make up less than 6% of the population yet they make up almost 100% of entertainment industry executives (see Joel Stein article in the New York Times if you don't believe me). We hold up the majority to a level of standards that the minority cannot even reach. There's this stigma that if you have nice things, you cheated to get them, didn't earn them, and must divide them and share them with everyone else or else you are sexist/racist.
Putting emotional reactions aside for a moment, I think the real point is that unbiased behavior is quite difficult to achieve and requires discipline. If you're not doing anything systematic to root out bias and just relying on good intentions, it won't be enough. Yes, having a variety of interviewers helps somewhat, but people can be biased in similar ways - it is possible for women to be unconsciously biased against other women, for example.
The solution isn't bias in the other direction, but to look for ways to remove the bias. This is why in science we have things like double-blind studies, for example. In music, doing auditions behind a screen seems to have been effective.
Putting systematic measures in place against bias also tends to help with self-selection, since it assures applicants that they have a fair shot. I believe that's what the original poster was asking for. I don't know what the best solution is for something like Y Combinator, but it seems worth giving it some thought. Of course, it's not going to be so easy as performing music behind a screen.
The percentages you cite show this is a problem in many industries. I doubt that 50% is achievable, but I also don't think it's helpful to either say "these people are sexist" or "yeah, but everyone does it." Those are both examples of moralistic thinking. The solution is to move beyond that sort of thing and treat this as a problem to be solved.
"The percentages you cite show this is a problem in many industries" No it's not a problem. This is where you and people like you, differ from me and people like me. You see "differences" as a problem, I see "differences" as a reality and not something that we need to play God with in order to equalize.
So the reason why I'm not on the football team isn't because I'm 5'8" and 125 pounds and can't compete with the other players but because football has a bias against my kind? So instead of me trying to bulk up, gain muscle, gain weight, and try to better compete with the other players I should instead blame the recruiters and coaches for discrimination? Maybe if they lower their standards and we implement some sort of forced quota more little guys like me will feel more welcome in the NFL.
Hey, you're the one bringing up quotas, not me. I think I said that aiming for a specific number isn't the goal.
Football has a lot of numbers associated with it so I'd guess it's pretty fair, especially since Moneyball was published. (Assuming football coaches learned from it; I don't actually follow football.) I was actually more interested in your other example of entertainment industry executives.
I am pro-analytics: I think you should measure all the things you can because the numbers can be interesting. But just as you wouldn't judge programmers by lines of code, raw numbers about hiring are only a suggestive data point. To figure out if there's a real issue, we would need to go deeper and look for other things to measure. (But obviously we're not going to do that here in a chat room discussion.)
That's not any more reasonable an interpretation than accusing anyone who prefers double-blind medical studies of believing that doctors can't be trusted.
>Just because we're in pg's house, it doesn't mean we have to treat him like a god
I'll be the first to agree with this, but I don't believe the guy owes anything to anyone. This idea that he should go out of his way to up-end an interview process to appease the writers of a hack-job and other whiners might be PC, but it's ludicrous.
My advice to PG: Leave it for the next person. If there is systematic sexism in tech incubators, that means there's economic profit to be made by targeting female founders. Someone else should hop to it!
Applying the scientific method to investigate whether there is an unconscious bias in the selection of founders (perhaps resulting in the selection of less than optimal candidates) should not be insulting to anyone.
The straight answer is no. Here's a slightly longer version of the story, in case you're curious:
I first met pg at SXSW several years ago, when he was swamped by hungry startup founders. The whole scene was intimidating to me--I hate crowds! I finally got to ask him a question, which I can't recall the exact content of now, but was something about women and YC. He suggested I email Jessica about it. I didn't do that--probably because I had been intimidated, and partly because I felt like he had punted on the question instead of giving me an actual answer (I now know that this was just part of his characteristic bluntness, and I definitely don't hold it against him especially given the environment in which the conversation happened, but at the time I didn't know pg and I found it offputting.)
Since then, I've had two good friends go through YC, both young white males. One of the companies is now "Internet famous" and shows up here on HN on a regular basis. The other one is still completely underground. Both of them enjoyed and recommended YC.
Another fellow entrepreneur here in Austin went through YC recently and we sat down and compared notes after he went through YC and I went through Techstars. Our conclusion: Techstars wins in terms of mentoring and support, but YC wins in terms of visibility and fundraising.
So, tl;dr I've met pg (briefly), I know one of the partners and a handful of YC founders, but they're not female. I didn't specifically seek out female founders who'd gone through YC, though now that you ask, I'm really curious to hear some of their viewpoints!
For context: I am male and Indian. There were several female founders in my YC batch and I know female founders from other batches. From everything I heard, they felt quite comfortable and enjoyed and value the YC experience as much as I did.
Having been through it, I know YC definitely treats founders the way great startups treat customers - they pay a lot of attention to what founders want.
If a group of my prospective customers had trepidation about using my product, especially if it was because of undeserved generalizations, I would work hard to fix that. Looks like YC is going to do more of that with the female founders conference they have planned.
Yes. The whole problem of every controversy involving YC rests on the fact that there's no control population.
The great majority of YC alumni are young white males. Every time the issue is raised of some minority or another being under represented, the answer is invariably that the process is completely fair and that the problem lies somewhere upstream.
That may be so. But wouldn't it be interesting to have some proportion of YC selected purely randomly and see what happens?
Well that just does it. Someone needs to found a YC funded startup to use standardized A/B testing to implement outsourced founder evaluation as a service. Keep your finances and negotiators and mentors in house, but think of this similar to an outsourced credit check, call it a ... credibility check or something.
To say it would be high risk / low volume / high cost service would be an understatement. And just defining success would be hard. But a hard problem is a good startup problem. And you could probably pivot into (or out of?) employee interviewing.
I guess you could bootstrap as some kind of outsourced HR lady to ask those annoying anxiety producing interview questions (you know the typical HR lady questions, like explain your worst attibute, or tell me about your greatest failure, or the classic when did you stop beating your wife? (kidding about the last one)). This is a legit business opportunity to help small biz do the "HR" questions at an interview and formalize the reporting of multiple candidates, and could pivot into this A/B testing of startup founders once some cash starts flowing.
I'm not kidding about this. Someone else with more spare time that me, take it and run.
A reputation can be a blessing or a curse. YCombinator has a great reputation as the best startup incubator and it's founders have sterling reputations as being the people you absolutely need to talk to if you're considering a tech startup. It takes a lifetime to become known as superlative, the proverbial gold standard. It's as true on the mean streets as it is in the halls of power: You are what people think you are.
I'm not sure where this "frat house" thing comes from (scare quotes, not direct quotation). Have you ever been to a frat house? Believe me, they have nothing in common with a summer at YCombinator. I've described yc dinners as being "like a high school lunchroom where everyone is happy to see you and every table is the cool kid's table". Women are utterly and completely welcome. Minorities are welcome. Bring them your nerds, your socially inept, your ambitious hackers yearning to be free. Frat houses are all about pecking orders and childish humor. YC is genuinely about mutual support and an open exchange of ideas.
If "frat house" means that there aren't many women present, I can only guess as to why. There are a variety of social and cultural factors that push the majority of women away from hacking at a young age. I can't point the finger of blame at anyone in particular, but I can report on what I have observed. Women are generally underrepresented in computer science departments, engineering programs, computer clubs and yes, startup incubators. It has nothing to do with Paul Graham or the YC partners. We're all responsible as members of society at large.
I understand your reasons for not appliyng to YCombinator. TechStars is a great program, and I'm glad that you've thrived there. But there's something to be said for seeing things with your own eyes. I would be very unhappy if someone dismissed me out of hand because of something that they'd heard. I can only believe that YCombinator’s positive reputation will outweigh whatever negative reputation that they have fairly or unfairly received.
Does your company respond to customers like this: start by pointing out your "sterling reputations" and end by claiming "I understand"?
The person you responded to offered two doable action points. A litmus test is if YC moves on at least one of them. YC does not have the excuse that it doesn't have the technical know-how. And it would be a laughingstock if they didn't have the hacker spirit to figure out how to implement them.
They would be a laughingstock if they did implement a voice adjuster. It makes it appear that rampant sexism is such a problem that they have to implement protection against it.
I don't get this at all. Even with just names discrimination has been shown to occur at places like universities, so it wouldn't be revealing a problem, it would be being proactive in case there is one. Trust but verify.
Second, a perfect excuse was provided: for science! Its not that they think they are sexist, but an untested hypothesis is less strong then a tested one.
Am I missing something here? Is there a single case of a female founder with very compelling business/tech that was rejected by ycombinator, whose rejection was at least somewhat widely controversial?
Or, are we talking solely about the lack of females accepted, and explicitly disallowing discussion of what they brought to the table?
I honestly don't know, but if there's a controversy with no specific examples, at least for me, it's pretty hard to take seriously.
HN hides the reply button on some comments that it deems might start flame wars (or similar). If you click the link link, that will let you reply from there.
The "reply" link is also hidden on comments posted less than some (0 < n < 9) number of minutes prior to page load, but the same trick works in that case as well.
Hey I think your intentions are in a good place but I think you're placing the onus on the wrong party. @ericabiz is very open, transparent and direct about what she has seen and heard. It sounds like she's quite talented and had a choice available to her in the marketplace. Based on her market research she went with what she believed to be the better option for her situation. It's possible that she may have decided to go against her instincts and research and go with YCombinator anyway but it's odd to argue that she should have taken the risk and done it over her preferred solution. These are very big decisions involving where you live in the short term and how your life turns out in the long run. The onus really is on YC to address the perceived or real notion in the marketplace (that it's not female founder friendly) to continue to attract the best startups. That is, if there is an onus on any party here it's not on the buyer but rather the seller to address these issues. If these notions are false and unfounded it won't be too hard to clear them up. If they're based on something that does have a grain of truth then go tackle that. (Female founders focus FTW!) I just think it's unfair that you have a somewhat lecturing tone in your comments. It's a little bit of shooting the messenger.
> had a choice available to her in the marketplace
Well, that's not actually true, because she didn't apply to yc to begin with, so we don't know whether or not the choice would have been available.
Oddly enough, I think I met ericabiz (hello ;), she briefly stayed at my house through airbnb. I totally agree that she is talented, and that if people like her are not even applying because of such a perception, it is a problem. I feel it's a false perception, but not well-addressed by statistics trying to prove or disprove a lack of bias (as she had suggested).
But, really, it's a one page form and it was designed to be useful for founders whether or not you are accepted. The worst outcome (which 95%+ of applications receive) is not getting an interview. So apply! (erica and every other female, male, white, black, green, 40-something etc in this thread).
Fear of rejection (not just from YC) is simply a dumb fear if you think about it, particularly if your doing a startup. Because you are going to be rejected over and over anyway, and ultimately no one can save you from building something no-one wants (the only rejection that means anything in this context).
The worst thing that could happen is not being rejected. Just one hypothetical worse case scenario is:
1. Being accepted, signing over equity and giving up on the chance to move to another accelerator.
2. Getting to YCombinator and realising that all of the group bonding indeed happens over heavy late-night boozing sessions.
3. Trying to find a way to remain part of the group experience without participating in the boozing, but failing and becoming disillusioned and demoralised.
4. Abandoning your startup because you can't join another accelerator anymore and are afraid having to explain why YCombinator didn't work for you.
"@ericabiz is very open, transparent and direct about what she has seen and heard." Really? Sounds like she just sat around with some friends who all agreed with each other without any knowledge of anything.
Erica: "I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house"
"Genuine question: Did you reach out to any female founders who went through YC to ask about their experience?"
Erica: "The straight answer is no. Here's a slightly longer version of the story..." goes on to ramble about unrelated bs.
What does YC being a "frat house" have to do with applying though? I can understand why that perception may discourage someone from participating in YC, but the acceptance rate is so low that it seems like premature optimization to think beyond the application.
Why would you apply for something when you've determined that you're not going to accept even if you get in? Also, it seems irrational to spend time completing a form when you know there's a very small chance you'd be accepted and even if you were you would decline it? If the chances were very high, say 80%, you could say "Well, I have no intention now but I'll apply anyways just in case circumstances change and I do want to go" You can't even rationalize wasting time on a form when you know there's a small chance you even get the option of changing your mind.
(just to get more tangled the fact that she was accepted into a well known accelerator probably means she's not in the 'so low" category of acceptance)
Why would anyone make such a "determination" on hearsay that the clearly #1, gold-standard program is a "frat-house", promulgated at that by founders who were never part of that program?
The acceptance rate is now ~1%, so according to you nearly all those applying are irrational (the vast majority of even high quality applications will have a less than 80% chance).
The order just doesn't make any sense. Even the best students don't assume they are going to get into a particular dream school (MIT, Stanford etc), unless they are nuts. And those have about 5-10 times the accept rate of YC.
There's not much more I can say that I haven't already said, as some of the conversations I've had were explicitly off the record. But I can say this, in a generic sense: All of the top accelerators will seek out people they want to attend and encourage them to apply. When this happens to you, as a founder, you're well aware that if you apply, you're very likely to get an interview and also very likely to get in. I can say on the record that this happened for me with Techstars Austin.
So the decision you're facing as you're applying, knowing what you know, having the conversations you've had, is not "Will I get in?", but "Do I really want to do this?" And that's when I found the frat-house aspect of YC to be discouraging.
(Edit: I suppose I should expand on that since people will invariably have questions. I'm a 32-year-old female. I'm in a different stage of my life than a 22-year-old who just got out of college. I didn't really want to deal with keggers full of falling-over-drunk guys, jokes about "chicks", guys hitting on me, etc. I'm just kind of over all that, and I'm weary of fighting battles I have no inclination to fight over casual sexism--I'd rather focus on growing my business, so I choose not to be around those types of people. Yes, you could say I'm painting YC with a wide and potentially unfair brush, but that was my impression.)
This year, I decided to do Techstars instead, and have no regrets about that.
Today, having gone through one accelerator with my company, I'm done with accelerators for this business and I'm moving on to doing a seed round. If I have another business that might be a good fit for YC, and they've made an effort to change (this article by pg is a good first step), I'd potentially consider it again.
This is weird. What should YC change? Tech Stars doesn't do blind apps or publish all the stats you request so that's not it.
"I didn't really want to deal with keggers full of falling-over-drunk guys, jokes about "chicks", guys hitting on me, etc." "I have no inclination to fight over casual sexism"
Very difficult to work with if you're concerned about imaginary things or looking to read into things that aren't there. This sounds much more about you than YC. Good luck.
@argumentum: Please feel free to contact me offline; you've met me through Airbnb, so you have my contact info.
I'm going to repeat what I said above: "There's not much more I can say that I haven't already said, as some of the conversations I've had were explicitly off the record." I'm not going to repeat things that aren't true or that I don't have data for. But I also can't break the trust of people who've spoken with me privately. I will say I did my homework on YC. I've reached the limit of what I can say publicly.
> There are a variety of social and cultural factors that push the majority of women away from hacking at a young age. I can't point the finger of blame at anyone in particular, but I can report on what I have observed. Women are generally underrepresented in computer science departments, engineering programs, computer clubs and yes, startup incubators.
I don't think women have to even be pushed away. I would assert (and am more than happy to be proven wrong) that in many if not most
undertakings where the ratio of hours of fun to non-fun (I wish I had a better way to describe what I'm thinking) are low, you will find a lack of females. One example is "hardcore" personal investing, I'm talking investing forums, twitter, etc - if you are familiar with them, once again you will notice it is a sausage-fest. Women aren't pushed out of these communities or discriminated against, they simply are just extremely disproportionately not present.
For whatever reason, I think woman who choose to excel in a field tend to focus on endeavors with clearer and more structured formal paths. For example, you will find plenty of female representation in finance in universities and as career professionals. But after quitting time, the people putting in the extra hours in forums and on twitter are disproportionately male, as are the people who have been coding multiple hours per day since under 10 years old, or multiple hours after quitting time once in their professional lives. These are simple facts. Only when race or gender is involved would anyone ever suggest this not relevant to success.
I've really got to disagree with you there. When I think of female-dominated careers, nursing and teaching are what come to mind. And neither of those careers strike me as having a high "ratio of hours of fun to non-fun". Particularly since I've been a teacher before. My ratio is faaar better as a hacker than as a teacher.
Self-selection, as you have done, is a hard problem to solve.
Not just in tech, but in our entire culture. As noted elsewhere, Americans are sorting themselves by demographics.
It feels awkward to be a woman in a predominantly male organization. It feels awkward to be a republican in San Francisco. It feels awkward to be gay in Mississippi. It feels awkward to be black in Portland. And so we place ourselves in locations (and organizations) where it's less awkward to be ourselves, and the problem gets worse.
What's difficult about this problem is that it's nobody's fault. There's no conspiracy behind this trend. (In fact there is a conspiracy to try and reverse it! But to little avail.) Counterintuitively, perhaps it's the fault of the people who choose the comfort of sameness over diversity, but that feels too close to victim blaming.
As you said, victim blaming. It isn't just feeling awkward about things - there are consequences both psychologically, financially, and physically being an outcast. Being uncomfortable with a place isn't something the person can fix themselves - they neither have the power nor the ability to do so.
Diversity begets diversity. The only way to do that is to set up systems and infrastructure that supports and enables that and it requires support from community leaders.
> there are consequences both psychologically, financially, and physically being an outcast
I think nerds and geeks are acutely aware of the costs of being outcasts. The period of their life when they typically turn to computers and programming is the same as the period in which they are socially marginalized (middle school / high school).
Yes, but how any individual responds to a treatment like that is not obvious. Some people respond with understanding and compassion, actively avoiding similar behavior. Others learn marginalization as the standard forms of group interaction and propagate the same behavior towards other groups - see the way women are treated in the video-gaming community as a good example, or as a less direct parallel how violence in a home usually leads to children either desperately avoiding or repeating the same mistakes in adulthood.
I'm not saying people should stay in places where they are ostracized. That's not healthy. But I think it's also a mistake to withdraw from places and activities before we've even had a chance to become ostracized.
An example: I'm a gay atheist from Idaho. I have extended family members that look like they belong on Duck Dynasty. Each family event, me and my husband are presented with a choice: we can skip the event and its awkwardness, or we can join the event and face it head on.
Each time we attend these events, we leave with the same impression. "That wasn't so bad," and from my husband, "Your family is actually super nice." And because of this interaction, they become less homophobic, and I grow to understand redneck values a bit better.
Besides, I've learned over time that what I think they're thinking about me is actually much worse than what they're actually thinking about me.
But each time I'm invited to one of these events, my first gut instinct is not to go, because it's work, and it can be awkward, and it's much easier for me to spend time around people who are more like me.
THIS. And this is the problem. People don't understand this. It HAS to be somebody's fault. It has to be black OR white. Gray is beyond the understanding of many.
What's difficult about this problem is that it's nobody's fault. There's no conspiracy behind this trend.
Well, it's not really any one person's fault who set everything up. But we can change it. There are tools to undo the "death by a million cuts" that make it this way.
I would say that the people who don't do these things are partially at fault for not attempting to fix a broken system.
As a founder, with due respect, why you don't do anything about it?
I think they are good ideas. So how is that you expect someone else to do the work for you?
As a founder I know how hard is to make an idea a reality, and my ideas had relative success(I managed to get things done and most people look to me now like "all I have was given" to me, or that what I created was obvious and easy, as it is obvious now, but the same person was arguing to me how it "was never going to work" in the past). Most people are not that lucky, but they try anyway.
So if you care about this, why you don't take action?
You expect someone else, who is a man (and does not care, there are more urgent problems to them), to do something you should be doing in my opinion.
The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.
You could start working on this. It is impossible to do it alone, but organizing with others there is nothing imposible.
> As a founder, with due respect, why you don't do anything about it?
There's a difference between "good idea" and "marketable business." As founders, we have to make that distinction. I'd like to see YC do blind interviews because I think it's a good idea for them to do so. I am not working on that myself because I can't see that good idea, in and of itself, turning into a business--a product a company could replicate and sell to others.
Perhaps other founders have the necessary domain expertise to turn something like what I suggested into a replicable, marketable business. If so, I support them in doing so.
> So if you care about this, why you don't take action?
I did. I took time away from my business to write this comment and make a suggestion. I hope YC takes it into account. I think it would make an awesome experiment for them.
> The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works.
I suspect this might have been your real point. Sure, YC has worked well...but could it work better? Those are the questions we as hackers ask all the time. I think it's worth a shot to try something different and unique that could work even better than the status quo. Given the popularity of my comment here, I'm not the only one who thinks so. We'll see if YC (or any other accelerator) runs with this suggestion!
> The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.
Yes. Y Combinator could very well decide that their current process is offputting to women, but that it is so successful that they don't care, and that they're perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing even if it effectively excludes women.
But if this is the case, then their only two options are to lie about it or to stand up in public and say that they don't care about including women. The former has significant risk as a long-term strategy, and the latter is a PR debacle that could negatively impact their ability to attract a significant percentage of male founders -- which is to say, anyone who cares about gender equality.
"then use technology to change their voices so every voice sounds the same"
Right off the top I would say I don't like that for the simple reason that you can't tell confidence (and I will assume that is a factor) or even how full of shit someone is if you disguise their voice.
I do negotiating over the phone, in person, and by email. I dissect each and every nuance to try and determine what is under the hood. I've had good results with that. I make money that way. To me how someone sounds is important on many levels. If you are going to do this, why have them speak at all? (Not suggesting this.)
Along the sames lines I've had a theory for a long time that it is much harder to tell if someone is truthful if they have an accent (even american from a different regioin) that you are not used to because you can't tell nuance like you can with an accent that you know.
Bottom line is hiding the voice, for the purposes of getting diversity, is not the way to go. Especially for decision making that takes into account "the team" and/or "the individual" and not just the idea.
Out of curiosity, I wonder what people would conclude if YC was able to perform blind applications, and ten years later that class performed significantly worse than classes from the traditional application process.
the whole notion of blind studies I would love to see implemented not just for tech startup funding, but jury selection, and a few others I'm having trouble imagining at the moment.
This whole episode is the first time I have ever picked up on a gender discussion in relation to yc applications. The general feeling here seems to be that some type of affirmative action of quots needs to be applied. But there already is a quota - those with the most promising teams and ideas get to go.
The last thing a successful female founder wants or needs is a quota or lower bar of entry for things like yc. Because once that happens, you're going to have to work twice as hard to get respect, because now you have to prove your place wasn't just because the quota needed to be filled. if you get picked fair and square, then being there is a strong signal that you are worthy.
There are times and places for intentionally creating diversity, but a start up incubator is a bad fit for that type of intervention.
If I were a capitalist VC, and discovered I was potentially missing out on a raft of profitable ideas only because otherwise capable founders were intimidated by the selection process... I would change the process asap to increase my win ratio.
> The last thing a successful female founder wants or needs is a quota or lower bar of entry for things like yc.
I don't think anyone is arguing to lower the bar of entry for women in YC, instead (as far as I can tell) they are arguing for ways to increase the number of female applicants to YC.
Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc.
Sorry, but this is a terrible route to go for YC as there's a huge risk of backlash to achieve nothing good. Say, for instance, that black co-founders had received more funding but achieved poorer returns on investment. A very simple interpretation of that data (not necessarily correct, but easy to formulate interpretation) would be that blacks are less successful than whites at getting a return on investment even with odds stacked in their favor. The conclusions and the data would then be deemed "racist" and YC would have shit all over its face. It doesn't even have to be right. There just has to be published data available for there to be a debate about race/sex, etc... leading to a toxic atmosphere around YC.
The reason data like this isn't collected is because VCs are interested in being politically neutral. Data on race and gender are a political powderkeg. PG said that women who haven't been hackers can't see the world as a hacker, and we see the shitstorm it's caused. Imagine if they were tracking stats based on race or gender? They'd be called nazis.
I'm not sure I want to work in an industry where some offhanded quip can lead to the kind witchhunt and character assassination like we saw over the last few days. Paul Graham may have some views that seem controversial to some people, but don't we all? I really blame the tabloidization of the tech press and the "twitter controversy of the day" bandwagon effect for these kind of incidents.
I wish him luck on his follow-up essay about female founders. What's valuable about a PG essay is 1) his careful analysis and 2) generalization from his wealth of experience. But if he does (2) at all, he's going to piss off Social Justice Warriors.
Writing nowadays is like playing football in a minefield.
It's not really a problem with the tech industry, so much as it is in general with the mainstream media and consumer society. People have loved sensational stories for centuries.
The only difference is the persistent toxicity of extreme social justice and how they've invaded tech, for some reason. Perhaps because it's a big and booming field, but I've always found it odd how a lot of feminists decry geek culture as outcasts, losers and misogynists, yet simultaneously want desperately to be a part of it.
Ultimately, I think you'll do yourself good with a social media detox.
There are people who wake up in the morning, just like you or me, and instead of doing something productive with their time begin the day's hunt for a topic to be offended about. These are people that spend every day searching for something that offends them so that they can bitch to their followers about it and feel like they are producing some real change in the world. Think on par with "Fox News commentary," except militant feminism instead of hyperconservative. Facts just get in the way of the rage train. Can't have those.
You are getting a glimpse of those people. Spend your days looking to be offended and, my God, it occasionally happens and you get your chance to rabble! Welcome to social justice warriors.
I used to think I wanted out of the industry too. Now I just keep a list and act accordingly when I am asked to hire. I've also learned to spot the signs, including certain phrases, retweeting of certain people consistently, linking to the Geek Feminism wiki because it's a wiki and it has facts, and so forth. A good example of a red flag tweet: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417775128831741952
You are so correct, except that some of them don't even hunt for something to be offended about, they simply log onto their favorite websites and take other people's word at what to be offended about!
"Anyone can become angry -- that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way -- this is not easy."- Aristotle
the SJW thing is in the most classic sense a meme. it's spread into tech and it's really disappointing. i don't really get it. the only explanation I have is that it offers people the feeling that they are somehow smarter than the rest of the sheep for realizing the effects of "the patriarchy" and "privilege". They have a more enlightened perspective and one which has easy to use go-to rhetorical defenses when called into question. These views also have the attribute of making the person feel like they are by definition always on the morally right side of any argument, since they are de facto always supportive of the victim. (Since they define the victim.)
The problem is that these things are set up to be unfalsifiable, and claiming that perhaps situation A or B was not in fact influenced by some hidden, systemic, nefarious thing like the patriarchy sets you up to be labeled at best ignorant and at worst sexist/racist/intolerant/etc. Simple explanations for cause and effect events in society are by definition suspect, if they cannot be tied to some larger scale societal struggle and narrative. It's basically a intellectual framework that has built up immunity from criticism via built-in argumentative tricks, similar to various forms of pseudo-science.
This is not to say there aren't plenty of places where discrimination happens and needs to be confronted. But it is not always the answer, and it is certainly not always the dominant factor in our day to day lives. Folks like the one you posted above seem to see everything in life through this lens, and it colors their opinions on everything, from the important to the mundane.
There is no racism, misogyny, or meritocracy worship anywhere in my comment. To be clear, after that comment, a person who has never met me felt the appropriate conclusion was "that guy hates people who aren't white, hates women, and worships meritocracy." Which, for anybody that knows me, is an asinine thing to say.
People from that group like to trot out horrible things (like "this guy came up to me at a conference and asked to fuck me," which is fucking awful, and I hope it was dealt with appropriately), then condemn a huge swath of people with that experience, then put people that disagree with them in the same bucket and accuse them of supporting horrible behavior. Because disagreeing with a method of discourse is literally the same as sexual assault, right?
I'm past being afraid of these people. The last 24 hours have helped a great deal. I e-mailed several people who said awful things and they all clammed up real fast (or asked me to take the conversation back to public forums, so that they'd have help), including one person who asked me to e-mail her.
Thank you for that, really. It's bad enough I have the opinion that goes against the grain and it's an uphill battle, and then you come along and softball a dumbass comment like that. And now that you've left it in close proximity to me, it's fairly easy for most people to draw the conclusion that HN is a cesspool and the opinions are automatically undermined. You're a real peach for that.
See, when they talk about dicks who have dicks, they're talking about you. You are illustrating exactly what they (and I) are so fed up with. Now the rest of us look bad because you had to piss your tripe in the comments.
I'm done with this account and I've said what I mean to say.
Get over yourself. When someone throws a tantrum on twitter with the regularity of clockwork, mockery is a completely valid response, and often the quickest way to get the point across. Logos, pathos, ethos. The former has no effect without the latter two to back it up.
You are dealing with a mob of righteous indignation that refuses to ever consider that they might be wrong. If you think the appropriate response is to perpetually tiptoe around them and apologize profusely, you are sorely mistaken.
They are toxic, and should be labeled as such until they themselves grow up.
The fact that all these SJWs seem to care so much about their appearance that their impeccably groomed avatars rotate faster than the seasons makes it a doubly delicious burn.
I find the twitter comment you linked to very insightful, it's just a thinly veiled statement of "even if the facts don't support the claims I made about your actions, you're still to blame for your inaction". This kind of "You're either with us, or against us" mentality is rather alarming...
Search for "Offence trolling" and read that section please (the whole article in general is good, but that section talks specifically about what you are talking about).
Amen. I stated earlier that because of this behavior people now treat me (a female) as if I'm just looking to fight. It's disgusting and actively pushing me out of the industry. Sexist men are not my enemy anymore :/
Thanks for the clarification. It is unfortunate that your statements were taken out of context and spun. I typically look for the original source, and am relatively skeptical of poorly edited viral stories such as this one.
With that said, I do think that the moderation / upvoting / flagging of Hacker News is overwhelmingly male. I sometimes see sexist comments here, and there doesn't seem to be a good system for women to flag and remove those. This is a problem in my opinion.
There's a comment system. A sane, non-blaming comment calling out sexist comments can do wonders for swaying the opinion of others. The last thing we need to solve this is to start segmenting ourselves on here.
Why are you linking someone's gender to the ability to flag and remove sexist comments? Are you saying that women are allowed to make sexist comments about men?
Sexism is everyone's problem, regardless of gender expression.
Admittedly, there's no 'flag' or 'remove' option. There is however a downvote option--but only for users with enough 'karma'. You and I, being (relatively) new users, don't have enough karma to downvote posts. _That_ is unrelated to gender.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadI would love it if this were true, but I think it's way too optimistic.
Nitasha Tiku made several negative blaming statements in her story. The one that stuck out to me as an obvious tell of a blaming statement was "That archetype, of course, is usually attached to a penis." In all fairness, I don't think that anyone wants to be addressed via 'being attached' to their private parts.
Here's a link on NVC if anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication. It's powerful stuff.
The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham. We covered a wide range of topics including “mass producing” startups, Mr. Graham’s controversial statements on founder accents, his wife and YC's secret weapon Jessica Livingston (link) and some little-known stories about YC alum Airbnb.
https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete...
…which implies that it was a formal interview. I don't have a subscription but something still doesn't quite mesh there. If I were PG I would be writing to them to demand that they change that lead-in to the story.
edit: Another part of this saga that stands out to me is how very few people commenting on it actually have a subscription to the supposedly first hand source at The Information. It was a bit strange that we had a scandal caused by a news report about a news report that most people don't have access to.
The only differences between The Information and The Register [1] are that the latter acknowledges its tabloid nature, and lacks the breathtaking presumption to peddle its tripe for four hundred dollars a year.
[1] http://theregister.co.uk
EDIT: I did read the article and know he was allegedly tricked, but my questions still stand. It was a long interview to just be a background about Jessica, and it was for a profile using the YC name to get $400 subscriptions. If they lied about the reasoning and then edited his words to say something completely different, I would have thought he'd be more outraged.
[1] http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (see #3)
Publishing remarks made as part of background for a completely different topic, in such a way as to make it seem as though they were made during an actual interview on the topic quoted, is unethical, IMO. And since that's what happened, I stand by my remark.
So, you're just wrong about this. Filed under: Ethics - Human Sources: "'On background' is a kind of limited license to print what the source gives you without using the source's name."
http://journalism.nyu.edu/publishing/ethics-handbook/human-s...
And, knowing many journalists, none of them would ever print something given to them on background with the source's name attached. It is unethical.
EDIT: Found it: https://www.theinformation.com/When-Founders-Fight-They-Call...
1 - Most notably, as a gatekeeper in startup culture (<- this seems to be causing confusion: not a gatekeeper to doing a startup, but a gatekeeper to YC which can often be important in succeeding as a startup in my and many other people's opinions), it seems pretty willfully ignorant to assume that you'd know if you were biased against female founders because if you missed some you'd know. If women are a group that starts on the outside to, as a gatekeeper you'd need more than that to know if you're keeping the gates properly, since we it'd be pretty hard to argue the system as a whole isn't a boys club.
I would personally argue it's a large one, but it certainly IS one.
1. That's what YC almost always does, invest as the first and only investor in their own round where they take 7%-ish equity in exchange for a bit of money and all the other things they do. There are rare occasions where that's not what happens, but that's the norm. There's also a follow up from the YC fund that is convertible debt of some kind and always comes from the investors, but that's still 100% based on YC's decision
2. Gatekeeper might not be the perfect term, but it's darn close. YC is a gate, they are the keepers of the gate, and it's an important gate. Not the gate TO doing a startup but a gate IN startupdome.
Edited original comment to be more clear, I can see how the insinuation the being in YC is a gate you must cross to do a startup would cause confusion.
It's not about an attitude about life - I don't worry about gatekeepers at because practically you can't. You've got to give gatekeepers no choice - give YC no choice but to accept you, Techcrunch no choice but to write about you, etc. etc. But as a matter or discussing how our SOCIETY should work, gatekeepers need to examine their biases, strongly and often.
YC is one of those ways, arguably a very significant one.
"wouldn't"?
The stuff I added in brackets is implied. The main question is accepting women who are not hackers, as if they were, given the (challenged) assumption that you can turn them into hackers in YC.
It is if you are seeking funding for a startup based on hacking. The context in the article makes it clear that this condition was implied.
I'm glad to see such a thorough, intelligent reply from PG. He is extremely careful and precise in his language, without coming across as robotic or inhuman. It's impressive.
But this kind of thing is going to continue to happen. There is no market for taking an honest man at his word without reading subtext into it. The opinion ecosystem is a cesspool of the worst pieces of humanity. "Reporting" on Silicon Valley from the east coast would be hubristic and a folly if the organs involved had any intention of doing so honestly.
PG is fortunate that he is self-employed which provides some barrier against the power of the easily-offended. Somehow the talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. We live in a time when a person lower in an organization could easily find himself out of a job for an off-handed remark.
Teddy Roosevelt most eloquently described what is wrong with Gawker:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Agreed, although I don't think it's the talkers vs. the doers; it's the talkers' audiences vs. the doers.
Here's your "somehow": The lack of critical thinking skills in the general population (not new), combined with the power of instant global communication (new).
The lack of critical thinking skills leads people to seek absolutes, simplicity, and swift action in areas where shades of gray, nuance, and care should be called for. Again, nothing new here: mob justice is a well-understood, if regrettable, characteristic of human society.
Instant global communication much more swiftly connects 1) the easily-manipulated with 2) those who lack experience and maturity but who nevertheless possess the gift of persuasion.
In short, I blame the listeners, not the talkers. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if people were generally more skeptical of everything they heard and read, and even better if they knew how to ask the right questions to resolve that skepticism. It would make it harder for unworthy critics to hold power, and easier for worthy ones to be heard.
Here's another quote, from Joseph de Maistre: "Every nation gets the government it deserves." A similar thing could be said for culture and civil society.
I blame both. The listeners for not exercising critical thinking, as you say, and the talkers for spending their time and effort (not to mention sucking in the time and effort of many other people) on these useless witch hunts instead of adding actual value.
I disagree:
- If the talkers are the problem, then the solution is... less speech? Muzzling/censorship? I'll pass, thanks. Better to have the frenzied finger-pointers grow hoarse blathering to a crowd that's ignoring them, than to give them the very attention that they crave and that drives their fortunes.
- I didn't mention solutions to the problem because my post was already long enough.
Solutions would involve (at least):
- Persuading people to take their media viewership and loyalty away from the worst offenders (MSNBC, Fox News, etc.). Hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. Do this by pointing out the emperor's nakedness. - Persuading people to give their media viewership to sources and outlets that don't pander to them (not quite the opposite of the first point). This gives influence (money) to media voices who, eventually, can credibly call our leaders to task for their race-to-the-bottom mentality. - Improved critical thinking curricula in formal education at all levels.
The above improvements would have gradual second-order effects on civic life, e.g. you might eventually end up with real town hall meetings instead of staged, scripted tripe. It really wouldn't take much overt change to see results -- you don't have to boil the ocean.
What's important is fairness and equality of opportunity.
But the real point is that if we believe that jobs will be more technical in nature and that deeper knowledge of technology and coding will be required, maybe we should be concerned with the current ratio. Thus we not only create a skills divide, but one that grows into an economic divide as the better paying jobs are technology jobs. Maybe this is an "equality" movement worth putting some energy into.
I think that kind of is No True Scotsman, because it's an unreasonable conflation of two attributes ('really caring about x' and 'being careful with sourcing in debate/arguments'). I know lots of people who care deeply about various causes but are terrible about research, sourcing and verification in general. And some people might care deeply about a cause but do damage to it by being involved (deeply unpleasant so that nobody wants to work with them and the volunteer group falls apart, that kind of thing). Level of caring is not, in my opinion, strongly correlated with a person's value as an advocate :)
Read http://jessicalessin.com/2013/12/31/on-the-information-and-h...
and the things I wrote elsewhere on this thread.
ValleyWag comes out looking terrible, of course.
but that's just my opinion on the matter.
Data source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ...
For example, you say that you don't know how you'd convince 13 year old girls to be interested in programming. The normal interpretation is, 'Clearly 13 year old girls are very rarely interested in programming, and Paul Graham doesn't know how to change that.' The nasty interpretation is 'Paul Graham thinks that girls are intrinsically incapable of being interested in programming'.
It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible.
"It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible."
Personally, this sort of behavior affects my career. When I first started at my current job people were afraid to speak to me because they expected me to get offended at the slightest thing. I want people to treat me equally, but I don't want people to be afraid to come to work because I might sue them for looking at me. That's not what I'm about at all but unfortunately I'm pre-judged to lash out at people when I see something I don't like.
I want everyone to come to work and get fair treatment/compensation/etc. but I feel that incidents like this set all of us back. The discrimination is different now. People don't see me as incapable of STEM, they see me as incapable of working with other people. It sucks. A lot.
And I could see how that could make things less enjoyable for women who aren't so up tight; women who are easy going and just want to get along with their co-workers and share a laugh and get good work done.
It is unfortunate.
I just want to come to work, maybe draw stupid things on a white board, make cool shit, and go home. I'd really love it if my vagina wasn't the deciding factor in whether or not I was capable of STEM or whether or not I was capable of working around other human beings.
Yet this seems to imply that you place most of the blame on him... though it seems that you are both (potential) victims here.
WRT calling him out on his behavior, all I was trying to say is that I disagree and wish he would consider changing his mentality going forward. I'm not mad at him for it, I'm sad that the actions of a few have caused him to think this. At the same time I was hoping to imply that I won't twist his arm because I see where he's coming from. No malice intended!
Please read some of the other things I said -- I'm actually on the same side as him.
This seems to contradict when you previously wrote that it is up to him, and him alone, to change his behavior, when here it seems to be actually a needed tactic bourn of forces outside of his control. Allocating 50% blame doesn't seem terribly sympathetic, either.
But never mind, I have probably nitpicked more than my fair share for today.
I didn't feel that this warranted more or less blame on anyone's part. He seems like he might assume a woman is up tight based on his experiences -- I can't change how he feels about that. Unfortunately I also can't change the women that caused him to feel that way. All I can do is try my hardest to not be like the women he speaks of and ask him to reconsider his position.
I appreciate the nitpicking fwiw. I think you misinterpreted what I said, possibly due to the fact that I sometimes suck with words.
It's been my experience that when men feel like they're walking on eggshells around women in the workplace it's because they're normally comfortable making sexists/rape jokes and/or have sexist beliefs. The feeling of eggshell walking is them trying to cover that up. I say this as a guy who has seen other male coworkers' behavior when there are no women around and how difficult it is for them to clean up their act when there is a lady in the room.
Don't take this to mean that I think I can say/do whatever I want in this industry on account of being female -- no one is bulletproof. It just seems men are vilified more than women when it comes to these sorts of things. Maybe that's just my world view.
For the tech-world, I guess a black lesbian would be a triple-concern? I would say that is a problem. Not sure how to fix it, but that's a problem. I personally don't have to change my behavior or speech when a lady is in the room. But then again, I'm probably unique in that... I never, ever use profanity and never make jokes that wouldn't be safe on the Disney channel. I don't know anyone who can claim that besides me. But, I will say compared to my time at at&t... the men there seemed to be less frat-housey than the SV-startup-culture. The men at at&t seemed to be more "gentlemanly", more socially acceptable. SV-startup-culture I think allows the frat-house/bro-grammer attitude to grow thus making it more difficult to the men who are use to that to clean up when a lady is around. At least, that's what I've seen.
It's not just a tech problem either. This stuff is going on all around the world. I don't claim to have solutions to these problems, but I would appreciate it if the public shaming and witch hunts would stop. I'm tired, SV. So very tired.
I've never worked at AT&T but I'd wager the same stuff went on. Perhaps you experienced the same sort of thing I did where people assumed you wouldn't appreciate their words/actions and elected to avoid you?
Being a black male myself, it saddens me to think that you're probably right in more ways than one....
I think men are less concerned about their ability to tell rape jokes and more concerned that anything can be blown out of proportion and taken to social media. This sort of stuff can ruin lives and I think THAT is why many men walk on eggshells. In this case, people went after pg without even hearing his side of things, and a quick browse of Twitter leads me to believe that even though he's stated his side of things people are still unwilling to change their stance on this. Instead, they'd rather be pissed off and label him as part of the problem.
In some cases what you said is probably true, but based on what I've seen they seem to be a minority. I don't think your average person honestly thinks that rape is okay, even if they find humor in rape jokes.
translated - "If you're afraid of being labeled a witch, you're probably a witch."
Well, rapist is easy. But me and you may have very different ideas as what constitutes a "sexist". That's the crux of the problem; that's what causes men to walk on eggshells.
>it would be awesome if you gave women the benefit of the doubt because we're not all this way
Most people are not willing to risk their job to find out.
And that's the part that makes me sad about all of this. People are all about "Consider the woman's feelings here!" but no one wants to consider how men feel about it because they're "privileged."
I'm talking more about the tone of jokes (non-individually directed) and things like that. Stuff that you don't need to remember to hide when clients or the Board of Directors come to the office, and that doesn't turn up in an email log that will be reviewed later on by regulators. Stuff that you can switch off right away when you need to go in to "serious professional mode".
I see a few points being made ("out of context"): - You want to start programming at 13 to be a hacker. - 13 year old girls are not interested in programming. - PG doesn't know how to make programming more attractive to this group.
As far as I can tell these are neutral observations and opinions. Even if his statement is plainly incorrect, simply being wrong doesn't make it offensive.
I for one care about when problematic or false things are said not because I am offended, but because falsehoods make it harder to accurately deal with problems like the low number of women in STEM careers, including tech startups.
That's a quote that, when I read it the first time, I tried to interpret charitably. It's one that I read as, 'Women generally (but with exceptions) don't start hacking at the age of 13, and there's nothing we can do to make these women see the world through hacker eyes.'
Rather than, 'There's no such thing as a woman who's hacked since she was 13, and thus no woman can see the world through hacker eyes.'
Saying the quote is 'problematic' and that it needs clarifying -- I have no problem with that, and in fact I totally agree. What I don't like is how large swaths of the blog-o-sphere didn't even consider the first interpretation; they talk as if the second interpretation is just clearly without qualifiers what he must have meant.
It's important for all of us to remember that the incentives of the media and their subjects are not necessarily aligned, and that bombastic distortions such as this are common.
At what point does misquotation become libel? As much as I hate the idea of suing the press, lawsuits seem like the only defense. Real and lasting damage was done to pg's reputation here. Even with yc as his personal loudspeaker, I doubt pg will be able to set the record strait.
[1] The anti-harassment policies of Pycon are a gold-standard for the industry
And no, Jacob is already bitching about pg's essay on his Twitter.
I doubt he would have tweeted any of it, if he had known this.
I took a few minutes to catch up on what JKB is saying and
A) His primary concern seem to be to promote all of the work he's done for women in IT and to make himself seem like a victim because of the backlash from his ramblings about PG.
B) he's completely ignoring PG's side of the story and continuing to promote the ideas mentioned in A.
I'm so sick of the insanity surrounding the issue of the lack of women in IT. Yes, it's a real problem and steps should be taken to fix it but the tsunami of hate that is aimed at anyone who is portrayed as remotely uncaring / oblivious to the issue is beyond disgusting. This is not how to make things better.
BTW, I'm disappointed that only "witch hunt" (terrorism against women) is used in this particular thread so far. Where's "lynch mob" and "McCarthyism", to round out the irony trifecta? (Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to women, whites to blacks, and capitalists to communists.)
Bertrand Guilladot and Louis Debaraz come to mind.
Anyhow, that completely misses the point - that witch trials were based on a presumption of guilt against which no defense could be made. Much like the way certain media sites attack people.
As for the trifecta, I can't help you out on "lynch mob", I'm afraid, but how about this for McCarthyism?
"The [tech industry] is infested with [sexists]. I have here in my hand [2] a list of [102] -- a list of [user]names that were made known to the [Github administrators] as being members of the [sexist majority] and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the [tech industry]." [3]
[1] https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417776560603549696
[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a3j7b1R...
(This link points to Google's cache of @ashedryden's tweet, because the tweet as originally hosted on Twitter has been deleted since I saw it last. I hope you'll agree that Google's cache is an acceptably authoritative source for what used to be hosted at that Twitter URL. The replies are more interesting than the original tweet, anyway.)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Wheeling_speech
Believing men and women are equal is "sick" now? What a strange notion.
Do you know that witch hunt still being a thing in some countries of the world?: http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/medellin/ARTICULO-WEB-NEW_N... (title translated: Woman accused of being a witch in a town in Antioquia was burned)
This is a witch hunt: a woman was accused of being witch and _burned alive_, do you think that is even comparable with the tweets of Jacob Kaplan Moss?
I'll start using this metaphor from now on, just to annoy PC-nazis like you.
witch hunt (n): the act of unfairly looking for and punishing people who are accused of having opinions that are believed to be dangerous or evil
Sounds like proper usage of the word to me.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about a literal witch hunt, as an allegory for McCarthyism. Do you think that he thought that blacklisting actors was literally as bad as crushing somebody to death with stones over several days?
Of course he didn't. It was fucking allegorical. Do you really not understand the basic premise of a metaphor? I think you do. I think you are trolling.
^ little is due.
I don't think the work that Python/Django people are doing to get more women involved in the community can be easily ignored.
In a similar vein, I'd love to see YC take on one or both of the following:
1) Do at least one application cycle completely blind. How could you accomplish this? Much like in the concert auditions where this was first tried, put people behind a curtain--and then use technology to change their voices so every voice sounds the same. I think it would be a really cool experiment to see if different types of companies or a more diverse founder set would get funded.
2) Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc. Of course, I'd fully expect that this would be "opt-in" from the founders as well--i.e. each set of founders would need to agree as part of the application to have their data anonymously shared. You could also share data on % who opted to not have their data shared. (Techstars is doing some great stuff with their stats here: http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/ )
I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house" (I told one of the YC partners that personally when he asked me to apply.) I decided to not apply to YC and instead was in the first Techstars Austin cohort, which was a fantastic program overall. Techstars definitely seemed more welcoming to women from my perspective as a geek-turned-tech-entrepreneur.
I'm hoping this is the start of breaking down the "frat house" reputation around YC and getting more women actively involved with it.
When you evaluate a team, you need to be able to judge their confidence, see how they interact with each other, get a feel for the trustworthiness, the way they look at you when they answer a question, and so on. If you can't see them, and their voice is distorted, then you might as well just ask for a slide deck and forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem like a good idea.
I've long wanted to see in general some more experimental testing of selection variations. What if YC (or some other funder's) candidates were just selected completely randomly from the applications? What if they were selected solely according to some dumb criterion, like take everyone with the most degrees, or the longest CV, or the most GitHub LoC? What if they were selected purely based on the applications (without the dumb-criterion requirement) but without interviews? For a few tens of thousands of $$, someone willing to try those kinds of things out could get some pretty interesting information on how reliable different selection methods are.
My own hypothesis is a negative one: that beyond screening out a few obviously-bad candidates and taking a few obviously-good candidates, the bulk of the YC selection process is randomly related to outcomes, and the YC mentoring/contacts/press/etc., rather than predictive value of the selection process, is the main driver of their generally strong outcomes. But I can't prove that. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect#Rosenthal.E2.8...
Also, you have to consider how much quantitative and qualitative experience YC has accumulated, the partners are pretty good at telling in a couple minutes conversation if you're a strong founder. This advantage would be lost with blind interviews.
This is the part I doubt, though, if by "strong founder" you mean "statistically more likely to exit successfully than people selected according to much simpler 'dumb' criteria". These kinds of claims to predictive ability based on un-quantified holistic properties like "experience" rarely hold up under scientific scrutiny.
2.) Paul has admitted to being susceptible to the Mark Zuckeberg effect, at least he was honest about that and should be respected for the fact that he realizes that. Most VC's i believe also fall into this trap but don't admit it.
3.) Now what are we going to do about this? Shrug our shoulders and just say this or that won't work or get to trying solutions and iterating on that?
How many are asking for this? Where are your stats?
While I agree that blind applications would be somewhat tough for startup founders, conducting seems like a bad example. You could fairly easily judge the resulting music without being able to see the conductor.
Even with world-class orchestras, where performances are regularly put on with guest conductors after only a few hours of rehearsal time, no permanent conductor would ever be hired on the basis of merely listening to their music. It's a leadership position. (Unlike orchestra players, where it really is more directly about musical proficiency.)
I would disagree strongly in that YC has a measurable financial risk of excluding potentially profitable founders solely for meaningless cultural woo woo reasons. For example if some Finnish dudes conduct perfectly normal business transactions nude in the sauna, a prudish American who refuses to participate has an obvious measurable economic loss solely because of irrational cultural woo woo. Now extend that far out example into female communication style.
Now what would work, or at least would be interesting, is having a female partner interview female founders separately from the male partners then study the female partner's impression vs male partner impression. I don't suspect there would be a huge difference; but at least this would be a somewhat more effective way to test the proposed effect. For my ridiculous made up example, you'd need a Finnish partner; probably easier to run this test on the somewhat easier to acquire and categorize male vs female test subjects.
This fratty culture certainly drives away slightly older founders (by that, I mean 25+!) and others who don't appreciate the atmosphere. Ultimately, I expect differentiation in the ecosystem, with different incubators forming to attract talent from different pools of talent.
Creating an atmosphere where your founders feel like they belong is a competitive advantage for an incubator. But no one incubator can make an atmosphere that appeals to everybody. If you make an atmosphere to appeal to 40-year-old females, someone else will lure the 19-year-old males away with beer pong, dorm living, and video game breaks.
The truly break-out companies founded in markets where customers are willing to pay, are started by entrepreneurs over 28. Age is not a hard rule but we talking about averages here. Steve blanks spoke well about how he started up his companies while still managing family life. Check quora for famous tech founders over 30 and their take on it.
An example about how a person over 30 starts a business from Quora:
Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners
We did it by starting with a profitable service line.
I was 34 when I founded Arcstone. We had three young kids (we now have four). I was coming off a VC salary of ~$250K, and yet didn't have much savings to speak of. I started Arcstone with $18K borrowed from my brother-in-law, and a couple credit cards to service revolving debt.
We started a service business targeting a specific, relevant pain point, which has a quick sales cycle. We became profitable immediately; with our profits we both fed ourselves and invested in technology and infrastructure. We were careful not to overbuild on our way up, though some expenditures (like our 5-year lease) were taken with a leap of faith.
Three+ years on, we are a nationally respected financial services firm (primarily in the valuation niche) with a healthy top (and bottom) line, and a very happy and dedicated team of seven.
Getting out of the Silicon Valley mindset -- Seed/A/B/C/Exit -- has been incredibly liberating.
John William Meriwether - born August 10, 1947
Myron Samuel Scholes - born July 1, 1941
Robert Cox Merton - born 31 July 1944
I said that I think that people interested in fratty culture tend to be young.
Beanbag chairs and a constantly flowing keg are not meant to attract older talent. Certainly there are some older people who are attracted to that type of climate, but that really is not the target audience.
Not everyone who works at a hedge fund comes from the cast of Boiler Room. Talk about painting people with the same brush...
What kind of pressure are you feeling about applying to funds now?
Edit: Is this a bad question? I was trying to be empathetic.
A lot of this has to do with impostor syndrome which is why the idea of a blind applications would, in my opinion, help many other talented founders think of applying.
Thanks for your comment on empathy. That is something that makes me feel really welcome to comment here.
The successful among us are the ones who operate even though they are afraid of failure. Otherwise only the people that were born with a perfect hand dealt to them would ever succeed.
When I read this, it exactly encapsulated what I was trying to say. You are allowed to fear everything, but if you let fear control you or decide what you will or will not do you will not become great. You may even regret bitterly not taking the jump off the cliff.
Which brings up another point: it would be interesting to see a YC batch where the colleges/universities' names were redacted from the screening process.[1] Again, I don;t think this will ever happen...but as a thought experiment I would likely be of equal interest in terms of "opening" access. At some stage, business is as much about trading favours as it is about measuring "competence". There are some good game-theoretic reasons for this (ie, establishing trust in sequential repeated games), but there is more to the story than that.[2]
___________
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-discriminates-agai...
[1] Even if this was replaced by a sort of rating system, eg. that placed X schools into N buckets. This could be done so that the information was recorded but never made visible (say by online application). And the data could still be verified later prior as part of due-dilligence/ affadavit to avoid a problem with gaming the system.
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-30/jpmorgan-s-mistake-...
I'd like to think that we could genuinely make a fairly well balanced system for meritocratic selection. Yes, it's a lot of work and there is always room for error however I'd like to think that ultimately the STEM industry favours these kinds of methods and they could be improved on so we'd see some kind of futuristic system that we saw in the Starship Troopers narrative (as a crazy example that in the movie at least, no-one complained about). Maybe we just need a ton more data to be able to make better predictions. But I also think that face-to-face interviews are ultimately needed as others have mentioned: cultural fit is important to a degree as well.
On that note it reminds me of the Declara article I read (about the founder Ramona Pierson), where data is working to pair relevant people.
https://www.declara.com
Telephone numbers? I found that I identified a lot more with area code 206 than 425 or 253, just as I identify a lot more with an @gmail.com address than @hotmail.com or @aol.com.
- Kaytlyn (female, youngish, spelled unconventionally)
- who graduated from WSU (the rival of my alma matter)
- who has a 253 area code (my least favorite suburb)
- who uses Papyrus for headings (my least favorite font)
- with the email address belieber69@aol.com (triple yuck)
I would want to get that person in for an interview and explicitly check the subtle biases of me and other people who are making hiring decisions.
True story: when I was in college I had a classmate in my database class who was so good-looking it kind of hurt to look at her. I never once explicitly thought that she was a dumb blonde, but I was surprised when I found out that she was just brilliant. Similarly, I worked on a group project with a few prototypical "frat boys" with their Abercrombie sweaters and backwards baseball caps, and found myself surprised that they were smart as hell, too.
I just want to give people an honest chance to be brilliant and not have their resumes passed over for bullshit reasons, even subconsciously.
I wonder how a surname like "Lang" would fair. It is either Germanic of Asian, though it seems to be primarily Germanic in practice but seems strongly Asian to people who are not familiar with it[0]. If there is discrimination keyed off of "Asian-ish sounding" names then it might be apparent when looking at these sorts of names.
[0] I know a germanic "Lang". Apparently he gets asked how his family got that name a lot.
You chose not to apply. No one else forced you to walk away from the opportunity.
If you're unsure about applying, I recommend doing so. No matter what happens, you stand to benefit.
"Do at least one application cycle completely blind."
Sorry but this comes off as insulting (I know that wasn't your intention), you applaud and agree with him then turn around and pull a "but I still don't trust you". As if PG can't be trusted, or you think that he's secretly sexist and want him to change his successful interview process just to prove himself to you.
I'm positive that women get discriminated in many fields, I've heard my mother's own stories. There's something about seeing a strong woman succeed that makes men feel weak. But this assumption that women are absent or less represented at Y-combinator simply because they are subconsciously discriminated against by Paul and Jessica Livingston just seems absurd. Especially seeing has how politically correct everyone's trying to be now a days. Many people (especially those running Tech Crunch events) are purposely looking for that unicorn female developer to rid themselves of male guilt. The one that's worked on algorithms, programmed since a kid, and coded up numerous apps.
Rather than focus on discrimination ask yourself this: How many times have we seen a female coder's blog? How many frameworks/api/apps have we seen created by females? Is it discrimination or lack of ambition? Take a look at the 10 industries that women rule http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/01/26/10-industries-where-.... Are men being discriminated against (one can argue the day care industry) or do they lack the desire and ambition to get into these industries?
Just because we're in pg's house, it doesn't mean we have to treat him like a god. He's a fallible human being, just like the rest of us.
The whole point of a blind interview is to prevent implicit bias that the bearer might not even be aware of.
"You assert that these studies exist, but you don't bother to identify them for those of us who are not au courant with the journals in which they presumably appear. Would you care to link at least a representative example of the studies to which you refer, so that those of us who are unimpressed by argument from authority may examine them for ourselves?"
The semantic value of these two rather long sentences being identical with that of the two words I actually posted, the only apparent reason to choose the former over the latter would be an interest in pandering to your prejudices. I harbor no such interest, and therefore feel no urge to replace what I did post with what you seem to prefer I post.
All that aside, the request stands. Do you intend to cite a representative sample, &c., or do you prefer to settle for the bare-faced argument from authority you've made so far, without even bothering, as I gather is customary in the use of that fallacy, to name the authority from whom you are arguing? "Studies suggest," after all, is rather weak tea.
Finally, there's probably a name for the fallacy inherent in tossing out an unsupported assertion followed by " -- now prove me wrong!", the way you're also doing; I can't be bothered to look it up, though. Between trying to find the studies to which you cannot possibly have referred more vaguely, and trying to do the impossible by proving a negative, I've got too much on my plate already; you'll just have to find the name for that fallacy yourself, I'm afraid.
One interesting place to start is Harvard's "Project Implicit". They have a massive publication list[1] and you can even test your own implicit reactions[2].
There are plenty of other scientists testing things like whether people judge women as less competent. A quick google search pulled up a PNAS paper where they did an experiment on women in science, for example.[3]
This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. There is a whole host of related work, testing other sorts of biases and using other methodologies. I'd suggest a search on your favorite academic search engine for "implicit bias".
[1] https://www.projectimplicit.net/papers.html [2] https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ [3] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...
You disappoint me, sir. I had such hopes of finding something new and interesting, only to discover that your mere vagueness led me astray.
So even if we arbitrarily exclude a perfectly valid psychological technique because it "doesn't impress you", there's still the matter of my third link. Didja click it?
EDIT: The most surprising part of the PNAS study, to me, is that people who agreed with statements like "Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States" were statistically more affected by implicit gender bias.
On the other hand, I must concede that I previously failed to look closely enough on first inspection at your third link. In my opinion, it does a great deal more to substantiate your statement than the IAT stuff does. I'd like to see similar studies with much higher n, but it's hard to argue with the analysis.
Your response was filled with bitterness, like someone who was flustered at having been proved wrong. It sounded just like a child crossing their arms and yelling, "Well citations are stupid anyway!"
http://med.stanford.edu/diversity/FAQ_REDE.html
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/01/0212/7b.shtml
We all have some biases, and taking reasonable efforts to mitigate them has worked very well in other fields, the typical example being the screen for orchestra auditions.
[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/between-the-lines/201204...
1. Isn't a woman, Jessica Livingston (Paul Graham's wife) on the interviewer panel and a part of the application process? It's not just Paul Graham himself.
I'm quick to defend Paul in the same way others are quick to blame him. It seems we as a diverse society are so conditioned to enforcing equal extremism that any time we don't see an industry, a workforce, or a group equally divided between male/female, black/white, gay/straight we immediately sound off the alarm and go on a witch hunt. All of this without considering that certain groups of people are better at something than others. For instance, African Americans make up only 12-14% of the population but over 60% of the NFL. Jewish people make up less than 6% of the population yet they make up almost 100% of entertainment industry executives (see Joel Stein article in the New York Times if you don't believe me). We hold up the majority to a level of standards that the minority cannot even reach. There's this stigma that if you have nice things, you cheated to get them, didn't earn them, and must divide them and share them with everyone else or else you are sexist/racist.
The solution isn't bias in the other direction, but to look for ways to remove the bias. This is why in science we have things like double-blind studies, for example. In music, doing auditions behind a screen seems to have been effective.
Putting systematic measures in place against bias also tends to help with self-selection, since it assures applicants that they have a fair shot. I believe that's what the original poster was asking for. I don't know what the best solution is for something like Y Combinator, but it seems worth giving it some thought. Of course, it's not going to be so easy as performing music behind a screen.
The percentages you cite show this is a problem in many industries. I doubt that 50% is achievable, but I also don't think it's helpful to either say "these people are sexist" or "yeah, but everyone does it." Those are both examples of moralistic thinking. The solution is to move beyond that sort of thing and treat this as a problem to be solved.
So the reason why I'm not on the football team isn't because I'm 5'8" and 125 pounds and can't compete with the other players but because football has a bias against my kind? So instead of me trying to bulk up, gain muscle, gain weight, and try to better compete with the other players I should instead blame the recruiters and coaches for discrimination? Maybe if they lower their standards and we implement some sort of forced quota more little guys like me will feel more welcome in the NFL.
Football has a lot of numbers associated with it so I'd guess it's pretty fair, especially since Moneyball was published. (Assuming football coaches learned from it; I don't actually follow football.) I was actually more interested in your other example of entertainment industry executives.
I am pro-analytics: I think you should measure all the things you can because the numbers can be interesting. But just as you wouldn't judge programmers by lines of code, raw numbers about hiring are only a suggestive data point. To figure out if there's a real issue, we would need to go deeper and look for other things to measure. (But obviously we're not going to do that here in a chat room discussion.)
I'll be the first to agree with this, but I don't believe the guy owes anything to anyone. This idea that he should go out of his way to up-end an interview process to appease the writers of a hack-job and other whiners might be PC, but it's ludicrous.
My advice to PG: Leave it for the next person. If there is systematic sexism in tech incubators, that means there's economic profit to be made by targeting female founders. Someone else should hop to it!
Fixed.
I first met pg at SXSW several years ago, when he was swamped by hungry startup founders. The whole scene was intimidating to me--I hate crowds! I finally got to ask him a question, which I can't recall the exact content of now, but was something about women and YC. He suggested I email Jessica about it. I didn't do that--probably because I had been intimidated, and partly because I felt like he had punted on the question instead of giving me an actual answer (I now know that this was just part of his characteristic bluntness, and I definitely don't hold it against him especially given the environment in which the conversation happened, but at the time I didn't know pg and I found it offputting.)
Since then, I've had two good friends go through YC, both young white males. One of the companies is now "Internet famous" and shows up here on HN on a regular basis. The other one is still completely underground. Both of them enjoyed and recommended YC.
Another fellow entrepreneur here in Austin went through YC recently and we sat down and compared notes after he went through YC and I went through Techstars. Our conclusion: Techstars wins in terms of mentoring and support, but YC wins in terms of visibility and fundraising.
So, tl;dr I've met pg (briefly), I know one of the partners and a handful of YC founders, but they're not female. I didn't specifically seek out female founders who'd gone through YC, though now that you ask, I'm really curious to hear some of their viewpoints!
For context: I am male and Indian. There were several female founders in my YC batch and I know female founders from other batches. From everything I heard, they felt quite comfortable and enjoyed and value the YC experience as much as I did.
Having been through it, I know YC definitely treats founders the way great startups treat customers - they pay a lot of attention to what founders want.
If a group of my prospective customers had trepidation about using my product, especially if it was because of undeserved generalizations, I would work hard to fix that. Looks like YC is going to do more of that with the female founders conference they have planned.
The great majority of YC alumni are young white males. Every time the issue is raised of some minority or another being under represented, the answer is invariably that the process is completely fair and that the problem lies somewhere upstream.
That may be so. But wouldn't it be interesting to have some proportion of YC selected purely randomly and see what happens?
To say it would be high risk / low volume / high cost service would be an understatement. And just defining success would be hard. But a hard problem is a good startup problem. And you could probably pivot into (or out of?) employee interviewing.
I guess you could bootstrap as some kind of outsourced HR lady to ask those annoying anxiety producing interview questions (you know the typical HR lady questions, like explain your worst attibute, or tell me about your greatest failure, or the classic when did you stop beating your wife? (kidding about the last one)). This is a legit business opportunity to help small biz do the "HR" questions at an interview and formalize the reporting of multiple candidates, and could pivot into this A/B testing of startup founders once some cash starts flowing.
I'm not kidding about this. Someone else with more spare time that me, take it and run.
I'm not sure where this "frat house" thing comes from (scare quotes, not direct quotation). Have you ever been to a frat house? Believe me, they have nothing in common with a summer at YCombinator. I've described yc dinners as being "like a high school lunchroom where everyone is happy to see you and every table is the cool kid's table". Women are utterly and completely welcome. Minorities are welcome. Bring them your nerds, your socially inept, your ambitious hackers yearning to be free. Frat houses are all about pecking orders and childish humor. YC is genuinely about mutual support and an open exchange of ideas.
If "frat house" means that there aren't many women present, I can only guess as to why. There are a variety of social and cultural factors that push the majority of women away from hacking at a young age. I can't point the finger of blame at anyone in particular, but I can report on what I have observed. Women are generally underrepresented in computer science departments, engineering programs, computer clubs and yes, startup incubators. It has nothing to do with Paul Graham or the YC partners. We're all responsible as members of society at large.
I understand your reasons for not appliyng to YCombinator. TechStars is a great program, and I'm glad that you've thrived there. But there's something to be said for seeing things with your own eyes. I would be very unhappy if someone dismissed me out of hand because of something that they'd heard. I can only believe that YCombinator’s positive reputation will outweigh whatever negative reputation that they have fairly or unfairly received.
The person you responded to offered two doable action points. A litmus test is if YC moves on at least one of them. YC does not have the excuse that it doesn't have the technical know-how. And it would be a laughingstock if they didn't have the hacker spirit to figure out how to implement them.
Second, a perfect excuse was provided: for science! Its not that they think they are sexist, but an untested hypothesis is less strong then a tested one.
Source? Also, universities are much different than ycombinator so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Or, are we talking solely about the lack of females accepted, and explicitly disallowing discussion of what they brought to the table?
I honestly don't know, but if there's a controversy with no specific examples, at least for me, it's pretty hard to take seriously.
Well, that's not actually true, because she didn't apply to yc to begin with, so we don't know whether or not the choice would have been available.
Oddly enough, I think I met ericabiz (hello ;), she briefly stayed at my house through airbnb. I totally agree that she is talented, and that if people like her are not even applying because of such a perception, it is a problem. I feel it's a false perception, but not well-addressed by statistics trying to prove or disprove a lack of bias (as she had suggested).
But, really, it's a one page form and it was designed to be useful for founders whether or not you are accepted. The worst outcome (which 95%+ of applications receive) is not getting an interview. So apply! (erica and every other female, male, white, black, green, 40-something etc in this thread).
Fear of rejection (not just from YC) is simply a dumb fear if you think about it, particularly if your doing a startup. Because you are going to be rejected over and over anyway, and ultimately no one can save you from building something no-one wants (the only rejection that means anything in this context).
1. Being accepted, signing over equity and giving up on the chance to move to another accelerator.
2. Getting to YCombinator and realising that all of the group bonding indeed happens over heavy late-night boozing sessions.
3. Trying to find a way to remain part of the group experience without participating in the boozing, but failing and becoming disillusioned and demoralised.
4. Abandoning your startup because you can't join another accelerator anymore and are afraid having to explain why YCombinator didn't work for you.
Erica: "I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house"
"Genuine question: Did you reach out to any female founders who went through YC to ask about their experience?"
Erica: "The straight answer is no. Here's a slightly longer version of the story..." goes on to ramble about unrelated bs.
(just to get more tangled the fact that she was accepted into a well known accelerator probably means she's not in the 'so low" category of acceptance)
The acceptance rate is now ~1%, so according to you nearly all those applying are irrational (the vast majority of even high quality applications will have a less than 80% chance).
The order just doesn't make any sense. Even the best students don't assume they are going to get into a particular dream school (MIT, Stanford etc), unless they are nuts. And those have about 5-10 times the accept rate of YC.
So the decision you're facing as you're applying, knowing what you know, having the conversations you've had, is not "Will I get in?", but "Do I really want to do this?" And that's when I found the frat-house aspect of YC to be discouraging.
(Edit: I suppose I should expand on that since people will invariably have questions. I'm a 32-year-old female. I'm in a different stage of my life than a 22-year-old who just got out of college. I didn't really want to deal with keggers full of falling-over-drunk guys, jokes about "chicks", guys hitting on me, etc. I'm just kind of over all that, and I'm weary of fighting battles I have no inclination to fight over casual sexism--I'd rather focus on growing my business, so I choose not to be around those types of people. Yes, you could say I'm painting YC with a wide and potentially unfair brush, but that was my impression.)
This year, I decided to do Techstars instead, and have no regrets about that.
Today, having gone through one accelerator with my company, I'm done with accelerators for this business and I'm moving on to doing a seed round. If I have another business that might be a good fit for YC, and they've made an effort to change (this article by pg is a good first step), I'd potentially consider it again.
This is weird. What should YC change? Tech Stars doesn't do blind apps or publish all the stats you request so that's not it.
"I didn't really want to deal with keggers full of falling-over-drunk guys, jokes about "chicks", guys hitting on me, etc." "I have no inclination to fight over casual sexism"
Very difficult to work with if you're concerned about imaginary things or looking to read into things that aren't there. This sounds much more about you than YC. Good luck.
Ugh .. disappointing to say the least.
I'm going to repeat what I said above: "There's not much more I can say that I haven't already said, as some of the conversations I've had were explicitly off the record." I'm not going to repeat things that aren't true or that I don't have data for. But I also can't break the trust of people who've spoken with me privately. I will say I did my homework on YC. I've reached the limit of what I can say publicly.
I don't think women have to even be pushed away. I would assert (and am more than happy to be proven wrong) that in many if not most undertakings where the ratio of hours of fun to non-fun (I wish I had a better way to describe what I'm thinking) are low, you will find a lack of females. One example is "hardcore" personal investing, I'm talking investing forums, twitter, etc - if you are familiar with them, once again you will notice it is a sausage-fest. Women aren't pushed out of these communities or discriminated against, they simply are just extremely disproportionately not present.
For whatever reason, I think woman who choose to excel in a field tend to focus on endeavors with clearer and more structured formal paths. For example, you will find plenty of female representation in finance in universities and as career professionals. But after quitting time, the people putting in the extra hours in forums and on twitter are disproportionately male, as are the people who have been coding multiple hours per day since under 10 years old, or multiple hours after quitting time once in their professional lives. These are simple facts. Only when race or gender is involved would anyone ever suggest this not relevant to success.
Not just in tech, but in our entire culture. As noted elsewhere, Americans are sorting themselves by demographics.
It feels awkward to be a woman in a predominantly male organization. It feels awkward to be a republican in San Francisco. It feels awkward to be gay in Mississippi. It feels awkward to be black in Portland. And so we place ourselves in locations (and organizations) where it's less awkward to be ourselves, and the problem gets worse.
What's difficult about this problem is that it's nobody's fault. There's no conspiracy behind this trend. (In fact there is a conspiracy to try and reverse it! But to little avail.) Counterintuitively, perhaps it's the fault of the people who choose the comfort of sameness over diversity, but that feels too close to victim blaming.
Diversity begets diversity. The only way to do that is to set up systems and infrastructure that supports and enables that and it requires support from community leaders.
I think nerds and geeks are acutely aware of the costs of being outcasts. The period of their life when they typically turn to computers and programming is the same as the period in which they are socially marginalized (middle school / high school).
An example: I'm a gay atheist from Idaho. I have extended family members that look like they belong on Duck Dynasty. Each family event, me and my husband are presented with a choice: we can skip the event and its awkwardness, or we can join the event and face it head on.
Each time we attend these events, we leave with the same impression. "That wasn't so bad," and from my husband, "Your family is actually super nice." And because of this interaction, they become less homophobic, and I grow to understand redneck values a bit better.
Besides, I've learned over time that what I think they're thinking about me is actually much worse than what they're actually thinking about me.
But each time I'm invited to one of these events, my first gut instinct is not to go, because it's work, and it can be awkward, and it's much easier for me to spend time around people who are more like me.
THIS. And this is the problem. People don't understand this. It HAS to be somebody's fault. It has to be black OR white. Gray is beyond the understanding of many.
Well, it's not really any one person's fault who set everything up. But we can change it. There are tools to undo the "death by a million cuts" that make it this way.
I would say that the people who don't do these things are partially at fault for not attempting to fix a broken system.
I think they are good ideas. So how is that you expect someone else to do the work for you?
As a founder I know how hard is to make an idea a reality, and my ideas had relative success(I managed to get things done and most people look to me now like "all I have was given" to me, or that what I created was obvious and easy, as it is obvious now, but the same person was arguing to me how it "was never going to work" in the past). Most people are not that lucky, but they try anyway.
So if you care about this, why you don't take action?
You expect someone else, who is a man (and does not care, there are more urgent problems to them), to do something you should be doing in my opinion.
The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.
You could start working on this. It is impossible to do it alone, but organizing with others there is nothing imposible.
There's a difference between "good idea" and "marketable business." As founders, we have to make that distinction. I'd like to see YC do blind interviews because I think it's a good idea for them to do so. I am not working on that myself because I can't see that good idea, in and of itself, turning into a business--a product a company could replicate and sell to others.
Perhaps other founders have the necessary domain expertise to turn something like what I suggested into a replicable, marketable business. If so, I support them in doing so.
> So if you care about this, why you don't take action?
I did. I took time away from my business to write this comment and make a suggestion. I hope YC takes it into account. I think it would make an awesome experiment for them.
> The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works.
I suspect this might have been your real point. Sure, YC has worked well...but could it work better? Those are the questions we as hackers ask all the time. I think it's worth a shot to try something different and unique that could work even better than the status quo. Given the popularity of my comment here, I'm not the only one who thinks so. We'll see if YC (or any other accelerator) runs with this suggestion!
Yes. Y Combinator could very well decide that their current process is offputting to women, but that it is so successful that they don't care, and that they're perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing even if it effectively excludes women.
But if this is the case, then their only two options are to lie about it or to stand up in public and say that they don't care about including women. The former has significant risk as a long-term strategy, and the latter is a PR debacle that could negatively impact their ability to attract a significant percentage of male founders -- which is to say, anyone who cares about gender equality.
Right off the top I would say I don't like that for the simple reason that you can't tell confidence (and I will assume that is a factor) or even how full of shit someone is if you disguise their voice.
I do negotiating over the phone, in person, and by email. I dissect each and every nuance to try and determine what is under the hood. I've had good results with that. I make money that way. To me how someone sounds is important on many levels. If you are going to do this, why have them speak at all? (Not suggesting this.)
Along the sames lines I've had a theory for a long time that it is much harder to tell if someone is truthful if they have an accent (even american from a different regioin) that you are not used to because you can't tell nuance like you can with an accent that you know.
Bottom line is hiding the voice, for the purposes of getting diversity, is not the way to go. Especially for decision making that takes into account "the team" and/or "the individual" and not just the idea.
The last thing a successful female founder wants or needs is a quota or lower bar of entry for things like yc. Because once that happens, you're going to have to work twice as hard to get respect, because now you have to prove your place wasn't just because the quota needed to be filled. if you get picked fair and square, then being there is a strong signal that you are worthy.
There are times and places for intentionally creating diversity, but a start up incubator is a bad fit for that type of intervention.
I don't think anyone is arguing to lower the bar of entry for women in YC, instead (as far as I can tell) they are arguing for ways to increase the number of female applicants to YC.
Sorry, but this is a terrible route to go for YC as there's a huge risk of backlash to achieve nothing good. Say, for instance, that black co-founders had received more funding but achieved poorer returns on investment. A very simple interpretation of that data (not necessarily correct, but easy to formulate interpretation) would be that blacks are less successful than whites at getting a return on investment even with odds stacked in their favor. The conclusions and the data would then be deemed "racist" and YC would have shit all over its face. It doesn't even have to be right. There just has to be published data available for there to be a debate about race/sex, etc... leading to a toxic atmosphere around YC.
The reason data like this isn't collected is because VCs are interested in being politically neutral. Data on race and gender are a political powderkeg. PG said that women who haven't been hackers can't see the world as a hacker, and we see the shitstorm it's caused. Imagine if they were tracking stats based on race or gender? They'd be called nazis.
Writing nowadays is like playing football in a minefield.
The only difference is the persistent toxicity of extreme social justice and how they've invaded tech, for some reason. Perhaps because it's a big and booming field, but I've always found it odd how a lot of feminists decry geek culture as outcasts, losers and misogynists, yet simultaneously want desperately to be a part of it.
Ultimately, I think you'll do yourself good with a social media detox.
You are getting a glimpse of those people. Spend your days looking to be offended and, my God, it occasionally happens and you get your chance to rabble! Welcome to social justice warriors.
I used to think I wanted out of the industry too. Now I just keep a list and act accordingly when I am asked to hire. I've also learned to spot the signs, including certain phrases, retweeting of certain people consistently, linking to the Geek Feminism wiki because it's a wiki and it has facts, and so forth. A good example of a red flag tweet: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417775128831741952
"Anyone can become angry -- that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way -- this is not easy."- Aristotle
The problem is that these things are set up to be unfalsifiable, and claiming that perhaps situation A or B was not in fact influenced by some hidden, systemic, nefarious thing like the patriarchy sets you up to be labeled at best ignorant and at worst sexist/racist/intolerant/etc. Simple explanations for cause and effect events in society are by definition suspect, if they cannot be tied to some larger scale societal struggle and narrative. It's basically a intellectual framework that has built up immunity from criticism via built-in argumentative tricks, similar to various forms of pseudo-science.
This is not to say there aren't plenty of places where discrimination happens and needs to be confronted. But it is not always the answer, and it is certainly not always the dominant factor in our day to day lives. Folks like the one you posted above seem to see everything in life through this lens, and it colors their opinions on everything, from the important to the mundane.
Indeed. Here's a reply to my comment[1] from yesterday:
https://twitter.com/ashedryden/status/417475900850974720
There is no racism, misogyny, or meritocracy worship anywhere in my comment. To be clear, after that comment, a person who has never met me felt the appropriate conclusion was "that guy hates people who aren't white, hates women, and worships meritocracy." Which, for anybody that knows me, is an asinine thing to say.
People from that group like to trot out horrible things (like "this guy came up to me at a conference and asked to fuck me," which is fucking awful, and I hope it was dealt with appropriately), then condemn a huge swath of people with that experience, then put people that disagree with them in the same bucket and accuse them of supporting horrible behavior. Because disagreeing with a method of discourse is literally the same as sexual assault, right?
I'm past being afraid of these people. The last 24 hours have helped a great deal. I e-mailed several people who said awful things and they all clammed up real fast (or asked me to take the conversation back to public forums, so that they'd have help), including one person who asked me to e-mail her.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981307
So is her hair.
See, when they talk about dicks who have dicks, they're talking about you. You are illustrating exactly what they (and I) are so fed up with. Now the rest of us look bad because you had to piss your tripe in the comments.
I'm done with this account and I've said what I mean to say.
You are dealing with a mob of righteous indignation that refuses to ever consider that they might be wrong. If you think the appropriate response is to perpetually tiptoe around them and apologize profusely, you are sorely mistaken.
They are toxic, and should be labeled as such until they themselves grow up.
The fact that all these SJWs seem to care so much about their appearance that their impeccably groomed avatars rotate faster than the seasons makes it a doubly delicious burn.
Also, Moldbug: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technol...
Search for "Offence trolling" and read that section please (the whole article in general is good, but that section talks specifically about what you are talking about).
With that said, I do think that the moderation / upvoting / flagging of Hacker News is overwhelmingly male. I sometimes see sexist comments here, and there doesn't seem to be a good system for women to flag and remove those. This is a problem in my opinion.
Me too. And I will downvote, comment, or both. The system isn't perfect, but there are people who are trying.
Sexism is everyone's problem, regardless of gender expression.
I see a link to https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete..., but there's no way I'm subscribing to this junk website.