I recently published a statistical analysis of the proportion of female founders who receive funding from VC firms and accelerators such as Y Combinator to male founders: https://medium.com/p/2613f58e5082
"It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself."
No matter how the rest of the essay is, this honestly doesn't mean jack and insults the intelligence of his critics, no matter how off-the-mark they were. He goes on to note other, more meaningful statistics, which is great, but this sentence alone is kind of laughable.
edit: the downvote was predictable, although still disappointing. I was simply pointing out that picking your wife as a cofounder should not be used as proof that you are not biased against women. Honestly, PG's argument would be stronger as a whole if he removed that line from the essay.
She was an investment banker, I believe (or some equivalent) at the time YC was formed. I seriously doubt PG would take on a cofounder that couldn't pull her weight, even if he were in love with her.
A racist is less likely to have black friends than a non-racist. I'd suggest that a racist is even less likely to have black co-founders than a non-racist.
edited to add: The reason the "look at my black friends" argument is mocked is that in many cases the friends referred to are not friends in the true sense of the word. There's no such distinction possible when talking about a co-founder. One either is or is not a co-founder.
This is a dangerous oversimplification of what "racist" (or any negative bias) means. There are many people who have no problem associating with individuals of [insert class here], but would be less likely to hire them, etc. Racism, like everything else, is a spectrum, and it's critical not to characterize it by its most extreme elements.
How can I simplify the meaning of something I haven't attempted to define? How can I mischaracterise the nature of something I haven't attempted characterize?
One can overlook one's own prejudice with regards to a few friends from categories which their disregard, having gotten to know them as /people/, and still regard strangers in those categories with disdain.
In the same vein the argument later that investors aren't going to be biased against women because they're interested in money is a dud. Most businessmen are motivated by money, but there's more than one instance of businesses who discriminated in the past.
The fact that investors make or lose money based on their beliefs does provide one source of pressure to be rational, but it's not a guarantee.
If you accuse someone of a specific business misbehavior, and that person's actual behavior in the conduct of his business bucks that, it's a relevant statement. It's not Archie Bunker saying "I don't have a problem with those people".
In my professional life, of the the managers working for me was formally accused of racist conduct by an employee he supervised. The core argument was that he was unpleasant and unfair to him based on his race. A major part of his defense was his family (his wife happened to be of the same race), his children, and the extensive work that he did in that community mentoring people.
Bias is a state of mind. Facts/statistics alone do not tell the story.
This is taking the whole paragraph out of context. Paul mentions the 3 partners out of 12 in YC and compares it to the rest of the VC industry. I would say its a fair statement. This is a bit of nitpicking here.
I don't know Paul but I do know that based on this article he's laying out the problem based on what he knows which is start ups. I appreciate him doing this as I get a better insight to the problem from someone that has firsthand, "in the field" knowledge. I also got some great takeaway action items that I can apply for my own kids. So, thanks for that.
I don't know about female founders, but I always thought that given the readership, pseudocode problems placed as job adverts in some of the puzzle magazines would get a lot of interesting candidates, many of them middle aged women who have been solving a variety of logic puzzles daily for decades, entirely for their own amusement. I bet some of them could code like demons, if given the impetus.
That doesn't address the major obstacle I see when trying to introduce programming to beginners.
Finding smart people who can think abstractly isn't actually that hard -- lots of people can do it. But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.
The layers of abstraction go very deep, and every layer leaks a bit.
But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.
Depends what you define as productive programming. Not every problem requires intimate knowledge of the whole stack. Besides, I found that the most important skills for me are not in trying to memorise all the details, but to get good at using reference materials and to look for the structures rather than the nouns.
Like mediocre people in any field, they're fighting
the last war, and the last war was won by Mark Zuckerberg.
My curiosity has been piqued. Does the author have point of view previously stated on Zuckerberg?
Where does Zuckerberg stand merit wise? I see him in the news headlines often with his smiling picture. What makes him more clever than the rest of you.
To cut to the point, how many leg ups did Zuckerberg get between luck and connections? What part of his success was environment, what part was his own will and power?
Where does he stand as an engineer, at founding and then? Is he just a face, a legend, or does is he a real decision maker?
He controls 57% of the Facebook voting stock (may be less after his secondary offering). He's one of the most powerful founder CEO's in the world. Zuck definitely got some advantage in connections and upbringing, but there have been countless other founders with the same advantage who didn't win the war PG is talking about.
I'm glad it that he doesn't go into depth about the core and controversial statement re: why 13 year old girls don't flock to programming in the way that nerdy 13 year old boys do.
I'm also glad YC is being proactive here. It's always clear that certain biases exist, and the only way to overcome them is by addressing them specifically. Deep cognitive biases (against young people for example) can only be overcome by amazing success stories.
He never made that statement. He just said that the best founder-hackers start hacking around age 13, and that admitting female founders who did not do that wouldn't address what he sees as the biggest bottleneck to female founder-hackers.
In a footnote, PG says the poor need hardware to program. I work with poor kids (and volunteer to teach technology to them). Hardware is relatively easy to come by (there are cheap options and donations), but access to the Internet is not.
They just have to go to central places (cafes, libraries). It's not easy. Also, not everything we do needs internet -- we tear apart and rebuild desktops -- that's actually a fairly easy thing to teach even a young kid.
Can you source a router and teach them to build their own internet over private LAN? There is a huge range of basic to one-day advanced things they could do with socket programming and building basic client/servers to have fun with. Then source some donations and build a neighbourhood mesh network.
Note: I'm a woman and started this way teaching myself C when young. Client/server tutorials were one of the most fun, I recall.
I'm not part of an organization -- it's mostly 1:1 with people I find through other volunteering (Big Brothers, talking at middle schools, etc). We wing it based on their interest.
I posted because PG said a YC non-profit was looking at this and wanted to say that if you want a kid to program at home, the issue is that they need access to the Internet (to get to a client/server tutorial, for example). His statement seemed to say that access to hardware was the problem, which in my experience, is not the case.
In my 1:1 cases, I can manage.
EDIT to add the footnote text from the article
Many kids now have computers with Internet access, but kids from poor families often don't. So to get them interested in programming you also have to solve the problem of hardware somehow. That is among the problems being attacked by one of the nonprofits in the current YC batch.
The problem of not having a "computer with Internet access" is not a "problem of hardware", it's the Internet part.
This is an excellent initiative. However, their focus is on in-school internet, which may be a problem in some places, but not near me. The in-school internet is fine, and they even have some technical classes.
But, to a kid, that wants to follow their own interests, they need the internet at home. Not having it at home is a huge disadvantage to the poor.
That's one positive side effect of 3G: more people can get Internet access. Data caps for pre-paid plans are low here (200MB-300MB), but at roughly $5/month, they're the only affordable option for poor families and people who live away from metro areas.
It's a cup half-empty/half-full thing. I'm happy that more people can access the Internet, but I wish they could have uncapped broadband. Until we get there, hacker spaces for the poor will remain a necessity.
"If negative stereotypes are present regarding a specific group, group members are likely to become anxious about their performance, which may hinder their ability to perform at their maximum level. For example, stereotype threat can lower the intellectual performance of African-Americans taking the SAT reasoning test used for college entrance in the United States, due to the stereotype that African-Americans are less intelligent than other groups. Importantly, the individual does not need to subscribe to the stereotype for it to be activated. Moreover, the specific mechanism through which anxiety (induced by the activation of the stereotype) decreases performance is by depleting working memory (especially the phonological aspects of the working memory system).
But do note that the same wikipedia page points out that several recent attempts to replicate the studies that claimed to measure stereotype threat have failed, putting the whole idea into question.
I'm not saying that out of some attempt to sweep away the general problem of improving diversity; it's just important to work on solutions that will actually make a difference.
There are also recent studies that confirm different manifestations of it, for example [1]. I tend to agree with Wikipedia on the publication bias aspect, but I don't think you can sweep away the impact of stereotypes at all. I also think working to change tech stereotyping (in general) as one of the things that will actually make a difference, so I guess I'm biased too.
In all seriousness, why would that be the case? I assume you mean that you should start a startup if you believe that you can outperform the median, although presumably all (or most) founders believe that of themselves. I guess gambling based on your confidence in your ability is preferable to gambling on something else with poor performance at the median, like the lottery.
No, he would say you should start a startup because you want to start one. Your reading of it as "I should only start a startup if I think I am above median" is probably even more risk averse than he would advise, since he thinks many more people can start companies than do.
I should have been more explicit, and said "I should only start a startup if I think I am above median if my goal is to build a company that makes a net gain."
Less than 10% of nurses in the United States are male. Why isn't there a hue and cry about this gender imbalance? Is it even a real problem?
There is, but you're probably not that exposed to it often by dint of (presumably) not being part of that industry. But if you look into it, there's concern about the lack of male nurses and a concerted effort to improve diversity (the same for other professions with traditionally female-skewed demographics, like teaching).
Quick Google search turned up http://menteach.org/ for example, founded in 1979 to get more men into teaching.
Frankly, organizations working to get more men into teaching or nursing is so easy to find by Google, I think people claiming otherwise should be assumed to have agenda. I am starting to suspect these are intentional trolling.
Diversity, when it comes to sexes, is such a nebulous idea. Here is a comment I left above.
What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different.
Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways.
For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes.
For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.
And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
>And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it?
Nursing would be among the worst professions for me. It requires a lot of simultaneous attention to wide variety of details - the cost of missing something is somebody's pain, injury, life... I can focus really deep on one thing at a time - suited me well in Math before and in programming now - while any situation requiring attention to a several different details in parallel or quick sequence just exhausts me.
Related to it is the perfection level required. Take the simplest thing - inserting needle into a vein. Doing it a 1000 times, you need to do it perfectly a 1000 times. In my mentality - it is much more efficient/faster to do something not perfectly, thus getting it right, say, 9 times out of 10 and apply additional effort to correct the 1 out of 10 mistake. The same about following a multi-item checklist (or multi-step procedures) - i immediately filter out "unnecessary/unimportant" items. Obviously, such mentality have no place in nursing :)
I don't know why this isn't a well-established point, taken as an axiom of these discussions. It has been proven that testosterone increases risk-taking. Men, on average, are more willing to take risks--and even more willing, the more testosterone-triggering a situation becomes (e.g. a competition with the possibility of impressing a potential mate will induce higher risk-taking.) It's not so much a fact about "men" in the strict biological sense, either; it's just a fact about testosterone itself. Trans-men take more risks, too, when they're on hormone therapy.
The expected monetary return on a startup is positive, because the giant win at the end of the tail more than pays for the losses.
However, the expected happiness is probably negative (unless people like failing). The guy at the end of the tail is not 10,000X happier than the average person.
People do more than win and fail at startups. They mostly spend their time trying, and there are great personal rewards for that. For entrepreneurs, failing is just another step towards success.
If you're only looking at cash in the bank afterwards from the exit maybe.
What doing a startup does is worst case, that it accelerates your carreer a lot. If you do startups for 2 years, you can get the jobs (if you want) that people working at a corporation will get within 10 years, so it accelerates your career by the factor of around 5.
Examples? Myself and all my startup-friends who have to work for someone every now and then when the bank balance nears 0 again are offered very high-paying/high responsibility jobs.
The reason for that is that the education about business, building a product and personal growth that you get out of a startup is simply unmatched.
For that reason, it's smarter to do a startup in all cases. However, only if you want to accelerate your career of course. If you don't want to make career in your life, then doing a startup is not smarter, because it does take a toll.
I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad.
He comes closest to saying anything of substance with the paragraph: So how would you cause there to be more female programmers? The meta-answer is: not just one thing. People's abilities and interests by the time they're old enough to start a startup are the product of their whole lives—indeed, of their ancestors' lives as well...you probably have to go back to the point where it starts to become significant.
The fact this post mentions no group currently working towards what pg says should be done really bothers me. It appears he has done no research. Groups exist which work towards that very goal of getting girls interested in programming so they become women involved in tech.
How would you get more girls interested in programming? I don't know much about girls specifically, but I have some ideas about how to get kids interested in programming.
This came off similar to how Stephen Colbert jokes that he "doesn't see color". If you cannot be bothered to understand the very group you hope to address why even bother? How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)?
I don't think he should have written this post. He put lots of effort into writing, but seems to have put very little thought or research into the actual subject. I guess he felt defensive about his character being sullied but I think he sufficiently addressed that issue already.
How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)?
Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? The reason sexism-related stories fall down is not because of lack of interest or due to prejudice, but quite the contrary: too much interest, causing an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, and a subsequent sinking.
> Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice?
Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.
I guess you could. Although I'm not sure how exactly an algorithm can be inherently prejudiced, that sounds rather postmodern. You can make one that is inefficient or apply one that isn't suitable to a given data set, and end up with skewed results. But an algorithm promoting prejudice by itself? I don't know. I always thought mathematics was neutral.
Either way, it absolutely does not apply here. HN's algorithms sinking sexism-related stories is a side effect. The fact of the matter is it will sink any story that has an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, whether it's about sexism, Haskell or the Church of the SubGenius.
This is the same logic as saying that encryption is evil because it can be used by terrorists to hide information. Encryption always does the same thing, it's fundamentally neutral, regardless of what's being encrypted. The same way HN's algorithms are fundamentally neutral, regardless of what happens to trigger their procedures.
I think you're overcomplicating it by insisting on isolating the algorithm from its owner and environment. No-one else was doing that.
If you don't want to apply a label to the algorithm, how about "Foo Bar's decision to run Algorithm X against Dataset Y resulted in consequences that predictably increased prejudice, so it would have been better if he hadn't done it"?
If that's okay, note that this is pretty close to what parfe said -- he's clearly upset at the fact that pg chooses to run an algorithm on Hacker News, rather than at the algorithm itself.
I won't comment on the efficiency of the algorithm (although it is questionable).
Let's assume that it's a bad design decision. Your logic behind it being prejudiced is still faulty, as it ascribes a fallacious cause.
The algorithm merely shuffles page rankings based on two criteria: upvotes and comments, both of which are user-supplied. The algorithm does not support prejudice, it simply behaves in the fashion it is programmed to. You're completely ignoring all of the mundane stories that go down due to the same factors, and cherry picking the ones about sexism.
Along a slightly different track than you were originally running on, there are a number of ways in which an algorithm could promote prejudice. Consider a nice little machine-learning algorithm that analyzes characteristics of successful employees at a given company in order to select new hires that share those characteristics. If, for instance, the company had a couple rabid barbecue-lovers who made sure that all lunches primarily featured delicious pork ribs, and they made fun of the vegetarians, Jews, Muslims, and people with braces who couldn't chew the meat off the ribs, and so being a rabid lover of pork was strongly correlated with success in the company and being a non-pork-lover or hampered by braces was strongly correlated with simply leaving the company at an early stage to get a job with the rival across the street that had vegetarian and shrimp satay lunch options... well, it's just the algorithm at work, my friend! Math is truth! As a mathematician, I guarantee it.
Once again, this isn't the algorithm being inherently prejudiced. It does what it's meant to do, but it's being applied to a prejudiced and unreliable data set.
Don't blame the algorithm for the fallacies of the people using it. The only fault in your scenario is the PEBCAK.
The algorithm was written with an intent and it can be changed.
Its been very clear for a long time that almost all discussion about women in tech is as good as censored on hackers, which is a shame because its giving a lot of well intentions but naive people the impression that there is no problem.
Whereas the latest NSA disclosure, facebook privacy setting etc etc leads to a rational though provoking discussion that stays on topic and within its own thread?
If they get more comments than upvotes in a window of time (IANpg but last I heard, it was the first 30-45 minutes after submission), they'll suffer the same fate as submissions about sexism in tech.
Unfortunately it seems that no one can actually agree on the exact nature of what the problem is, so most discussions end up being just pointless shouting matches.
Aren't upvotes a measure of interest? I would argue that the lack of upvotes on sexism-related posts indicates a lack of interest in discussing these issues on the part of the general population of HN.
What you get is a small group of vocal people eager to discuss the topic while everyone else simply avoids the post. This is similar behavior to what is seen in a flamewar, but could we agree that there might possibly be a better way to rank posts that is able to differentiate between an important discussion that not many people want to have, versus a petty internet argument?
> Aren't upvotes a measure of interest? I would argue that the lack of upvotes on sexism-related posts indicates a lack of interest in discussing these issues on the part of the general population of HN.
The sexism-related posts have a large number of upvotes, yet they are penalized anyway by the controversial algorithm under discussion.
That was my understanding as well. Every single "sexism in tech" thread on HN devolves into some combination of the following:
* The Tumblr SJW PC brigade flinging poo
* The people who wish the first group would FOAD, flinging poo
* The people who have something interesting to say lamenting the existence of
the first two groups, who wish they'd both FOAD.
* The people who make meta posts about the whole thing.
I.e. boring, predictable, bile-filled, and more suited to certain Reddit and Tumblr communities who shall remain nameless. Every time this comes up, especially this high up on the page, my reaction is "Oh god, not this shit again..."
I would have flagged it myself, but somehow I don't think flagging a PG article is conducive to my further ability to use the feature...
I don't have a strong opinion on (the lack of) women in tech. I don't feel strongly either way, so I'd be more moved to change the status quo if I could be presented with a good case that women are being held back.
Sorry for being insensitive, but complaints about presentation slides mentioning porn stars (unnecessarily edgy IMO, but not misogynistic unless you stretch the definitions of freedom/dignity/exploitation to mean that all porn is exploitative), late night invitations to drink coffee and dongle/forking jokes haven't made me more sympathetic to having a debate about sexism in tech; if anything, they've made me avoid reading or commenting on anything related to sexism. I don't want to keep women who feel wronged by some event from retelling the experience, but most of the stories about sexism in tech I've read have made me form a pattern of avoiding sexism stories altogether.
I fear I might be missing insightful essays from women about their experiences (good, bad, and anything in between) in tech.
I don't mean any of the following as flame-war type criticism, so I hope you are able to find a way not to take it that way.
Stories by women* about their perceptions of the hostile sexualization of many work and conference environments are themselves part of the case being made that women are being held back.
(You would perhaps be shocked how many men share many of the same concerns, and not just out of solidarity with women.)
Ambivalence of the sort you claim and the concomitant disinclination to engage and try to understand things like the late night coffee invitation incident is part of what is holding women back.
I'm not* saying that you're actively choosing to make the world a worse place. Further, as beings of finite attention and lifespan it's quite true that we can't possibly pay attention to everything.
In your writing I do hear a bit of something that makes me thing you might want to understand what the big deal is, but it just hasn't "clicked" for you. Perhaps this is because you find the existing discussions off-putting, or perhaps because the things you read about are about situations that wouldn't be a big deal for you personally.
If you're interested in understanding more, I'm wiling to continue the conversation here or elsewhere.
Even if not, I'd encourage you to keep dipping your toes in the conversation from time to time.
The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"
Actually by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black." And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.
And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch. The reason I didn't go into detail about it is that I'm not an expert on the topic. I wasn't going to write about something other people understand so much better than me just to send the message that I care.
As written, the first paragraph lays out the situation of you being personally accused of sexism and the second paragraph starts with defending yourself against those accusations. I do not think you set the proper context to use the fact YC has a woman cofounder to defend yourself against accusations of sexism.
The 'Some of my best friends are black...' cliche is only actually a problem if it is used to justify a racist statement. Otherwise it's a perfectly valid indicator of having non-racist character.
> And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.
That... is not an argument? There's ample evidence to show that members of underrepresented groups within individual companies/industries experience unconscious biases in hiring/ranking/etc, even towards groups of which they're a member.
As long as the ratio isn't much worse than 3:1 (men or women are at least 25% of the workforce) either way I'd argue that it's a pretty balanced work environment all things considered. Shooting for 50/50 equality would potentially make more inequality problems than it solves, just for a different subset of the population.
In other words in nursing if you paid men 2x what women make you'd sort that shit out it quite a hurry and get a bunch of dudes helping take care of people. I'm not sure you could find anyone who would agree that it's an equitable or desirable way to achieve the "right" outcome, though.
Equality is definitely a goal, I think we should have more male nurses, but that's not really a priority when men are over represented in most of the higher paid fields (doctors, lawyers, CEOs .etc). Let's work on helping the more disadvantaged party first, yeah?
I don't know if we drove some men into nursing from high paying engineering jobs then there would be more space for women in engineering. Salaries would raise for everyone still in engineering so it would become more attractive to women.
I'm an engineer. I was in grad school at the same time as some of my friends were in law school. I know lawyers who make $40k per year or even less if they're public defenders. Prosecutors don't make a lot more than public defenders.
Then I moved to Houston for work. There are plenty of jobs out here that pay substantially more than what your average doctor or lawyer makes. I know of welders who are making $80/hr, quadruple what some lawyers I know earn. I know of machinists who own their house and cars and boats and whatever.
I think you're confusing prestige with pay which is totally understandable. But with the education bubble having happened and the resultant unbalance in the workforce prestige != paid well, nor does "uneducated" mean bad pay.
The really great part of all this is that welding or machining or some of these skilled trades are actually much easier than startup founding. It's nearly impossible to get filthy rich that way (not that a startup is any guarantee but there are more billionaire startup founders than billionaire welders) but it's much, much harder to go broke. In other words the income distribution has a shorter right tail but also a shorter left one.
Trying to get more women as startup founders as a way to reduce income inequality seems like a fools errand due to the speculative nature of startups. I'm not saying that there should be fewer women founders, not at all. But to suggest that we can have more equality in the world by balancing out startups totally misses the bigger picture.
It's like pushing for more women princes in Saudi Arabia. Yeah men dominate that right now, but even if you made it 100% equal you're still talking about a trivial percentage of the world's population.
First, it's not only a question of paychecks but about how it affects society as a whole. That you want more women leaders because you want the decision makers to have less biases and blindsights, on average. Perhaps you also want more men elementary school teachers because you want more male role models for children, and perhaps less chances of biased behaviour towards schoolchildren based on gender. Not just because you want the men who are already wanting to be elementary teachers to have an easier time. These two seem more important on the societal level than bringing more women in to tech and more men into nursing.
Secondly, this looks similar to the argument that 'men are over represented in positions of power, so men are better off as a whole'. This assumes that men are a collective soup that automatically benefits from being collectively better off. Perhaps by assuming that more men in positions of wealth and power means that all men have an easier time getting into it, ignoring that men come from different backgrounds and social classes and may not ever get a shot at something like that, anyway. I doubt that many have the conundrum of becoming a big-shot CEO, or taking on a high-risk fisherman job because he needs the risk premium (yes, you've probably already read about men being over-represented in some jobs that aren't really featured items on 'career day'. They come up often enough in these threads). Another assumption behind this is that men necessarily benefit from other men being in power. That's a problematic assumption. Why would all men necessarily benefit from that? In fact, assume that a man in power things of women as inferior, and only think that men are a threat to his position of power; then he has a motivation to keep men down, or at least the swaths of men that aren't immediately useful to him.
Sure - my wording was poor. I mean to say that the women wield enough collective and individual power to ensure that they are not an ignored minority. It's not yet close enough to 50/50, the female voices are clearly central to the group.
Let's remember that this is a journey, that YC seems to be at the forefront of it and we should encourage the progress to date while maintaining high expectations for the future.
Meanwhile there are genuine benefits to being at the forefront of diversity, as it widens the pool of awesome founders.
Moreover other players tend to take note of what YC does, and as the evidence builds this will help change the industry.
This reminds me of the industry groups going after Apple for their manufacturing practises, which turn out to be amongst the best in the game. While I felt that Apple was unjustly accused, they did open their books about their sustainable practices, and that's helped improve industry expectations.
He's not talking about evidence as much as a lack of acknowledgement of internalized oppression: the fact that there are plenty women who believe their rightful place is indeed in the kitchen, plenty of gay men who think gay love is indeed disgusting, etc. etc.
If any evidence would be relevant here it would be something like results of implicit association tests on the topic. I for one would be very interested in the (effects of the) results.
I also still can't reconcile how a month and a half ago pg apparently believed that Silicon Valley is a near perfect meritocracy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795606) and now he's been working hard(er than average) to address systemic inequalities.
For the record though; I thoroughly applaud his efforts on improving gender equality and I very much appreciate the first baby steps he's taking here on behalf of the industry. I really hope though that one day he'll be able to look back on this essay and realise this was really only just the start of it.
In general, meritocracy's tend to have market inefficiencies. It's one of their traits that allows those who should rise based on merit but may be held back by other factors to thrive: by exploiting those inefficiencies. Female founders may currently be the market inefficiency that will be corrected next, the same way young founders were when YC was founded. It's not a perfect analogy, but the Rays and A's have been able to be some of the most successful franchises in baseball simply by targeting those inefficiencies. Hopefully something similar happens in the founder world soon.
Also, a bit unrelated but since Billy Beane became GM, the A's have never won less that 74 games. It seems like exploiting market inefficiencies is extraordinarily effective at minimizing downside risk.
> Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely.
He's saying that a useful definition of meritocracy does not mean that everyone is only judged by his abilities. He's saying explicitly that such a thing does not exist. Further:
> And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good.
I don't know how you jump from "pretty good" to "near perfect meritocracy".
This was on an article about one of Silicon Valley's particular problems with diversity being that it thought it was more meritocratic than it actually was.
Given that context pg then goes on to use math as a rhetoric device to illustrate an inherently perfect meritocracy and then states SV is nearly as good; hence 'near perfect'.
I'm not judging particular people (I have no opinion on the individuals mentioned), and I honestly haven't kept up with this whole narrative so there are certainly no statistics I can cite. I'm saying that stating that someone belongs to a class is entirely insufficient to demonstrate the assertion that they are not biased against that class, particularly in a context where that class is systemically biased against.
The personal opinions of individuals are pretty irrelevant when discussing systemic issues, so I don't see that as very productive to focus on. In either direction, actually; personally well-meaning people can nonetheless be complicit in systemic racism/sexism/etc., and personally bigoted people might not be.
I do think YC is probably more open to women as founders than the VC norm, but it's the overall statistics that convince me of that more than some attempt to discern what its principals personally think about things. That was the most interesting part of this post as well, talking about what YC is actually doing.
Systems are made of (or by) people. Systematic biases are not curses handed down by gods, they originate from somewhere within organizations.
It is therefore relevant to consider the individuals involved when we are talking about systematic biases of the system which is composed of them. You cannot talk about the biases of YC without talking about the biases of the people who comprise YC. It would be like talking about the structural integrity of a building while trying to never consider the physical properties of the building materials.
(Of course, even if we strike off this entire thread of conversation as irrelevant, that does not make the comment I was responding to any less problematic.)
Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.
None of this is relevant to the discussion at hand.
The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]. None of the men overlap in expertise with the positions held by the women. None of the women overlap in expertise with the positions held by the men. The "model" person the firm likes to do business with is a caricature of only <one> of the sub-sets of staff. Because there is no gender overlap in these two sets, this is "strucurally" sexist...at least arguably...regardless of which sub-set does the selection [2,3].
[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant.
[1] The rest of the staff are all Hackers or Designers.
[2] The allocation actually doesn't matter. Only the stratification.
[3] Note, however that the "model" personality type is de-facto gendered [male]. This is not a logical necessity. It could be the case that the roles are reversed--either all of the hackers were/are women, etc...or the target Founders could be Hr/ops-legal-accounting...etc.
The "appeal to statistics" is just re-proposed racist talking points. You would not accept it in a discussion involving race, and you should not accept it in a discussion involving sex or gender.
> Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.
1) See above.
2) I am not baiting anybody into disparaging these women, and do not see how my comments could honestly be misconstrued as such. I don't want @zorpner to insult these women, I want zorpner to realize that unless they have specific information about these specific women, then there is no justification for assuming such disparaging things about these women.
3) I have made absolutely no threats, veiled or otherwise. Where the hell are you getting this from?
> "The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]...""[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant..."
This has been addressed in this discussion by one of the women in question, I am genuinely stunned that you are repeating it.
Everyone is sexist to some degree, even women, even me. We all have unconscious biases because that's the way the human brain works. We do pattern matching. And we currently live in an environment where women are _usually_ not amazing programmers and startup CEOS. Admitting that would add a lot more strength to PG's piece.
For more info and facts on unconscious bias and women in tech:
I'd say it's more like "I'm not racist! I adopted a black kid."
The second paragraph was mostly fine but it did come off a little... unhumble. And humility is usually the tone you want when talking about how your company is doing good for X cause, but it could be doing more.
That does not work due to fundamental differences in how racism and sexism typically manifest.
Up until about the 70s or so, racists campaigned heavily against interracial marriage. Most racists likely still hold these views, though after 1967 they are no longer relevant so you don't hear about it very often.
I do not recall any sexist groups ever campaigning against heterosexual marriage. Now, sexists have campaigned against laws that would equalize the rights that people in marriages have.
Therefore "I am not sexist because I believe that my wife and I are equals and should be treated as equals by the law" would be an analogous statement.
Odds are good if you're married to someone of a different race, your in-laws are of a different race, and you know your kids are going to be mixed, that you're probably not racist.
While it's great that you took the time to write that essay, from what I have learned over the years about human nature (not from what I've read but from a large amount of real life experience) you can't use logic and intelligence to change the opinion of those who feel particularly strong about something that is emotional to them (think middle east conflicts). [1] Because emotion and rationality are two different things.
[1] The most important thing about any relationship is that the other party will at least listen and consider what you have to say. People online (and spouses or girlfriends) who cut off without even considering are persona non grata to me. I wouldn't marry or date them and I wouldn't invest in them.
> And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch.
Can you share more about what Hacker School is doing to get girls and women interested in programming? "Hacker School is currently only for people who already know how to code," according to their FAQ, which seems counterintuitive to getting people (women or otherwise) interested in programming.
You're correct that Hacker School is not for people who have never programmed before. We are not directly working on helping people write their first line of code.
But we do help people, including many women, take the next step (e.g., we've had women come to HS as little as eight weeks after they wrote their first lines of code). Learning to code is a continuum (and something that takes place over many years), not a binary thing, and we help at just about every point except the first month or two.
We've also put a lot of work into fixing the leaky-pipeline problem. For instance, a female Stanford CS grad told us that Hacker School is why she decided to take a job as a programmer (she was planning not to go into programming after her experience at Stanford).
A few ways we've worked to support female programmers:
- We've built an environment that we think is more human-friendly (and therefore also more female-friendly) by having explicit social rules and norms that work to fight impostor syndrome and other fears and insecurities that get in the way of people's education (see: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment).
- We've awarded over $500,000 in grants for female programmers, which were generously funded by numerous companies including GitHub, Etsy, Dropbox, Palantir, Jane Street, Tapad, Tumblr, and others (note that Hacker School is 100% free for all students, so these grants are purely used for living expenses).
- As a result, Hacker School has been 30-45% women for our past five batches.
- We've helped numerous women (and men) move from being very beginner programmers working in other fields to being employed as programmers at excellent companies.
- We've helped experienced female programmers become even more awesome and progress personally and professionally.
Towards this last point, we're working on visibility and gender equality on the higher end. Here's a testimonial from a recent alumna who was already a pretty accomplished programmer when she came to Hacker School:
"Hacker School gave me a lot more confidence in my programming abilities. I wouldn't have even considered proposing a conference talk before Hacker School, but now I've spoken at LambdaJam, Strange Loop, and Strata this year! I had previously believed that contributing to open source was just too hard for me to do (big unfamiliar code base with no help!), but now I don't hesitate to make pull requests when I find minor bugs in software I use. The most important thing to me about attending is that you become part of this network of supportive, technical people. They connect you to interesting opportunities, help you when you ask, and support you when you're stretching to do something new."
I think increasing the number of female role models for women who don't yet code indirectly helps bring more women into the field. And additionally, many of our alumnae volunteer and mentor new female programmers outside of Hacker School, and many of them would not have been in a position to do so without the confidence, experience, and skills they acquired at Hacker School.
(Sorry if my response is all over the place; I'm supposed to be in a meeting now so this is a little rushed.)
After reading this from pg today and your comment here, I'll again suggest considering a change to your logo to a young female hacker or a male/female hacker pair and changing your name to NY Hacker Apprenticeship. Role model, balance, etc, etc. Possibly we can then have many Apprenticeship programs across the US, a useful but long gone part of our economy as people. The needs of role models are fulfilled, and the equality debate can be put in its place by making the political stance clear at the front door.
In my opinion this is antithetical to Hacker School. One of the things I most appreciated about Hacker School is that while it manages to get 30-45% women in recent batches which is quite refreshing, it does so without distracting students from their actual goals which are not to work on social problems of sexism and racism, but to focus on becoming a dramatically better programmer while making friends and connections with other students who are doing the same.
In fact, one of the rules in Hacker School is that you are not even allowed to discuss sexist, rascist, etc things at all. From the manual [1]:
"Why don't we want public discussions of sexism, racism, etc. at Hacker School? For many people, especially those who may have spent time in unpleasant environments, these conversations can be very distracting. At Hacker School, we want to remove as many distractions as possible so everyone can focus on programming. There are many places in the world to discuss and debate these issues, but there are precious few where people can avoid them. We want Hacker School to be one of those places."
> And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.
While I don't agree (really, I know virtually nothing about those women and haven't met them), I think you would find that many of your critics from the original controversy do think they are sexist and would say it to their faces.
I may be the public face of the company, but it's impossible to imagine YC doing something that Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn were against.
So effectively they have veto powers. This sounds a bit like "my wife runs the house, I'm only allowed to do what she lets me do." I know that's not what you mean, but you come off sounding too defensive in most of the essay. Stop playing defense with words, let your actions (or YC results speak for themselves). More importantly, take a step back to truly understand the problem and perhaps study some solutions that have worked in other industries.
Why do I think you should do some more studying?
Because you still make comments like this: "You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like. There’s a bunch of ways you can do it. You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon." You made a similar comment two years ago [1].
Because of statements in your essay like the ones highlighted by parfe in the parent post and by me in this post. These statements don't mean anything, they carry no weight, and I'm surprised you would think they do. All your best friends could be Martians and you could be actively trying to destroy every Martian on Mars, except your friends of course. One does not preclude the other.
I've been considering what interested my 11-year-old {female} self about programming. The question keeps popping up, and the only answers I've seen are so vague that I feel something of a moral obligation to offer my own specific insight.
To put my experience in context, I didn't know a single soul interested in programming IRL. So the only way I could have come to it is from a deeply genuine place.
In my adult life, I've heard many men talk about their excitement for coding/programming at a young age, and it is almost always about the love of simply building things. Because building is fun.
Unfortunately, my experience could not have been more different. Reflecting on my thought processes at that age, I remember it being entirely about 2 things:
1. Expression. Nothing could have sounded more dull than building aimlessly-- I wanted to DESIGN. (My definition of this being "carrying out a specific communicative purpose through look and function.") I wanted to make a website that demonstrated my tastes and values to my friends. (Which is likely why I went straight to websites and not desktop software.)
2. Social dynamics. Similar but different to the aforementioned point, I wanted to actually affect other people with what I was making. As a young girl, that typically meant impressing potential friends and boyfriends. I had a poetry site at one point. I made sites for a fake band my girl friends and I talked about forming. I had tons of blogs. I really should have segued into games at that time, as that would have fallen in the same category, but sadly I did not.
That said-- while I know every human being is different, I was what you'd consider a "girly girl." So I believe the difference between myself and a young boy was quite pronounced in a stereotypically feminine direction-- which is where one should be investigating a subject like this, in my opinion.
It's not pg's job to equalize the gender ratio in programming, nor is it his job to get girls interested in it. Saying he thinks you need to reach girls young does not obligate him to go research what organizations are out there doing just that.
He meant the post to be a statement of his position, not a rallying cry to fix a societal problem. You seem to have wanted the latter, not the former. That's fine, but it's not a failing on his part that he didn't write the post you wanted him to write.
I tend to agree. It certainly appears people are assuming just because pg wrote his thoughts on women in programming that he must somehow be held responsible until all problems - real or perceived - are alleviated in this domain. Don't blame the messenger.
I think you're reaching. Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist. He's not saying HE has women FRIENDS he's saying YC is actually RUN in a large degree by women, one woman in particular - the co-founder of Y-Combinator Jessica Livingston. Not to minimize the other women involved, but it's just particularly relevant that the founder of YC could as much be said to be Jessica as Paul.
It's a clunky transition, but the transition goes from "I (PG) have a female co-founder" to "here is the makeup of YC as it applies to women" in the second sentence of the second paragraph.
He was accused both of being a sexist himself and of YC being sexist. I would say the "he is sexist" (for the sake of argument, let's assume that "sexist" means "particularly sexist" because it's hard to argue ANYONE is entirely innocent of being sexist) were pretty tenuous, but his attitude toward whether or not YC was biased toward men were pretty off.
This does a great job of explaining the latter, which I feel were a legitimate problem.
I'll give you this: "It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself" is a weak sentence. Yes, you having a female co-founder is strong evidence, but if you do sexist things then it doesn't make it any harder for me to argue you're sexist. The "it's hard to argue" part doesn't belong there, it belongs after he's not only explained who he chose to start YC with, but how YC and he have acted in relation to others in the industry, which stacks up extremely favorably.
This comment makes me so angry that it is difficult to remain calm, but I will try. You have this wrong. All three of us are in charge of so much more than you suggest here. We all participate in investment decisions and advise the companies on many different matters-- including business strategy. Since we started YC, there has not been one important decision we've made that I have not been a part of.
"That's good to know - I wasn't aware of that. I'm happy to hear this isn't the case, but I've heard this from YC founders many times which is why it was my perception."
Jessica is the reason Steve + I got into Y Combinator. It was her decision to give us a second chance after we were rejected (reddit would end up being one of the first breakout hits from YC).
I wouldn't have just told Charlie Rose "All Hail Jessica Livingston" if her role were just "founder relations" -- without going into the roles all the partners (male and female alike) play in YC, that simplification is way off.
... and lest anyone think this is limited just to (the extremely helpful and insightful) JL, we (a recent-batch YC company) have been repeatedly and substantially helped on important strategy matters by KN and CL. Reducing their roles to "taxes" and "legal" misses the point completely; they are more like "finance strategy" and "legal strategy". Both have advised us on important structural decisions we made early in our company's life.
Although I'm merely a messenger in "my" two comments above, there seem to be 2 important takeaways here:
(1) First off, it's great that several YC founders are so quick to come to the female YC partners' defense, which lends a lot of credence to PG and JL's claims about the large role of female partners at YC.
(2) We all know that even the greatest product can be held back by poor marketing. I don't personally know the YC founders my friend above referenced (via my username), but the fact that some~many YC founders would think that at all, shows that there's a lack of good marketing/branding around how active and influential women (i.e. JL/KN/CL) are at YC.
The (positive) reality clearly does not match the (negative) perceptions.
I don't know what the solution would be, and you could certainly argue that PG/JL/et al. shouldn't have to "market" or "brand" this aspect of YC at all, but clearly this a problem, especially in light of PG's latest essay, the Information/Valleywag incident, etc.
Just because your friend wasn't aware of their roles doesn't mean that his/her lack of awareness is someone else's fault and responsibility. Maybe s/he should research a little more next time before singling out and belittling female tech workers. Isn't the rallying cry of social justice something like "it's not our job to educate you?"
Sounds like you, your friend, and their YC founder friends were actually hurting women by spreading untrue rumors that underplayed the true importance of these women in YC.
And yet there is no sense of remorse or apology for that.
Where is the indignation now towards yourself and them? Or is that only reserved for people who are actually doing something in the world?
If you are genuinely taking requests, I'd personally ask you to ask your friend to query their YC contacts on these subjects:
1) whether they can actually describe in some detail what JL / KN / CL do at YC (hint: they're easily seen to be quite active, so one might wonder what's keeeping them so busy)
2) whether they ever bothered to arrange office hours with any of them to see whether they could be helpful (YC partners' schedules are oversubscribed so you can't expect them to come to you to offer help)
3) whether they ever drafted a contract or financing document during their early stages without consulting KN or CL (and if so, why they chose to make important decisions without the advice of experts who are strongly incentivized to help them free of charge)
4) whether their company survived long enough to need advice on financing, contracts, or founder issues such as a departing founder or bringing on a late-stage founder
I think that would help to clarify how justified the initial claims were.
It's not my place to ask, but if I were Jessica I would probably appreciate an apology. She said you made her so angry that it was difficult to remain calm. If you make someone that angry in real life based on your own mistake, wouldn't you normally apologize for it?
But my greater point was that there is generally too much criticism and indignation that are substituting for listening and understanding. Put yourself in the place of PG and YC in having unjustified criticism like you posted directed at them. And maybe take that to heart before you throw stones.
"Yes, I absolutely am sorry and saddened to have made JL upset. Again, it's been my understanding that while the female partners are great and I'm sure sit in on important decisions, they are primarily YC's accountant and lawyer. If that's not their main role at YC, I and others are mistaken. For the record, I think JL is /great/ and YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like her."
I can confirm that you and others with this understanding are indeed mistaken.
Based on my extensive experience with all of them, I would shuffle your words around a bit and suggest a more accurate characterization is:
YC's female partners are great and make and participate in important decisions. Though it is not their main role at YC, two of them have chief responsibility for YC's own finance/accounting/legal needs.
In hiring Kirsty and Carolynn, YC did hire other women like Jessica, at least on the "great-ness" scale.
And I wholeheartedly agree that YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like all three of them. Just as it would do itself a lot of good to hire other men like pg, pb, Robert, Trevor, Kevin, Aaron, Geoff and Garry.
"there has not been one important decision we've made that I have not been a part of."
Careful, you're not fitting the narrative these people want believe. But seriously, disappointed pg even wrote this. Just engaging with these people is losing.
The sad thing is that it's very likely that sjws will embark on some sort of crusade against her for not fitting into their worldview. Anyone who exists in a way counter to their ideology is marked an enemy to be destroyed in the most high school styled manner possible. Ironic, considering that they claim that their goal is to further the cause of women in tech, etc.
I contemplated a response to the question from pshin45's friend, but decided it might be a fool's errand because the question itself suggested a deep misunderstanding of YC. I am hard pressed to imagine a more incorrect characterization of the role Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica play in YC than "one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations". I certainly understand why Jessica's initial reaction to the question would be anger.
I would estimate that, collectively, I have worked with Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica for upwards of 500 hours over the past 2 1/2 years. And I would estimate that 80-90% of that time has been on product development, business development, sales, customer acquisition, fundraising assistance ... I could go on.
Outside of our company, there is nobody who has been more involved with our "business strategy" than Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica. There is not one part of our business that they have not been critically and deeply involved with.
Y'know, for a company that deals with funding founders to do their work, founder relations sounds like a pretty important job to me. Someone has to keep an eye on where that money's going. Maybe that's just naïve on my part but it sounds like it should matter a whole lot to keeping the enterprise going.
'The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"'
Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends?
Or is it up to the mob to define what "friendship" is?
> Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends?
No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X. Finding specific people of group X meet your bar from friendship, no matter how high that bar is, does not mean that you don't have a bias -- even potentially a very strong bias -- against people of group X, it just means that if you do some people have other characteristics that have weighed sufficiently in your favor to outweigh any general bias you have.
> Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then.
I think the problem has nothing to do with the word "friend" but the word "prejudice".
> I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.
So what? The fact that people in group X can earn any given position with you doesn't mean that they don't, just by the fact of being members of group X, start out in a worse position in your view. So, that people in group X may have earned the designation "friend" from you does not in any way prove that you don't have a prejudice, even potentially a very strong one, against group X.
Basically, the difference is between, on one hand, having friends who are black and that being an orthogonal characteristic unconsidered in the friendship; and, on the other hand, having friends despite their being black.
> How then, might one prove that one is not bigoted?
Generally, in practice, one can't prove the presence or absence of prejudice on a particular axis. I mean, to prove its absence, you'd have to prove that your subjective assessment of people is not affected by their status on the axis in question.
EDIT: If one is accused of bias based on a particular example of supposedly unequal treatment based on the status in question, of course, one can always provide the actual basis for the specific treatment at issue, or simply rebut the factual characterization of the treatment.
Surely however that sort of defense against specific manifestations of bigotry can be evidence (assuming proof is practically unobtainable). For instance, if I were accused of hiring practices that are biased against black people, pointing out that I have only hired black people would be evidence (if not proof, in this hypothetical and silly black and white example...) that the accusations are false.
> For instance, if I were accused of hiring practices that are biased against black people, pointing out that I have only hired black people would be evidence [...] that the accusations are false.
Without information about the external constraints on your hiring, I'm not sure it would really constitute meaningful evidence (e.g., if the entire available employment pool was black, hiring only blacks wouldn't be evidence that the process you had implemented wasn't biased, just that the bias has no opportunity to manifest.)
(This is the kind of thing that would work mostly to burden shift, but then the burden would already, IMO, be on the person making the accusation from the start.)
OTOH, it would be very challenging (though not impossible) for anyone to have evidence that your system was biased against blacks with a hired-all-blacks outcome.
I suppose my hangup here is what I perceive to be the difference between evidence and proof.
It is entirely possible to find evidence of things that turn out to be false. For example, you could take the seemingly chaotic retrograde motion of the planets in the night sky as evidence of the existence of gods with self-determination. We know know that isn't true, we have better explanations for that phenomenon (notably the notion of heliocentricity).
The planets moving differently from the stars was never proof that there were gods up there, but evidence? Sure, it was evidence. Evidence can be of various qualities, evidence of thins has to be judged critically, and weighed against the alternatives.
Evidence for or against bias on a particular axis is something that tends to indicate the presence or absence of differential treatment basis on that axis.
Facts which do not provide a basis for comparisons of how different values on that axis are treated are not much evidence for or against bias, this include facts about outcome (e.g., all the people I hired are black, etc.) without additional information from which the expected outcome in the absence of bias can be inferred.
I can see you are trying to help the subject and advance the discussion forward. I wonder if it would be more productive to instead just criticize point by point pg's post (which I think was decent), instead write what you would suggest would be an alternative.
You pointed to What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/) and another one and mentioned how he has done no research. Alright, what about CWC? What is your research? Instead of just shutting down point after point in the original post, maybe explain why you think GWC or BGC is a better alternative.
> I don't think he should have written this post.
Then we would have seen comments complaining about "PG has has this incident in a while and hasn't followed up, that is so typical of such and such ...".
> The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"
It bothers me unduly much that it has become a common meme that saying this amounts to saying "I am a racist!" That may be convenient pattern-matching, but if someone has friends that are black, that is definitely some evidence that they aren't racists.
I think this really comes down to pattern-matching and goalpost shifting. There are many definitions of racism, and conflating them serves the purposes of people on both sides of the argument, which makes it an anti-useful rather than merely useless term. When someone says "I'm not a racist, I have black friends" they are referring to the casual/common definition of racism, which is that they judge individuals as individuals and not based on their membership of a racial group. Under this definition, calling someone a racist is essentially saying that they have views that are sympathetic to the views of extremist groups like the KKK. Under this definition, saying, "I'm not racist, I have black friends" makes perfect sense, because it implies that, even if they have tiny biases against people based on race, they are at least not so strong as to preclude having close personal relationships with them.
Another definition of racism, used by people arguing against them, amounts to "everyone is racist in some ways, so it's basically always wrong to say you aren't a racist." (Obviously this is a caricature of another end of the spectrum, there are intermediate definitions) Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what. If this is the definition of racism you are using, there is literally no evidence you can provide other than to be black yourself to avoid claims of racism against black people. People who subscribe to this definition have had arguments with people who they believe to be self-evidently racist, yet who used "I have black friends," so many times, that it pattern-matches in their brain to "this person is a racist." This is an uncharitable view.
Having black friends or black family members is Bayesian evidence that someone isn't racist as it is defined in casual discourse, and I think it's time that people stop pretending it's the opposite. Similarly, having a female co-founder is valid evidence that you view females as having the capability of equal business acumen to men, no matter how much people dislike the way the argument pattern-matches.
Unfortunately, there is literally no way to be so careful with your language use to avoid this argument, because the issue has long, long since diverged from the norms of reasonable discourse. There will always be people on the side of "everyone is racist" who will just say, "He's just hiding his racist views by trying to use alternate terminology."
> Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what.
In some limited cases, even being a member of the group that you are accused of being biased against is not enough to save you from the accusations.
" "Within the logic of the concept, those who accuse others of being self-hating Jews may themselves be self-hating Jews."[14] Gilman says "the ubiquitousness of self-hatred cannot be denied. And it has shaped the self-awareness of those treated as different perhaps more than they themselves have been aware."[5]"
When someone crushes the industry average in hiring an under-represented group, you really have to ask yourself what more can they do?
Being specific - are you suggesting more outreach? Overpaying to take funding opportunities away from others? Lowering the bar? Offering more coaching to promising candidates?
Glad PG wrote this and equally glad this is the top comment so far. It appears PG hasn't yet learned that it will never be enough for some people. In anything he writes on this topic he'll leave out some group or state a point in a way that someone disagrees with. And then, all they'll do is attack attack attack.
PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true."
John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."
I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.
I think you misinterpreted that. PG said funding decisions aren't made based on similarity to the people making the funding decision.
John Doerr is saying that sometimes one of factors in making a funding decision is similarity to other massively successful founders, not the people making the funding decisions. PG has been pretty open about the fact that pattern matching to other successful founders is very common.
The other massively successful founders are also incredibly similar to the people making the funding decisions, though - in fact, quite often they are the people making those decisions.
Do you really think that interpretation would improve PG's position? That pattern matching based on gender and race is "very common"? Are you implying that is ok so long as it's the race/gender of other founders?
Thankfully PG does not actually take as extreme a position as Doerr. He merely downplays the existence of it in the VC community.
I can imagine that one reason "sexism related stories get flagged" is because they are rarely interesting, innovative or well though out.
Such articles mostly repeat feminist/misandric boiler-plate amounting to little more than defending female privilege (e.g. no draft, longer life, many more opportunities to avoid having to work, better medical care, earlier retirement, more lenient sentencing for equal crimes etc, more social services, etc). I think a common term for this is "privilege blindness". Why would a thinking person want to read this again and again?
Men learn at a certain point that we are not, in fact, women. We have different values, priorities, and hormones than women, and given the same scenarios we're likely to come to a different conclusion than a woman.
So why would Paul try and talk from his zero years of experience as a woman and explain how to get more women in coding? Why not simply state "Please stop calling me a sexist, I don't like it, here's some facts about sexism at YC and in the industry in general."
I dunno. Allow me to share some thoughts as a young woman.
I had no problem getting into computer programming when I was young.
I had no problem getting accepted to a high-ranking university and graduating mathematics.
I had no problem completing a master's in computer science.
I had no problem finding resources for programming because they're already there, written by men and women. They just don't have "women's" or "for girls" written on the cover in large, brightly-coloured, friendly script.
So I don't really see what the fuss is about. Couldn't the low number of female computer scientists be due to the fact that not many girls are actually interested in such things? Maybe women can think and perceive what is around them for themselves, and don't need charities to show them the "hidden option" of programming?
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Addendum: before somebody jumps to the conclusion that I'm from a wealthy background, I'm working class, a humble chain-smoking serf. I'm from a bloody poor family and my CV has more bartending credentials than tech. I've never even dreamed of owning a current-gen Macbook, in stark contrast to every student I see these days, all seeming to have thousands of pounds worth of hardware without working a day in their lives. I've been using the same Linux machine for half a decade.
Libraries are free. If you're interested in doing something and you have the aptitude, you don't need to be spoon-fed by liberals.
Finally, thank you! I totally agree with you. I find that the current crusade against "prejudice" (against different social groups) in programming is largely caused by the fact that programmers have gone from "uncool nerds" to "cool rich kids" during the financial crisis. As a consequence of that, many people wish they were programmers, and they encourage kids to be programmers "because it will earn them a good wage" and not "because it's what you're interested about". That is the same reason many people become lawyers and doctors - not because they genuinely want that, but because of the prestige and money one gets by being a doctor or a lawyer. However, personally I would rather be represented/operated by a lawyer/doctor who is in it because of genuine interest, not because of the money. The "real" hackers who have been programming since young age, since before it was cool, have demonstrated that they are really interested in technology, and not just because it's hip or it will make them rich.
> We have different values, priorities, and hormones than women, and given the same scenarios we're likely to come to a different conclusion than a woman.
We have different hormones, definitely. But different values and priorities? Different conclusions? I (a man) have very different values and priorities from quite a lot of men. Men often come to different conclusions than other men.
This is not a fundamental men vs women difference. People are different. Men and women are both people.
> I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad.
Suppose that you walk up to someone who earns $100,000 a year and donates 60% to charity, and you see that although he rarely goes on vacations abroad and lives in a 500 square foot apartment he does have a relatively new car. You then say "how could you? If you had gotten a slightly crappier car you could have saved $3000 and sent that off to fight malaria in Africa and saved someone's life! Do you really value that tiny dose of comfort above a human life?"
It may be a valid moral point depending on your personal morality, but acting that way is absolutely useless if not counterproductive toward the general goal of getting more money donated to charity to fight malaria in Africa.
1. Being an above 25y founder was viewed as advantageous and below 25y founder was viewed a disadvantageous before YC/2005. YC made being <25y old founders viewed as advantageous and >25y founders as disadvantegous.
2. YC making young founders succeed inspires the older founders, plus other young founders.
3. They tried the same for female founders. However, acquiring the skills to do a startup requires decade-long exposure to tech and business of a decade, sometimes even it requires exposure for a whole generation. For that reason, it is not as easy to what YC did with women as with young founders
4. Prgrammers here, stereotypes there, it ALL goes back to getting young girls to do their own projects in their teens to acquire the business acumen, hard programming skills and understanding of how to build a product that people will want. That is the solution and nothing else will help more than this.
>>YC made changed that into being a >25y founder disadvantegous.
Disagree with this point, unless you mean relative to pre-2005. I'd argue that it brought the age range of founders closer to the optimal spread, rather than bias against founders above 25. It just made investors admit that there's not an age at which you suddenly become "founder" material.
I think it addresses the issues better as being of education, certification, professionalism, skills, talents, and abilities that one needs to get started in STEM roles regardless of gender, et al. I really think GG hits the nail on the head with that post. Don't let a few jerks or douchebags who are not 99.9999% of the industry make you think that all of the industry are just like them.
Also, I must say I apologize for my Gatekeeper comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6986872). I didn't have YC's female founder numbers at the time, but being 2x the average VC's portfolio in terms of female founders is pretty darn good evidence that you aren't biased. You weren't attempting to make the point eloquently in your "The Information" piece and you didn't, but you do here.
I'm still glad I brought it up - the discussion (not from PG but from others) was revealing, but your head is screwed on straight about how to think about whether or not YC is allowing the institutional biases of others cloud its own judgement, and that's great news.
Side note: if anyone knows who said "instead of being a gatekeeper, we should be a gateway" I'd love to see it. It's similar to what I said except way, way better and I'd love to see the context.
Why is pg engaging with these trolls? Does anyone think they truly care about women succeeding in business or software? No, this is about making a stink and attention whoring. The appropriate response is to flip these weenies the bird.
It's not the trolls I care about so much as more moderate people who may have seen the fight from a distance and come away with the idea that YC is somehow sexist. Particularly women, because I want them to apply.
In other words, this is a posture piece: it's about your reputation, and only about the issue at hand insomuch as it is important to give that issue its due.
I mean that ('posture piece') as neutrally, perhaps, as it is possible to mean it.
>come away with the idea that YC is somehow sexist.
And you can say, with a straight face, that YC is not sexist? That it's just the tech environment, and you're on the 'right side'?
Again, this is about your reputation--controlling the narrative.
The nature of this kind of discussion is always going to be hyperbolic and emotionally charged, which is why gender discussions here get nuked.
That's what I find so amusing about PG's foray today: PG could write the most innocuous treatise imaginable, and he'd still be getting into trouble, and deservedly so.
Ask yourself: what happens after this? Is YC going to be the shining light that brings sexual equality to the Valley?
Or does YC culture get to pat itself on the back for being less sexist than the other parts of tech culture and continue its general status quo?
This essay doesn't heal any divide; it just stirs the pot a bit more. It's about reputation, not solutions--which is somewhat a shame, because the second half of the essay (which essentially is a restatement of PG's initial comment) is pretty thoughtful and reasonable.
Because by engaging the toxic, he's cementing his role in the toxic.
Dude actually wrote: 'by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black."'
Comedy gold. You just don't say stuff like that.
I mean, maybe he's got some semblance of a good point in there somewhere, but you can't hear it over the kneejerk outrage.
And maybe that's where I have a problem with this. PG ignores the flamewar unless by touching it he can get something he wants--the appropriate reputation amongst moderates. And he can't (and won't) get away scott free.
PG is now and always has been one of those ruthlessly pragmatic people. He has his mission and he sticks to it. His mission exists within an overarching framework that many of us consider horrific. His work is genuinely less horrific than that of his competitors (standard VCs) and that is one of his selling points.
It's business as usual. I suppose people like you and I are more interested in understanding the relation of SV to the broad context of humanity. Which is why we always get downvoted into oblivion and have to create new accounts.
Not hate, cynicism. Talk's cheap and tends to benefit the speaker.
The rhetorical arc of the piece is public self-exoneration. I don't think you can reasonably argue otherwise.
PG isn't required to give a deposition of his thoughts on the matter. He could remain silent and continue working on what's important to him.
Or more interestingly, he could launch YC initiatives to get girls coding, shift resources towards some meaningful contribution, something more tangible. Possibly he's done that, and combined with aforementioned silence he might be cruising quite comfortably.
Instead he writes a piece designed to keep the 'more moderate people' from thinking YC sexist, a piece that changes nothing (the flame war abounds) except public perception.
See above, "working on what's important to him," with a certain wry taste.
I find that a very strange definition for cynicism. Usually cynics tend to assume that people are, more often than not, consequentialists: pursuing means for their ends.
PG's ends, in this case, are his business; he wants to make more money. This piece, seen as a consequentialist act, would be a gambit played to calm a possible negative tide in feminist circles toward YC, that might have resulted in YC getting fewer (qualified!) female applicants... which would be bad for business.
I think your problem might be in assuming PG cares about his personal reputation, rather than about YC's reputation. Only one of those two things will make him money.
In other words: this is part of "working on what's important to him." Playing the politics of business brand-image is just as much a part of "business" as building your product, as far as profitability goes.
I didn't intend to particularly provide a definition for cynicism so much as deflect the idea I was writing out of hatred.
>This piece, seen as a consequentialist act, would be a gambit played to calm a possible negative tide in feminist circles toward YC, that might have resulted in YC getting fewer (qualified!) female applicants... which would be bad for business.
Precisely, with a possible qualifier on 'feminist circles'--moderate, maybe even conservative feminist circles.
By which I mean to say, he's pointedly ignoring the feminist concerns outside of the most mainstream: even those that have a point.
Which is why this isn't a conversation! There is no interchange of ideas happening here, only the inevitable flame war spawned by a HN gender topic.
I dunno, I thought I was being direct. The tech sector has sexism problems, and YC, as part of that sector, is not going to be immune to them.
This piece does nothing but puff up YC in an effort to distance YC from the tech sector's sexism, which will only work to a point.
The target audience is the section of moderate feminists that are inherently sympathetic to YC; the concerns of those outside that layer, even the valid ones, are simply not important to PG.
To reiterate: this is a posturing move, in the most neutral sense possible.
Apparently Helianthus think's PG should have both said nothing at all (eg, Because by engaging the toxic, he's cementing his role in the toxic.) and said something radical (the section of moderate feminists that are inherently sympathetic to YC; the concerns of those outside that layer, even the valid ones, are simply not important to PG)
Not entirely sure what the author thinks they are achieving.
Not both; either of those would have been more interesting and less prone to hypocrisy.
Perhaps I am less critical of Paul as much as I am the crude politics of it all--thus critical of Paul by extension.
(Before you think I am directly calling Paul a hypocrite, what I mean is that the toxic flame wars are, by their nature, hypocritical, and it takes care to interact with them without appearing hypocritical yourself--care that I do not think Paul managed.)
i.e. Not only is pg a witch but also a liar for not admitting it!
Look we get it. You enjoy being some moral arbiter that has impossible standards so you can act like your better than everyone while accomplishing nothing.
One thing I have noticed is female journalists, who chose not to do CS themselves, but feel very strongly that other women should go into CS. Not even that they wish they themselves could go back in time and get into BBC Micros. It's a curious phenomenon and I wonder if it's really driven by anything other bandwagoneering.
Do you not root for your country's athletes at the Olympics, and wish that more people would enroll in X so that your country would have a shot at a gold medal?
I don't think that's a scalable analogy. Programmers aren't an elite, really, among professionals. Anyone smart enough to be an accountant or a doctor or a civil engineer is smart enough for 99% of programming jobs, and many of them, for any programming job. Even someone who ended up as a journalist could probably handle the helpdesk or doing QA or websites.
So if it's not so difficult, and there are already a lot of women as doctors and lawyers, it's normal for women to say that they wish that the social barriers that prevent women from getting in the field from an early age would should be broken. It's not a question of bandwagon, it's a question of equity.
But what are these barriers? No-one seems to know, and in these articles, they always say it's because "geeks" have no social skills and poor personal hygiene and that drives women away. Which is nuts, to imagine a conspiracy of men to keep women out by the cunning strategy of not being "cool" enough (!) Not to mention sexist as hell.
And once again, they aren't wishing things were different so they could have done it...
> Do you not root for your country's athletes at the Olympics, and wish that more people would enroll in X so that your country would have a shot at a gold medal?
This might be the wrong audience to ask a question like that. :-)
(My own answer: no, of course I don't root for my country's athletes at the Olympics or care whether "we" have a shot at a gold medal.)
I suspect a relatively small number are real trolls; the majority are probably just used to the standard media / Internet battle lines and narratives and attempting to reproduce them, without thinking deeply about the issue. Many of those people can be reached with a more nuanced and interesting discussion, but not in the course of, say, an interview, or a short e-mail exchange.
Having been in a surprisingly large number of situations in which people misinterpret what I say because it doesn't fit into the standard box or boxes common to a subject, I empathize with the problem. And I'm not a famous person or someone who gets interviewed about hot-button topics by time-pressed reporters!
When they're wielding ridicule like this and you defend yourself, you look weak. You're playing into the frame. The sane people who are only superficially concerned with the issues at hand are first and foremost repulsed by weakness. The appropriate response to ridicule of this sort is to laugh at the accusers and give them a wedgie. Like it or not, that's how you win the crowd.
The post was just put here 42 minutes ago, I think it's hard to have any serious rebuttal without some thought. PG took a long time to think this through and write it, it deserves the consideration it was given in its response.
I haven't really been keeping up, so I don't know if the criticism is valid or not. However, I think the topic of sexism, and discrimination in general, is something that needs to be talked about more openly.
Hopefully something good will come from all of this, so if Paul, or anyone else, has to take a hit at least it will assist in initiating some these conversations.
"People's abilities and interests by the time they're old enough to start a startup are the product of their whole lives..." regardless of their gender.
At Thinkful we recently dug into our enrollment and performance numbers to see what we could learn about people towards the beginning of their careers as developers [1].
Turns out that women enroll in our courses at about the same proportion they're currently represented in engineering, which is disappointing, but that there's no difference between their performance once they enroll.
Of particular relevance is the rate at which incoming students report their motivation for taking the course is to "found a startup". 16% of men, but only 5% of women, gave that reason.
We just went through the entire 2013 performance for female and male students here at Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/).
The results are very revealing for this debate: Once enrolled in our courses, women perform exactly as well as men in every dimension. However, enrollment among women is significantly behind their male peers, but sadly on par with what other coding schools are seeing.
I find the outrage over this so disingenuous. It looks to me like it's more about punishing someone for being a high-profile member of a hated, perceived-oppressor group than actually caring about women being programmers.
To think that pg actually believes that there are no female programmers was the least charitable possible interpretation, and the only reason to have picked that one in particular was to confirm your own bias.
Note that there is no similar hand-wringing about the lack of women in the fields of sanitation, construction, plumbing or cartooning. Likewise, not much hubbub about the gender imbalance in the fashion industry.
Could it possibly be that men and women think differently, and those minor differences are reflected in their career preferences? Could it be that these preferences play a bigger role in gender imbalances in career fields than sexism in a modern society?
> Note that there is no similar hand-wringing about the lack of women in the fields of sanitation, construction,
Yes there is, and examples of programmes to get men into. Ursing or women into construction have been posted to HN before.
Someone always always makes the same point as you and for some reason it always manages to infuriate me. I've had to re-write this 4 times because it was so vicious at first. But it does feel tbat a person must be deliberately trollin when they trot out the same tired bullshit that other idiots spout, especially when that bullshit has been debunked on the same forum that they're posting to and when it is so easy to debunk with a simple websearch. It feels as if some people like living their lives with the blinkers on.
'But it does feel tbat a person must be deliberately trollin when they trot out the same tired bullshit that other idiots spout, especially when that bullshit has been debunked on the same forum that they're posting to and when it is so easy to debunk with a simple websearch. It feels as if some people like living their lives with the blinkers on.'
Well then, since I'm spouting "bullshit" (your words):
Educate me. Let me play the "Citation Needed" card.
Just search HN for [women construction] and you'll see a bunch of MRAs making the point that there are no programmes to get women into construction, and people giving examples of such programmes across a range of countries.
Your inability, or unwillingness, to perform a simple websearch even when given suitable search terms tells me all I need to know about your desire to find facts and make corrections to your weong statements.
"Your inability, or unwillingness, to perform a simple websearch even when given suitable search terms tells me all I need to know about your desire to find facts and make corrections to your weong statements."
And your hair-trigger temper and vitriol tell me all I need to know about you.
Someone always always makes the same point as you and for some reason it always manages to infuriate me
It has been so thoroughly brought up and smacked down that at this point, I'm going to be charitable (?) and assume that this guy is just trolling and/or meta-trolling at this point. Take a deep breath and let it go.
The fact that you know of programs "to get men into nursing or women into construction" that have been "posted to HN before" or have seen some claim "debunked" in the past doesn't mean the person you're writing to has.
FWIW, I read HN pretty regularly and had never noticed any programs to get more women into construction. Not to say that they don't exist, but I'd agree with your interlocutor that the level of hand-wringing on that subject doesn't seem at all similar to the level seen in tech.
As for whether that sort of claim is "easy to debunk with a simple websearch", it's probably much easier for you. Keep in mind that google tailors its results to return the sort of sites you've looked for before, so what you see in response to a given search is different from what others would see. (Not to mention that not knowing that something exists makes it hard to know what phrase one might google to find it.) So instead of saying "it's easy to debunk this with a web search", it's far more productive if you do that search yourself and provide an actual link to the references that YOU think debunk it.
> FWIW, I read HN pretty regularly and had never noticed any programs to get more women into construction.
Here there actually is a government program to get women into trades, simply because there's a shortage of skilled tradespeople in general, and nearly every other demographic is 'tapped out' if you will.
Construction, while it can be lucrative, is simply not 'aspirational', so anyone looking to improve their social status steers clear of the profession.
The women into construction line seems to be specific to a certain type of poster. It's a trope that gets trotted out by people who have seen it somewhere else.
I haven't seen much talk about construction at all here on HN. It's a tech site, full of techies, talking about tech. Of course tech will be an overwhelmingly popular topic here.
Do you spend time on construction forums every day, hearing about the latest trends in construction? I would guess not, which is why you don't hear much about what is going on there.
1. It is possible that men and women do think differently and therefore have different career preferences, so the optimal gender ratio is not 1:1.
2. Just because the optimal gender ratio may not be 1:1 does not mean that the current expression is the optimal one.
I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women. I don't think we'll ever see 50% participation, but I don't want to see any person (man, woman, or anyone identifying otherwise) turn away from this field because they found it hostile. I do believe that this happens, and that sucks.
'I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women.'
And I completely agree. I guess my point is: how much of this outrage is manufactured? Is the gender imbalance truly a "crisis" or is it an artifact of something else entirely?
Certain parties like to fuel the outrage flame because they make money on clickbait. There are also just people with an axe to grind that get off on starting fights. Then you have people that will swear up and down that there is no gender problem in tech, nothing wrong with 'brogrammer' culture, etc. The reasonable people in the middle all think they are arguing against the extreme views, but just end up fighting each other because they misunderstand each others' view points. You have people that have directly experienced sexism in tech thinking they are arguing with the deniers when in actuality they are arguing with people who think their interlocutors are just the angry people looking for a fight.
Messy. And no women are persuaded to learn programming, and no one wins but those websites making money on advertising. Everyone comes away angry.
Oppressed minorities have historically been excluded from highly desirable fields. As a consequence even today you see few black people in, say, Princeton or investment banking. This is most certainly not because black people (or women) think differently. The status quo just takes a long time to improve, especially when people pigheadedly deny there's a societal problem.
Looking at the hard data from 2012-13, we have 10.7% international students. So of the US students, 7.4/.897 = 8.2% identified as African American.
It's true that this is under-represented compared to the 12.2% of the US population for that demographic cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat... and in fact the ratio of the two percentages is about 0.67, so you could argue that about 33% of African American students who ought to be at Princeton if the student body were strictly proportional to population are missing.
If we look at the corresponding numbers of non-Hispanic whites, we see 72.4% of the population, and 56.7% (100 - 10.7 - 38.4)/.897 of Princeton's student body. The ratio is .78, which is definitely higher than 0.67, but not nearly as much higher as I was expecting when I saw the Princeton numbers. For one thing, I recalled the US as being 15-16% African American, but it looks like in the last 20-some years the demographics have shifted markedly... The upshot is that you see fewer black people in Princeton than you might expect based on general population but way more than you used to even in the recent past.
It would be interesting to see what US demographics for college-age folks look like, though; they may be significantly different from overall demographics.
For comparison with the above numbers, American Indian students are underrepresented at Princeton by a factor of 4 or so, and Pacific Islanders by a factor of 1.8. Hispanics are presumably underrepresented by a factor of 2 or so, but it's hard to tell with the complexities of the classifications there. Asian Americans are overrepresented by a factor of 4.
I'm not actually sure I have a point here, other than attempting to quantify "few"...
Ah, OK, it sounded like you'd picked Princeton in particular.
And yes, there are substantial differences between the Ivies, and between other "otherwise prominent" institutions. And even within a single school it can fluctuate widely, whether due to trends or chance. For example, http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/students/diversity.html shows a pretty wide range in African American enrollment numbers at MIT over the last 4 years (ranging from 5.3% to 7.7%) and similar fluctuations for Latinos (but at a much higher base level).
Another confounding factor here is that even though the applicant pools and matriculating classes for these schools have gotten much more national than they used to be, the matriculation demographics still tend to skew somewhat local. MIT, for example, has a disproportionate number of undergrads from Massachusetts: according to http://web.mit.edu/registrar/stats/geo/ there are 340 of them out of 4080 US students total (8%) this year, while the population of MA, at 6.6 million, is only 2% of the US population. Similarly, http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admi... says Princeton has 204 students from NJ this year, but only 38 from MA, while the population of NJ is only 1.5 times that of MA at most.
Since different parts of the country have different racial breakdowns (MA is 7% African American, not 12%, for example) this complicates any analysis of the goings-on at such schools. :(
That's an interesting factor that I never thought about in admissions of universities. Location and ethnic makeup of a state might have impact on the enrollment of minorities, though I don't think it's substantive it might have an impact.
But please tell me honestly how you feel about the fact that RIGHT NOW, anyone can look up "investment banking" in the library and start learning about it? They can open trading accounts and start doing it right away without permission from anyone. Would you disagree that the playing field is not level because of this?
I feel people who want to be coders should not wait to get acceptance from incumbent coders, but instead, go to the library and learn to code from books and websites.
Bosses want people with abilities, so if people get abilities, they'll be employable.
YC is probably a great way to start a company, but it is far from a requirement. If females want to found a company, why not start it right now, right away? Why waste time focusing on anything outside their goals?
Why fight to persuade someone that you can make customers happy and then give them back a portion of your work? Why not simply begin to make customers happy right now? This is the best time in the world for doing this, yet so many people are wasting it away by focusing on convincing other people that a minority of people are wrong.
Even if they get everyone to agree with them, they'll still need to do all kinds of hard work to learn to code/be a vet/dancer/founder, etc. So, why not start NOW to do that hard work for one's self?
Although I'm sure you mean well this comment comes across as out of touch with reality.
- Most investment bankers aren't self-taught kids from impoverished neighborhoods who got where they are today through a combination of pluck and determination.
- Good libraries are in good neighborhoods. Poor neighborhoods often don't have a library at all.
- Bosses want people who have abilities, but depending on your circumstances at birth it may take a lot more effort to acquire those abilities.
Some people succeed even though the deck is completely stacked against them. This has always been the case. And yes, the individual should do what they can to make the best of an unfair situation. However, I'm arguing that the deck shouldn't be stacked against people based on gender and race in the first place. And before there can be meaningful change people have to acknowledge that this unfairness has to be addressed.
I think a major argument against this, in the field of programming in particular, is that most of those other field-related imbalances are culture-neutral. You'll find more male sanitation workers, construction workers, plumbers, etc. everywhere from the US, to Brazil, to China, to Russia, to Pakistan. (Controlling, of course, for the more general inequities in employment-by-gender that those cultures face.)
But the "no female programmers" thing is specific to western culture. There are plenty of female programmers in India, and in Russia. So this is likely something about western culture, that has caused this difference.
>But the "no female programmers" thing is specific to western culture. There are plenty of female programmers in India, and in Russia. So this is likely something about western culture, that has caused this difference.
i'd be very curious to hear from a female programmer from Russia. I just find it hard to believe in overturning of the sexist culture there, and my impression that we have more females in hi-tech here in SV.
Do you have any statistics for your claim about female programmers in India? I have yet to meet a single Indian programmer who was female in the decade and a half I have been programming. In fact, the only females in tech of Indian heritage that I know have been US-born.
I don't have statistics, but Apple sent me to India/Infosys in 2009 to train their programmers, and it seemed about 50/50 to me (I worked with a few hundred people). I have no idea if that's representative, but I have no reason to think it isn't.
For a girl in India, studying computer science is one of the best options. Jobs are abound, pay relatively well and work environment is thousand times better and safer when compared to other industries. This I guess, explains what you observed on your trip.
The Scandinavian countries rank high, probably the highest, when it comes to gender equality. They also rank high when it comes to having a gender segregated labour market. You might find more women in STEM in a third world country that has less gender equality than in a Scandinavian country. One possible explanation is that these countries are affluent while countries with more gender inequality tend to be less affluent. If you don't have a social safety net, and maybe even have to rely on finding a husband to provide for you and all the uncertainty that goes with that, if you don't find a job for yourself that is lucrative enough, STEM might be a good choice. But if you live in a country with both a lot of gender equality and income equality? Then money doesn't factor into it that much anymore...
I tried to Google for the articles I've read about this but I didn't manage to find them.
I think it's more about first world culture and career opportunities.
Programming (or anything with a keyboard) is not really seen a manly profession in developing countries. Or, to be frank, in the first world countries either.
The difference is that in the first world, the pay increase and quality of life is much greater between say carpenter or fireman vs computer programmer.
I've been in conversations in with high level execs where the disdain for the 'tappy tappy' crew is clear.
There are also many apprenticeships for women in construction/plumbing, because they are 1) good-paying jobs (at least in housing booms) and 2) ones where historically women have been denied apprenticeships/union membership.
Oddly enough, there is also gender imbalance in the fashion industry, but not the way you're thinking of it. Sure, women models make WAY more money than male models, but more top designers are men: (http://www.universityobserver.ie/2012/02/06/gender-imbalance...)
Maybe you should do a little googling before you sound off about the lack of hand-wringing? Maybe it's just you who don't care.
An assertion that female behaviour or aptitude differs from male behaviour or aptitude in a way that casts women in a positive light is valid.[1]
An assertion that female behaviour or aptitude differs from male behaviour or aptitude in a way that casts women in a negative or possibly negative light is evidence of sexism and something that must be fixed.[2]
Usually when people are making the argument that "men and women think differently", it is an excuse for why the status quo should remain so. Yes, we all know that men and women have different brains and may not be interested in programming in the same percentages.
That doesn't mean that programmer culture can't often be hostile to women, and doesn't deserve scrutiny. But that also doesn't mean that pg and YC need to be crucified for not immediately ridding the world of all "Cowboy Developer" wanted ads.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadYear over year, the female participation in YC batches has been improving: http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg
From the article, "What stops female founders?"[1].
[1] Citation: http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2011/01/what-stops-fema...
And the related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6986797
No matter how the rest of the essay is, this honestly doesn't mean jack and insults the intelligence of his critics, no matter how off-the-mark they were. He goes on to note other, more meaningful statistics, which is great, but this sentence alone is kind of laughable.
edit: the downvote was predictable, although still disappointing. I was simply pointing out that picking your wife as a cofounder should not be used as proof that you are not biased against women. Honestly, PG's argument would be stronger as a whole if he removed that line from the essay.
edited to add: The reason the "look at my black friends" argument is mocked is that in many cases the friends referred to are not friends in the true sense of the word. There's no such distinction possible when talking about a co-founder. One either is or is not a co-founder.
You can also be married and be sexist.
The fact that investors make or lose money based on their beliefs does provide one source of pressure to be rational, but it's not a guarantee.
In my professional life, of the the managers working for me was formally accused of racist conduct by an employee he supervised. The core argument was that he was unpleasant and unfair to him based on his race. A major part of his defense was his family (his wife happened to be of the same race), his children, and the extensive work that he did in that community mentoring people.
Bias is a state of mind. Facts/statistics alone do not tell the story.
I don't know Paul but I do know that based on this article he's laying out the problem based on what he knows which is start ups. I appreciate him doing this as I get a better insight to the problem from someone that has firsthand, "in the field" knowledge. I also got some great takeaway action items that I can apply for my own kids. So, thanks for that.
> The 13% number is from a study we did ourselves
What 13% number? I don't see the number 13 mentioned anywhere else on the page. I suppose it's related to this line:
> In the current YC batch, 16 out of 68 companies, or 24%, have female founders. That's almost twice the rate at which VCs fund such companies
...but if so, it could be stated more explicitly.
Finding smart people who can think abstractly isn't actually that hard -- lots of people can do it. But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.
The layers of abstraction go very deep, and every layer leaks a bit.
Depends what you define as productive programming. Not every problem requires intimate knowledge of the whole stack. Besides, I found that the most important skills for me are not in trying to memorise all the details, but to get good at using reference materials and to look for the structures rather than the nouns.
Where does Zuckerberg stand merit wise? I see him in the news headlines often with his smiling picture. What makes him more clever than the rest of you.
Where does he stand as an engineer, at founding and then? Is he just a face, a legend, or does is he a real decision maker?
I'm also glad YC is being proactive here. It's always clear that certain biases exist, and the only way to overcome them is by addressing them specifically. Deep cognitive biases (against young people for example) can only be overcome by amazing success stories.
Note: I'm a woman and started this way teaching myself C when young. Client/server tutorials were one of the most fun, I recall.
I posted because PG said a YC non-profit was looking at this and wanted to say that if you want a kid to program at home, the issue is that they need access to the Internet (to get to a client/server tutorial, for example). His statement seemed to say that access to hardware was the problem, which in my experience, is not the case.
In my 1:1 cases, I can manage.
EDIT to add the footnote text from the article
Many kids now have computers with Internet access, but kids from poor families often don't. So to get them interested in programming you also have to solve the problem of hardware somehow. That is among the problems being attacked by one of the nonprofits in the current YC batch.
The problem of not having a "computer with Internet access" is not a "problem of hardware", it's the Internet part.
But, to a kid, that wants to follow their own interests, they need the internet at home. Not having it at home is a huge disadvantage to the poor.
> For those wondering why this is important, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
"If negative stereotypes are present regarding a specific group, group members are likely to become anxious about their performance, which may hinder their ability to perform at their maximum level. For example, stereotype threat can lower the intellectual performance of African-Americans taking the SAT reasoning test used for college entrance in the United States, due to the stereotype that African-Americans are less intelligent than other groups. Importantly, the individual does not need to subscribe to the stereotype for it to be activated. Moreover, the specific mechanism through which anxiety (induced by the activation of the stereotype) decreases performance is by depleting working memory (especially the phonological aspects of the working memory system).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966969
I'm not saying that out of some attempt to sweep away the general problem of improving diversity; it's just important to work on solutions that will actually make a difference.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23713580
Less than 10% of nurses in the United States are male.
Why isn't there a hue and cry about this gender imbalance? Is it even a real problem?
And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it?
Could women in technology be the flip side of that coin, when sexism by bosses and coworkers is eliminated?
There is, but you're probably not that exposed to it often by dint of (presumably) not being part of that industry. But if you look into it, there's concern about the lack of male nurses and a concerted effort to improve diversity (the same for other professions with traditionally female-skewed demographics, like teaching).
Do you have some links to orgs working to get more men into female-skewed professions? I'd be very interested to read them.
Frankly, organizations working to get more men into teaching or nursing is so easy to find by Google, I think people claiming otherwise should be assumed to have agenda. I am starting to suspect these are intentional trolling.
What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different. Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways. For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes. For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller. And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
Nursing would be among the worst professions for me. It requires a lot of simultaneous attention to wide variety of details - the cost of missing something is somebody's pain, injury, life... I can focus really deep on one thing at a time - suited me well in Math before and in programming now - while any situation requiring attention to a several different details in parallel or quick sequence just exhausts me.
Related to it is the perfection level required. Take the simplest thing - inserting needle into a vein. Doing it a 1000 times, you need to do it perfectly a 1000 times. In my mentality - it is much more efficient/faster to do something not perfectly, thus getting it right, say, 9 times out of 10 and apply additional effort to correct the 1 out of 10 mistake. The same about following a multi-item checklist (or multi-step procedures) - i immediately filter out "unnecessary/unimportant" items. Obviously, such mentality have no place in nursing :)
However, the expected happiness is probably negative (unless people like failing). The guy at the end of the tail is not 10,000X happier than the average person.
What doing a startup does is worst case, that it accelerates your carreer a lot. If you do startups for 2 years, you can get the jobs (if you want) that people working at a corporation will get within 10 years, so it accelerates your career by the factor of around 5.
Examples? Myself and all my startup-friends who have to work for someone every now and then when the bank balance nears 0 again are offered very high-paying/high responsibility jobs.
The reason for that is that the education about business, building a product and personal growth that you get out of a startup is simply unmatched.
For that reason, it's smarter to do a startup in all cases. However, only if you want to accelerate your career of course. If you don't want to make career in your life, then doing a startup is not smarter, because it does take a toll.
He comes closest to saying anything of substance with the paragraph: So how would you cause there to be more female programmers? The meta-answer is: not just one thing. People's abilities and interests by the time they're old enough to start a startup are the product of their whole lives—indeed, of their ancestors' lives as well...you probably have to go back to the point where it starts to become significant.
The fact this post mentions no group currently working towards what pg says should be done really bothers me. It appears he has done no research. Groups exist which work towards that very goal of getting girls interested in programming so they become women involved in tech.
What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/)
What about Black Girls Code? (http://www.blackgirlscode.com/)
How would you get more girls interested in programming? I don't know much about girls specifically, but I have some ideas about how to get kids interested in programming.
This came off similar to how Stephen Colbert jokes that he "doesn't see color". If you cannot be bothered to understand the very group you hope to address why even bother? How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)?
I don't think he should have written this post. He put lots of effort into writing, but seems to have put very little thought or research into the actual subject. I guess he felt defensive about his character being sullied but I think he sufficiently addressed that issue already.
Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? The reason sexism-related stories fall down is not because of lack of interest or due to prejudice, but quite the contrary: too much interest, causing an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, and a subsequent sinking.
This is HN. Come on, we should know better.
Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.
Either way, it absolutely does not apply here. HN's algorithms sinking sexism-related stories is a side effect. The fact of the matter is it will sink any story that has an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, whether it's about sexism, Haskell or the Church of the SubGenius.
This is the same logic as saying that encryption is evil because it can be used by terrorists to hide information. Encryption always does the same thing, it's fundamentally neutral, regardless of what's being encrypted. The same way HN's algorithms are fundamentally neutral, regardless of what happens to trigger their procedures.
If you don't want to apply a label to the algorithm, how about "Foo Bar's decision to run Algorithm X against Dataset Y resulted in consequences that predictably increased prejudice, so it would have been better if he hadn't done it"?
If that's okay, note that this is pretty close to what parfe said -- he's clearly upset at the fact that pg chooses to run an algorithm on Hacker News, rather than at the algorithm itself.
Let's assume that it's a bad design decision. Your logic behind it being prejudiced is still faulty, as it ascribes a fallacious cause.
The algorithm merely shuffles page rankings based on two criteria: upvotes and comments, both of which are user-supplied. The algorithm does not support prejudice, it simply behaves in the fashion it is programmed to. You're completely ignoring all of the mundane stories that go down due to the same factors, and cherry picking the ones about sexism.
All known halting program/input pairs are inherently a little bit prejudiced.
Time for dinner. heh.
Don't blame the algorithm for the fallacies of the people using it. The only fault in your scenario is the PEBCAK.
Its been very clear for a long time that almost all discussion about women in tech is as good as censored on hackers, which is a shame because its giving a lot of well intentions but naive people the impression that there is no problem.
What you get is a small group of vocal people eager to discuss the topic while everyone else simply avoids the post. This is similar behavior to what is seen in a flamewar, but could we agree that there might possibly be a better way to rank posts that is able to differentiate between an important discussion that not many people want to have, versus a petty internet argument?
The sexism-related posts have a large number of upvotes, yet they are penalized anyway by the controversial algorithm under discussion.
I would have flagged it myself, but somehow I don't think flagging a PG article is conducive to my further ability to use the feature...
Sorry for being insensitive, but complaints about presentation slides mentioning porn stars (unnecessarily edgy IMO, but not misogynistic unless you stretch the definitions of freedom/dignity/exploitation to mean that all porn is exploitative), late night invitations to drink coffee and dongle/forking jokes haven't made me more sympathetic to having a debate about sexism in tech; if anything, they've made me avoid reading or commenting on anything related to sexism. I don't want to keep women who feel wronged by some event from retelling the experience, but most of the stories about sexism in tech I've read have made me form a pattern of avoiding sexism stories altogether.
I fear I might be missing insightful essays from women about their experiences (good, bad, and anything in between) in tech.
Stories by women* about their perceptions of the hostile sexualization of many work and conference environments are themselves part of the case being made that women are being held back.
(You would perhaps be shocked how many men share many of the same concerns, and not just out of solidarity with women.)
Ambivalence of the sort you claim and the concomitant disinclination to engage and try to understand things like the late night coffee invitation incident is part of what is holding women back.
I'm not* saying that you're actively choosing to make the world a worse place. Further, as beings of finite attention and lifespan it's quite true that we can't possibly pay attention to everything.
In your writing I do hear a bit of something that makes me thing you might want to understand what the big deal is, but it just hasn't "clicked" for you. Perhaps this is because you find the existing discussions off-putting, or perhaps because the things you read about are about situations that wouldn't be a big deal for you personally.
If you're interested in understanding more, I'm wiling to continue the conversation here or elsewhere.
Even if not, I'd encourage you to keep dipping your toes in the conversation from time to time.
Actually by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black." And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.
And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch. The reason I didn't go into detail about it is that I'm not an expert on the topic. I wasn't going to write about something other people understand so much better than me just to send the message that I care.
That... is not an argument? There's ample evidence to show that members of underrepresented groups within individual companies/industries experience unconscious biases in hiring/ranking/etc, even towards groups of which they're a member.
"While 3 out of 12 is not 50-50,"
http://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing
As long as the ratio isn't much worse than 3:1 (men or women are at least 25% of the workforce) either way I'd argue that it's a pretty balanced work environment all things considered. Shooting for 50/50 equality would potentially make more inequality problems than it solves, just for a different subset of the population.
In other words in nursing if you paid men 2x what women make you'd sort that shit out it quite a hurry and get a bunch of dudes helping take care of people. I'm not sure you could find anyone who would agree that it's an equitable or desirable way to achieve the "right" outcome, though.
Then I moved to Houston for work. There are plenty of jobs out here that pay substantially more than what your average doctor or lawyer makes. I know of welders who are making $80/hr, quadruple what some lawyers I know earn. I know of machinists who own their house and cars and boats and whatever.
I think you're confusing prestige with pay which is totally understandable. But with the education bubble having happened and the resultant unbalance in the workforce prestige != paid well, nor does "uneducated" mean bad pay.
The really great part of all this is that welding or machining or some of these skilled trades are actually much easier than startup founding. It's nearly impossible to get filthy rich that way (not that a startup is any guarantee but there are more billionaire startup founders than billionaire welders) but it's much, much harder to go broke. In other words the income distribution has a shorter right tail but also a shorter left one.
Trying to get more women as startup founders as a way to reduce income inequality seems like a fools errand due to the speculative nature of startups. I'm not saying that there should be fewer women founders, not at all. But to suggest that we can have more equality in the world by balancing out startups totally misses the bigger picture.
It's like pushing for more women princes in Saudi Arabia. Yeah men dominate that right now, but even if you made it 100% equal you're still talking about a trivial percentage of the world's population.
Secondly, this looks similar to the argument that 'men are over represented in positions of power, so men are better off as a whole'. This assumes that men are a collective soup that automatically benefits from being collectively better off. Perhaps by assuming that more men in positions of wealth and power means that all men have an easier time getting into it, ignoring that men come from different backgrounds and social classes and may not ever get a shot at something like that, anyway. I doubt that many have the conundrum of becoming a big-shot CEO, or taking on a high-risk fisherman job because he needs the risk premium (yes, you've probably already read about men being over-represented in some jobs that aren't really featured items on 'career day'. They come up often enough in these threads). Another assumption behind this is that men necessarily benefit from other men being in power. That's a problematic assumption. Why would all men necessarily benefit from that? In fact, assume that a man in power things of women as inferior, and only think that men are a threat to his position of power; then he has a motivation to keep men down, or at least the swaths of men that aren't immediately useful to him.
You're right, we should pay garbagemen and janitors more. Maybe that will encourage more women to go into those fields.
Let's remember that this is a journey, that YC seems to be at the forefront of it and we should encourage the progress to date while maintaining high expectations for the future.
Meanwhile there are genuine benefits to being at the forefront of diversity, as it widens the pool of awesome founders.
Moreover other players tend to take note of what YC does, and as the evidence builds this will help change the industry.
This reminds me of the industry groups going after Apple for their manufacturing practises, which turn out to be amongst the best in the game. While I felt that Apple was unjustly accused, they did open their books about their sustainable practices, and that's helped improve industry expectations.
If any evidence would be relevant here it would be something like results of implicit association tests on the topic. I for one would be very interested in the (effects of the) results.
For the record though; I thoroughly applaud his efforts on improving gender equality and I very much appreciate the first baby steps he's taking here on behalf of the industry. I really hope though that one day he'll be able to look back on this essay and realise this was really only just the start of it.
Also, a bit unrelated but since Billy Beane became GM, the A's have never won less that 74 games. It seems like exploiting market inefficiencies is extraordinarily effective at minimizing downside risk.
> Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely.
He's saying that a useful definition of meritocracy does not mean that everyone is only judged by his abilities. He's saying explicitly that such a thing does not exist. Further:
> And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good.
I don't know how you jump from "pretty good" to "near perfect meritocracy".
Given that context pg then goes on to use math as a rhetoric device to illustrate an inherently perfect meritocracy and then states SV is nearly as good; hence 'near perfect'.
You are judging particular people based on statistics that you think you know about groups of people. I don't think I have to explain the irony here.
Responding with statistics about women in general, rather than relevant information about those particular women, is problematic.
I do think YC is probably more open to women as founders than the VC norm, but it's the overall statistics that convince me of that more than some attempt to discern what its principals personally think about things. That was the most interesting part of this post as well, talking about what YC is actually doing.
It is therefore relevant to consider the individuals involved when we are talking about systematic biases of the system which is composed of them. You cannot talk about the biases of YC without talking about the biases of the people who comprise YC. It would be like talking about the structural integrity of a building while trying to never consider the physical properties of the building materials.
(Of course, even if we strike off this entire thread of conversation as irrelevant, that does not make the comment I was responding to any less problematic.)
Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.
None of this is relevant to the discussion at hand.
The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]. None of the men overlap in expertise with the positions held by the women. None of the women overlap in expertise with the positions held by the men. The "model" person the firm likes to do business with is a caricature of only <one> of the sub-sets of staff. Because there is no gender overlap in these two sets, this is "strucurally" sexist...at least arguably...regardless of which sub-set does the selection [2,3].
[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant.
[1] The rest of the staff are all Hackers or Designers.
[2] The allocation actually doesn't matter. Only the stratification.
[3] Note, however that the "model" personality type is de-facto gendered [male]. This is not a logical necessity. It could be the case that the roles are reversed--either all of the hackers were/are women, etc...or the target Founders could be Hr/ops-legal-accounting...etc.
The "appeal to statistics" is just re-proposed racist talking points. You would not accept it in a discussion involving race, and you should not accept it in a discussion involving sex or gender.
> Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.
1) See above.
2) I am not baiting anybody into disparaging these women, and do not see how my comments could honestly be misconstrued as such. I don't want @zorpner to insult these women, I want zorpner to realize that unless they have specific information about these specific women, then there is no justification for assuming such disparaging things about these women.
3) I have made absolutely no threats, veiled or otherwise. Where the hell are you getting this from?
> "The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]..." "[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant..."
This has been addressed in this discussion by one of the women in question, I am genuinely stunned that you are repeating it.
For more info and facts on unconscious bias and women in tech:
http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/ncwit_the...
Unconscious bias is the reason a resume with a female name is rated more poorly, even by women.
Sexism is everybody's problem. (Although as a guy who has benefited from it, I think it's my job to use that unearned power to reduce the inequity.)
The second paragraph was mostly fine but it did come off a little... unhumble. And humility is usually the tone you want when talking about how your company is doing good for X cause, but it could be doing more.
Up until about the 70s or so, racists campaigned heavily against interracial marriage. Most racists likely still hold these views, though after 1967 they are no longer relevant so you don't hear about it very often.
I do not recall any sexist groups ever campaigning against heterosexual marriage. Now, sexists have campaigned against laws that would equalize the rights that people in marriages have.
Therefore "I am not sexist because I believe that my wife and I are equals and should be treated as equals by the law" would be an analogous statement.
[1] The most important thing about any relationship is that the other party will at least listen and consider what you have to say. People online (and spouses or girlfriends) who cut off without even considering are persona non grata to me. I wouldn't marry or date them and I wouldn't invest in them.
Can you share more about what Hacker School is doing to get girls and women interested in programming? "Hacker School is currently only for people who already know how to code," according to their FAQ, which seems counterintuitive to getting people (women or otherwise) interested in programming.
You're correct that Hacker School is not for people who have never programmed before. We are not directly working on helping people write their first line of code.
But we do help people, including many women, take the next step (e.g., we've had women come to HS as little as eight weeks after they wrote their first lines of code). Learning to code is a continuum (and something that takes place over many years), not a binary thing, and we help at just about every point except the first month or two.
We've also put a lot of work into fixing the leaky-pipeline problem. For instance, a female Stanford CS grad told us that Hacker School is why she decided to take a job as a programmer (she was planning not to go into programming after her experience at Stanford).
A few ways we've worked to support female programmers:
- We've built an environment that we think is more human-friendly (and therefore also more female-friendly) by having explicit social rules and norms that work to fight impostor syndrome and other fears and insecurities that get in the way of people's education (see: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment).
- We've awarded over $500,000 in grants for female programmers, which were generously funded by numerous companies including GitHub, Etsy, Dropbox, Palantir, Jane Street, Tapad, Tumblr, and others (note that Hacker School is 100% free for all students, so these grants are purely used for living expenses).
- As a result, Hacker School has been 30-45% women for our past five batches.
- We've helped numerous women (and men) move from being very beginner programmers working in other fields to being employed as programmers at excellent companies.
- We've helped experienced female programmers become even more awesome and progress personally and professionally.
Towards this last point, we're working on visibility and gender equality on the higher end. Here's a testimonial from a recent alumna who was already a pretty accomplished programmer when she came to Hacker School:
"Hacker School gave me a lot more confidence in my programming abilities. I wouldn't have even considered proposing a conference talk before Hacker School, but now I've spoken at LambdaJam, Strange Loop, and Strata this year! I had previously believed that contributing to open source was just too hard for me to do (big unfamiliar code base with no help!), but now I don't hesitate to make pull requests when I find minor bugs in software I use. The most important thing to me about attending is that you become part of this network of supportive, technical people. They connect you to interesting opportunities, help you when you ask, and support you when you're stretching to do something new."
I think increasing the number of female role models for women who don't yet code indirectly helps bring more women into the field. And additionally, many of our alumnae volunteer and mentor new female programmers outside of Hacker School, and many of them would not have been in a position to do so without the confidence, experience, and skills they acquired at Hacker School.
(Sorry if my response is all over the place; I'm supposed to be in a meeting now so this is a little rushed.)
Edit: Typos and formatting
In fact, one of the rules in Hacker School is that you are not even allowed to discuss sexist, rascist, etc things at all. From the manual [1]:
"Why don't we want public discussions of sexism, racism, etc. at Hacker School? For many people, especially those who may have spent time in unpleasant environments, these conversations can be very distracting. At Hacker School, we want to remove as many distractions as possible so everyone can focus on programming. There are many places in the world to discuss and debate these issues, but there are precious few where people can avoid them. We want Hacker School to be one of those places."
[1]: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual
While I don't agree (really, I know virtually nothing about those women and haven't met them), I think you would find that many of your critics from the original controversy do think they are sexist and would say it to their faces.
So effectively they have veto powers. This sounds a bit like "my wife runs the house, I'm only allowed to do what she lets me do." I know that's not what you mean, but you come off sounding too defensive in most of the essay. Stop playing defense with words, let your actions (or YC results speak for themselves). More importantly, take a step back to truly understand the problem and perhaps study some solutions that have worked in other industries.
Why do I think you should do some more studying?
Because you still make comments like this: "You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like. There’s a bunch of ways you can do it. You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon." You made a similar comment two years ago [1].
Because of statements in your essay like the ones highlighted by parfe in the parent post and by me in this post. These statements don't mean anything, they carry no weight, and I'm surprised you would think they do. All your best friends could be Martians and you could be actively trying to destroy every Martian on Mars, except your friends of course. One does not preclude the other.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256052
To put my experience in context, I didn't know a single soul interested in programming IRL. So the only way I could have come to it is from a deeply genuine place.
In my adult life, I've heard many men talk about their excitement for coding/programming at a young age, and it is almost always about the love of simply building things. Because building is fun.
Unfortunately, my experience could not have been more different. Reflecting on my thought processes at that age, I remember it being entirely about 2 things:
1. Expression. Nothing could have sounded more dull than building aimlessly-- I wanted to DESIGN. (My definition of this being "carrying out a specific communicative purpose through look and function.") I wanted to make a website that demonstrated my tastes and values to my friends. (Which is likely why I went straight to websites and not desktop software.)
2. Social dynamics. Similar but different to the aforementioned point, I wanted to actually affect other people with what I was making. As a young girl, that typically meant impressing potential friends and boyfriends. I had a poetry site at one point. I made sites for a fake band my girl friends and I talked about forming. I had tons of blogs. I really should have segued into games at that time, as that would have fallen in the same category, but sadly I did not.
That said-- while I know every human being is different, I was what you'd consider a "girly girl." So I believe the difference between myself and a young boy was quite pronounced in a stereotypically feminine direction-- which is where one should be investigating a subject like this, in my opinion.
He meant the post to be a statement of his position, not a rallying cry to fix a societal problem. You seem to have wanted the latter, not the former. That's fine, but it's not a failing on his part that he didn't write the post you wanted him to write.
That's a huge distinction.
The first three sentences of his post disagree.
He was accused both of being a sexist himself and of YC being sexist. I would say the "he is sexist" (for the sake of argument, let's assume that "sexist" means "particularly sexist" because it's hard to argue ANYONE is entirely innocent of being sexist) were pretty tenuous, but his attitude toward whether or not YC was biased toward men were pretty off.
This does a great job of explaining the latter, which I feel were a legitimate problem.
"PG, of the three female partners you mentioned, one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations.
How many full-time or part-time YC partners actually advise companies on business strategy?"
"That's good to know - I wasn't aware of that. I'm happy to hear this isn't the case, but I've heard this from YC founders many times which is why it was my perception."
I wouldn't have just told Charlie Rose "All Hail Jessica Livingston" if her role were just "founder relations" -- without going into the roles all the partners (male and female alike) play in YC, that simplification is way off.
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-without-their-permission-cha...
(1) First off, it's great that several YC founders are so quick to come to the female YC partners' defense, which lends a lot of credence to PG and JL's claims about the large role of female partners at YC.
(2) We all know that even the greatest product can be held back by poor marketing. I don't personally know the YC founders my friend above referenced (via my username), but the fact that some~many YC founders would think that at all, shows that there's a lack of good marketing/branding around how active and influential women (i.e. JL/KN/CL) are at YC.
The (positive) reality clearly does not match the (negative) perceptions.
I don't know what the solution would be, and you could certainly argue that PG/JL/et al. shouldn't have to "market" or "brand" this aspect of YC at all, but clearly this a problem, especially in light of PG's latest essay, the Information/Valleywag incident, etc.
And yet there is no sense of remorse or apology for that.
Where is the indignation now towards yourself and them? Or is that only reserved for people who are actually doing something in the world?
1) whether they can actually describe in some detail what JL / KN / CL do at YC (hint: they're easily seen to be quite active, so one might wonder what's keeeping them so busy)
2) whether they ever bothered to arrange office hours with any of them to see whether they could be helpful (YC partners' schedules are oversubscribed so you can't expect them to come to you to offer help)
3) whether they ever drafted a contract or financing document during their early stages without consulting KN or CL (and if so, why they chose to make important decisions without the advice of experts who are strongly incentivized to help them free of charge)
4) whether their company survived long enough to need advice on financing, contracts, or founder issues such as a departing founder or bringing on a late-stage founder
I think that would help to clarify how justified the initial claims were.
But my greater point was that there is generally too much criticism and indignation that are substituting for listening and understanding. Put yourself in the place of PG and YC in having unjustified criticism like you posted directed at them. And maybe take that to heart before you throw stones.
"Yes, I absolutely am sorry and saddened to have made JL upset. Again, it's been my understanding that while the female partners are great and I'm sure sit in on important decisions, they are primarily YC's accountant and lawyer. If that's not their main role at YC, I and others are mistaken. For the record, I think JL is /great/ and YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like her."
Based on my extensive experience with all of them, I would shuffle your words around a bit and suggest a more accurate characterization is:
YC's female partners are great and make and participate in important decisions. Though it is not their main role at YC, two of them have chief responsibility for YC's own finance/accounting/legal needs.
In hiring Kirsty and Carolynn, YC did hire other women like Jessica, at least on the "great-ness" scale.
And I wholeheartedly agree that YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like all three of them. Just as it would do itself a lot of good to hire other men like pg, pb, Robert, Trevor, Kevin, Aaron, Geoff and Garry.
Careful, you're not fitting the narrative these people want believe. But seriously, disappointed pg even wrote this. Just engaging with these people is losing.
http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s
I would estimate that, collectively, I have worked with Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica for upwards of 500 hours over the past 2 1/2 years. And I would estimate that 80-90% of that time has been on product development, business development, sales, customer acquisition, fundraising assistance ... I could go on.
Outside of our company, there is nobody who has been more involved with our "business strategy" than Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica. There is not one part of our business that they have not been critically and deeply involved with.
(minor edit for grammar)
Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends?
Or is it up to the mob to define what "friendship" is?
No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X. Finding specific people of group X meet your bar from friendship, no matter how high that bar is, does not mean that you don't have a bias -- even potentially a very strong bias -- against people of group X, it just means that if you do some people have other characteristics that have weighed sufficiently in your favor to outweigh any general bias you have.
Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then.
I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.
I think the problem has nothing to do with the word "friend" but the word "prejudice".
> I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.
So what? The fact that people in group X can earn any given position with you doesn't mean that they don't, just by the fact of being members of group X, start out in a worse position in your view. So, that people in group X may have earned the designation "friend" from you does not in any way prove that you don't have a prejudice, even potentially a very strong one, against group X.
The man accused described his black golf caddy as a friend. Of course, he was no such thing no matter how cordial their relationship.
Generally, in practice, one can't prove the presence or absence of prejudice on a particular axis. I mean, to prove its absence, you'd have to prove that your subjective assessment of people is not affected by their status on the axis in question.
EDIT: If one is accused of bias based on a particular example of supposedly unequal treatment based on the status in question, of course, one can always provide the actual basis for the specific treatment at issue, or simply rebut the factual characterization of the treatment.
Without information about the external constraints on your hiring, I'm not sure it would really constitute meaningful evidence (e.g., if the entire available employment pool was black, hiring only blacks wouldn't be evidence that the process you had implemented wasn't biased, just that the bias has no opportunity to manifest.)
(This is the kind of thing that would work mostly to burden shift, but then the burden would already, IMO, be on the person making the accusation from the start.)
OTOH, it would be very challenging (though not impossible) for anyone to have evidence that your system was biased against blacks with a hired-all-blacks outcome.
It is entirely possible to find evidence of things that turn out to be false. For example, you could take the seemingly chaotic retrograde motion of the planets in the night sky as evidence of the existence of gods with self-determination. We know know that isn't true, we have better explanations for that phenomenon (notably the notion of heliocentricity).
The planets moving differently from the stars was never proof that there were gods up there, but evidence? Sure, it was evidence. Evidence can be of various qualities, evidence of thins has to be judged critically, and weighed against the alternatives.
Facts which do not provide a basis for comparisons of how different values on that axis are treated are not much evidence for or against bias, this include facts about outcome (e.g., all the people I hired are black, etc.) without additional information from which the expected outcome in the absence of bias can be inferred.
Someday, the community can wake up and decide that witch-hunting is not a respectable hobby.
They are unrepentent and relentless. Flagging the threads is the only way to defend https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments from horrible halfwits.
I can see you are trying to help the subject and advance the discussion forward. I wonder if it would be more productive to instead just criticize point by point pg's post (which I think was decent), instead write what you would suggest would be an alternative.
You pointed to What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/) and another one and mentioned how he has done no research. Alright, what about CWC? What is your research? Instead of just shutting down point after point in the original post, maybe explain why you think GWC or BGC is a better alternative.
> I don't think he should have written this post.
Then we would have seen comments complaining about "PG has has this incident in a while and hasn't followed up, that is so typical of such and such ...".
It bothers me unduly much that it has become a common meme that saying this amounts to saying "I am a racist!" That may be convenient pattern-matching, but if someone has friends that are black, that is definitely some evidence that they aren't racists.
I think this really comes down to pattern-matching and goalpost shifting. There are many definitions of racism, and conflating them serves the purposes of people on both sides of the argument, which makes it an anti-useful rather than merely useless term. When someone says "I'm not a racist, I have black friends" they are referring to the casual/common definition of racism, which is that they judge individuals as individuals and not based on their membership of a racial group. Under this definition, calling someone a racist is essentially saying that they have views that are sympathetic to the views of extremist groups like the KKK. Under this definition, saying, "I'm not racist, I have black friends" makes perfect sense, because it implies that, even if they have tiny biases against people based on race, they are at least not so strong as to preclude having close personal relationships with them.
Another definition of racism, used by people arguing against them, amounts to "everyone is racist in some ways, so it's basically always wrong to say you aren't a racist." (Obviously this is a caricature of another end of the spectrum, there are intermediate definitions) Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what. If this is the definition of racism you are using, there is literally no evidence you can provide other than to be black yourself to avoid claims of racism against black people. People who subscribe to this definition have had arguments with people who they believe to be self-evidently racist, yet who used "I have black friends," so many times, that it pattern-matches in their brain to "this person is a racist." This is an uncharitable view.
Having black friends or black family members is Bayesian evidence that someone isn't racist as it is defined in casual discourse, and I think it's time that people stop pretending it's the opposite. Similarly, having a female co-founder is valid evidence that you view females as having the capability of equal business acumen to men, no matter how much people dislike the way the argument pattern-matches.
Unfortunately, there is literally no way to be so careful with your language use to avoid this argument, because the issue has long, long since diverged from the norms of reasonable discourse. There will always be people on the side of "everyone is racist" who will just say, "He's just hiding his racist views by trying to use alternate terminology."
In some limited cases, even being a member of the group that you are accused of being biased against is not enough to save you from the accusations.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew
" "Within the logic of the concept, those who accuse others of being self-hating Jews may themselves be self-hating Jews."[14] Gilman says "the ubiquitousness of self-hatred cannot be denied. And it has shaped the self-awareness of those treated as different perhaps more than they themselves have been aware."[5]"
That is some 'next level shit' right there.
Being specific - are you suggesting more outreach? Overpaying to take funding opportunities away from others? Lowering the bar? Offering more coaching to promising candidates?
Even Seinfeld isn't immune: http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s
PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true."
John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."
I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.
John Doerr is saying that sometimes one of factors in making a funding decision is similarity to other massively successful founders, not the people making the funding decisions. PG has been pretty open about the fact that pattern matching to other successful founders is very common.
Thankfully PG does not actually take as extreme a position as Doerr. He merely downplays the existence of it in the VC community.
Such articles mostly repeat feminist/misandric boiler-plate amounting to little more than defending female privilege (e.g. no draft, longer life, many more opportunities to avoid having to work, better medical care, earlier retirement, more lenient sentencing for equal crimes etc, more social services, etc). I think a common term for this is "privilege blindness". Why would a thinking person want to read this again and again?
So why would Paul try and talk from his zero years of experience as a woman and explain how to get more women in coding? Why not simply state "Please stop calling me a sexist, I don't like it, here's some facts about sexism at YC and in the industry in general."
You're looking too deeply into this, I think.
That's what HN does.
I dunno. Allow me to share some thoughts as a young woman.
I had no problem getting into computer programming when I was young.
I had no problem getting accepted to a high-ranking university and graduating mathematics.
I had no problem completing a master's in computer science.
I had no problem finding resources for programming because they're already there, written by men and women. They just don't have "women's" or "for girls" written on the cover in large, brightly-coloured, friendly script.
So I don't really see what the fuss is about. Couldn't the low number of female computer scientists be due to the fact that not many girls are actually interested in such things? Maybe women can think and perceive what is around them for themselves, and don't need charities to show them the "hidden option" of programming?
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Addendum: before somebody jumps to the conclusion that I'm from a wealthy background, I'm working class, a humble chain-smoking serf. I'm from a bloody poor family and my CV has more bartending credentials than tech. I've never even dreamed of owning a current-gen Macbook, in stark contrast to every student I see these days, all seeming to have thousands of pounds worth of hardware without working a day in their lives. I've been using the same Linux machine for half a decade.
Libraries are free. If you're interested in doing something and you have the aptitude, you don't need to be spoon-fed by liberals.
That really doesn't help anything. Why are they not interested? Are you saying something in the core of being a woman makes them not want to code?
> spoon-fed by liberals.
Something something true colors.
We have different hormones, definitely. But different values and priorities? Different conclusions? I (a man) have very different values and priorities from quite a lot of men. Men often come to different conclusions than other men.
This is not a fundamental men vs women difference. People are different. Men and women are both people.
Suppose that you walk up to someone who earns $100,000 a year and donates 60% to charity, and you see that although he rarely goes on vacations abroad and lives in a 500 square foot apartment he does have a relatively new car. You then say "how could you? If you had gotten a slightly crappier car you could have saved $3000 and sent that off to fight malaria in Africa and saved someone's life! Do you really value that tiny dose of comfort above a human life?"
It may be a valid moral point depending on your personal morality, but acting that way is absolutely useless if not counterproductive toward the general goal of getting more money donated to charity to fight malaria in Africa.
He's going with the "black friend" defense?
Key learnings:
1. Being an above 25y founder was viewed as advantageous and below 25y founder was viewed a disadvantageous before YC/2005. YC made being <25y old founders viewed as advantageous and >25y founders as disadvantegous.
2. YC making young founders succeed inspires the older founders, plus other young founders.
3. They tried the same for female founders. However, acquiring the skills to do a startup requires decade-long exposure to tech and business of a decade, sometimes even it requires exposure for a whole generation. For that reason, it is not as easy to what YC did with women as with young founders
4. Prgrammers here, stereotypes there, it ALL goes back to getting young girls to do their own projects in their teens to acquire the business acumen, hard programming skills and understanding of how to build a product that people will want. That is the solution and nothing else will help more than this.
Disagree with this point, unless you mean relative to pre-2005. I'd argue that it brought the age range of founders closer to the optimal spread, rather than bias against founders above 25. It just made investors admit that there's not an age at which you suddenly become "founder" material.
I think it addresses the issues better as being of education, certification, professionalism, skills, talents, and abilities that one needs to get started in STEM roles regardless of gender, et al. I really think GG hits the nail on the head with that post. Don't let a few jerks or douchebags who are not 99.9999% of the industry make you think that all of the industry are just like them.
I'm still glad I brought it up - the discussion (not from PG but from others) was revealing, but your head is screwed on straight about how to think about whether or not YC is allowing the institutional biases of others cloud its own judgement, and that's great news.
That is a very mature approach, I am sure :P
I mean that ('posture piece') as neutrally, perhaps, as it is possible to mean it.
>come away with the idea that YC is somehow sexist.
And you can say, with a straight face, that YC is not sexist? That it's just the tech environment, and you're on the 'right side'?
Again, this is about your reputation--controlling the narrative.
I don't think he could have made that any clearer.
The nature of this kind of discussion is always going to be hyperbolic and emotionally charged, which is why gender discussions here get nuked.
That's what I find so amusing about PG's foray today: PG could write the most innocuous treatise imaginable, and he'd still be getting into trouble, and deservedly so.
Ask yourself: what happens after this? Is YC going to be the shining light that brings sexual equality to the Valley?
Or does YC culture get to pat itself on the back for being less sexist than the other parts of tech culture and continue its general status quo?
This essay doesn't heal any divide; it just stirs the pot a bit more. It's about reputation, not solutions--which is somewhat a shame, because the second half of the essay (which essentially is a restatement of PG's initial comment) is pretty thoughtful and reasonable.
Dude actually wrote: 'by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black."'
Comedy gold. You just don't say stuff like that.
I mean, maybe he's got some semblance of a good point in there somewhere, but you can't hear it over the kneejerk outrage.
And maybe that's where I have a problem with this. PG ignores the flamewar unless by touching it he can get something he wants--the appropriate reputation amongst moderates. And he can't (and won't) get away scott free.
It's business as usual. I suppose people like you and I are more interested in understanding the relation of SV to the broad context of humanity. Which is why we always get downvoted into oblivion and have to create new accounts.
You seem to be looking at this through a lens of hate. May I ask why?
The rhetorical arc of the piece is public self-exoneration. I don't think you can reasonably argue otherwise.
PG isn't required to give a deposition of his thoughts on the matter. He could remain silent and continue working on what's important to him.
Or more interestingly, he could launch YC initiatives to get girls coding, shift resources towards some meaningful contribution, something more tangible. Possibly he's done that, and combined with aforementioned silence he might be cruising quite comfortably.
Instead he writes a piece designed to keep the 'more moderate people' from thinking YC sexist, a piece that changes nothing (the flame war abounds) except public perception.
See above, "working on what's important to him," with a certain wry taste.
PG's ends, in this case, are his business; he wants to make more money. This piece, seen as a consequentialist act, would be a gambit played to calm a possible negative tide in feminist circles toward YC, that might have resulted in YC getting fewer (qualified!) female applicants... which would be bad for business.
I think your problem might be in assuming PG cares about his personal reputation, rather than about YC's reputation. Only one of those two things will make him money.
In other words: this is part of "working on what's important to him." Playing the politics of business brand-image is just as much a part of "business" as building your product, as far as profitability goes.
>This piece, seen as a consequentialist act, would be a gambit played to calm a possible negative tide in feminist circles toward YC, that might have resulted in YC getting fewer (qualified!) female applicants... which would be bad for business.
Precisely, with a possible qualifier on 'feminist circles'--moderate, maybe even conservative feminist circles.
By which I mean to say, he's pointedly ignoring the feminist concerns outside of the most mainstream: even those that have a point.
Which is why this isn't a conversation! There is no interchange of ideas happening here, only the inevitable flame war spawned by a HN gender topic.
Have some guts and stop beating about the bush.
This piece does nothing but puff up YC in an effort to distance YC from the tech sector's sexism, which will only work to a point.
The target audience is the section of moderate feminists that are inherently sympathetic to YC; the concerns of those outside that layer, even the valid ones, are simply not important to PG.
To reiterate: this is a posturing move, in the most neutral sense possible.
Not entirely sure what the author thinks they are achieving.
Perhaps I am less critical of Paul as much as I am the crude politics of it all--thus critical of Paul by extension.
(Before you think I am directly calling Paul a hypocrite, what I mean is that the toxic flame wars are, by their nature, hypocritical, and it takes care to interact with them without appearing hypocritical yourself--care that I do not think Paul managed.)
Look we get it. You enjoy being some moral arbiter that has impossible standards so you can act like your better than everyone while accomplishing nothing.
:D
And once again, they aren't wishing things were different so they could have done it...
This might be the wrong audience to ask a question like that. :-)
(My own answer: no, of course I don't root for my country's athletes at the Olympics or care whether "we" have a shot at a gold medal.)
I suspect a relatively small number are real trolls; the majority are probably just used to the standard media / Internet battle lines and narratives and attempting to reproduce them, without thinking deeply about the issue. Many of those people can be reached with a more nuanced and interesting discussion, but not in the course of, say, an interview, or a short e-mail exchange.
Having been in a surprisingly large number of situations in which people misinterpret what I say because it doesn't fit into the standard box or boxes common to a subject, I empathize with the problem. And I'm not a famous person or someone who gets interviewed about hot-button topics by time-pressed reporters!
Hopefully something good will come from all of this, so if Paul, or anyone else, has to take a hit at least it will assist in initiating some these conversations.
Turns out that women enroll in our courses at about the same proportion they're currently represented in engineering, which is disappointing, but that there's no difference between their performance once they enroll.
Of particular relevance is the rate at which incoming students report their motivation for taking the course is to "found a startup". 16% of men, but only 5% of women, gave that reason.
[1] http://blog.thinkful.com/post/72670499078/gender-differences...
Edit for grammar.
The results are very revealing for this debate: Once enrolled in our courses, women perform exactly as well as men in every dimension. However, enrollment among women is significantly behind their male peers, but sadly on par with what other coding schools are seeing.
Here's the data: http://blog.thinkful.com/post/72670499078/gender-differences...
To think that pg actually believes that there are no female programmers was the least charitable possible interpretation, and the only reason to have picked that one in particular was to confirm your own bias.
Could it possibly be that men and women think differently, and those minor differences are reflected in their career preferences? Could it be that these preferences play a bigger role in gender imbalances in career fields than sexism in a modern society?
Nah. That's crazy talk.
Yes there is, and examples of programmes to get men into. Ursing or women into construction have been posted to HN before.
Someone always always makes the same point as you and for some reason it always manages to infuriate me. I've had to re-write this 4 times because it was so vicious at first. But it does feel tbat a person must be deliberately trollin when they trot out the same tired bullshit that other idiots spout, especially when that bullshit has been debunked on the same forum that they're posting to and when it is so easy to debunk with a simple websearch. It feels as if some people like living their lives with the blinkers on.
Well then, since I'm spouting "bullshit" (your words):
Educate me. Let me play the "Citation Needed" card.
Until we see what you are basing your silly assertion on, yeah, you are the one spouting bullshit.
Your inability, or unwillingness, to perform a simple websearch even when given suitable search terms tells me all I need to know about your desire to find facts and make corrections to your weong statements.
And your hair-trigger temper and vitriol tell me all I need to know about you.
It has been so thoroughly brought up and smacked down that at this point, I'm going to be charitable (?) and assume that this guy is just trolling and/or meta-trolling at this point. Take a deep breath and let it go.
FWIW, I read HN pretty regularly and had never noticed any programs to get more women into construction. Not to say that they don't exist, but I'd agree with your interlocutor that the level of hand-wringing on that subject doesn't seem at all similar to the level seen in tech.
As for whether that sort of claim is "easy to debunk with a simple websearch", it's probably much easier for you. Keep in mind that google tailors its results to return the sort of sites you've looked for before, so what you see in response to a given search is different from what others would see. (Not to mention that not knowing that something exists makes it hard to know what phrase one might google to find it.) So instead of saying "it's easy to debunk this with a web search", it's far more productive if you do that search yourself and provide an actual link to the references that YOU think debunk it.
Here there actually is a government program to get women into trades, simply because there's a shortage of skilled tradespeople in general, and nearly every other demographic is 'tapped out' if you will.
Construction, while it can be lucrative, is simply not 'aspirational', so anyone looking to improve their social status steers clear of the profession.
1. It is possible that men and women do think differently and therefore have different career preferences, so the optimal gender ratio is not 1:1.
2. Just because the optimal gender ratio may not be 1:1 does not mean that the current expression is the optimal one.
I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women. I don't think we'll ever see 50% participation, but I don't want to see any person (man, woman, or anyone identifying otherwise) turn away from this field because they found it hostile. I do believe that this happens, and that sucks.
And I completely agree. I guess my point is: how much of this outrage is manufactured? Is the gender imbalance truly a "crisis" or is it an artifact of something else entirely?
Messy. And no women are persuaded to learn programming, and no one wins but those websites making money on advertising. Everyone comes away angry.
Looking at the hard data from 2012-13, we have 10.7% international students. So of the US students, 7.4/.897 = 8.2% identified as African American.
It's true that this is under-represented compared to the 12.2% of the US population for that demographic cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat... and in fact the ratio of the two percentages is about 0.67, so you could argue that about 33% of African American students who ought to be at Princeton if the student body were strictly proportional to population are missing.
If we look at the corresponding numbers of non-Hispanic whites, we see 72.4% of the population, and 56.7% (100 - 10.7 - 38.4)/.897 of Princeton's student body. The ratio is .78, which is definitely higher than 0.67, but not nearly as much higher as I was expecting when I saw the Princeton numbers. For one thing, I recalled the US as being 15-16% African American, but it looks like in the last 20-some years the demographics have shifted markedly... The upshot is that you see fewer black people in Princeton than you might expect based on general population but way more than you used to even in the recent past.
It would be interesting to see what US demographics for college-age folks look like, though; they may be significantly different from overall demographics.
For comparison with the above numbers, American Indian students are underrepresented at Princeton by a factor of 4 or so, and Pacific Islanders by a factor of 1.8. Hispanics are presumably underrepresented by a factor of 2 or so, but it's hard to tell with the complexities of the classifications there. Asian Americans are overrepresented by a factor of 4.
I'm not actually sure I have a point here, other than attempting to quantify "few"...
There are also substantial differences between Ivy League schools: http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/ivy-...
And yes, there are substantial differences between the Ivies, and between other "otherwise prominent" institutions. And even within a single school it can fluctuate widely, whether due to trends or chance. For example, http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/students/diversity.html shows a pretty wide range in African American enrollment numbers at MIT over the last 4 years (ranging from 5.3% to 7.7%) and similar fluctuations for Latinos (but at a much higher base level).
Another confounding factor here is that even though the applicant pools and matriculating classes for these schools have gotten much more national than they used to be, the matriculation demographics still tend to skew somewhat local. MIT, for example, has a disproportionate number of undergrads from Massachusetts: according to http://web.mit.edu/registrar/stats/geo/ there are 340 of them out of 4080 US students total (8%) this year, while the population of MA, at 6.6 million, is only 2% of the US population. Similarly, http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admi... says Princeton has 204 students from NJ this year, but only 38 from MA, while the population of NJ is only 1.5 times that of MA at most.
Since different parts of the country have different racial breakdowns (MA is 7% African American, not 12%, for example) this complicates any analysis of the goings-on at such schools. :(
But please tell me honestly how you feel about the fact that RIGHT NOW, anyone can look up "investment banking" in the library and start learning about it? They can open trading accounts and start doing it right away without permission from anyone. Would you disagree that the playing field is not level because of this?
I feel people who want to be coders should not wait to get acceptance from incumbent coders, but instead, go to the library and learn to code from books and websites.
Bosses want people with abilities, so if people get abilities, they'll be employable.
YC is probably a great way to start a company, but it is far from a requirement. If females want to found a company, why not start it right now, right away? Why waste time focusing on anything outside their goals?
Why fight to persuade someone that you can make customers happy and then give them back a portion of your work? Why not simply begin to make customers happy right now? This is the best time in the world for doing this, yet so many people are wasting it away by focusing on convincing other people that a minority of people are wrong.
Even if they get everyone to agree with them, they'll still need to do all kinds of hard work to learn to code/be a vet/dancer/founder, etc. So, why not start NOW to do that hard work for one's self?
- Most investment bankers aren't self-taught kids from impoverished neighborhoods who got where they are today through a combination of pluck and determination.
- Good libraries are in good neighborhoods. Poor neighborhoods often don't have a library at all.
- Bosses want people who have abilities, but depending on your circumstances at birth it may take a lot more effort to acquire those abilities.
Some people succeed even though the deck is completely stacked against them. This has always been the case. And yes, the individual should do what they can to make the best of an unfair situation. However, I'm arguing that the deck shouldn't be stacked against people based on gender and race in the first place. And before there can be meaningful change people have to acknowledge that this unfairness has to be addressed.
But please proceed. Other groups are underrepresented in tech. Let's hear how they think differently.
But the "no female programmers" thing is specific to western culture. There are plenty of female programmers in India, and in Russia. So this is likely something about western culture, that has caused this difference.
i'd be very curious to hear from a female programmer from Russia. I just find it hard to believe in overturning of the sexist culture there, and my impression that we have more females in hi-tech here in SV.
I tried to Google for the articles I've read about this but I didn't manage to find them.
Programming (or anything with a keyboard) is not really seen a manly profession in developing countries. Or, to be frank, in the first world countries either.
The difference is that in the first world, the pay increase and quality of life is much greater between say carpenter or fireman vs computer programmer.
I've been in conversations in with high level execs where the disdain for the 'tappy tappy' crew is clear.
There is in actually an immense amount of discussion online about the representation of women in the cartooning and comic book professions.
It's not an open-and-shut case that women are unambiguously respected within the fashion industry: http://www.forbes.com/sites/yec/2013/11/05/why-arent-women-i...
As I don't read sanitation, construction, or plumbing forums, I haven't run into much discussion of the subject there.
There are also many apprenticeships for women in construction/plumbing, because they are 1) good-paying jobs (at least in housing booms) and 2) ones where historically women have been denied apprenticeships/union membership.
Oddly enough, there is also gender imbalance in the fashion industry, but not the way you're thinking of it. Sure, women models make WAY more money than male models, but more top designers are men: (http://www.universityobserver.ie/2012/02/06/gender-imbalance...)
Maybe you should do a little googling before you sound off about the lack of hand-wringing? Maybe it's just you who don't care.
An assertion that female behaviour or aptitude differs from male behaviour or aptitude in a way that casts women in a negative or possibly negative light is evidence of sexism and something that must be fixed.[2]
[1] http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-news-blog/2013/feb/05/gi...
That doesn't mean that programmer culture can't often be hostile to women, and doesn't deserve scrutiny. But that also doesn't mean that pg and YC need to be crucified for not immediately ridding the world of all "Cowboy Developer" wanted ads.