Unrelated to article: I'm not sure how this post made it to the front page so fast. It's been up for ~ 5 mins and it's already #7 on my list with 7 pts. Did you people who upvoted even read the article? Doesn't look like it.
After doing some experimentation with Bayesian classification of HN articles (for selecting articles that interest me) I've actually found that titles, rather than URLs, domains, or even article text, is one of the best indications of how good an article (and the accompanying discussion) will be.
(This is one of the reasons that I hate the moderators reverting article titles to less descriptive ones.)
I haven't, but I can if you're interested. "Best results" in this case is pretty subjective so I didn't perform any rigorous experiments about the relative quality of each method, that was just a general observation that I had.
The program itself is just a quick HN scrapper combined with a naive bayes classifier which periodically runs and sends selected article titles to an IRC channel.
It's a little bit of both submission title and domain. In this particular case, the title contained an "I": when people looked who the "I" was, they immediately upvoted.
Guilty as charged. I sometimes use upvoting as a means of simply marking a story for later, based on an interesting title or a familiar author. Unlike Reddit, HN doesn't distinguish between a vote for quality and a "save" action (as evidenced by the "saved stories" link in your profile).
It's telling of the environment we're in that the author has to make such a heavy disclaimer about not doing things for diversity's sake. What would be so bad about admitting one cares about diversity? I think there's room in business to pursue one's values.
I said "we're not doing this for diversity's sake alone." It'd be terribly unfair to the super qualified people we work with to imply that we were working with them just because we wanted diversity.
That's a good point, that it is about diversity but that it's only part of the entire picture.
I think people will complain about fairness even when they're not affected, because the tech community tends to have a strong knee-jerk reaction to this sort of thing. But it would be foolish to not consider diversity as one of many metrics to gauge how effectively one is avoiding costly biases.
I'd wager he said that because diversity for the sake of diversity would probably damage the micro climate and would be quite difficult to deal with politically(among participants and employees).
The entire campaign is centered around encouraging women to apply more BECAUSE they can be good founders, not because they are women, and men feel bad for not including them.
Because it's a canard that diversity can only be achieved by compromising on the quality of applicants accepted.
Competence knows no race, color, creed, gender, or nationality. It may be found in anyone. I'm greedy too, and want to receive the benefit of competent people of all kinds who are allowed to flourish and succeed. Here's Sam:
> We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women.
and
> Again, we don't do this for the sake of diversity. We do it because we want to get the best people, whatever they're like.
The reason why I said this is telling is because people scream and rant against attempting to correct biases as if it is about compromising on quality.
I think it's great for YC to improve and help women but I hope YC doesn't start accepting female funded companies just for the sake of having more female founders instead on looking at the quality of the startups.
Read the article carefully; we won't. We'll accept female-founded companies because some of them will be extremely successful. Everyone is subject to the same bar (this is addressed in the middle of the post).
How can YC be pressured? They sure don't have an LP problem. In terms of hiring for YC itself, it's already quite diverse.
The only thing YC really needs to care about is 1) getting the best possible startups to apply and then 2) for those companies to be successful.
#2 is pretty much immune to pressure-on-YC; YC has no control of YC startups, with only 2-10% common equity. #1 is explicitly the thing they are working on, so it seems unlikely "we will pressure you to accept more female founders if you don't accept more female founders by convincing female founders not to apply" would be a realistic threat.
He mentions -multiple times- in the article that they wish to avoid this. I don't know what could have prompted you to write this comment if you read it, he says it more than once...
Practically everyone would agree that the status quo is not just YC's fault. For example, the STEM gender gap plays a big role, and that's not something YC is directly responsible for. So it's easy to conclude that YC shouldn't just go right for a 50:50 ratio because the burden shouldn't rest entirely on their shoulders.
But here's another way to look at it: Accepting more women applicants -- even if they don't fit YC's acceptance heuristic (which is, by definition, already an approximation for actual success) as well -- is not necessarily a bad idea. Sexism and other irrational biases are strongly fueled by bad intuitions, and people learn these bad intuitions by not seeing enough diversity in tech and/or founders. This is a situation that YC can improve.
This wouldn't be about lowering the bar. It's more like accounting for the "home field advantage" that males have long benefited from, and eventually eliminating the advantage by letting everyone play on a neutral field starting with their first game. (First person to come up with a better metaphor gets an upvote...)
(edit: and yes, I know @sama says YCombinator won't do that. But it's still worth considering!)
And we're working on something to improve the quality of Hacker News comments.
Wait, is this implying that we're actually getting an upstream change in the HN codebase for the first time in $amount_of_time_I_am_not_aware_of_exactly?
Or perhaps some sort of cultural shift, like increased moderation and less tolerance for certain views? I can't see the latter going very well, but it's too early to tell anything.
Otherwise this is good news. However, when I read this...
Many emails pointed out that our website shows nearly all men; we'll fix that.
They are committed to this, he says so multiple times. Much of the piece is him acknowledging that there are systematic barriers in place that are discouraging many of the pool of "potentially best founders" from applying, and they'd like to lower them so more people, from many different backgrounds, apply. Re-read the bit on "greedy in the good kind of way."
>Re-read the bit on "greedy in the good kind of way."
Yeah, that bit was clearly bullshit. The assertion is
"Some percent of good startups are run by women" => "we want more startups run by women [to increase the number of good startups, because we will earn more]"
This line of reasoning is clearly ridiculous. Only if A) startups run by women had a higher chance of success and B) the VCs had no better way of judging startup merit than looking at probabilities tied to the gender of the founder would it make sense to explicitly recruit more women for the sake of increasing profits. It is immediately clear that the only way to get more good startups is to A) recruit more people in general (not just people of some biological characteristic) and/or B) have better selection metrics.
It's not bullshit, you just misunderstood the line of reasoning.
It goes like:
Assumption: There is a population of women out there who would be really capable of running a successful technology startup
Fact: Not many women do, whether this is because of VC bias, or women's own biases from social conditioning or whatever
Opportunity: encourage more women to start companies that we fund, we will have a competitive advantage by being among the first to mine this under-utilized resource while other VCs compete for the best male-run startups
That is a fair line of reasoning, but it's not what I got from the article at all. What I got from the article is "How can we incentivize people who otherwise wouldn't found startups to found startups?", which is distinctly different from lowering barrier to entry.
I think sama is arguing for b.) better selection metrics.
Here's another model of startup success:
1.) Part of your success is due to innate factors in your team: who you are as a person, how well you process information, how much relevant experience you have, how well you get along with teammates, etc.
2.) Part of your success is due to how people react to you, which includes both 2.a) how well they consciously perceive the qualities in #1 and 2.b) how they unconsciously attribute qualities of other people to you, based on categories or groups you may belong to (like woman, black, old, big-company employee, Java programmer, Lisp programmer, Ivy League grad, etc.)
Everybody does #2.b - it's part of our brain's short-circuit judgment wiring, and we couldn't function if we didn't. In psychology, the effect is called "transference". However, sama's saying that they want to investigate ways that #2.b may be conflating the accuracy of #2.a, and the fact that an applicant is a woman may make them inaccurately perceive the innate qualities that she brings to the table.
If you don't believe that unconscious factors may alter how well you process information about how successful a person is, I highly suggest you take an IAT here:
Easier said than done. First, how do you define "best"? Certainly personality traits like confidence are a factor, but it's naive to believe that men and women display confidence in the same way. So YC's selection criteria need to be updated to be more fair at identifying "best". Everyone on the team needs to re-learn all their methods of evaluation and all the processes need to be re-thought.
On top of that, there's a feedback loop involved. Women have traditionally been at a disadvantage and it takes conscious effort to dig out of that hole. The only way to fight entropy in a system is by inputting work.
Finally, your statement presumes that YC isn't already "funding the best startups". Obviously, that approach -- the status quo -- hasn't been fair to both sexes. For the reasons above.
You can't fund people who don't apply, and people can't apply if they don't decide to start startups. The goal of the Female Founders Conference was to encourage more women to do both, and as Sam points out, there is more YC can do in that department.
There are plenty of other categories of people who don't apply as well. What percentage of female applicants implies no prejudice? Where is this even coming from?
I question the assumption that the perceived low female application numbers are due to prejudice. It could be due to differences in the predispositions to excel at different types of work between the sexes. Men and women are different.
Why are so many professional basket ball players black? Racism?
There is an implicit assumption in this and its validity is assumed. It is not being questioned.
The correct default assumption is that any two individuals are similarly capable. The burden of proof is on the person asserting that they're not. The presence of physical differences between men and women is no evidence that they're differently capable in terms of founding a startup. You would need specific data to that effect that accounted for the confounding factor of relatively low female participation in the startup scene.
And look, in the very article you're commenting on, the people best able to to analyze that have decided that women founders are worth pursuing. I'm guessing they know a bit more about it than you do.
There is no evidence that it is due to different predispositions, and even if it was, that would not necessarily mean that it would not give a high ROI to try to coax more into trying. The only realistic way of determining whether or not they can get a good ROI on encouraging more female founders is to try it and measure results.
It might even be that it would be profitable to encourage more female founders even if they as a group under-perform, if encouraging them mean you attract more of the best of them, as well as goodwill and PR effects.
The upshot is that barring evidence that an effort to increase diversity will lower ROI, any sensible VC ought to at least try from the point of view that there's a huge risk of losing out if they perform well and your competitors gain a reputation as more diverse and modern.
If the result of trying is data to support that women are somehow predisposed not to make good tech founders, then there'd be another discussion to have, but your argument above effectively boils down to "it could be they don't apply because they're predisposed against it, so let's not even try"
>" your argument above effectively boils down to "it could be they don't apply because they're predisposed against it, so let's not even try" "
No the assumption is made further up stream than this. The assumption is that a 'low' (defined how exactly, compared to what, applying what rationale?) number of female applicants is evidence of prejudice.
I simply ask how you know. Id like to know what proportion of female applicants would indicate no such prejudice and how that is arrived at.
I also question the assumed 'correct' course of action is to prejudge based on gender in an effort to combat this apparent perceived prejudice based on gender.
This is a nonsense. It is a fashion. The likes of YC should know better.
I think I have a different perspective on this topic than most here. My wife has founded multiple companies. I also have two daughters (and a son). One of which is very interested in programming. I'm older, but back in college and early professional life I worked with a number of women. Myself and my colleagues treat them the same as the rest of the team. There certainly weren't a lot of women, but we didn't treat them any different.
But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women. All you have to do is read some of the comments on HN whenever a topic in this area arises. From some of the things I read in comments I seriously give pause on whether I should push my daughter in programming/tech. Some women can tolerate this hostility better than others, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I really think the problem is with the attitude of the modern young techy towards females. I don't know where it comes from or how to fix it. But it worries me.
>But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women.
To the extent that this is true, I think it could be backlash in response to pushing for more women in tech.
My youngest brother's high school has a girls only programming club, and a girls only robotics team (with no male equivalents). There was also a program where kids from his engineering class got selected for a summer electrical engineering program, with preferential selection for girls. He really wanted to do it and he definitely had the grades and ability, but all 3 kids who were selected were girls (who had lower GPAs and lower scores in the engineering class.)
He lives in a pretty rural area, so there aren't really a lot of options for him to get involved in something like a robotics team outside of school. I would have probably been upset if something I was really interested in was off limits because of my gender, and I can't really say how something like this would have affected me when when I was 14.
If it makes you feel any better, it seems unlikely to me that attitudes have changed for the worse. I think there were always people who thought these things, and what's changed is that the anonymity of online commenting makes it easier for them to say them.
If you asked college admissions officers in the 1950's what kind of student would be most likely to succeed, they would probably describe someone who was white, male, and came from a middle-to-upper-class background. Not because those kinds of students are inherently superior, but only because the vast majority of college students at the time came from this very limited demographic.
There's the same danger with VC. It's probably/hopefully an unconscious bias, but it's very tempting to want to invest in a "type" of founder that has succeeded often in the past - Young, white, male, Harvard/Stanford dropout, wears a hoodie, etc.
Every VC wants to invest in the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but the more we fixate on past successful archetypes, the more likely we are to (unconsciously) dismiss other possibilities.
It's my same gripe with the job interview process. Obviously every company wants to hire "the smartest, hardest-working people who are a good cultural fit". But how do you measure that in a way that's both accurate and efficient/scalable? You usually can't, which causes you to use certain heuristics which optimize for efficiency/scalability at the expense of considering everyone who might be a good candidate.
For example, the heuristic of using internal referrals for hiring works, because if you're a company like Google where everyone is smart, then smart people are likely to know other smart people, and since you're referring friends, it's likely they will be a good cultural fit. But obviously, in the long run internal referrals will lead to a very homogeneous culture, which can be good (everyone gets along) and bad (lack of diversity).
I'm curious about that one. There's a very tricky balance to work there, with the risk being that any change along these lines could exacerbate an already strong tendency towards groupthink in the comments.
Maybe replacing the moderator hell/slowban system with a feedback system to improve commenter behavior instead of infuriating commenters and scaring away controversial people.
I've been banned a few times simply for strongly expressing an opinion contrary to HN ideology. I probably will be again for even bringing it up.
HN is a site where some users say things like "tech feminists never seem interested in taking the high road, and instead optimize for maximum drama", while unironically claiming that they are reserving judgment.
HN is a safe-haven for sexism and bigotry.
It's great that samaltman claims that he wants to undo some of the damage that pg enabled, encouraged, and actively allowed. However, I'll believe it when I see it.
p.s. User johnbm made the comment I quoted, along with some other pretty great comments. And he got upvoted for it, because that's the sort of community pg built. samaltman has a huge job ahead of him if he wants HN to stop being sexist.
strongly expressing an opinion contrary to HN ideology
Is it merely contrary to HN ideology or something that's considered outside the realm of legitimate controversy in this community?
Some positions aren't going to be well-received no matter how well they are phrased, which is generally considered a good thing. We shouldn't have to continuously debate the idea that the universe is more than 10,000 years old, or that women should be first-class citizens in our society, for example.
EDIT: The percentages in chart are # female founders accepted into YC / # founders accepted into YC. The 24% statistic in the article is number of startups with at least 1 female founder, so the chart may be biased lower than that statistic.
One big learning from my time @msft was that the gender gap in STEM really starts in middle school. Everything else (YC included) is largely downstream. If you want to help get involved at the grade school level. For those who are interested here's one of the better resources they produced: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/wome...
Yes. Both Men and Women. And I think one gender is having a harder time understanding our differences and how we can suppress our natural urges and grow away from them.
We want to fund more women because it's the right thing to do, but we're not doing this for diversity's sake alone. We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women.
This is a huge thing that people seem to ignore when arguing "against diversity" (I put that in quotes because I don't think anyone actually argues against diversity -- they couch it in terms of meritocracy and egalitarianism, saying that the best people should succeed regardless of race and gender, it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.) I think Sam does a great job of presenting this as a thing of 'greed' -- or, more charitably, economic rationality.
In my mind, there are only two real possibilities (or, perhaps more realistically, two ends of a spectrum):
1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that.
2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.
Perhaps because woman are the fastest "big" gain they can do? There are lots of woman in the world (far more than any minority group), yet very few doing startups.
It's the biggest market inefficiency.
edit: You could also argue that the diversity in thinking and approach you'll get from woman could be very high. So perhaps they'll be more likely to start new kinds of companies in untapped markets.
There are more women in the world than pacific islanders, but if we only address the women aspect, are we not going to end up recruiting primarily white women? If the field is currently friendly to white men, and we make it more friendly to women, we wind up with white men & white women, not white men & all races of women. Right?
Do something about it then. The author of this article is seeing a way to help change the status for women. You could do something to help change the status for pacific islanders.
I'm not Sam. I haven't anywhere near his clout, nor am I even in that field. Nor are there more than even a tiny, tiny handful of pacific islanders in my town. I may have met two?
Sam didn't start this in a vacuum. He started it after women in the tech community laid a lot of groundwork educating the community about gender diversity problems.
Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way.
But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.
There are groups that cater to teaching women and girls how to code, with the strict exclusion of men despite women continuing to outpace men in college enrollment (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/08/2011-gender-hig...). I have no problem increasing diversity but I take exception to ignoring other race/gender makeups that are clearly under-represented in tech/startups especially those who have little post-secondary education (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/08/2011-gender-hig...).
As one of those 'privileged' minority males, I shake my head.
No, zip codes are irrelevant. Whites and Asians dominate elite schools because they are wealthier and/or more focused on money. Black in general are not seen as "attractive" socially (if you look at the data from dating sites, for example), whereas whites and asians are disporportionately so (at least for the females). So, if you combine the social dis-advantages and the educational disparity, you get a very strong anti-black bias. Pretty simple to understand, but hard to fix.
I know that this is just a lame dig at Paul Graham's advice that it's helpful for pitching founders to be intelligible to customers and investors, but I'm also not sure it's true. There's this place called "continental Europe". Also a pretty big strip of Asia called "Russia".
There is a massive bias for white founders (~87%), to the detriment of minorities (~13%). This is masked slightly by the fact that Asians dominate minority founders (12% to 1%). These numbers are "under-representations" in relation to university populations, even for asians. [1,2]
These goals aren't in opposition. But they aren't the same thing.
Women don't launch startups as often as men, and black people don't launch startups as often as white people, but these aren't necessarily for the same reasons, and there's no reason to think that the same advisors and mentors that can help achieve a goal of attracting more female founders would also be effective at attracting more African-American founders.
So it stands to reason that both of these things would be good things to do, but not necessarily as part of the same initiative. And it may be impractical for the same person or institution to launch multiple diversity initiatives at the same time and maintain institutional focus.
So I think the answer isn't to use this as a reason to critique initiatives aimed at attracting female founders. There's no reason the onus for other diversity initiatives should be placed on the people who are already devoting resources to recruiting female founders. Rather, I would suggest that you get involved yourself -- and also encourage others in the startup scene to get involved -- to devote equivalent energy to launching initiatives to recruit founders who are members of traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. The more the merrier.
>it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.
No, I don't believe that is the argument.
The argument is "Let's not over-compensate for historical institutional racism/sexism, and, going forward, select the best candidates based on merit, regardless of gender or colour."
You can't eliminate these issues overnight, with a rule or two.
I think the counter argument to that argument was always "can we actually do that as humans?"
The push towards diversity is a straight forward reaction in an attempt to prove "yes we can" by moving the numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible. I'd guess that eventually the pendulum will swing back again. The reason the diversity tactic is used so much is because it's the only tactic that seems to actually produce results, artificial or not.
>"yes we can" by moving the numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible.
(This is a touchy subject. I'm not implying this initiative takes it "too far" or anything of the like...)
I agree, the problem is that over-compensation (pendulum swinging too far) inevitably leads to another party being alienated. Sometimes the people at the margins most affected are relatively powerful and aren't happy with the results. An example being anti-affirmative-action sentiment among white blue-collar workers. This can diminish the effectiveness of the diversity push.
I'm not saying the sentiment is justified; I'm saying it inevitably happens. It's a tough balance. We know that SV and the tech scene is a very male oriented culture. What happens with as that changes? There are bound to be losers.
The problem is it is very difficult to ensure that your selection criteria is totally unbiased when investing is such an emotional, gut based decision. If most founders in the past have been white males, then investors are going to continue to give that group preferential treatment if only because they look like the type that has succeeded before.
"We want to fund more women" because "we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women."
How is this statement supposed to be read? Probably not like this
"We are going to fund people we otherwise wouldn't because they happen to be women and many successful startups are going to be funded by women."
Also, probably not like this
"We want to have 'more than a thousand dollars' because we want to have 'more than a million dollars' and many times 'more than a thousand' is 'more than a million.'"
If that's the case then it would be much better to simply say
"We want to fund the most successful startups and it would not be in our best interest to differentiate founders based on gender."
I read it as , hmmph, you know... the market for men's ideas is probably getting close to being played out and there is probably an untapped market for products made by women... Diversity? Bonus!
I read this as "There are women who would make good founders. If we can find them and nurture them, even if it's more work for us, we're still going to make a lot of money by doing so."
In fact, you could almost look at this as a startup-ish idea - finding an under-served niche, and making money from doing what nobody else is doing.
> 1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that.
So I'm a little confused here, since no one who has participated would ever think this is even remotely close to true, I guess it's a rhetorical element.
But I can't quite figure out to what end. Maybe you could explain to me like I'm 5?
One challenge is that there are some rational things working against diversity.
One heuristic is "Aim for as diverse a group of entrepreneurs because we don't want to miss any opportunities"
Another is "Fund people I've worked with, or come recommended by people I work with, because word of mouth is a better predictor that resume"
The first encourages diversity. The second discourages it, but is rational. It takes being very proactive to push for the first to win over the second, because you have to actively find something as strong as "Word of mouth from my network" to predict success. Bravo for YC pushing this agenda.
But even in a meritocracy you can only select the "best" from those who are available.
There are certainly plenty of people who could have been successful in technology but went into different fields entirely.
"it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male"
Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male. (Not sure about race, but it's probably true in Western countries). The majority of people interested in founding technology startups are probably white and male, and therefore the best people for starting a technology startup are white and male. You comment implies that it's wrong to state that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male, if you don't imply that, please make it clear.
If women are as skilled as men in, say, programming, then majority of best programmers are male.
>2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.
There's a third possibility: women and non-whites in Western countries are less interested in applying for venture capital. If that is the case, then in an equal world venture capitalists should invest less in startups founded by non-white women, because the majority of startups seeking venture capital are founded by white males.
The overall point is that you need to fix the root cause, not the effects of the cause. As long as women and non-whites are minorities in groups of people such as tech students, you should see less women and non-whites in tech student related phenomenon, such as technology startups.
This reminds me of all these communities like "AngularJS women", who try to get more women into AngularJS. I think that's pointless. Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men, you'll find that 50% of AngularJS developers will be female.
> "Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male."
Understanding of this point is perhaps facilitated by also mentioning that the worst programmers are also overwhelmingly white and male, for the same reason.
Are they, though? I wish I could just agree, but inconveniently the three or four strikingly terrible programmers I've encountered don't conform to this. (And the worst of them, who I only knew as a name on an @author tag, I had assumed to be male (and felt a kind of relief about it - "I'm not being sexist, worst of all is x and he's a guy"), so this isn't a case of prejudices clouding the assessment).
My comment is more of a statement about what you should expect if competency is evenly distributed in both populations, but one population is larger than another.
More competent people and more incompetent people would be expected from the larger population, if competency is evenly distributed.
> The overall point is that you need to fix the root cause, not the effects of the cause.
Part of the reason why women are less likely to become programmers and strartup founders is because of the lack of role models. Successful role models serve both to change ingrained cultural biases, as well as to inspire and encourage underrepresented groups to consider participation in new fields. There is no clear cause and effect, but rather a feedback loop (what we see affects our biases which then become even more entrenched). This is exactly the reasoning behind affirmative action, and why any fight against cultural biases should be at all levels.
as a 3rd-generation minority female entrepreneur, i can attest to this. however, even with those powerful role models, i had (and have) to fight a fairly gruesome battle.
fortunately, i am a warrior and don't really know any other way. otherwise, i'd have given up long ago.
Yes, and it's not a good thing for the entire industry to be dominated by a certain group, because then the industry will end up only serving the needs of that group.
There's a huge gap in the market if no programs are coded for non-English non-males. You're argument is quite a silly one to me as clearly it's not that big of an issue, people can normally make things for a different target market to themselves by testing it with their target market.
If you truly believe that large sections of the the market are not being served then I'd recommend that you start targeting them, they are clearly under-tapped.
> Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men,
I'm struggling to interpret that sentence in a charitable manner. Could you clarify what you meant? Are you saying that, when it comes to development, male values/interests (whatever that could possibly mean anyway) are the only ones worth having and that women need to conform to them?
No. He's just making fun of the idea that men and women should be identical and should be 50/50 on everything.
In actuality women and men do different things and have different interests. It's kind of crazy to pass up a better person just to get more women/men hired or to do something.
If you have to hire 10 people for a coding position and you have 100 applicants (10 male and 90 female) but the 10 male applicants are better (more qualified and better for the job) than the 90 female applicants then you should hire the 10 male applicant. There is no reason you should try to force it to 5 males and 5 females or even 9 females and 1 male. Just hire whoever is best regardless of gender.
Unfortunately, this kind of attitude (with which I wholly agree) is being criticized more and more.
Through contempt for the concept of meritocracy (even as an asymptotic ideal), and growth in identity politics, more and more people seem to view diversity and social engineering goals as more important than getting the best team in place for the job.
Maybe that's fine for a sclerotic bureaucracy, but for a startup in which everyone's effort counts, a single marginal hire is like a cancer - you simply can't afford it. Hiring needs to be focused on getting the best people for the job - diversity will arise as a consequence.
It's worth considering bias though. Do the people in charge of hiring fairly assess the skills of an applicant? I suspect that orchestras in the 1970's would have claimed to be meritocratic in their audition practices, but the success rate of female auditionees quintupled with the introduction of blind auditions. [1]
In the case where you've hired 10 males out of a pool of 90 females and 10 males, it's not unreasonable to suspect that maybe something is wrong with your hiring practices, is it? It definitely could be that everything truly was based on merit, however there could be biases in the hiring process of which you're not aware. Could this be what most of the people that you see as having "contempt for the concept of meritocracy" are actually thinking?
That said, there are good and bad ways of dealing with these sorts of issues. I generally dislike affirmative action like solutions, much for the same reason that Justice Clarence Thomas dislikes affirmative action. Solutions like blind auditions, that attempt to remove the biases, rather than negate them, are far better.
The example was a pretty extreme one (deliberately, I suspect). In that case, where group "A" outnumbered group "B" substantially in the candidate pool, and yet ALL the people hired were from group "B", it would be perfectly reasonable to suspect bias or various other factors than pure merit, unless a perfectly objective and fair process were used. Obviously few real world examples are that clear cut.
If the "anti-meritocracy" people simply want people and organizations to be less arrogant about believing they have a perfect selection process, I think that's a good thing. The biggest issue I have with the "anti-meritocracy" teams is this: the language that many people use seems calibrated to shame people for even using the word, or thinking of meritocracy as a ideal or target to aim for.
Anyone who's ever had to hire people for a startup is unlikely to feel terribly arrogant about their process, though - in my experience, people try to make it as systematic as possible and then improvise within that. Certainly, any adjustment to process that makes it less susceptible to prejudice or bigotry is a good step.
Obviously, "merit" is a function of a person's innate ability, education, effectiveness and fit in a particular role, and a million other factors. It's not an exact science. But it's a good thing for an organization to decide, at minimum, what does "merit" look like for this particular role or hire? (And, more broadly, what traits of "merit" are shared across the whole organization?)
The dictionary definition seems benign enough: "A system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement". I'm sure people would agree this is better this than racism, sexism, or straight up politics.
I have a novel suggestion to fix this diversity problem.
Women tend to outperform men in the general desirability of occupations[1]. In jobs like veterinary and psychologists, the competition is fierce and highly gender imbalanced in favor of women.
So in order to get more women into other fields like programming, lets favor men for occupations that has high general desirability. This will move men into occupations normally occupied by highly skilled and educated women, and move women into occupations with lower general desirability by which is otherwise male dominated.
Do not be against diversity, support this move today!
Thanks for bringing reason and sanity to such a politically-charged issue. The insults on Twitter when you asked for advice were pretty depressing even to a bystander, but it looks like you found the signal in the noise :)
It would be great for YC's outreach efforts to make a difference in getting more great female founders to apply. There are other groups where outreach could help get some quality underrepresented founders too, which might help with the big ambitious science RFS: going after mid-career people in the sciences and engineering a few years in advance of founding a startup and seeding them with the idea of doing so. I know NSF has some outreach efforts like that, but it would be great for YC if YC's name were known by PIs thinking of going commercial.
Agreed. There are many other underrepresented groups that can add much needed perspective on new startups that should also be part of the conversation.
Shouldn't a desirable attribute from a founder be that they seek out whatever is necessary for survival?
To me, regardless of gender, YC would only want those that were proactive and dedicated to join a YC batch. It seems pointless to encourage specific demographics that would not apply, to do so.
"whatever is necessary for survival" might include not wasting a ton of time applying to a startup incubator with a demonstrated track-record of not funding women or minorities or southpaws or whatever. Doing -anything- to change that perception could tip the effort/reward analysis in favor of more of $MINORITY applying.
It seems pointless to encourage specific demographics that would not apply, to do so.
I think you're missing the point that there could be reasons that females (or any demographic other than white American males) do not apply to YC that are not correlated with building great companies.
For example it is plausible that woman feel alienated by the tech startup scene and avoid applying to accelerators. White males born might not have that feeling. So effectively their "bar" is lower.
If YC is trying to address that it seems like a smart business move on their part. They are reducing irrationality in the system.
YC is clearly not necessary for survival, especially for someone who has already had an exit (and thus has some capital and contacts), or someone who is 50 and has run a 30 person lab, with some savings and other personal contacts. YC can probably help in both of those cases, but the company is capable of being successful without it.
I'd sure rather have an Elon Musk or a Mara Aspinall in YC than a randomly-selected person who already believes YC is the best (or only) way to do a startup.
There are two parts to this -- making YC as useful as possible to the best founders, and making sure the best founders know that and apply.
I was kind of disappointed by this article, I was expecting some information about things that women stereotypically do better than men in regards to starting a company. (If you've found something like this I'd be really interested to hear it!) Some traits that men, stereotypically, can learn from (or even vice versa). Instead it's just outreach drivel, (which is not what the title implies)
Did I miss something? The only thing he states he's actually learned from female founders so far is that women and men express confidence differently. I was hoping for more substance.
He literately can't say anything of substance on a topic like this or else his words will show up all over the news as an attack by YC on some party or other.
my observation is that we also apologize more, speak up less, and negotiate less effectively (if at all).
i teach 8 year-old girls how to code in my free time and one of the biggest challenges to their success is re-wiring them to believe in themselves, in their critical-thinking skills, in their ability to solve problems. it seems they don't need a few mentor-role models: they need a chorus of people encouraging them and reminding them of their innate abilities. which leads me to believe—i can only extrapolate—that this must be what many boys (and men) experience on a quotidien basis.
i will never know, but i can help create that for myself and other women, particularly the wee ones. :>
I learned several interesting things from Sam's post actually (I'm Jessica, one of the founders of Y Combinator). I hadn't known that women really want more YC women in the interviews. That would have been hard at first, when I was the only female, but now we have enough female partners to do this. I was also surprised to hear that women actually believed that we try to fund people who look like Zuckerberg. I thought that was just something that trolls liked to claim was our strategy.
Once could be ignored as sloppiness. But he wrote: "One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. [...] Whereas when you're starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with." (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html)
Or he says: "I see a couple of guys walking down the street and I think, oh, they look like they'd make good founders or bad founders, right, as the case may be. [...] The right kind of nerdy. Like, these guys in this room are not suits, but they're not schlubs either. These are fierce nerds. You have to be somewhat intimidating looking, and that's what these guys are. [...] Yeah, yeah. They're like the kind of people Julius Caesar was afraid of." (http://www.wbur.org/npr/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon...)
If YC people can't see this, that doesn't bode well for their self-critical thinking skills. (But at least Paul Graham's fairly open about what he thinks, and looks good compared to HN posters.)
I Must be invisible...no one ever responds to my posts any more...I'm typing with my hands...HHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAANNNNNNNDDDDDDSSSSSSSS...CAN YOU SEE ME? HELLO?
"We funded a guy once who looked like Mark but ended up doing badly, and when PG was asked by a reporter how to fool him, he said that apparently this was one way. His real point was that looking like Zuckerberg means nothing--that you can look remarkably like him and still fail miserably. "
To me the entire "look like Zuck" is more than the physical look. It's the harvard attendance, of a certain age, and having certain interests and mannerisms as well as background.
Truth is if you go to an Ivy or top school and view the student body you will see a certain look and feel. Doesn't mean that people with the same look don't attend a state school or community college, doesn't mean there aren't exceptions at the Ivy, but the look and feel is definitely there. Perhaps they end up looking that way after the first week as they get assimilated.
There is no doubt that people respond to visual cues and assign halo to them rightly or wrongly. Or stereotypes whatever you want to call it.
Go ahead in and try to pitch YC looking like a guy who runs a wholesale company and is 58 from the lower east side in NYC and doesn't look the part. It would almost certainly be, for lack of a super clear winning idea, an uphill battle.
Another message was that we should do more to make women feel welcome.
As we do more events, we'll continue to reach out to women.
This sort of thing really, seriously annoys me. HN is a funnel for applying to YC. You do not need to "reach out to women." You need to stop shutting out the ones who are ALREADY here and trying like hell to participate in spite of frequently being stonewalled, being unable to get anyone to hold a private conversation with them, etc ad nauseum.
In some sense, I will probably rant a bit more about this on my personal blog today because I was already steaming mad about this before I logged in to HN to read this article showing how badly the people at the top are simply blind.
> being unable to get anyone to hold a private conversation with them
Are you really surprised, right after that "Glass wall" story was posted here about one woman's terrible tragedy of having to deal with a male executive who briefly talked to her in an office stairwell? Convincing herself the entire office was about to think they were having an affair?
And you're surprised men are less eager to approach women than men in tech?
I don't think I've ever in my professional career observed someone being feverish and flushed and assume that it had something to do with sexual tension. Men just aren't that observant.
More likely, I would assume you were either sick or anxious because of some work-related conversation. Neither of which is a reason to be concerned vis-à-vis office politics.
Also, can I offer a suggestion to your problem? Couldn't you make up a little white lie and tell your coworkers that you had a very minor medical condition that resulted in being feverish and flushed often but that there were no other serious effects? No need to name anything, but that should take care of your worry about getting an email every time you sneeze and also deal with your concern about constantly having your obvious symptoms be misunderstood.
I no longer work at that company. I often told people very honestly things like "I have respiratory problems and allergies" without naming my condition. I did that kind of thing quite a lot.
No, I am not overreacting. There is still more to the story and I plan on writing more in the future. If my point of view is not your cup of tea, it isn't exactly required reading. If it helps other people, good. I write in some sense for myself.
I rewrote this from a rather snide to a bit more neutral comment; but are you aware that just because you don't that doesn't mean that others don't?
Or that even if all men really aren't observant enough, which is also a rather daring statement if I may say so, that still leaves room for women noticing it and communicating this more explicitly.
It's exactly the point I'm trying to make. I've never heard of anything like this happening, anywhere, ever. Even in casual settings. Nor have I observed that a normal response to sexual arousal is to be feverish and flushed.
To draw the type of conclusions that she is claiming, her coworkers would have to (1) be incredibly observant (2) reject all of the most plausible explanations for a very unlikely explanation and (3) care.
This is Ockham's razor.
I have a friend that is abnormally paranoid. He thinks everybody is out to get him and sees devious plotting from the most innocuous of situations. "those two guys at the water cooler are plotting to make me look bad at the meeting today" - type stuff.
Chances are they are not.
All I'm saying is that it sounds like fear of taking a wrong social step at work seems to be affecting her performance, not to mention increasing her anxiety.
It could perhaps be healthy to reconsider whether her assumptions are reasonable or not.
The thing is that she never said the thoughts were reasonable; it's perfectly possible that she acknowledges she's a bit over-sensitive about it just like you might do something out of fear that you'll be thought of as incompetent or unsuccessful.
On the other hand; thinking that this kind of thing is never discussed is rather naive. There's plenty of people who are very observant about these kinds of things and will happily discuss them when the opportunity arises. We even invented a word for it: gossiping.
Are you merely being dense or is it lost on you that maybe the world doesn't revolve around you, and expecting a cryptic two letter username to be recognized in the middle of a completely different discussion is the height of being a self-centred special snowflake?
Most people here care about ideas and principles, not the person behind them.
Regardless of whether it's nature or nurture, women in at least Western culture are used to focussing much more on the subtle interpersonal dynamics of situations.
It could be due to something as simple as hormonal differences creating more interconnections between hemispheres or historical oppression having given rise to a form of power play that by it's nature needed to be concealed from men.
Whichever it is, it creates a different kind of sense-making and internal dialogue. Right here, you're taking that 'kind' of internal dialogue and branding it as the sort of tripe for which women deserve to be excluded by men.
That, even disregarding the fact that you accidentally wrote this to the author of said post, is exactly the kind of stuff sexism in tech is made of.
Tell you what, why don't the feminists retire "Schrödinger's rapist" first, and then I'll stop being wary around women in tech in case of them decides to point a finger at me on Twitter because she's another Adria Richards.
As for the "different way of thinking"... she decided the best way to defuse suspicion about an affair that didn't exist was to act exactly as if she was having an affair.
That's called being an idiot, and it is not sexist to point that out.
As a female founder I hope these types of thoughts are promoted but the resulting actions are not obvious. I wouldn't want to be a female founder accepted into ycombinator and then have myself or others wonder if I am part of some kind of quota. I really want my acceptance to be based on my merits.
>I wouldn't want to be a female founder accepted into ycombinator and then have myself or others wonder if I am part of some kind of quota
I'm far removed from YC and the startup scene, but as an exceptionally intelligent black man I do have experience with scenarios that might lead one to feel that way. My advice is simply: don't feel that way. Be completely confident in yourself and abilities and ignore what others might be thinking. YC should not be seen as validation in any way, but as a stepping stone for your personal goals. In that light, the exact reasons you were funded are of no concern to your future success. Besides, I'm sure many a founder has been accepted for superficial reasons (being from the right school, having the right look, etc). If certain of your traits happen to match the current funding trends then so be it; consider it a stroke of luck and nothing else. I guarantee you the next white kid from Stanford that gets funded will not be sitting around wondering if he really belongs there.
I like to look at it this way. Y-Combinator is only getting bigger because startups are the future. Accepting more women does not mean accepting less men. Wealth and opportunity are not finite. The faster Y-Combinator can grow the more likely it is I might get in (I am also greedy in a good way). Bringing in more talented women can make Y-Combinator a more dominant force; I say great.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] thread(This is one of the reasons that I hate the moderators reverting article titles to less descriptive ones.)
The program itself is just a quick HN scrapper combined with a naive bayes classifier which periodically runs and sends selected article titles to an IRC channel.
I think people will complain about fairness even when they're not affected, because the tech community tends to have a strong knee-jerk reaction to this sort of thing. But it would be foolish to not consider diversity as one of many metrics to gauge how effectively one is avoiding costly biases.
The entire campaign is centered around encouraging women to apply more BECAUSE they can be good founders, not because they are women, and men feel bad for not including them.
EDIT: ahh sama beat me to it.
Competence knows no race, color, creed, gender, or nationality. It may be found in anyone. I'm greedy too, and want to receive the benefit of competent people of all kinds who are allowed to flourish and succeed. Here's Sam:
> We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women.
and
> Again, we don't do this for the sake of diversity. We do it because we want to get the best people, whatever they're like.
I'm probably not the only one who had to look this up :)
The only thing YC really needs to care about is 1) getting the best possible startups to apply and then 2) for those companies to be successful.
#2 is pretty much immune to pressure-on-YC; YC has no control of YC startups, with only 2-10% common equity. #1 is explicitly the thing they are working on, so it seems unlikely "we will pressure you to accept more female founders if you don't accept more female founders by convincing female founders not to apply" would be a realistic threat.
But here's another way to look at it: Accepting more women applicants -- even if they don't fit YC's acceptance heuristic (which is, by definition, already an approximation for actual success) as well -- is not necessarily a bad idea. Sexism and other irrational biases are strongly fueled by bad intuitions, and people learn these bad intuitions by not seeing enough diversity in tech and/or founders. This is a situation that YC can improve.
This wouldn't be about lowering the bar. It's more like accounting for the "home field advantage" that males have long benefited from, and eventually eliminating the advantage by letting everyone play on a neutral field starting with their first game. (First person to come up with a better metaphor gets an upvote...)
(edit: and yes, I know @sama says YCombinator won't do that. But it's still worth considering!)
- http://www.buffettsecrets.com/rose-blumkin-nebraska-furnitur...
- http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/13/business/rose-blumkin-reta...
Wait, is this implying that we're actually getting an upstream change in the HN codebase for the first time in $amount_of_time_I_am_not_aware_of_exactly?
Or perhaps some sort of cultural shift, like increased moderation and less tolerance for certain views? I can't see the latter going very well, but it's too early to tell anything.
Otherwise this is good news. However, when I read this...
Many emails pointed out that our website shows nearly all men; we'll fix that.
I was reminded of the following: http://www.snopes.com/college/admin/uwmadison.asp. Hopefully this won't just be a clumsy doctoring for PR purposes.
Yeah, that bit was clearly bullshit. The assertion is
"Some percent of good startups are run by women" => "we want more startups run by women [to increase the number of good startups, because we will earn more]"
This line of reasoning is clearly ridiculous. Only if A) startups run by women had a higher chance of success and B) the VCs had no better way of judging startup merit than looking at probabilities tied to the gender of the founder would it make sense to explicitly recruit more women for the sake of increasing profits. It is immediately clear that the only way to get more good startups is to A) recruit more people in general (not just people of some biological characteristic) and/or B) have better selection metrics.
It goes like:
Assumption: There is a population of women out there who would be really capable of running a successful technology startup
Fact: Not many women do, whether this is because of VC bias, or women's own biases from social conditioning or whatever
Opportunity: encourage more women to start companies that we fund, we will have a competitive advantage by being among the first to mine this under-utilized resource while other VCs compete for the best male-run startups
>> other VCs compete for the best male-run startups
is possibly more accurately this:
>> other VCs compete for the best white male-run startups based within 100 miles of San Francisco
Here's another model of startup success:
1.) Part of your success is due to innate factors in your team: who you are as a person, how well you process information, how much relevant experience you have, how well you get along with teammates, etc.
2.) Part of your success is due to how people react to you, which includes both 2.a) how well they consciously perceive the qualities in #1 and 2.b) how they unconsciously attribute qualities of other people to you, based on categories or groups you may belong to (like woman, black, old, big-company employee, Java programmer, Lisp programmer, Ivy League grad, etc.)
Everybody does #2.b - it's part of our brain's short-circuit judgment wiring, and we couldn't function if we didn't. In psychology, the effect is called "transference". However, sama's saying that they want to investigate ways that #2.b may be conflating the accuracy of #2.a, and the fact that an applicant is a woman may make them inaccurately perceive the innate qualities that she brings to the table.
If you don't believe that unconscious factors may alter how well you process information about how successful a person is, I highly suggest you take an IAT here:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
The results were incredibly eye-opening for me, and oftentimes have been very eye-opening for many other people in positions of power.
On top of that, there's a feedback loop involved. Women have traditionally been at a disadvantage and it takes conscious effort to dig out of that hole. The only way to fight entropy in a system is by inputting work.
Finally, your statement presumes that YC isn't already "funding the best startups". Obviously, that approach -- the status quo -- hasn't been fair to both sexes. For the reasons above.
He explicitly states they believe they're missing out on some of the best startups by not funding more women founders.
I question the assumption that the perceived low female application numbers are due to prejudice. It could be due to differences in the predispositions to excel at different types of work between the sexes. Men and women are different. Why are so many professional basket ball players black? Racism? There is an implicit assumption in this and its validity is assumed. It is not being questioned.
The correct default assumption is that any two individuals are similarly capable. The burden of proof is on the person asserting that they're not. The presence of physical differences between men and women is no evidence that they're differently capable in terms of founding a startup. You would need specific data to that effect that accounted for the confounding factor of relatively low female participation in the startup scene.
And look, in the very article you're commenting on, the people best able to to analyze that have decided that women founders are worth pursuing. I'm guessing they know a bit more about it than you do.
There is no evidence that it is due to different predispositions, and even if it was, that would not necessarily mean that it would not give a high ROI to try to coax more into trying. The only realistic way of determining whether or not they can get a good ROI on encouraging more female founders is to try it and measure results.
It might even be that it would be profitable to encourage more female founders even if they as a group under-perform, if encouraging them mean you attract more of the best of them, as well as goodwill and PR effects.
The upshot is that barring evidence that an effort to increase diversity will lower ROI, any sensible VC ought to at least try from the point of view that there's a huge risk of losing out if they perform well and your competitors gain a reputation as more diverse and modern.
If the result of trying is data to support that women are somehow predisposed not to make good tech founders, then there'd be another discussion to have, but your argument above effectively boils down to "it could be they don't apply because they're predisposed against it, so let's not even try"
No the assumption is made further up stream than this. The assumption is that a 'low' (defined how exactly, compared to what, applying what rationale?) number of female applicants is evidence of prejudice.
I simply ask how you know. Id like to know what proportion of female applicants would indicate no such prejudice and how that is arrived at.
I also question the assumed 'correct' course of action is to prejudge based on gender in an effort to combat this apparent perceived prejudice based on gender.
This is a nonsense. It is a fashion. The likes of YC should know better.
But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women. All you have to do is read some of the comments on HN whenever a topic in this area arises. From some of the things I read in comments I seriously give pause on whether I should push my daughter in programming/tech. Some women can tolerate this hostility better than others, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I really think the problem is with the attitude of the modern young techy towards females. I don't know where it comes from or how to fix it. But it worries me.
To the extent that this is true, I think it could be backlash in response to pushing for more women in tech.
My youngest brother's high school has a girls only programming club, and a girls only robotics team (with no male equivalents). There was also a program where kids from his engineering class got selected for a summer electrical engineering program, with preferential selection for girls. He really wanted to do it and he definitely had the grades and ability, but all 3 kids who were selected were girls (who had lower GPAs and lower scores in the engineering class.)
He lives in a pretty rural area, so there aren't really a lot of options for him to get involved in something like a robotics team outside of school. I would have probably been upset if something I was really interested in was off limits because of my gender, and I can't really say how something like this would have affected me when when I was 14.
There's the same danger with VC. It's probably/hopefully an unconscious bias, but it's very tempting to want to invest in a "type" of founder that has succeeded often in the past - Young, white, male, Harvard/Stanford dropout, wears a hoodie, etc.
Every VC wants to invest in the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but the more we fixate on past successful archetypes, the more likely we are to (unconsciously) dismiss other possibilities.
It's my same gripe with the job interview process. Obviously every company wants to hire "the smartest, hardest-working people who are a good cultural fit". But how do you measure that in a way that's both accurate and efficient/scalable? You usually can't, which causes you to use certain heuristics which optimize for efficiency/scalability at the expense of considering everyone who might be a good candidate.
For example, the heuristic of using internal referrals for hiring works, because if you're a company like Google where everyone is smart, then smart people are likely to know other smart people, and since you're referring friends, it's likely they will be a good cultural fit. But obviously, in the long run internal referrals will lead to a very homogeneous culture, which can be good (everyone gets along) and bad (lack of diversity).
Excellent. Can't wait to see what it is.
I've been banned a few times simply for strongly expressing an opinion contrary to HN ideology. I probably will be again for even bringing it up.
HN is a safe-haven for sexism and bigotry.
It's great that samaltman claims that he wants to undo some of the damage that pg enabled, encouraged, and actively allowed. However, I'll believe it when I see it.
p.s. User johnbm made the comment I quoted, along with some other pretty great comments. And he got upvoted for it, because that's the sort of community pg built. samaltman has a huge job ahead of him if he wants HN to stop being sexist.
Is it merely contrary to HN ideology or something that's considered outside the realm of legitimate controversy in this community?
Some positions aren't going to be well-received no matter how well they are phrased, which is generally considered a good thing. We shouldn't have to continuously debate the idea that the universe is more than 10,000 years old, or that women should be first-class citizens in our society, for example.
EDIT: The percentages in chart are # female founders accepted into YC / # founders accepted into YC. The 24% statistic in the article is number of startups with at least 1 female founder, so the chart may be biased lower than that statistic.
Genetics isn't destiny. We're more sophisticated than that.
This is a huge thing that people seem to ignore when arguing "against diversity" (I put that in quotes because I don't think anyone actually argues against diversity -- they couch it in terms of meritocracy and egalitarianism, saying that the best people should succeed regardless of race and gender, it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.) I think Sam does a great job of presenting this as a thing of 'greed' -- or, more charitably, economic rationality.
In my mind, there are only two real possibilities (or, perhaps more realistically, two ends of a spectrum):
1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that.
2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.
So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?
It's the biggest market inefficiency.
edit: You could also argue that the diversity in thinking and approach you'll get from woman could be very high. So perhaps they'll be more likely to start new kinds of companies in untapped markets.
Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way.
But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.
As one of those 'privileged' minority males, I shake my head.
Honestly I think because the women's issue has been more front and center in attention as well as blog posts. So it's more "de la journée".
"We're a female minority-owned small business, so we get preferential treatment in bidding."
[1] http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit...
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/how-amer...
Women don't launch startups as often as men, and black people don't launch startups as often as white people, but these aren't necessarily for the same reasons, and there's no reason to think that the same advisors and mentors that can help achieve a goal of attracting more female founders would also be effective at attracting more African-American founders.
So it stands to reason that both of these things would be good things to do, but not necessarily as part of the same initiative. And it may be impractical for the same person or institution to launch multiple diversity initiatives at the same time and maintain institutional focus.
So I think the answer isn't to use this as a reason to critique initiatives aimed at attracting female founders. There's no reason the onus for other diversity initiatives should be placed on the people who are already devoting resources to recruiting female founders. Rather, I would suggest that you get involved yourself -- and also encourage others in the startup scene to get involved -- to devote equivalent energy to launching initiatives to recruit founders who are members of traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. The more the merrier.
No, I don't believe that is the argument.
The argument is "Let's not over-compensate for historical institutional racism/sexism, and, going forward, select the best candidates based on merit, regardless of gender or colour."
You can't eliminate these issues overnight, with a rule or two.
The push towards diversity is a straight forward reaction in an attempt to prove "yes we can" by moving the numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible. I'd guess that eventually the pendulum will swing back again. The reason the diversity tactic is used so much is because it's the only tactic that seems to actually produce results, artificial or not.
(This is a touchy subject. I'm not implying this initiative takes it "too far" or anything of the like...)
I agree, the problem is that over-compensation (pendulum swinging too far) inevitably leads to another party being alienated. Sometimes the people at the margins most affected are relatively powerful and aren't happy with the results. An example being anti-affirmative-action sentiment among white blue-collar workers. This can diminish the effectiveness of the diversity push.
I'm not saying the sentiment is justified; I'm saying it inevitably happens. It's a tough balance. We know that SV and the tech scene is a very male oriented culture. What happens with as that changes? There are bound to be losers.
How is this statement supposed to be read? Probably not like this
"We are going to fund people we otherwise wouldn't because they happen to be women and many successful startups are going to be funded by women."
Also, probably not like this
"We want to have 'more than a thousand dollars' because we want to have 'more than a million dollars' and many times 'more than a thousand' is 'more than a million.'"
If that's the case then it would be much better to simply say
"We want to fund the most successful startups and it would not be in our best interest to differentiate founders based on gender."
In fact, you could almost look at this as a startup-ish idea - finding an under-served niche, and making money from doing what nobody else is doing.
So I'm a little confused here, since no one who has participated would ever think this is even remotely close to true, I guess it's a rhetorical element.
But I can't quite figure out to what end. Maybe you could explain to me like I'm 5?
One heuristic is "Aim for as diverse a group of entrepreneurs because we don't want to miss any opportunities"
Another is "Fund people I've worked with, or come recommended by people I work with, because word of mouth is a better predictor that resume"
The first encourages diversity. The second discourages it, but is rational. It takes being very proactive to push for the first to win over the second, because you have to actively find something as strong as "Word of mouth from my network" to predict success. Bravo for YC pushing this agenda.
Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male. (Not sure about race, but it's probably true in Western countries). The majority of people interested in founding technology startups are probably white and male, and therefore the best people for starting a technology startup are white and male. You comment implies that it's wrong to state that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male, if you don't imply that, please make it clear.
If women are as skilled as men in, say, programming, then majority of best programmers are male.
>2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.
There's a third possibility: women and non-whites in Western countries are less interested in applying for venture capital. If that is the case, then in an equal world venture capitalists should invest less in startups founded by non-white women, because the majority of startups seeking venture capital are founded by white males.
The overall point is that you need to fix the root cause, not the effects of the cause. As long as women and non-whites are minorities in groups of people such as tech students, you should see less women and non-whites in tech student related phenomenon, such as technology startups.
This reminds me of all these communities like "AngularJS women", who try to get more women into AngularJS. I think that's pointless. Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men, you'll find that 50% of AngularJS developers will be female.
Understanding of this point is perhaps facilitated by also mentioning that the worst programmers are also overwhelmingly white and male, for the same reason.
More competent people and more incompetent people would be expected from the larger population, if competency is evenly distributed.
Part of the reason why women are less likely to become programmers and strartup founders is because of the lack of role models. Successful role models serve both to change ingrained cultural biases, as well as to inspire and encourage underrepresented groups to consider participation in new fields. There is no clear cause and effect, but rather a feedback loop (what we see affects our biases which then become even more entrenched). This is exactly the reasoning behind affirmative action, and why any fight against cultural biases should be at all levels.
fortunately, i am a warrior and don't really know any other way. otherwise, i'd have given up long ago.
Yes, and it's not a good thing for the entire industry to be dominated by a certain group, because then the industry will end up only serving the needs of that group.
If you truly believe that large sections of the the market are not being served then I'd recommend that you start targeting them, they are clearly under-tapped.
I'm struggling to interpret that sentence in a charitable manner. Could you clarify what you meant? Are you saying that, when it comes to development, male values/interests (whatever that could possibly mean anyway) are the only ones worth having and that women need to conform to them?
In actuality women and men do different things and have different interests. It's kind of crazy to pass up a better person just to get more women/men hired or to do something.
If you have to hire 10 people for a coding position and you have 100 applicants (10 male and 90 female) but the 10 male applicants are better (more qualified and better for the job) than the 90 female applicants then you should hire the 10 male applicant. There is no reason you should try to force it to 5 males and 5 females or even 9 females and 1 male. Just hire whoever is best regardless of gender.
Through contempt for the concept of meritocracy (even as an asymptotic ideal), and growth in identity politics, more and more people seem to view diversity and social engineering goals as more important than getting the best team in place for the job.
Maybe that's fine for a sclerotic bureaucracy, but for a startup in which everyone's effort counts, a single marginal hire is like a cancer - you simply can't afford it. Hiring needs to be focused on getting the best people for the job - diversity will arise as a consequence.
In the case where you've hired 10 males out of a pool of 90 females and 10 males, it's not unreasonable to suspect that maybe something is wrong with your hiring practices, is it? It definitely could be that everything truly was based on merit, however there could be biases in the hiring process of which you're not aware. Could this be what most of the people that you see as having "contempt for the concept of meritocracy" are actually thinking?
That said, there are good and bad ways of dealing with these sorts of issues. I generally dislike affirmative action like solutions, much for the same reason that Justice Clarence Thomas dislikes affirmative action. Solutions like blind auditions, that attempt to remove the biases, rather than negate them, are far better.
[1] - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
If the "anti-meritocracy" people simply want people and organizations to be less arrogant about believing they have a perfect selection process, I think that's a good thing. The biggest issue I have with the "anti-meritocracy" teams is this: the language that many people use seems calibrated to shame people for even using the word, or thinking of meritocracy as a ideal or target to aim for.
Anyone who's ever had to hire people for a startup is unlikely to feel terribly arrogant about their process, though - in my experience, people try to make it as systematic as possible and then improvise within that. Certainly, any adjustment to process that makes it less susceptible to prejudice or bigotry is a good step.
Obviously, "merit" is a function of a person's innate ability, education, effectiveness and fit in a particular role, and a million other factors. It's not an exact science. But it's a good thing for an organization to decide, at minimum, what does "merit" look like for this particular role or hire? (And, more broadly, what traits of "merit" are shared across the whole organization?)
The dictionary definition seems benign enough: "A system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement". I'm sure people would agree this is better this than racism, sexism, or straight up politics.
Women tend to outperform men in the general desirability of occupations[1]. In jobs like veterinary and psychologists, the competition is fierce and highly gender imbalanced in favor of women.
So in order to get more women into other fields like programming, lets favor men for occupations that has high general desirability. This will move men into occupations normally occupied by highly skilled and educated women, and move women into occupations with lower general desirability by which is otherwise male dominated.
Do not be against diversity, support this move today!
[1]: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-societ...
To me, regardless of gender, YC would only want those that were proactive and dedicated to join a YC batch. It seems pointless to encourage specific demographics that would not apply, to do so.
I think you're missing the point that there could be reasons that females (or any demographic other than white American males) do not apply to YC that are not correlated with building great companies.
For example it is plausible that woman feel alienated by the tech startup scene and avoid applying to accelerators. White males born might not have that feeling. So effectively their "bar" is lower.
If YC is trying to address that it seems like a smart business move on their part. They are reducing irrationality in the system.
I'd sure rather have an Elon Musk or a Mara Aspinall in YC than a randomly-selected person who already believes YC is the best (or only) way to do a startup.
There are two parts to this -- making YC as useful as possible to the best founders, and making sure the best founders know that and apply.
But we would prefer women?
What the hell is up with YC and positive discrimination?
See: http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/19/women-hiring-ma...
i teach 8 year-old girls how to code in my free time and one of the biggest challenges to their success is re-wiring them to believe in themselves, in their critical-thinking skills, in their ability to solve problems. it seems they don't need a few mentor-role models: they need a chorus of people encouraging them and reminding them of their innate abilities. which leads me to believe—i can only extrapolate—that this must be what many boys (and men) experience on a quotidien basis.
i will never know, but i can help create that for myself and other women, particularly the wee ones. :>
Or he says: "I see a couple of guys walking down the street and I think, oh, they look like they'd make good founders or bad founders, right, as the case may be. [...] The right kind of nerdy. Like, these guys in this room are not suits, but they're not schlubs either. These are fierce nerds. You have to be somewhat intimidating looking, and that's what these guys are. [...] Yeah, yeah. They're like the kind of people Julius Caesar was afraid of." (http://www.wbur.org/npr/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon...)
Or that hilarious cherry-picked stat YC came up with: "at least one female founder." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/04...)
If YC people can't see this, that doesn't bode well for their self-critical thinking skills. (But at least Paul Graham's fairly open about what he thinks, and looks good compared to HN posters.)
To me the entire "look like Zuck" is more than the physical look. It's the harvard attendance, of a certain age, and having certain interests and mannerisms as well as background.
Truth is if you go to an Ivy or top school and view the student body you will see a certain look and feel. Doesn't mean that people with the same look don't attend a state school or community college, doesn't mean there aren't exceptions at the Ivy, but the look and feel is definitely there. Perhaps they end up looking that way after the first week as they get assimilated.
There is no doubt that people respond to visual cues and assign halo to them rightly or wrongly. Or stereotypes whatever you want to call it.
Go ahead in and try to pitch YC looking like a guy who runs a wholesale company and is 58 from the lower east side in NYC and doesn't look the part. It would almost certainly be, for lack of a super clear winning idea, an uphill battle.
As we do more events, we'll continue to reach out to women.
This sort of thing really, seriously annoys me. HN is a funnel for applying to YC. You do not need to "reach out to women." You need to stop shutting out the ones who are ALREADY here and trying like hell to participate in spite of frequently being stonewalled, being unable to get anyone to hold a private conversation with them, etc ad nauseum.
In some sense, I will probably rant a bit more about this on my personal blog today because I was already steaming mad about this before I logged in to HN to read this article showing how badly the people at the top are simply blind.
Are you really surprised, right after that "Glass wall" story was posted here about one woman's terrible tragedy of having to deal with a male executive who briefly talked to her in an office stairwell? Convincing herself the entire office was about to think they were having an affair?
And you're surprised men are less eager to approach women than men in tech?
FYI: I wrote some follow-up yesterday explaining more of the context: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-personal-...
I had my reasons for my conclusion. I do not believe they were an overreaction at all.
I don't think I've ever in my professional career observed someone being feverish and flushed and assume that it had something to do with sexual tension. Men just aren't that observant.
More likely, I would assume you were either sick or anxious because of some work-related conversation. Neither of which is a reason to be concerned vis-à-vis office politics.
Also, can I offer a suggestion to your problem? Couldn't you make up a little white lie and tell your coworkers that you had a very minor medical condition that resulted in being feverish and flushed often but that there were no other serious effects? No need to name anything, but that should take care of your worry about getting an email every time you sneeze and also deal with your concern about constantly having your obvious symptoms be misunderstood.
No, I am not overreacting. There is still more to the story and I plan on writing more in the future. If my point of view is not your cup of tea, it isn't exactly required reading. If it helps other people, good. I write in some sense for myself.
Thank you.
Or that even if all men really aren't observant enough, which is also a rather daring statement if I may say so, that still leaves room for women noticing it and communicating this more explicitly.
It's exactly the point I'm trying to make. I've never heard of anything like this happening, anywhere, ever. Even in casual settings. Nor have I observed that a normal response to sexual arousal is to be feverish and flushed.
To draw the type of conclusions that she is claiming, her coworkers would have to (1) be incredibly observant (2) reject all of the most plausible explanations for a very unlikely explanation and (3) care.
This is Ockham's razor.
I have a friend that is abnormally paranoid. He thinks everybody is out to get him and sees devious plotting from the most innocuous of situations. "those two guys at the water cooler are plotting to make me look bad at the meeting today" - type stuff.
Chances are they are not.
All I'm saying is that it sounds like fear of taking a wrong social step at work seems to be affecting her performance, not to mention increasing her anxiety.
It could perhaps be healthy to reconsider whether her assumptions are reasonable or not.
On the other hand; thinking that this kind of thing is never discussed is rather naive. There's plenty of people who are very observant about these kinds of things and will happily discuss them when the opportunity arises. We even invented a word for it: gossiping.
Most people here care about ideas and principles, not the person behind them.
It could be due to something as simple as hormonal differences creating more interconnections between hemispheres or historical oppression having given rise to a form of power play that by it's nature needed to be concealed from men.
Whichever it is, it creates a different kind of sense-making and internal dialogue. Right here, you're taking that 'kind' of internal dialogue and branding it as the sort of tripe for which women deserve to be excluded by men.
That, even disregarding the fact that you accidentally wrote this to the author of said post, is exactly the kind of stuff sexism in tech is made of.
As for the "different way of thinking"... she decided the best way to defuse suspicion about an affair that didn't exist was to act exactly as if she was having an affair.
That's called being an idiot, and it is not sexist to point that out.
I'm far removed from YC and the startup scene, but as an exceptionally intelligent black man I do have experience with scenarios that might lead one to feel that way. My advice is simply: don't feel that way. Be completely confident in yourself and abilities and ignore what others might be thinking. YC should not be seen as validation in any way, but as a stepping stone for your personal goals. In that light, the exact reasons you were funded are of no concern to your future success. Besides, I'm sure many a founder has been accepted for superficial reasons (being from the right school, having the right look, etc). If certain of your traits happen to match the current funding trends then so be it; consider it a stroke of luck and nothing else. I guarantee you the next white kid from Stanford that gets funded will not be sitting around wondering if he really belongs there.