Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Are women better suited for this job?

Yes, practically all of the core traits PG describes are typical feminine traits. This is a nice piece because it explains how critically important the feminine touch is, and how easy it is to ignore that because most females don't care much about their personal fame, they mostly care about helping people and being useful.

While PG has described the utility these traits have in running a "family" of founders, they're also extremely valuable in running an actual family. PG has really written an ode to womanhood in general, and whilst reading it, I think most of us will relate as we identify similar things in our wives and mothers.

This is not to detract from Jessica Livingston's specific ability to apply these to the world of VC, which undoubtedly takes a lot of skill and knowledge, but I think it's important that we recognize the value from these types of contributions is accessible and often regularly enjoyed by those of us who are lucky enough to have such stereotypically selfless women in our lives.

Ugh. I get that the gender binary is something that we all grew up with, so it can seem like some sort of immutable feature of the universe. But "typical feminine traits" can be learned by actual dudes.

Guys, if you think that these traits are useful for running successful businesses, just go learn them. It is possible for men to listen just like Jessica. We can also be nurturing, supportive, sensitive, thoughtful, emotionally perceptive, and kind. These are actual skills that we can actually learn if we want. We don't have to push women to be stereotypes just to have successful businesses and families.

I largely agree with you that these traits can be learned (let's exclude the fact that hormones affect mood and thus personality). However, growing up in a system that pushes this binary also affects personality. Thus, while I don't think your sex plays too big of a role into this, your gender (see: social constructs) totally does. You grew up in that environment with those expectations, and that forms you in some way.

> We don't have to push women to be stereotypes just to have successful businesses and families.

Totally agree with that, despite my above comment.

Sure. Plenty of people grow up with a religious upbringing as well, but as adults we can choose to stick with it or to change. If people consciously choose to stick with that, fine. But I don't want them imposing it on others, and I especially don't want them acting like their way is the only possible way to arrange the universe.

Gender roles are an immutable feature of the universe. Yes, men can learn and become good at some of these things that women have a natural inclination toward, just as women can learn and become good at some of the things that men have a natural inclination toward, and there is some play here in terms of the quantity of each trait that a specific individual gets, but it's hard to fully substitute a native intuition.

We need both genders -- neither can be discarded, and insisting that the two genders are so similar as to not have any unique properties or advantages is the same as discarding them.

The hardcore downvotes on this comment, ostensibly given because it seems to run counter to today’s moral crisis of Women in Engineering, and it sounds so very regressive, despite the possibility it’s … not wrong, are a perfect illustration of http://paulgraham.com/say.html

I have a simple thought experiment for those who have a strong impulse to downvote the parent comment (and doubtless my own comment): Imagine the discussion here were, say, a study that illustrated men naturally resorted to forming factions and solving disagreements with violence, and someone commented, “No, it’s 100% society, not innate whatsoever” and then someone replied to that saying “no, while individual variation is of course very real, there is some evidence that the general trends that inform some of our stereotyped intuitions of gender are based in biological fact.” Would you be quite so quick to mash the down arrow? … Perhaps. It’s a discussion fraught with a lot of charged emotions, and we collectively are not so good at dealing with points of view contrary to whatever we want to believe.

The difference is that in your imaginary discussion, the person is proposing nuance informed by evidence. The comment you're replying to, on the other hand, pushes against nuance based only on personal opinion.

I don't know anybody who would argue that gender has absolutely no biological implications. But to suggest they tell us something about how society should be structured is the naturalistic fallacy, confusing is with ought.

As an example, illness and death are natural. But that doesn't mean that we should just shrug and say, "Oh well, tuberculosis is natural, so we should just accept it." The natural details of death should certainly inform how we fight it. But they can never tell us we shouldn't.

Individual variation swamps gender variation. Unless you're hiring at a demographic level (like the military), basing decisions on gender of the individual is largely pointless.

Yes, there are real differences between the genders, but I think they are much fewer and less pronounced than most people think. Many supposedly immutable gender differences have been found to be societally imposed upon closer inspection. (Citation needed, I'm posting this from a phone.)

Definitely. The notion that gender roles are an immutable part of the universe is basically a religious statement, not a factual one.

For those interested in how much this varies across species, I heartily recommend Dr Taiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00846X144

It's a great and funny book on the biology of gender and reproduction, written as an advice column.

Growing up in the midwest, I mistook a lot of what people got up to as essential facts of human biology. But after 15 years living in San Francisco, I've come to realize how much of that is purely socially constructed.

"Stereotypically selfless"? She's a founder of Y Combinator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com