Women, Men, And Other Things Done Wrong By Silicon Valley

Founders today have significant control of their company’s formation and development. They no longer have to locate in the Valley but can operate from almost anywhere worldwide. The web has given them vast amount of knowledge about how things work, where they were once relegated to trying to pick up scraps around the water cooler. The infrastructure build-out has significantly reduced their capital needs, where they once routinely needed immediate large funding just to launch their basic product. The desktop PC is no longer a primary software development platform, where it once dominated and defined the range of startup opportunities available. The barriers are down, and there is much more room for sheer drive and talent to hold sway and define the path to success.

The dark side has always been there, as noted in this fine piece, and it will remain - doing startups does "suck" if one compares it to conventional ways of making a living but that is why the rewards can be large as well.

But demographic diversity is today quite pronounced in terms of racial, ethnic, and cultural mix (the white males among the founders I work with are today a distinct minority). Only on the gender side does it continue to lag. On that side, I am not sure how much will change in the near term. Given the otherwise radical changes that have occurred, whatever is causing this state of things to persist must be pretty deeply ingrained.

> My beef with the discourse of “diversity” in a nutshell: it screams “give us more women” and whispers “give us more women like us”.

The real lack of diversity in startupland doesn't seem to me to be in chromosomes or melanin, but in experience and target markets. Everyone's building general-purpose to-do lists and twitter clients instead of researching and finding underserved markets.

On the subject of social pathologies and the idiot men who sign up for them: T minus 30 work days until I am no longer a salaryman.

I was a contractor at a large company that prided itself on diversity, and from what I could see, the were successful in their hiring and promotion. What they were not successful in is accepting or promoting diversity of thought. Once you were in the door, you needed to get on board with their way of thinking.

First, just to get this out of the way, it's kind of embarrassing that pornographers are once again in the vanguard. Now that that's out of the way, the author has an excellent point. There must be a lot of educated moms who are having second thoughts about staying at home, for economic reasons or otherwise, but they look around and think, "Crap, how the hell can I get a decent job here? I'm stuck in Middle America, nobody cares that I'm an excellent writer and researcher, and even if I wanted to work as a receptionist, I'd be ridiculed by my coworkers for the lack of return on my graduate degree in anthropology." When people have second thoughts about their lives, maybe they persuade their families to turn their lives upside down, or maybe they decide not to. Telecommuting from home is a great option for those who don't. I suspect there's a culture gap between educated stay-at-home moms and ragingly ambitious (and sometimes very narrowly educated) twenty-something software entrepreneurs, but they're basically from the same class and should be able to get along without too much effort.

Haidt argues there's two kinds of diversity: demographic and moral.

People who want demographic diversity are arguing for he inclusion of previously excluded groups.

Moral diversity is a lack of consensus on normal norms and values, and Haidt argues no one can coherently want moral diversity (e.g., if you are pro-life, how can you want there to be a diversity of views on abortion with none dominating?)

In his article Patrick touches on this I think. Some people want Silicon Valley to be more demographically diverse for reasons of justice; but they would not feel comfortable if that diversity led to moral diversity. People want to associate with others who think and believe like themselves.

In reproduction, which is what evolution is made of, men and women are very different. A woman can only have one baby every nine months, and realistically maybe every other year. This limits her choices for reproduction so she has to find the right man for the job meaning someone that has the resources to take care of the kid and make sure he grows up and has offspring. Men on the other hand can reproduce as much as they like given they can find a willing woman. This has some interesting consequences on evolutionary selection.

- Women are risk averse and look for security, knowing that they only have a few shots at successful propagation.

- Since men can have many women, but women can have only one man (a women with many men will not produce more offspring, but a man with many women will) the offspring of the men will be unequally divided. The bottom of the pack won't have any offspring at all while the top of the pack will have a lot. Ghengis Khan had lots of children with many wives, and so do people with harems. This means there are men that have no offspring at all.

- Women look for men that can take care of their offspring. They care more about them since they have fewer chances than men do. This is why women go for rich men, and why only rich men have harems.

What this means is that a woman is somewhat guaranteed to find a man that she can produce offspring with if she is conservative in her choices, and that she will tend to mate with the most successful man she can find. Men, on the other hand, don't have this guarantee and have to play a risky game of trying to make it to the top. The more success a man has the more women will want to mate with him. On the other hand if he is conservative there's a risk he won't find anyone to mate with at all thus ending his gene pool.

I think this combined with Patrick's post explains pretty clearly why there are no more women in Silicon Valley. It's simply too risky.

I think that YC has done a very good job of that.

I survived that whole dotcom boom watching all of my male internet buddies start, get hired at and then cash out of start-ups. As many times as I privately asked to be considered, I was denied. My male friends networked for jobs, got references. I asked for the same and got hems and haws and shufflings of feet. I had to marry one of them, just to get that opportunity. It worked: I've stayed with MTSO for 3 years -- longer than any place I've worked since I left high school. Sounds bitter, doesn't it?

The truth is, I never let myself be bitter. And I've always told the women who do whine to suck it up. Whining sets a bad example.

So let's review:

- I'm exceptionally motivated. You put yourself through college scrubbing toilets and see how motivated you are. So far there is nothing I've tried that, in time, I did not excel at. Pardon my hubris. But it's impossible to be at the top of a game you cannot play, right?

- I would have loved that job. I kept applying and kept getting turned down. The closest I could get was as a contractor, which is kinda like a temp who can script instead of type. Sun hired me to train full-time employees. Contracting came to a swift end when I became pregnant. To quote, "We think you should reconsider your fit within this organization." You don't forget words like that.

- I used to program, decades ago. I quit, but I don't exactly remember why. It's a mystery, because coding does not feel like work, and I get paid for that, now. Instead, I spent those decades as a sysadmin. I have a lot of grey hair and innumerable scars on my arms and legs from running cable and shifting heavy equipment.

- I worked 100 hour weeks, anyway. Even now I try to cram work into every small time slice available (today, that meant coding while waiting for an x-ray appointment). I always was paid less than my male peers, so the threat of being paid next to nothing is meaningless to me. I wouldn't trade what I do now for anything short of "independently wealthy." What does crushing defeat really feel like? When a famous do-no-evil company interviews you and asks what your kids will do all day while you're at work. Or a recruiter mentions she hears your kids in the background and asks for reassurance that you can work 40 hours a week. That's the moment when it hits you that all the blood, sweat and tears that flowed from you while you were paying your dues count for nothing. A friend of mine quit the industry for two years to work as a roofer. He walked right back into a six-figure salary. Note that I've never had a six-figure salary, but I know what most of my old co-workers made then and make now.

- No, sir, the pinnacle of my career comes at the ripe old age of 40 when I really don't care if we ever cash out. I'm sure Tom does, but not me. Risk tolerance? All our eggs are in this one basket. Even though I know that, if something goes wrong, we can get "regular jobs," this is just too much fun. Not in it for the money... in it for the bragging rights.

When I went back to work full-time, Tom didn't quite have a sense of what I was up against. Though I think he got an inkling when I was interviewed by someone who showed me a picture of his ass during the interview. Heck, I was even SURPRISED to find out that it was illegal for to be asked what my kids would be doing while I was at work. And I called that recruiter's boss -- a woman, also. She peed all over herself, verbally, apologizing.

Your ideas to make startups more palatable are not bad, but they are expensive. Startups need to run lean. And as for women, a lot of the time we're trying not to aggravate bias by whining. As my grandmother said, "You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar." Nobody likes a whiner. It's a dignity thing. But I don't have anything to lose. So if you want to hear more of the gory stories of my work experiences, feel free to track me down and email me.

Oh, and sorry for the really long response. It was a long post.

A few posts I like about this subject:

http://blog.asmartbear.com/sacrifice-your-health-for-your-st... http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/calacanis-fires-people-... http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/20/european-startups-need-t...

> [...] it [Silicon Valley] has its peculiar jokes and rhythms and closely-held shadow beliefs which owe a bit more to repetition than they owe to empirical reality

The problem is that those beliefs include a broad perception of women as less than equal. Lack of diversity is a self-perpetuating prophecy in that way.

--- Broader reply:

I also think that Patrick is severely underestimating the benefits of a diverse environment. There are reasons Silicon Valley is next to SF and not Dallas; many of them have to do with the vibrant mix of cultures there.

Personal anecdote: I've moved across the country in search, specifically, of greater diversity. I've turned down jobs because the workplace was a monoculture. And the single biggest negative for me of the space I'm currently co-working in is that it is entirely composed of white guys under 30. I may or may not be the best developer ever -- but the best programmers and businesspeople I've ever met share some of the same values. In other words a homogeneous environment will not only drive away 'diverse' people, but also may be doing the same for the best non-diverse people as well.

Gay Jewish man in New York, an Englishman in London, a 4th generation zainichi kankokujin (ethnically Korean who was born in Japan), and an Irish Catholic dogmatist

Could be as diverse as anything, but they could also be very similar. I actually think they are very similar, because in foreign countries, the collaboration that usually falls in place is similar to that.

Real diversity happens when age, gender, culture barriers are crossed. English, New Yorker, Irish and even an Australian man of roughly the same age have very similar though processes, because they consume the same media.

It also points at a fundamental misunderstanding - intellectual diversity does not mean bringing in people that think the same as you, but have lived in slightly different neighbourhoods. Intellectual diversity actually starts when you find it difficult to understand the other persons point of view. When the cultural difference is so large that there is a difficulty communicating, then you have created an intellectually diverse place.

These oh-let-me-pat-myself-on-the-back posts are boring and offer exactly the same arguments as the other two posts. If you want to write a blog post where two other blog posts have been written, then make an effort to actually offer a viewpoint that is really unique to the situation.

The startup failure rate after 5 years is actually closer to 60 than 90%. Two comparisons come to mind:

In a standard company job, career stagnation and unrecognized toil are the standard. If you don't become the protege of someone important-- someone who will look out for you and make sure you're on the best projects-- in the first two years, it's no longer worth it to go to work in a lot of companies. Most people don't become proteges.

So, if you're ambitious at all, there's above a 60% chance you'll be looking for work again in 5 years no matter what you do.

Second, although the boring corporate job is safer, the enjoyment of startups comes from the fact that you're doing relevant, useful work (so long as the product you're working on has a successful launch and trajectory). To do relevant work isn't an option for most people in their early-mid 20s; even if they're brilliant, most companies expect them to "pay dues" before they can do anything interesting, and there are so many arcane, IO-bound permissions systems before even the smallest technological changes can be made.

In the startup, you have a 100% chance of doing relevant work for a product that has a sub-50% chance of ever existing. In the safe corporate job, less than 20% of what you'll do in your first three years is relevant work. It's tough to say which wins.

Personally, I chose the startup route under the belief that, no matter what happens, I'll learn a lot more-- that's a lot more important than what job title I get or what my pay is (as long as I can stay afloat). I figure that I can rewrite my own story a million times-- I've never had to resort to "creative career repair", but if I need to invent more impressive titles or inflate compensation, I can. On the other hand, knowledge and skill are completely impossible to fake. So I focus on a path where I learn a lot, not one where I get my tickets punched.