The reality is that there are simply very few women that hold the qualifications necessary to be successful in the startup world. When you do find one, the competition for their services is incredibly fierce. In a previous gig I tried desperately to hire a particular woman who had just graduated from MIT. We lost a pretty serious bidding war, not because she was a woman but because her skills were off the charts.
It's funny, there are similar articles written about certain disciplines in academia (like accounting). There too it's just a numbers game. My wife, until her latest birthday, was just 1 of 5 female accounting PhD's in the whole country (including foreign born) under 30. Of course there are precious few female accounting professors, there are very few females pursuing accounting PhD's!
Of course, that means she enjoys a tremendous advantage over her peers. The pressure to promote diversity means she enjoys a better salary and lot more job security than her male counterparts.
The same is true, from my experience, for the few intelligent and talented female engineers that I've met in the valley.
That's interesting, because Leah Culver is someone who I've frequently heard discussed in the context of who she is dating or who she has dated, with the implication that she's riding on the coattails of her boyfriends. So, maybe that's not such a good example for you to use.
(Disclaimer, in case that wasn't clear enough: I'm relaying things I've heard other people say. I don't personally know enough about Ms. Culver to have any opinions on her abilities.)
http://blog.leahculver.com/2008/11/couchdb-documents-python-...
Using exec to access object fields? Really? There was also a fiasco a while back where she converted floats to strings in order to compute an average (!). She deleted that post, but if you google "leah culver star ratings" you'll find some discussion of it.
She's a great marketer, but I'd hardly say she has the programming ability.
Truest words ever written. I can only respect people whose _work_ I admire, and who understand. What has she built? Leah hasn't contributed anything of value to the Internet, unless a few videos or popularity contests count.
The 'Internet' was/is ruthless in laughing at her and putting her down, in a way that I just don't see happening to guys. Could be just that its more apparent with the fewer # of women - people are more likely to remember these faux pas. Would be interesting to hear of specific technical instances of the same occurring with guys.
Most of those terrible engineers have not been featured in Wired and Technology Review. If Leah Culver were a man, no one would criticize her because no one ever would have heard of her. Do you really think anyone would have cared about her facebook/twitter clone if she weren't pretty?
Would be interesting to hear of specific technical instances of the same occurring with guys.
ESR wrote some crappy code a while back. Comments:
John Graham Cummings: "It's amusing to actually look at the source code of this...Reading it, it looks like a total hack job by a poor programmer..."
Other HN readers:
"He's [esr] certainly a talented self-publicist, but I'd go no further than that. He's the Michael Moore of software. Or the Paris Hilton."
"He's more Nichole Richie. He doesn't rise to the level of Paris, who was surprised by jail, but never surprised by wealth."
"Truth is, he is loud, but... he's not very good at writing software."
(Will grant that ESR is a pretty good example, for Atwood I dont see the attacks reaching as low a level)
Being a woman and being in tech is certainly different than a man could completely understand, and hard for not exactly the reasons a man would expect. But being a man is hard in different ways.