Female founders who've had a great 2016
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Note: There's a (very gray) "View All" button in the top-right of the slideshow. I was just going to complain about the hypocrisy of stuffing a list of purportedly successful women into a photo slideshow in a cynical attempt to increase page views.
You also brought up #BlackLivesMatter, after 3 seconds of googling I get things like:
https://occamsrazormag.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/extreme-anti...
There is a lot of irony in this type of racism.
Why "#BlackLivesMatter"? Why not "#AllLivesMatter" or "#StopPoliceBrutality"?
All these things do is foster tribalism.
Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait?
Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?
To me this is like entering female athletes into the paralympics on the basis of their gender. Without any evidence of their consent.
Another issue is the promulgation and veneration of taboo, protected groups as being automatically special proportional to an university-proscribed, identity/attribute(s) neoliberal caste system. Bollocks.
I think such lists come from a positive intention for there to be less arbitrary discrimination and to motive likely-targeted/underrepresented individuals to succeed. I'm not sure how a special list helps motivate people with fundamental confidence, but instead may temporarily confer false confidence based on non-skill attribute(s) except by an inkling of almost getting on a generic list.
No, it is more like giving them separate awards, like the mens 400m and the womens 400m.
How do you support the rather extraordinary claim that the technology professions have markedly larger gender imbalance compared to other cognitive non-routine professions? From the data I saw, 2014 numbers placed technology professions around the 70%-30% gender distribution which puts it directly into the majority of professions of any kind.
The two extremes: Fair distribution (40%-60% or closer to 50%/50%) has as group a rather poor 10% of all employed people. Unsurprising, it has about the same number of women and men that works in those professions.
The second extreme are those with 90%-10% or higher, and if I remember right about the top professions in that list, it was topping with midwife nurse (99.7%), nurse with dentist specialization (99.4%) and carpenters that construct floors (99%). Going down from that you got several other specializations of nurses, mechanics, midwifes, construction workers, and kindergarten teachers (94%). You have to travel really far into the list to reach professions with as high gender equality as 70%-30%. To name a few cognitive non-routine professions at the 80%-20%, we got professions like veterinarian, psychologist, librarian, and teacher, all with worse gender distribution than technology professions.
Is your premise is that female founders are a fundamentally separate group from founders in general?
FWIW, I think it's a great idea and a good way to encourage women to join a field that they perceive as not being welcoming to them but I don't have any hard data to support this (and don't think I need any)
It's so broad a classification I'd have trouble seeing how it created biased framing. It's just a more precise way of saying "the professions" (in the traditional sense of medicine, the law, accounting, and engineering).
Why use the classification at all, if it so broad? If you use "all professions", you get perhaps things like garbage men and miners who are worse than tech? So you can always select a filter that makes tech look worst.
I think with some goodwill, you could see the point I was trying to make.
Some was certainly deserved, although I'm not sure about the proportionality of the 20th "No, seriously, Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible terrible person!" - article.
Some was offensive, misogynistic, backwards bullshit that I can only hope is highly correlated with the writer's chances at next year's Darwin awards – like about 90% of anything ever written about Ellen Pao.
Some was in between – Marissa Meyer comes to mind.
I have no idea why about a third of men feel threatened by the whole idea, but I believe those are problems that need to be addressed offline. I've seen a few cases where some measures to reduce discrimination succeeded even with some initial scepticism. 1:1 talks seem to work quite well, as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country). Once you get a team above a certain threshold (around 35% women I'd say) the whole dynamic shifts. Suddenly there's picnics and Tuesday morning runs and journal clubs etc. That's something that everyone notices and I believe it has dramatic impact.
The effects continue with any other measure of diversity you can introduce: having a few different nationalities around is an improvement, having someone with a completely different background can be a plus (met a 75-year old office manager once who was beloved at her startup) etc.
Unfortunately, very few efforts seem to focus on immediately applicable solutions like this that solve the problem (if there is one) fundamentally.
None of the Big Tech companies for example (Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft come to mind) currently do application blinding where possible, as far as I know. All of them however are very eager to promote movements like Girls Who Code because it's generally good PR and (I think) because it increases the available labor pool for them.
But if I had to guess, I'd say these large companies are actually quite fair in their hiring processes. Discrimination at that step in the process seems to be more common at smaller or older companies. The worst, most blatant actual case I have seen was the IT dept at a medium-sized bank.
At FB and Google I'd guess "career advancement" is more susceptible to biases. As company tries to create "shallow hierarchies", the risk of competition devolving into the law of the jungle increases (but, as I said, only guessing. Have no experience with them).
How about blinding during resume screening? Replace female or male names with a number or made up names. Phone screening even maybe, using some kind of audio processing. I have never heard of these companies using any such process.
Edit: Looks interviewing.io did such a process, here are the results – https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...
As for "Girls Who Code" as PR - does it increase the popularity of these firms with male coders, too? My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...
I can't think of many scenarios that would give you that impression. Did google personally reject you for being a man?
I haven't seen any effort to attract male talent. Of course having more women on the team will probably make a company more attractive to men, but I doubt that is the only thing they should bank on to attract men.
Just kidding - I didn't write a paper about it, nor did I conduct a rigorous study. Most of the Google Ads I have seen came via various Google Twitter accounts, like https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle (Life at Google seems to be dedicated to hiring people for Google).
So my filter bubble might be to blame. I haven't seen the video you mentioned which features a man.
(Edit: I just scrolled through the first several dozen tweets from "Life At Google - I think there is definitely a bias to only show female engineers there.... However, it is of course only one Google Twitter account dedicated to hiring, I don't know how many others exist. Maybe it was created explicitly to target women and minorities, but then maybe they should somehow say so).
Out of interest I googled the hits on HN for Holmes and 2016's other medical industry bête noir, Martin Shkreli. Holmes wins by 325 to 141, although I'd personally be hard pressed to say which of them was more terrible.
It's like arguing apples should be the same as oranges because they are both fruits.
That's not to condone the backlash, of course.
But perhaps we ought to stop focusing on identity politics - and start treating women as people, not tokens in our social engineering project.
1. https://techcrunch.com/gallery/18-more-female-founders-whove...
2. https://techcrunch.com/gallery/21-female-founders-who-killed...
I looked up people from first list on linkedin to see what path they took to end up there. One commonality that immediately obvious is studying at Ivy league/private university.
Perhaps a more inspiring new year list would have been " where you are born doesn't seal your fate list", but thats not clickbait enough.
1. Alex Depledge - University of Nottingham and the University of Chicago
2. Minnie Ingersol - Stanford University and Harvard Business School
3. Tracy Young - California State University-Sacramento
4. Melody McCloskey - University of California, Davis
5. Robin Chase - MIT and harvard
6. Angie Nwandu - ?
7. Payal Kakadi - MIT
8. Maran Nelson - UT austin
9. Adi Tatarko - ??
10 . Christina Lomasney - Harvard and University of Washington
11. Piraye Beim - Cornell
12. Valerie Wagoner - Stanford
13. Hooi Ling Tan - Harvard and Bath
14. Maria Ressa - ?
15. Danielle Morrill - ?
Sometimes it feels like upward mobility is limited in the very institutions we uphold as breaking those boundaries.
People whose parents struggled to send them to college aren't starting startups. They're probably paying off loans and attempting to bank money for 5-10 years. At which point, they probably start a family and still won't be starting a startup.
I'd like to see the rate at which alum from these schools found businesses vs everyone else; also, the percentage of successful founders in both groups.
I do think that parentage counts in other ways, including as part of the overall network to which these folks have access.
My parents absolutely could not have afforded to pay for college without extremely generous financial aid. Thankfully, that's exactly what elite universities provide.
I know plenty of other people who are interested in tech and startups who come from similar circumstances.
Also, for the record, if people's parents are genuinely poor then they will not have any loans from an elite university. It's all grant money.
We already have an accurate system of measuring privilege in form of parent wealth.
1. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-...
Top universities have, by far, the most generous financial aid you can get out there.
Speaking completely anecdotally, someone very close to me chose not to go to Stanford, simply because her family couldn't afford it. And that was with a scholarship.
I've never asked her about financial aid, and if she investigated it. My guess is though that she fell into the category of middle class... aka, too rich to qualify for financial aid, too poor to afford $100K+ a year college.
Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class.
The line where this happens is a lower income in mediocre private schools, and a higher income on good ones.
They've got this thing nailed down to a T. Upper/middle kids can't go because their parents can't afford it. For a variety of reasons, lower income kids can't get the marks to get in to these schools so they never reach the point where financial aid would matter.
This lets these schools preserve their elite enrolment while providing nominally generous support.
Sure it does. If everybody in the US had equal access to primary and secondary education and Harvard had income-blind admissions, do you really think that number would be so high?
Of course, there's still the factor that wealthy parents can pay for a better education. Also that intelligence is largely hereditary.
Again with the sweeping generalizations which are completely incorrect.
Because all low income kids are too stupid to get good marks, right?
Danielle Morrill did it without a degree at all. She jumped into a super early startup with friends and was an early employee at Twilio, too. Her story is worth hearing: https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode...
> While I was growing up, my dad worked on startups in the financial services industry.
> Eventually my dad started his own company and I worked for him from age 13 to 19.
>I was extremely rebellious at this point and, despite scoring a 1390 on the SAT and a high GPA, I didn't apply to any colleges at all.
Not exactly an underdog story. Almost nobody on the planet get this type of deal. Forget about jumping in with startup founders, I don't think most people know one in real life.
Still, I'm glad to see a non-conformist on this list :)
Yes, there is overlap.
Please let men and women be differently abled. Equality is the opposite of specialization. Specialization is power in a complex world. Video on that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNz5WXwKHsU
Sexual dimorphism has outcompeted equality. Equality lost.
Please don't take my question as an attack, I'm genuinely curious how people who support these initiatives view wealth.
To put it another way, most people agree with MLK Jr's dream of people not being judged by the color of their skin. At the same time, MLK Jr. also argued that racial equality wouldn't just come about on its own after victories for the civil rights movement, but would require a concerted effort by society to make up for past inequality:
> "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."
http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/04/martin_luther...
It's indisputable that the achievements of female founders are not as significant as what male founders have achieved. Part of the way to encourage potential female founders is to celebrate what female founders have done so far, even if on certain metrics (e.g. market cap) they are far behind men.
It is not primarily an economic justice movement and cannot therefore reasonably be attacked on the grounds you're attempting to attack it on.
This is, obviously, a tangent not relevant to article. 'danso was drawing an illustrative parallel, between the (implied) "All Lives Matter" rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, to "where's the men-only event" rebuttal to women-in-tech initiatives.
This list however I don't support because the members are from wealthy backgrounds and are being presented as needing extra help.
If it was 'top Silicon Valley founders' no one would think 'needs extra help'; if it was 'top Midwest founders' probably HNers would think 'needs extra help'. There's nothing in the article format that says 'needs extra help' -- that idea is brought by the reader.
Similarly: there simply is a profound gender imbalance in technology, and celebrating progress toward correcting that imbalance is reasonable regardless of the underlying economic story.
It is reasonable to have concerns both about the structural privileges afforded to wealthy people in technology and the gender gap. What's not reasonable is to use one issue as a cudgel to beat back concerns about the other. If you think the tech gender gap doesn't matter, you'll have to argue that directly.
So where is the list of male founders who kicked it in 2016?
I would be less bothered by such lists without the undertone of "we need such lists because of sexism".
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 and marked it off-topic.
But hey ho - I suppose we have important social engineering to do...
Please drop the ideological vitriol from your comments here. It breaks the rules, poisons the discourse, and discredits the substantive point you were making.
And organically grown companies aren't going to make a "Top N List" of anything until they're so big that it doesn't matter anymore.