XX Combinator
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There are always complaints about women in technology. Yet when I spent my Saturday nights in an underground lab, there weren’t a lot of women in the lab. The bar and social spots on the humanities side were full of them though.
Is it okay to have double standards? If we make women only organizations to promote things, is it okay if we make men only organizations?
If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?
Y Combinator is designed to be an environment for young hackers to flourish, where they might otherwise be stifled by large institutions and various cultural expectations (read PG's essays, etc.)
It seems the idea behind XX combinator is to take a similar look at 40+ women and design an environment where they can flourish. Just like Y Combinator wouldn't turn away a promising woman candidate merely because she's over 40, putting up "girls only" signs is probably not going to help XX all that much either.
There's no shortage of men in the humanities, nor in teaching once you get past the lower grade levels. In the US, at least.
The point of women in tech advocacy is that there are a variety of forces discouraging women into self-selecting themselves out of careers in technology. One is just the fact that there are so few women in tech to begin with. Another is that barely any can be considered high-profile. Then there are all the historical, cultural, and sociological factors.
This sort of advocacy is just an attempt to fight against those forces by establishing greater visibility and precedent for successful women in tech.
(As an aside, I think it'd be great if there were more female engineers in the dating pool.)
That's true currently, but only because of very long cycles, I think: there are still plenty of male professors in the humanities today who got their PhDs in the 1960s and 70s, when all of academia was male-dominated. But men make up around a 40%-and-declining proportion of new non-science/eng PhDs, which is actually not much better than the women in science/eng numbers (women make up about a 35%-and-rising proportion of new science/eng PhDs). In some fields it's closer to 25%, since that 40% of men getting humanities PhDs are strongly clustered in a handful of fields (like philosophy, which is still male-dominated). I think things are going to look quite interesting in 20-30 years once the current crop of older profs retires.
I think you're mostly making a strawman argument. I don't know what your opinion on the matter is, but I think that most self-described feminists would agree that a dearth of men in teaching is just as much a problem as a dearth of women in engineering.
Nursing can stay 90% female for all I care, though. I think most men prefer having female nurses (either of the hot variety or the motherly variety) and I'm guessing most women do too.
Why? If you take a group of 100 random men from around the world, they're going to have as wide a range of opinions and ideas as a group of 100 women.
Groupthink comes more from cultures than genders. A group of 100 Americans is going to have more shared opinions and ideas relative to any other group than 100 men or 100 women or mixed culture. Cultural diversity would be more helpful to avoid groupthink than gender diversity.
X-only in terms of constituents is always dangerous, of course. groups should aim to create a specific culture where Y is not tolerated, but where individuals are free to join the community within the constraints of the culture. eg, hacker news.
I can't imagine waiting until my 40's to start hitting the ground running as fast as I can. Nor should women. The women I know who have done various accelerators, including y-combinator, were hackers and not interested in having children immediately. They were more interested in doing amazing things as goal #1
What does this borderline-sexist generalization even mean?
First, there aren't enough women entrepreneurs. There aren't enough women VCs. There aren't enough women developers.
Is there a quota? The beauty of our (Western) society (at this moment in history) is that people have the freedom to shoot for whatever they want independent of their race/religion/age/gender. Using people's physical or demographic characteristics to fill out some sort of social prescription is as offensive as it is misguided.
Really? Downvoted? I'd love to know what for. Is what I'm saying making people angry?
What, exactly, are these older men doing such that younger men can benefit and younger women can not?
If your response is "they're men", that's not something that they're doing. That's something that the younger women are doing, or rather, not doing, namely thinking that the gender of X matters in "X is doing Y, so I can do it too" when it doesn't.
To flip it around, think about nurses before male nurses became commonplace. What would run through your head, thinking about being a nurse? There are probably a lot of things that would stop you from taking the idea seriously, just because the profession was dominated by women and had hardly any men.
And you think that "like" is gender?
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People here seem to be using the fact that girls/women frequently "decide" against or don't "want" a career in tech to obscure the question of what determines why they decided that way or didn't want to pursue it, and whether those determinants are fair or beneficial.
A more extreme example that demonstrates what's wrong with how you guys are using "free", "decided", "wanted", etc. would be something like a minority "deciding" against running for president in a country where the majority is racist against his kind, even if he is free to attempt it. Note that I'm not claiming any moral equivalence here, or that the problem of females self-selecting themselves away from tech is primarily the result of discrimination. But there's a real sense in which the decisions being made, and the ideas of what someone wants for themselves, are being generated in less than optimal conditions.
Are you asking rhetorically? It means "the average woman would want more experience in a field before starting a business in that field than the average man would." I'm not saying I agree, but why not address it on whether it's true or not than with borderline-namecalling?
IMO if you want to be in tech, you'll find a way to do what you want to do. People (all people! not just women!) who are motivated to do something will do what's necessary to achieve it. Sure it's nice to have another woman to chat to occasionally when you run into sexist jerks, but otherwise I get on just fine with people of any gender because I'm confident and know my stuff, work hard, and am pretty laid back. Probably helps that I grew up with the net a bit though (I'm almost 30) so am no longer horrified by gutter humour or swear words, or other "unladylike" things.
I am not saying this is a problem for all women or that it only affects women, but it is still a problem that needs to be solved. Role models help, encouragement helps, and having someone around to convince these students they aren't stupid helps. I would rather more women get into TAing intro classes than this program, but take what you can get.
I will admit, it can be quite intimidating as a woman to, say, start going to things like Linux Users Groups though; back when I first joined my local one (late 90s, early 2000s?) there were a lot of... intimidating people there. But there were also a number of women, and a few friends of mine also there, which was good for that moral support. But then again, these people are loud mouthed egotistical dicks to everyone that has an opposing view to them, usually, not just women (e.g. if they use emacs and you use vim, be prepared!).
In these very charged environments it only really came up a couple of times: one of these that happened to me was one of the main examples used in the "women in linux howto" (which I'm not a fan of actually, because I think it causes a bit of a negative feedback loop), and was dealt with very well by both male and female members of the group. Curiously, due to that howto, I still get email from concerned guys hoping that I haven't been turned off LUGs for the rest of my life!
I definitely think it's a great idea to have more women in tech, especially education, but I think that they need to feel like they have a passion for it. And all the incentives, etc. make for a bit of a bad taste in the mouth w.r.t. that :)
Showing up to some groups, posting on some boards (like this one even) and jumping into the conversation can be outright terrifying.
My XY-card doesn't make it instantly simple to show up to any event and feel comfortable.
I actually think a lot of the problem is the culturally linked gender roles that society pushes on kids from an early age. The "girls play with dolls, boys play with cars" type stuff. I was always a tomboy and hated dolls, I was far more interested in cars and planes and Lego than more girly toys (though when peer pressure started to become a part of my life I felt left out without Barbies and things).
The point being, at my academically-selective girls high school, we had only a tiny computer room (and not much done in there), no metalwork or woodwork or anything like that classes, but lots of sewing and cooking as our "design and technology" part. Us girls weren't really encouraged to use computers much, the only thing that really got me into it was my dad, who was (and still is) an oldskool computer nerd. I'm sure if we'd had more opportunities to do more with computing there would have been more women going into computer-related degrees at university, for example. But these distinctions are things that need to be addressed well before the getting-to-uni part.
I just get the distinct impression that to get more women into these sorts of areas they need to be more exposed to them from an earlier age, so it's part of their normal expectations about what they can do with their life, much like becoming a doctor or a lawyer is these days, when in the past these were most definitely male dominated areas.
Also, one thing Tereza mentioned, that "women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing", could be seen more as a problem to be addressed than a constraint to be worked around.
I believe that the status quo is not going to evolve much through anything that can be construed by naysayers as affirmative action. Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done. Laura Finton, founder of oneforty and a Tech Stars grad is a great example. She started her company as a single mom with young kids as a solo founder with no programming skills. Even though I'm not a Twitter person at all, I take my hat off to her. She's taking the time to tell her story to the Boston entrepreneurial community and leading by example.
I don't think it's that simple though. For a majority change, positive feedback is required along the lifecyle from knowing nothing to loving it and having entrepreneurial aspirations. I think the main problem is the mostly invisible peer pressure to do something else - not the peer pressure to not do something. This is why more female role models are needed and more tech-oriented schooling from a young age and more gender neutral literature, etc.
I guess there isn't really a real platform for this that isn't bloated with bots, spam and ads.
as a woman myself, being a 40-yr-old entrepreneur makes sense in a dozen ways. one less important but rather interesting way is that one is more likely to be interacting with 40-yr-old males. i must say that most young men are rather self-minded. male hackers traditionally develop group process and team-supporting after a prolonged technical and super-independence+confidence phase. women tend to develop differently. once everyone matures and self actualizes interaction becomes awesome :-)
Less of the "women" and more of the "people," please. Many men are involved in child care and housework in a significant way, and similarly have to make trade offs between work and family.
Who's the you in this sentence? The government? Investors?
This strikes me as a tautology. Just about anyone would start a company if the risk and sacrifices involved were mitigated by a benevolent 3rd party.
The proportion of the general population that has applied to YC is vanishingly small. There is plenty of room for incubators with different priorities, and different intentional and incidental biases. Do you think YC is adversely affecting the startup landscape?
What percentage of people in YCombinator are black, gay, Muslim, or otherwise? Would low percentages of people with these labels be "pathetic"?