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Comment by w00pla | Hacker News Reader

Really?

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?

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I don't think the goal of XX Combinator is to make a women-only organization.

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.

> If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?

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.)

> 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.

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.

That's just PhDs, though. What are the percentages for new profs?

That's an interesting question, and in a bit of searching just now I wasn't able to find any good data. I'd love to see an estimate of gender-% for new prof hires per field across all U.S. universities, for some recent period.

I think organizations to get men into teaching and nursing would be valuable. Teaching especially. When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink.

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.

Teaching needs more men, because children (particularly boys) need more adult male role models.

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.

When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink.

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.

Take a group of 100 female engineers and contrast them with 100 male engineers, they will have very different attitudes towards engineering. I say this from experience.

i think that's what the article is trying to say. 22-yr-old women are not going to spend their nights in an underground lab (jesus christ!). a 40-yr-old woman has a different perspective and capability.

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.

Why shouldn't the 22-yr old woman spend their nights hacking like we do? The article just dismisses women kicking ass in their 20's because they, "like to be experienced first" or something like that? Then totally dismisses their 30's due to children. Guess what, if you're serious about running a business then children are often hard to fit into that picture. You can't have everything.

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

There is definitely this push (in Australia at least, with special scholarships, etc.) for more men in nursing and teaching.

ESR wrote about this: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2118

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