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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it.

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.

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There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can make it in technology. This is what we get to take for granted, and as a result, aren't really aware of. Girls trying to figure out what they want, out of the set of options that they think are viable/promising, don't have this benefit, and needlessly self-select themselves out.

Really? Downvoted? I'd love to know what for. Is what I'm saying making people angry?

> There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can make it in technology.

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.

I said what they were doing in the part you quoted. By dominating a field, they establish ample precedent that others like them can do so as well. This is not an intentional thing that they're doing. It's a byproduct. This phenomenon occurs all the time, for groups of all kinds.

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.

> By dominating a field, they establish ample precedent that others like them can do so as well.

And you think that "like" is gender?

What does this borderline-sexist generalization even mean?

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?

Ah, but it didn't mention men. It was making an implicit point that's hard to attack. Either way, if it /were/ making the point you bring up, it's crude for the writer to imply that men prefer being naive and inexperienced when starting a business.

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