Arrington is completely wrong about women in technology | Hacker News Reader

Arrington is completely wrong about women in technology

seldo.com

54 pointsseldo62 comments

Why do people love trying to make complex issues black and white? The fact that there are so few women in tech is an issue that is likely caused by multiple factors, some of which were addressed in this article, and some of which were addressed in the Arrington post. No one is wrong; each just seems to be arguing over which the greater factor is, but refuses to recognize the other.

Arrington cites factors dealing with biological and societal tendencies of women as reasons for them to not engage in risky lifestyle choices such as startups, or to not be interested in tech in the first place. I agree with this. This isn't 'bad' or 'good', but it's the truth. People need to stop ignoring that there ARE (on average) differences between men and women. We (women) just aren't as interested in tech or building our own businesses in general.

I'm just one data point, but based on many experiences, I would strongly argue that in general, women do not have the desire to take as many risks as males, or deal with day-to-day uncertainties. A vast majority of my female friends thought I was absolutely nuts when I first started doing startups. (They still think I'm a little nutty, despite being able to pay my bills now). The most common questions were, "What are you going to do for money if it fails?" (Answer: Get a job, or build something else), and "How do you deal with not knowing what you're going to be doing in the next [insert some time period]?" On the other hand, my male friends overwhelmingly asked about the technologies I'm building and admired me for taking a risk. Also interesting to note is that the reaction of female friends to my (male) co-founder was more of admiration than thinking he was crazy (but I was looked upon as crazy).

On the other hand, for the women who ARE interested in tech (or could be persuaded to be interested), there are certainly existing challenges within the field itself. Again, I'm just one data point, but I am always amazed at the reactions I get from males in the startup world when they find out that I code. They are SHOCKED. Not only because I'm a woman, but also because I'm a white, blonde woman who is reasonably attractive. Sometimes I really do feel like I'm not taken seriously by many people until I do something completely bad ass to prove myself. The other article certainly has a point there.

I disagree, one of the highest risks currently is:

-Marriage -Getting Married to raise a family

Most of those have failure rates higher than starting a small business...and some would argue its approaching the risk level of startups.

Women on the whole are no more or less risk averse than Men.

Perceived risk is the metric to look at here, but I think you probably know that.

I'd wholly disagree, women on the whole are more risk averse than men, it's everywhere in society. Women take less dangerous jobs regularly. More men die in work place accidents, because men take the risky jobs, more men die in the military because more men join it and take the risky jobs.

I work in construction, it's not high-risk but it's not office-job safe and we get higher pay than average and the company advertises to men and women. Our office has 4 female workers and 1 male (the owner), but we've only ever had 1 female employee outside the office and I believe she was the only one to ever apply and we have a fairly high turnover.

Why is our job not getting an equal number of applicants if women are just as risk taking as men because jobs are advertised to both.

"more men die in the military because more men join it"

Ooh, what a great example that women are (generally) encouraged to take less risks, while men are (generally) encouraged to take more risks.

Not that some brain function differences are impossible, but assumptions about brain function seem more risky (sorry) than assumptions about cultural conditioning. Until we can get an ethical double-blind study on a large group of women with perfectly controlled upbringing, or at least a good study including some hypothetical culture that encourages women to take risks (not the same as matriarchal), I think it's better to assume cultural differences.

40-50% of marriages end in divorce.

50% of small businesses will be gone in five years. 80% in ten. That's across the board, not just high-risk tech startups.

Sure but in those 50% will be a lot of businesses that where part time and where never meant to go on forever.

And if you remove the startups from the number, more than 50% of businesses succeed for five years.

"People need to stop ignoring that there ARE (on average) differences between men and women."

Considering that we live in an era where you can basically take a pill that gives you the experience of being a woman for whatever amount of time you want, it seems like these differences are going to get much harder to ignore, especially since this technology is only going to get better and more scientifically validated with time.

we live in an era where you can basically take a pill that gives you the experience of being a woman for whatever amount of time you want

Wait, what? I've never heard of that before, what is it?

There are many points of difference in how males vs females perceive the world. Different drugs approximate different points of difference. For example, increasing serotonin makes colors brighter, closer to the way a woman would perceive them. Which is probably why women like flowers and brightly colored clothing more than men, and why they are more OCD about keeping the house clean. I'm not sure to what extent mainstream science recognizes this, but it seems pretty obvious to me.

Amusingly, about a third of my friends on SSRIs have become temporarily attracted to the 'wrong' gender. Which is why I suspect that sexual attraction is an emergent property of our sensory perception systems, rather than being a discrete switch that's unrelated to anything else.

That sounds like a pill that makes you perceive colours more brightly, not a pill that makes you into a temporary-woman.

I'm not sure why you think that women perceive colours more brightly (I don't think the fact that they like flowers is evidence...). In fact, if women do perceive colours more brightly than men, how would we possibly know about it? We can't even solve the "What if the colour I see as blue is seen by you as red" problem.

"I'm not sure why you think that women perceive colours more brightly."

Well we know for a fact that women perceive colors differently than men because they like different colors than men. It's not exactly clear what the differences in color perception are, but it seems like the drugs that increase men's serotonin levels leave them with aesthetic color preferences that more closely resemble those of women. So it stands to reason that men's color perception is becoming more close to that of women. Obviously there are some epistemological problems with proving this, but it seems like a reasonably good assumption.

Well we know for a fact that women perceive colors differently than men because they like different colors than men.

I hate to turn this into a hard-core discussion of qualia, but I'm not convinced that the fact that women like different colours means that they perceive them differently.

At least, not except in the trivial sense that they see "purple" and think "I like purple" whereas I merely see "purple" and think "I am indifferent to purple".

I agree with you that this is possible. Then again, because it's trivial to prove (at least to yourself) that altering brain chemistry can change both color perception and color preference, I think that my hypothesis is the most likely explanation. Especially since the fact that gender differences in sensory preferences are detectable at 3-4 months of age shows that they are likely biological and not cultural.

Which gender is the 'wrong' gender now?

The gender that's the opposite of the one you were originally attracted to. (I put it in quotes so that it wouldn't be read as a value judgment.)

lol, and "originally attracted to" would be? Am I misunderstanding you or are you accidentally suggesting that gays and lesbians are originally attracted to the "right sex"? You are just digging deeper and deeper.

Seriously, though I realize it wasn't intended, just made me laugh.

  Why do people love trying to make complex issues black and white?

Because they love the resulting attention.

Also because most people find it very easy to convince themselves they've come up with a simple solution to a very complicated issue.

Come now, we can be more mature than this. The OP may be an oversimplification of the issue, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't earnestly see and want to fix a problem.

It's human nature to try to understand things. And the best way to do that is to simplify the issue. But some things just cant be simplified.

I'm sure there are plenty of existing challenges, but the author can't really fault people for being good at statistics and acting accordingly.

He is essentially asking males to ignore the current situation so that females can ignore the current situation (and the fact that women in tech are to some degree, still breaking new ground)

You're essentially using the existence of sexism as a justification for sexism. "There aren't many women in tech, therefore why should I treat women like they might be in tech?"

The reason you should ignore the current situation is precisely because _ignoring it will help change the situation_. That was the point of my post.

I don't think he was justifying sexism ANYWHERE in his comment. The fact is that few women are in tech. You can't fault people in good faith for making observations of their environments. But I doubt you can even claim good faith to your name.

I think you are wrong about what sexism is, or what any -ism is. I can make all sorts of observations without falling into an -ism: There aren't many women in tech. I am not sexist. A majority of convicts are minorities. I am not racist. Older people are more likely to be ignorant of new technology. I am not ageist.

Ism's are not about making the observation in the first place, they are about being reluctant to drop your assumptions when you meet an exception.

This is such rubbish, and I hate that we're having this argument again. The last wave of resumes for a software engineer position came out to something like 97% male. The one female that passed the screening was really impressive with a degree from M.I.T. and a very impressive track record.

We couldn't afford her.

Arrington is not very often right, but he is in this case. Look around your average computer science classroom (from which the majority of startup founders originate) and tell me what you see. It's not because women aren't allowed, it's because they choose not to be.

Why can't both sides be true? I've never seen or heard of gender bias in the hiring process, but that doesn't discount the possibility that women aren't going into computer science for a reason.

Yes, but "Why do women choose not to be entrepreneurs?" is a valid question. And one of the possible answers (not necessarily the right one) is "our society biases women against becoming entrepreneurs". If that is the reason there are less female entrepreneurs, then the conclusion is "many women who could have been successful entrepreneurs don't do it because society biases them against it".

Assuming we believe that the more people who become entrepreneurs, the better, then our society should take corrective action to make sure the women who could be entrepreneurs actually do it.

People make generalizations based upon the world around them. OK, so people don't expect a woman to be a programmer when they see her. Similar expectations didn't stop women from becoming lawyers or doctors or bankers, and now when you see a woman walking around a hospital or a courthouse she very well may be a doctor or a lawyer.

Women can and did overcome the same barriers to enter other fields. If you want to explain why women aren't in software, there's no explanatory power in explanations that equally apply to fields which women did become a part of.

One thing is that it took a long, long time for women to break into medicine and start being taken seriously as doctors. Tech is still relatively young, so I'm hoping that we can start making movements towards that level of parity faster than then several generations it took medicine.

Sure, if you count from the beginning of the medical profession (though technically, women dominated some parts of medicine, like delivering babies, for millennia before men ever became involved, and then women broke back in).

If you count from the beginning of women-in-the-workplace style feminism, software should have had women almost from the outset. If a new profession or a new sector of the economy arose now you'd expect it to have tons of women because as a culture we're used to women in the workplace, right? What about biotech--are there more women in biotech than software?

Here's how it happens: if a woman engineer starts talking, men will wait until she says something notably clever before they start taking her seriously. Men on the other hand are taken seriously by default, and only get dismissed if they say something notably dumb.

I was neutral to mildly positive on the post until this point. It is simply false. In tech, nobody is taken seriously by default. I certainly never have been, and I'm a young tall skinny white guy with glasses (the very computer-geek stereotype if ever there was one). I have to re-prove myself every time. I've never observed anything different with regard to anyone else.

It turns out that there is one way you can get people to take you seriously from the get-go: "earn the respect of your immediate peers" (people take you seriously if it's obvious that everyone else does). I suppose it might appear that this implies that the majority is taken seriously by default, because most of the people who have the respect of their peers will be from that majority by simple averaging.

Now, I don't mean to comment on whether or not it's harder for women to "prove themselves". Never having been a woman myself, and not being a neutral observer, it's hard to make that comparison. My only point is that the amount of effort is nonzero for men as well.

Techies take nobody seriously by default.

But when it comes to non-technical management types, I think what he says is very true. As a clean-cut, twenty-something male who speaks articulately, simply me saying "I'm a computer guy" gives me an enormous amount of credibility, far more than a girl my age could get.

Michael Arrington's real argument was:

Few women choosing to study CompSci\Engineering -> Few women in tech _startups_.

As long as you agree that a subset cannot be larger than its parent set, I don't see how you can disagree with that. It's as close to observational fact as you can get.

Funny enough, I'm in the group that thinks EVERYONE is incompetent and absolutely worthless until they prove themselves to me. This might not be as big of a deal in the bay area where tech is a bigger deal, but here in LA there are posers everywhere.

We ask candidates in interviews to hand-code a front-end page, assuming that is the position they're applying for. Some will actually be able to write markup on a piece of paper, which is a pretty stressful test. "Code this page, here." (slides pen and paper) But a lot of people end up saying something like "Oh well I'd just throw a div here, throw a div there." It's literally a joke. I've had to stop laughing in meetings. We'll ask a rails developer what kind of stack he's familiar with, and they'll look at you like a deer in the headlights.

I don't go into an interview with a woman assuming she wont be nearly as good. In fact, right now the ladies are 1 for 1. Unfortunately she's no longer working with us due to some family issues. A lot of the guys we've interviewed are actually quite literally living in their parents basements and building porn websites with their buddies. I could care less what people do in their personal time but holy shit, make something of yourself.

Anyway, this doesn't really side with either particular argument in this whole man/woman debate, I just personally have gotten so jaded with worthless people who have no skills or drive whatsoever that their sex doesn't matter.

This is the United States of America in 2010. It's not ancient Egypt. It's not feudal England. It's not even the U.S. in 1950. You can do whatever you want to do and be whoever you want to be. Nobody is stopping you but yourself. Might your climb to the top be steeper than mine? Sure. But realize that nobody who's ever made it to the top of their mountain complained about how steep it was. They just climbed. If you want to be the best, whatever that means to you, you have to go Jackie Robinson that shit. No matter what the douchebags throw at you along the way, you have to just smile back and hit home runs.

You should find some new material: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643294

If it can be used again, I'll use it again. No sense it paraphrasing just for the hell of it. You can't plagiarize yourself.

Imo, a good rule of thumb for when you're copy/pasting the same comment you've made before is to mark it somehow, e.g. "as I said the last time this same issue came up (perhaps link to comment here): [paste]".

A bigger question might be why you're saying the same thing over and over to begin with, paraphrasing or not. Is your one-paragraph comment filled with self-help-type platitudes really interesting enough to spam in every relevant discussion?

You're right, I'll do that next time.

I didn't get the kind of discussion I was interested in last time, so I thought I'd try a second time. Not "over and over." A second time.

That's good advice for someone who is on the receiving end of discrimination. Yeah, work harder, don't count on douchebags to stop being douchebags, because in predictable future they will not. Maybe they will become less douchebaggy. Maybe even thanks to you.

But that doesn't mean that douchebags are okay, or that people should tolerate them, or not try to stop being douchebags. Or that we should not try to make douchebags feel like douchebags.

You do realize that this is a Western societal phenom? I work with women who are from India and China. Quite a few of them in fact. What is different in their cultures that they have so many women in this field and we do not?

Yes I've noticed that in the "Women in IT" phenomenon. That doesn't really explain tech startups, though. All the Indian and Chinese engineers I know work for established, stable companies.

I must work in a really weird office then because I know 4 women engineers personally and several others in our office peripherally and no one in our office takes the attitude this guys seems to think is the norm.

Everyone I've heard in this debate argues from a subjective personal experience/viewpoint. I haven't really seen any hard data on the subject presented so it's strange that everyone is so certain they are right. (ok not really all that strange, human nature being what it is.)

Men don't get taken seriously by default. Almost every man I know has to work pretty hard to be taken seriously, and in my experience reputation is the overwhelming factor anyway. If you've got a good reputation you'll tend to get a favorable bias, otherwise you won't.

The WSJ article cited in Arrington's article:

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-th...

It's one thing to aspire to focus on small-scale businesses that benefit a local area / community (as do most female entrepreneurs). It's another thing entirely to focus on some kind of ambitious VC-funded enterprise that's visioned to scale big / globally from the get-go.

Ambition is an interesting animal.

...offensively wrong...

Why wasn't 'wrong' enough? Why should any honestly-presented, based-on-experience opinion like Arrington's generate 'offense'? Why not assume good faith?

It's "offensively wrong" because the author (a male) is striving for an image of being genuinely sympathetic to The Plight. "Look at me, I'm so understanding."

So you think he's lying about his internal mental state and specific efforts in areas he controls?

Why not assume good faith?

I don't think he's lying to us, I think he's lying to himself.

I think that's a rather unfair assumption to make. Do you have evidence that he's being disingenuous?

'Disingenuous' isn't quite the word I would use. I'm sure the author really does think he's contributing to The Crusade, which is precisely the problem. He can't just dissect the errors in Arrington's logic. No, that's not good enough.

He needs to put on a Crusader uniform and act like he thinks those people are supposed to act: offended. He can't just BE offended, he must explicitly tell you he's offended, and start swinging his sword around so you know what a noble Crusader he is.

If he were responding to a blog post offensive to men, would he have used that language? No, because being offended for yourself isn't noble, it's being offended for others. And telling everyone about it as much as you can. How else will people know what an altruist you are?

All this thread I thought you were criticizing Arrington as having been genuinely offensive!

(Note to self: avoid pronouns in replies, so anaphor collisions are recognized asap.)

Because the entire discussion is bogged down by people trying to signal how egalitarian they are, and if anyone has a marginally differing viewpoint then they must be distanced as far as possible as violently as possible lest the speaker be perceived as a bigot.

Personally? I don't think this is something that needs to be fixed. If women want to get into tech, they'll get into tech, and that'll be that. Many already have, and many more will continue to do so. Forcing the issue just keeps people on edge, overreacting to try to keep their perceived latent bigotry under wraps.

"Wrong" means "not correct". "Offensively wrong" means "not Politically Correct".

"... the expectation that women don't get into tech is what keeps them out of it..." Yeah well, how did this stereotype got built in the first place? and why isn't it the case with marketing? why this same expectation is not happening in sales? why tech?? The answer is clear: Women did it to themselfs. Men are not to blame. Women are not hackers by nature. It's usually a man who gets dirty. In my classroom, despite having the same teacher and the same lessons, it's always the boys who are trying to explain how things work to the "lot" of ladies who didn't get it. I personally can't imagine a lady creating C, Python, or running facebook on her dormroom. Ladies usually have guys over there, not data servers. I just can't imagine a bunch of ladies locked in a garage working on something. Whenever I think of a group of women, The only thing that comes to my mind is that they are talking about how cool is desperate housewives, or how great was Sara's date. This is not my fault, they are responsible for what we the men think of them. And don't tell me there's a white male controlling their brains to do such things. They just do them. face it. SO WOMEN, STOP BLAMING THE MEN and BE PROUD OF WHAT YOU LOVE. be it cooking or dating magazines or what ever. why do you want to hate what you love and force yourself in men things? are you ashamed of what you do? Why do you consider what you do as the work of a second class citizen? Women tend to love different things and I don't understand why people are trying to force them into tech. PEOPLE, women DID NOT ask for your help. Too sad for the ladies who have this computer addictivness syndrome, your group did not follow you, you are just an exception.

"Too sad for the ladies who have this computer addictivness syndrome, your group did not follow you, you are just an exception."

Computer addictivness? My group? Too sad?

You seem to have this odd perception that you cannot be both feminine and a programmer. Why can't women both program and talk about "how great Sara's date" was?

I said I CAN'T imagine women in a room discussing tech. Maybe 01% of women will be doing that. But yet, that's MY head. You can't make me imagine what I can't imagine. This has nothing to do with being a girl programer that talks about dating. wich is totally normal and happens to everyone.

  "Ladies usually have guys over there, not data servers."

 "Whenever I think of a group of women, 
 The only thing that comes to my mind is that they
 are talking about how cool is desperate housewives, 
 or how great was Sara's date."

Men don't spend a lot of time having women in their bedrooms? They don't talk about football or getting laid? Your language seems to be angry and aggressive towards women. Yet both articles you are responding to were written by men. I think your aggression is misplaced.

The difference is that for men, that's not the main activity. But for women, it tends to be it.

So you're saying that the amount of sex that takes place in colleges occurs predominately in the girl's dormroom, as opposed to the boy's?

Nop.

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