Hot Startups Lack Female Employees (even as applicants)

That's a pretty tall order for startups. And an almost impossible one if you expect them to take time out of (likely) much more pressing matters to expressly reach out (in some as yet undefined "woman-friendly" way) to females just to that they'll apply.

Not hire females. Just to get them to apply.

Your assertion shoots itself in the foot. Since you posit a group of people who are not inclined to study a subject, you can't count them as a loss -- all further effects are purely speculative.

It takes years and years of effort to get good at something difficult. You may as well lament the lack of interest in hammer-throwing, or ice hockey.

> If I were a woman I wouldn't want to associate with the men in a typical high school or college computer science environment.

And your bigoted attitude is the fault of other people why?

And despite that, you don't need to socialize with anyone to work on problems of theory or programming.

> I could give you a bunch of personal anecdotes, but the stories from [2] are typical of my experience.

I refer you to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment_in_education

Sexual harassment is not a computer science issue. There are any number of pursuits where sexual harassment is far more prevalent -- and yet females do not avoid those other pursuits like they do with computer science.

If anything, females are far more likely to experience sexual harassment and bullying from other females. Stories about this abound in the news and are fodder for teen movies.

Regardless of the makeup of a social group, you don't get good at a technical skill by socializing. You can spend all day painting and become a great painter, or you can try to "break into the scene" and spend all day trying to hang out with the hip crowd, and lament your lack of acceptance. None of that will make you a better painter.

Likewise, programmers get good by spending all day programming. There is more learning material available at everyone's fingertips than ever before in human history. A female of today has it a thousand times better than a male of the 1980s. Nobody is going to harass you while you are in your room working on programming, or art, or writing, or playing music.

Also note that the vast majority of males avoid computer science like the plague. Why are we not lamenting losing all of their talent? Are we only concerned with numbers of bodies here, or do individuals matter?

For every story about a female being harassed, there are 10 more about males bending over backward to be helpful and non-harassing to female peers. But it doesn't seem to matter, because ultimately, this stuff is difficult, no matter how nice people are to you.

Nobody can learn for you, just like a personal trainer can't exercise for you. And people have tons of excuses for why they aren't in shape.

Ultimately, this whole topic is begging the question, because people like you are assuming females ought to want to get into computer science. That seems the most condescending viewpoint of all, deciding that you know what's good for them better than they do.

The whole notion of making things more "female-friendly" is insidious sexism of the worst kind. How are you going to overcome social or cultural biases when you are dead set on preserving an existing set of cultural stereotypes and baggage?

If you are taking for granted that females are fundamentally different, then there is no basis for assuming that they should approach parity with males in any given context.

IQ tests show that there are more males at either extreme, with females clustered more toward the middle. If whatever IQ measures correlates well with whatever computer science requires, you should expect to see fewer females at the top end, even if you start with complete gender parity in classroom makeup.

Even disregarding that, it is not at all far-fetched that certain personality traits will be far more prevalent in one gender than another. It could just be that the kind of person who is okay with staring at a screen all day wrestling with code is more likely to be male.

It could even be that extremely smart people are evolutionary "mistakes", and all our progress comes thanks to the social equivalent of paraplegics. The more intelligent someone is, the more likely he or she is to be socially isolated or feel socially alienated.

And it may require social isolation to be able to devote enough time to certain pursuits to become very skilled.

Just by random chance, a small percentage of people born every year will be unusually smart, even when their parents aren't. So even if the smartest people never reproduce, there will still be a supply of smart people turned out by the general populace every year. That group -- a genetic dead-end -- picks up the reigns of the existing technology and takes the next step, generation after generation.

There is no reason we ought to wish anyone into that position. As a group, people who are into computers have traditionally been heavily discriminated against socially. Your comments are just another example of the social ostracization that technical people can expect. And then on top of it, they are a convenient scapegoat for why other people avoid the field. It couldn't be because it's hard -- no, it's got to be because of those fucking nerds.

Why should female applicants get a hand-out over more qualified male applicants? That doesn't do a damn thing other than even out some cosmetic "gender gap."

If I am passionate about programming, having done it from an early age, and I lose a position to a person who just discovered he/she could make a pretty penny at this "computer stuff," well, that really pisses me off.

It's probably true that the average age at which female engineers start programming is higher, and they haven't been programming as long. You are correct that this is not a matter of talent. It's a matter of experience. However, given that all other attributes are equal, why should anyone pick a less experienced person over a more experienced one? The circumstances that lead to that don't matter.

Yes, most job descriptions give the appearance of being biased towards males. The best thing to do is get feedback on it from a couple of women with the skills you're trhing to attract and a diversity/recruiting expert. We did that at my previous startup and it made a huge difference.

If a company sees diversity as important, it doesn't really take that much time or money to reach out.

The current unemployment rate for college grad worldwide is ~30%. So you're not the norm.

If I were interested in becoming a dancer, I would damn well become a dancer.

You can't just say it's the mens' fault. That is disingenuous and insulting to me as a male programmer.

The fundamental problem has nothing to do with men: it's that women aren't interested at all in computers. They're interested in babies, families, and things that are warm, cuddly and emotional. I'm not being sexist, I am quoting my girlfriend.

That's pretty damning accusation you're making for programmers everywhere. Do you have citations?

The same thing happened to me, only I started at 13 so I was more poorly equipped to deal with it. I learned anyway, because computers mesmerized me, and nothing that happened away from the keyboard could ever change that. Anyone capable of walking away really should, and go find their calling elsewhere, because this isn't it.