Will the Female Founders Please Stand Up? | Hacker News Reader

Will the Female Founders Please Stand Up?

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29 pointsmartian22 comments

I recall those getting described as: Y Combinator is trying something new to encourage female startup founders. We're organizing a series of informal dinners at which women interested in starting startups can learn more about it from YC alumni.

Looks like it did what it said on the tin.

Not a fan of this choice of thread title, by the way. [Edit for context: it was "Is YC Sexist?"] Racist and sexist are up there with kiddie porn these days, particularly in the bluer parts of the country. (Not that the redder parts of the country don't care, but that sort of accusation is a career ender at e.g. a university campus.) The question mark does not excuse all insinuations.

Re the last paragraph: excellent point and sorry for the confusion -- just changed the title.

Given the description of the event structure and its explicit organization as a Women's only event, the question is legitimate particularly since describing someone as sexist is in no way equivalent to describing them as a child pornographer.

That's not to say that YC's motives were necessarily poor, but their execution was less than brilliant - given a somewhat reasonable expectation of Jessica Livingston's participation at a YC event.

Though I do think the author's title was (unsurprisingly) more accurate than the poster here.

What's with the flamebait thread title? Why not just keep the title of the original blog post: "Will the Female Founders Please Stand Up?"

I don't see anything in that post to support any suggestion that "YC is sexist" at all. If anything, it's just the opposite; some YC founders came out for the explicit purpose of helping aspiring female founders. What's the problem again?

As for this bit:

But the circumstance produced an outrageously uneven power structure between the men and women in attendance.

YCombinator created a dynamic where every man at the table was there to “advise” and every woman at the table was there to “be advised”. Every man was a “guest of honor” and every woman was a “paid attendee”.

I know my way around a conversation about startups, and I regularly earn the respect of my male peers in conversation. Were I to meet any of these men in a different context, we would have been on a level playing field. But at this dinner table, for my life I could not convince these men to engage me as a peer. My comments were interpreted as questions and were met with “well, actually…” remarks. There was very little back and forth, and my opinion was of no consequence. The power structure of this dinner precluded any woman from being taken seriously at the table.

How does gender even factor into this equation? Would it have mattered if some of attendees were men? The attendees would still have been the "aspiring" founders and the "advisers" would still have been the "advisers," the ones brought there to serve up knowledge. Or what if some of the advisers had been female? Would that have made any difference to the "balance of power" bit? No.

Women might have had a little more insight on navigating the 98% male world of tech as a female founder. I think the dinner's a great idea and hate to criticize YC for trying to do a good thing (good on them for trying in general), but some successful women (from outside the YC diaspora if there aren't enough in it) could be more encouraging and englightening, given the topic.

Sure, I said in another comment that one would expect - intuitively if nothing else - to find some female founders. But that section reads like the OP found it to be some horrible, horrible thing just because - due to circumstance - all the advisers were male and the attendees were female; and went off on what felt like a bit of a weird digression.

Balance of power? Not being treated like a peer? I'm just saying that if you're at an event where you are - by nature - positioned in something of a "advisee" or "student" role, that you are in the "advisee" or "student" role regardless of your gender. And sometimes it's ok to put the ego aside, quit worrying about getting the other person to accept you, respect you, or whatever, and just listen and learn.

I mean, nobody likes being talked down to, or patronized, right? I think that's something that transcends gender. But sometimes we accept it because there's something to be gained.

The OPs perspective contains a lot of false assumptions. I was one of the YC alums who went to a dinner (though not the same one the OP was at).

The truth is YC consists of mostly men. I believe PG has said that YC accepts the same % women and men, but they have many fewer applications from women. This is an unfortunate situation, and is something I assume this event was meant to help correct (I had no part in its original planning).

With that being said, there actually aren't enough female YC alums to populate these dinners. Hopefully events like this will help create more YC alums, but you can see the chicken-and-egg problem of demanding women hosting these dinners.

From the article:

   YCombinator created a dynamic where every man at the table was there to “advise” and every woman at the table was there to “be advised”....
   [A]t this dinner table, for my life I could not convince these men to engage me as a peer.

From my perspective, every YC alum was there to advise and every prospective founder (or prospective YCer or what have you) was there to be advised. Why does gender have to come into play? Did any of the alums talk down to the OP because of her gender? Possible, but I doubt it. I would have loved more women to be alums giving advice, but only because they might be able to better answer gender-oriented questions from a first-person perspective. Saying the event should have only female alums, and then implying that the men did not view you as a peer because of some gender issue rather than the context of the event, is borderline offensive to me.

When I'm put in the situation of giving advice as a YC alum, I do just that: I give advice. My primary mindset, regardless of the people at the event, is that of a question answerer. I was sharing my experiences, just as most would do if you were at any event where you were the "alumni".

When one views everything as a male-female breakdown, any situation where there are more women receiving information than doling it out is going to seem sexist.

I'd look at it this way. If you were hyping a product, but then never showed any working code. It'd be hard to take you seriously.

If you're hyping up a female founders meeting, yet you bring no "working code"(female founders), it's going to be hard to take you seriously.

The same could be said if someone put on an event to encourage "African American startups" and yet when people show up the only people there who were "successful" were white people. It'd piss people off.

If the notice really said "females only", then it should have actually been females only. If it was being hyped by a successful female founder, then perhaps there should have been some female founders there. You need some examples, some role models people can relate to. Male founders, while possibly having good advice, are obviously not female founders.

People say they're disappointed that more women aren't in the tech field, but then they don't actually track down some prime examples of successful females in the field to pick their brains and find out why that might be. Rather silly if you ask me.

its a chicken-egg situation - dont fund female founders, wont find female mentors. Not surprising at all.

As the author of this post, I want to make clear that I did not originally title this thread or submit it. In this post, I made every effort to convey respect to the hosts of this event who quite obviously had great motives.

For all of the people out there who are interested in fostering female tech founders, I hope my feedback was useful.

Hard to tell if this person didn't simply walk into the event completely hyped up on a female gathering walked in and saw men and put up a wall immediately. From there did she simply see everything from a biased view because she was disappointed in not attending her hopeful venue?

Well, assuming the story's accurate, the event's pitched with Mrs Livingston's name, billed as a meetup for female founders, then she gets there and it's 4 dudes telling them how to be successful in business? I'd be pissed, too. I wouldn't go as far as "sexist" but maybe "put on a really crappy Female Founders event".

I think this was the greater crime, that a disparity existed between what Y Combinator was offering and what they were perceived as offering.

I wonder if Ms Livingston or other women founders were perhaps unable to make it, or if there was a greater flaw in choosing the advisors. It may be that, rather then being sexist, Y Combinator is strenuously avoiding the issue of gender, and it just so happens that most of their founders are men. In fact, I think this dinner might have been about that issue...

I also think that the issue of having all the woman there as "Paid Attendees" and the men as "Advisors" is less an issue then it seems... It's a fallout issue of their not being any woman founders (and there might be fair or foul reasons why THAT happened). It was an event where ONLY women could pay to go, so naturally all the Paid Attendees were women.

Calling the behaviour sexist (Because the ? is really only there to soften the blow) without all the information would one of the least respectful forms of criticism... Using terms charged with negative emotions in lieu of thoughtful criticisms.

No /thread

Seems there is no way to win this one. If men don't share it's a "boy's club", if they do share it's condescenion.

Also my bias detector is beeping. Reverse the genders. What if I found it insulting that a startup event wasn't "men only"? If I acted like it was a waste of time because female advisors can't teach me anything?

OP, are you the writer of this post? If not, was it really necessary to change the original title of the article?

Anyone else find the link between the title of this thread and PG's point (in one of his essays) about "-ism"s?

I do think if you're putting on a Female Founders event, you are under obligation to show up with some female founders. Like many other types of relationships, having mentors are as much about empathy, understanding, and having good role models as it is about actual business advice. The women can get advice from many other places, having Female in the title means the advice should have something to do with females.

> YCombinator created a dynamic where every man at the table was there to “advise” and every woman at the table was there to “be advised”. Every man was a “guest of honor” and every woman was a “paid attendee”.

No. This is just self victimization. It's called a coincidence, and something that should be changed. But reading into it too deeply will hurt you more than it helps you.

I voted you up for "you are under obligation to show up with some female founders", but I disagree with your self-victimization paragraph. She went out of her way to engage the adivsers as peers, and they shut her down. Repeatedly. I don't know if it was sexism in particular, or just a badly-considered power structure for the evening, but whatever the reason, that's not how founders are supposed to encourage each other.

The women can get advice from many other places, having Female in the title means the advice should have something to do with females.

I can certainly see how someone might have shown up and found a disconnect between their expectations and reality. It would be natural to assume that some - if not all - if the advisers would be female for something like this. Fair enough. But just making the event "females only" for the attendees does make it "something to do with females." To hear the stories you hear, some women are intimidated by the possibility of attending an event and finding that they are the only woman present, or something of that nature. At least by restricting the attendees to females, they created an environment where women could feel secure about coming out, knowing there would - at a minimum - be other female attendees to mingle with, etc. That's still a win, even if the advisers weren't female, so far as I can tell.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear the female take on how this wasn't still better than a similar event without the "females only" restriction.

I say no, because on the internet no one is aware of your gender unless you tell them, and YCombinator is by and large a website, and a non-sexist one at that.

However, for 100% of the experts at that conference to be male, is rather surprising.

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