I'm a woman, and I want to be a founder. Please don't assume you know why. | Hacker News Reader

I'm a woman, and I want to be a founder. Please don't assume you know why.

meetthefounders.com

26 pointsmisstatiana33 comments

> After cooling off, I realized that I was angry because I had just found remnants of the prejudice I thought was gone from startup circles.

Why would you think this? You don't have to be particularly socially enlightened or progressive to create a startup. I'd imagine that "startup circles" sample from the general population of smart people, and as such would have their fair share of any proclivity you can imagine. Sounds like you bumped into a run-of-the-mill chauvinist. As much as we may like to believe, "smart" does not imply any particular worldview -- I've met academics at research conferences who would take off their wedding rings before talking to a female colleague of mine, and other distinguished faculty members who would consistently talk down to female colleagues. Hell, read James Watson's (of double-helix DNA fame) book The Double Helix for some prime sexism, if aggravation is your thing.

The rest of the article was quite interesting though...

"A young, but influential, entrepreneur I talked with remarked that I was probably “only interested in doing a startup to be supportive of my husband.” I was, to be frank, incredibly angry."

I'm not sure why she felt angry[1]. People judge, get over it; if a pattern of judgements becomes a problem, work on your credibility. I think reducing emotion at work has value in a lot of circumstances.

[1] or: "allowed herself to feel angry", which fundamentally reduces to "chose to feel angry" (edited in later)

I can understand her anger to a degree, provided the person she was talking to knew she was married (or anything about her home life, for that matter). It would be on another level entirely if it was an assumption based on sexism, but without knowing the full context of the conversation I suppose we'll never know.

As for "people judge, get over it", that is a sorry state of pragmatism. Not saying it isn't true, just a bit sad.

Thanks for this post, misstatiana. There's always been a bit of a tension between my startup aspirations and my wife's vision of our life. Your post has put into words some of the motivations and reasons for my wanting to do a startup.

"First, being a founder requires courage, grit, and an ability to get shit done, and I like people like that because they set an example I want to aspire to."

So I think this insight on 'being a founder' is accurate, and I applaud your aspirations. I'd like to twist your thinking 90 degrees though, being a 'founder' is an artifact not a goal. What I mean by that is first:

"Get shit done." - you know, actually do stuff, build a web product, design a new line of swimwear and get it into production, convert the PTA to using Google Docs. Whatever, become a force to be reckoned with, see a need and address it.

"show your grit" - you know, do stuff someone else thinks is stupid but in hindsight is brilliant. To do that ...

"show your courage" - you know, in the face of someone telling you something is stupid or impossible, do it anyway.

And I'll add one

"show your humility" - when you fail, admit it, do a post mortem, learn from it and then go back to getting stuff done.

It sounds trite but really if you want to found a company go out and start one. Your first one you'll pretty much have to do without a lot of support (unless you've done something nearly like it already) because nobody (even you) knows if you can cut it running a company. So I would not try to start a company that involves say, designing a new type of semi-conductor, or requires large government purchases.

If you demonstrate you can execute then the next time you have a problem that takes more resources than you can scrape together you can go to someone and say, "This is what I've done, this is what I'm going to do, I'm wondering if you want in on the ride?" Its you're history that makes that second clause powerful.

i'm a man, and I wonder what "I'm a woman" has to do with in that title?

It makes more sense in context of the lengthy post.

I think the tl;dr is "sexism still exists".

>"sexism still exists"

to me it "she is still able to see sexism when she intends to do so".

For example, if i wanted, I could also see sexism in the respect for me at the worksplace - "they respect me because i'm a man!"

You would be able to see sexism in the workplace is a coworker explicitly came up to you and said, "you only work here because you want to support your wife!"

Serious question: did you read the post?

>"you only work here because you want to support your wife!"

that pretty much true. That is my point - if i wanted to see sexism i'd see it in everything i choose to.

>Serious question: did you read the post?

yep, and i'm trying to reclaim the wasted time by voicing my disagreement with that promotion of sexists stereotypes

I dunno, "you, WOMAN, only doing X because your HUSBAND is" is pretty sexist. Explicitly so. But whatevs, time spent is time wasted.

The comment she got from an "entrepreneur", and being part of a husband and wife team?

>A young, but influential, entrepreneur I talked with remarked that I was probably “only interested in doing a startup to be supportive of my husband.”

That comment is equally applicable to the other husband in the 2-husbands homosexual marriage configuration. Why she decided that it was about her female physiology and not about her being a part of a marriage?

Heterosexual couples have a stereotype of the husband as driver and wife as supporter. Given that stereotype, I think she made a reasonable assumption.

so she chose to assume that the guy was stereotyping while other interpretations were available. That exactly my point - she saw things she was inclined to see.

After a point, all communication relies on assumed prior understandings. The question becomes if those assumptions are reasonable or not. I think hers were.

>The question becomes if those assumptions are reasonable or not.

There is no question here - her assumption is reasonable based on the stereotype she has. There is absolutely no evidence that the guy shared her stereotype.

Direct evidence from him, no. But I think it's a reasonable assumption given that it's a stereotype in our culture. If I swapped the genders, then his question sounds completely out-of-place to me. I'm willing to assume that it is sexism because the mental-model I think a person would have to have for it to not be sexism seems less likely.

One could, of course, just ask the person what they meant, but we weren't privy to the actual conversation to know if she did.

> the mental-model I think a person would have to have for it to not be sexism seems less likely.

well, nice definition of a stereotype.

But I really don't think you'd see it applied there, and if you did it would most likely in the homophobic/sexist way that one is the wife, and their role is to support the "husband". It's one of the underpinnings of what some (and thankfully fewer and fewer) people think of marriage - that it is a union of a man and his wife, rather than that of two equals.

>most likely in the homophobic/sexist way that one is the wife, and their role is to support the "husband".

a guy would share his life with another guy. Based on that i see it is a natural to assign higher probability to the event that "the guy would also like to support his husband by sharing the business venture of the husband" - and you call this assignment of the higher probability as "homophobic/sexist"?

So when I read the title I tried to guess what the reason was going to be -- but it was really hard. All I could come up with that was reasonably plausible was: "To prove the people who say there are no women in tech wrong."

You can imagine my surprise upon reading the actual article... some guy thought you only wanted to be a founder to 'support your husband'? I can't even wrap my head around why that makes sense (or, well, why it made sense to the guy who said it anyway).

Can someone willing to play devil's advocate explain why this might come to someone's mind as a reason for starting a startup? How exactly does her having a company 'support' him? Unless it's in a financial sense, and then, well, that's a fairly valid reason for anyone to start a company (to support their family financially).

Well, they have a company together. One could assume that her husband (male/provider/aggressive) wanted to start a company and that she (female/nurturer/passive) joined to make it easier for him (as a real-world example, my girlfriends' mother does most of the administration for my girlfriends' father dentist business, but even if this work is highly appreciated it's clear which one of them is the dentist/owner/boss.)

In short, this thinking is rooted in a rich tradition. Of stupidity, but still.

I apologize if this comment makes HN readers uncomfortable, but this article is just another one of those trite "There is discrimination in [field X]" articles with the whole basis of argument on anecdotal evidence. I don't profess to know any better, but are there empirical evidence (Say, experiments with the same resumes with male/female names sent around)?

Perhaps I'm the only one who cares about data integrity, but making a conclusion from small observations is pretty flawed at best. Decisions should be data-driven.

I see where you're coming from, but sociology is a soft science. Even in an experiment like your resume example, there are many uncontrollable variables (company sizes/values/morale, hr staff, etc) that render the data somewhat anecdotal, even if it follows a pattern.

Moreover, this post is a personal outlook, and doesn't necessarily need hard data to prove an individual experience. There is really no "If A, then B" implied here.

Of course there are uncontrolled variables, but there are those in every experiment. With large enough samples, those uncontrolled variables become less significant. That's how statistical sampling works--if you expected everyone to be exactly the same, then you would only have to ask one person.

I understand that this is a personal outlook, but I feel like it is trying to make a more general point than "This is my story".

BTW: Would you consider economics a "soft science"? I study economics with some background with econometrics (statistics, essentially, where the entire focus is on controlling for unknowns)

I haven't really thought about economics as a soft science. I suppose its more objectively measurable, so I wouldn't necessarily lump it in with fields like psychology. Good point to ponder though :)

If there is any prejudice against women in technology, I am very disappointed. I have met some very hard working and smart tech entrepreneurs who were also women. I notice that they fly under the radar because they'd rather their business be judged on its merits, not because they are women.

Anyone who still has a prejudice against women in tech is just insecure imo.

"Her background meanders ... art, history, education, and massage therapy"

Male or female, a person who describes themselves as such will not be taken seriously in today's micro-biz scene. If you can't write code, you don't get a seat at the table unless you're a [very] good and successful sales person who sells and doesn't fancy themselves as a CEO-in-waiting.

I've never met this person and have only read half of that one post, but it sounds like she's more enamored with the aspect of being a founder and blogging about it than anything else. No serious person would take offense at the jibes from other entrepreneurs, let along post an eleven-paragraph self-justification on their blog.

I was talking more generally but I'd value someone with varied experience more than someone who was a specialist, unless that was important.

In theory, I'd value someone with varied experience as well, but we're talking about the technology industry here, nothing else, and albeit a somewhat enlightened community, the same social paradigms exist within as the do without to a varying degree. The same prejudices exist but what may be different is the way in which they're projected, perceived and handled.

The fact that the author found this shocking was, well, shocking. Coming from a lightweight, non-technical background and spouting off about what the startup scene should or shouldn't be based on her assumptions is very naive.

I wouldn't assume to delve in her decision-making process in regards to her current employment, but again, from what I've read, it seems that she has a bad case of founderitis and that shit gets old after a couple of minutes. It's embarrassing when people regard that as some sort of status symbol when they don't even have a half-baked app to show for it. Male or female.

Having a woman as co-founder is one of the best things a startup can do. It gives you much better insight into half your customer base. I like the article, but I find that too many articles fail to highlight the benefits of having a woman on your founding team. In 2011 if you're starting up I think it's absolutely essential to have a woman on your founding team.

In the tech startup scene the needs of women are definitely under served, it's a virtually untapped customer base. Ignore women founders at your own peril.

You know, I wasn't there and she really doesn't give much context for the remark. But a) She has a kid and this is a reason she has put off starting her own company. b) In place of actually starting her own company, she is interviewing other founders with the reasoning that it will help her prepare to someday do it herself (which maybe it will, I don't know). c) She "shied away from" being an entrepreneur when she was young because of what she saw her father go through.

So, she had a secure, stable job, got married, had a baby and makes a blog about "some day wanting to have her own company". She has apparently never actually tried to found anything at all. It makes me wonder if she got mad because the remark hit a nerve. (My therapist used to say "If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is probably the one you hit.") Which in my book wouldn't be indicative of sexism at all.

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