Stop Telling Women To Do Startups
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I was previously on an academic treadmill. It was more or less assumed that if you were capable, you wanted to be a professor. It took awhile before I could really see the pros/cons of tying my research to that particular structure.
I think a lot of women -- highly competent women -- are stuck in similar treadmills -- Law School, Finance, Consulting, Grad School. If they're not presented if this alternate life path, it may take many more year for them to get started.
And that may be when they have a family, and that may put a damper on startup ambitions.
Absolutely people have the right to make their own choices, and it's possible that different genders/families/ethnicities/what-have-you will make statistically different choices.
But I really don't think we are doing such a great job with presenting women, or the population at large really, with the full range of what's possible. There are a lot more people out there who would be happier doing a startup, or any kind of entrepreneurial endeavor focussed on something they are really passionate about, than are actually doing one.
There's really a lot we can do in this arena, and I don't think this industry's exhortations or encouragement really represents some kind of dismissal of women's choices or co-opts free will.
If so, I can definitely believe that. I understand and agree with the author's point about women empirically being less interested in a startup lifestyle and disagreeing with how some people pitch startups to women. However anytime you're marketing an idea to people, sometimes it's best to take a niche approach to reaching them.
I had only a few role models of people doing good science outside of academia (Craig Venter was one), but it would have made it easier for me if I knew other young women doing the same thing. There still aren't many, but the numbers are growing.
I do know women who felt, early on in their lives, quite specifically that they couldn't be both "smart" and "feminine." This is really tough, and it's going to be an influence for as long as technical or intellectual fields are perceived as being "guy's things." Most of us want to identify with something. When people's ideas for "woman" or "mother" or "entrepreneur" or "engineer" start to be mutually exclusive, it's going to restrict the futures they can imagine for themselves, and what they do. I mean, even "scientist" and "grad-school dropout" seemed contradictory to me, and scared me. If my stereotype for "entrepreneur" insists that I work 100 hour weeks until achieving world domination, how can that leave room for a family?
More immediately, leaving the family question out of it, oftentimes I may need to force a particular issue in an engineering or business discussion. To be heard, especially in a discussion where the male-dominated norms of raised voices are common, I may need to be forceful, stubborn, insistent, controlling, resolute. I have felt like less of a woman at those times. Ugly. It hurts me, yet it may be what is demanded of a startup founder. And in dark moments, I have considered that I didn't like who I was having to become to succeed, and considered dropping out. I can see why a lot of women do. This is a fine line to walk that doesn't really go away.
I think these pressures continue throughout adulthood. It leads to a lot of women downplaying their achievements and abilities. And not just socially. I think it gets into our heads and hearts. I think it's a major reason why women consistently underestimate their talents as compared to men.
I think it's really a big help for a lot of people to see a diversity of role-models, living their lives happily and without contradiction.
Even when I began trying to start startups, I thought I would have to do a software startup first. I pretty much started my current company by accident -- I was too afraid of doing a hardware startup and tackling the energy question head-on. I tricked myself into starting by saying I wanted to just make it an open source project, and hoping someone with more resources could take it further. A common mistake, which, once I realized I'd have to push it forward myself, I overcame.
Even then, I was quite afraid that as a young woman, without many credentials, the energy industry wouldn't take me seriously. It turns out that a lot of this can be dealt with by assembling a great team around oneself. Also, even though I've been dismissed on numerous occasions, without much of a thought on their part, because I am a young woman, it turns out that, for the most part, people can have their minds changed quite readily by confident expressions of confidence. Perhaps even by being unexpectedly knowledgable, they remember me better?
I will declare that misogyny still exists within the ranks of investors and engineers, which can be quite upsetting. It's far from the norm, but shows up once in a while. And it might not be so bad as to tip off everyone else that there's a problem, but it is bad enough to seriously unnerve someone, if they're unprepared.
And honestly, it's true -- being a woman in tech still sucks a lot of the time. You have to fight harder to get respect because you don't look like other competent engineers that people have come across. You have to prove yourself every time you meet someone new. You face skepticism that you wouldn't if you were a man (particularly a white guy.)
And I know this because I'm guilty of this too.
And that doesn't sound too different from your experience. I want my daughters to have every option available to them, from stay-at-home mom to founder. I obliquely can't speak for the societal pressures of being a woman, but the educational aspects between my boys and my girls has not been noticeably different.
I don't know if there are any related experiments with priming subjects with the concepts of "mother" or "feminine" or what-have-you, but it's a good place to start.
Maybe priming women with a reading comprehension test involving a passage with Marie Curie? Or Lynn Margulis? Or Sophie Germaine...
Also, this is indirect, but the study of highly talented women and men here: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/Ferriman2009.pdf
...shows a strong pull toward shorter hours/working from home for women over men, and it gets stronger as women age from 25 to 35.
I think this indicates some of the pressures of motherhood.
To this end, I think it might be a good idea to have mixed age Montessori schools at places of business. Since it's an exploratory learning model, and the place is set up to be a cool place to learn and play and be anyway, and one of the biggest recruiting draws and factors in the choice of workplace is often the school district, and a single teacher can handle the mixed-age children of a small-mid sized company because they largely teach themselves/each other, and because that's less expensive than private school and the parents could participate more in their kids lives if they were physically close to work, I think it could be a huge benefit to forward thinking companies. Don't know, but it could help both men and women.
Bonus:
Check out the graph on page 477 here:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/SexDiffs.pdf
It plots surveyed personal importance for various issues, like "Developing my intellectual interests" to "Part time career for a limited time". You'll notice that the male and female responses almost entirely match, with the few exceptions, and there it doesn't deviate by much!
After all, a man and a woman of equal intrinsic ability may perform just as well under ideal circumstances, but the woman's performance is fragile. If the woman is reminded of her gender at lunch, she might return from lunch and perform "significantly worse".
(This does of course assume equal statistical distributions of intrinsic ability between men and women.)
Boys/Men are also susceptible to stereotype threat. The priming with race is well known. They are also especially susceptible if they are primed with an "immutable talent" over "hard work = success" lesson, and then undertake a very difficult task. Boys struggle with this, and perform much worse in the next test, just as girls do.
Or an even more vivid example: Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes test:
"Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why "that King" (referring to Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks. She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.[1]
On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess.[citation needed] The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment's rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students' reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King and write compositions about the experience.[1]"
Boys/Men are also susceptible to stereotype threat. The priming with race is well known. They are also especially susceptible if they are primed with an "immutable talent" over "hard work = success" lesson, and then undertake a very difficult task. Boys struggle with this, and perform much worse in the next test, just as girls do.
Cultural factors are absolutely the dominant factors in which stereotypes are threatened. Both genders respond negatively to threats. That's no justification for claiming women are inferior!
An even more vivid example: Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes test:
"Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why "that King" (referring to Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks[citation needed]. She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.[1]
On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess.[citation needed] The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment's rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students' reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King and write compositions about the experience.[1]"
Demanding that certain ideas be phrased in a politically correct way only serves the purpose of making it more difficult to express those ideas. If your goal is to suppress dissent that is valuable, but not if your goal is to find the truth. What is your goal?
If men are prone to stereotype threat in some area, then they too are inferior in that area. For example, if a "white men can't jump" stereotype prevents men from performing well in basketball, then men are indeed likely to be inferior basketball players. Similarly, in the non-scientific experiment you described, the brown-eyed children did appear to perform more poorly.
Obviously the inferiority only holds in a cultural context and in certain areas - mine referred to the modern American context, where apparently even marking [X] Female lowers women's performance on scientific topics. I probably should have expressed this more clearly in my original comment.
An interesting fact to realize is that the stereotype-threat based inferiority might be unavoidable. Suppose hypothetically that white men are shorter or worse jumpers (on average) than black men. In this case, the "white men can't jump" stereotype is true - but then knowledge of this true fact might cause them to also perform worse than their height would otherwise suggest due to stereotype threat. Human psychology might actually amplify innate differences in abilities.
To my knowledge we haven't found a single demographic group immune to stereotype threat. I suppose one could argue under your tortured semantics that they are all inferior to one another under different forms of discrimination, but what is the point?
This is a straw man. I never claimed any group was immune to stereotype threat.
You claimed stereotype threat affects some groups more than others in some areas. Your specific example was women are affected by it in math. I pointed out that if this generalizes beyond the GRE, and if men and women's abilities are equal absent stereotype threat, the result is that women would be inferior to men in math-related jobs.
You can claim my arguments poorly reasoned all you want, but you still haven't pointed out any flaws in them. All you did was demand I not be "insensitive" and attack straw men.
I just realized I've had this conversation before, not going to waste my time further. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256492
Consider several groups of equal ability and equal vulnerability to stereotype threat. On average, the groups that have more negative stereotypes directed toward them will perform worse. Given two people of equal ability, a purely rational actor trying to choose a member of their team will choose the one to which fewer negative stereotypes apply.
Both of these predictions seem to concur with reality, so I'd suggest maybe Danifong's theory has something going for it.
Source: pages 8-11, Whistling Vivaldi, by Stanford professor and stereotype threat researcher Claude Steele.
Stereotype threat has been shown to affect any group subjected to a negative stereotype. Steele's book is rife with examples. Stereotype threat can also be dispelled with enough encouragement and the right kind of mentorship. You can, for example, decrease the performance of Asian female math students by first reminding them of their gender, but then you can improve their performance, too, by reminding them of them being Asian.
I am appalled that you made the leap from "women experience stereotype threat" to "they are inferior and have universally inferior psyches" without considering "hmm, do other groups experience stereotype threat too?"
All else held equal, this would indeed make white men inferior athletes to black men, as I acknowledge in my response to danifong.
I didn't declare women as having "universally inferior psyches", I declared women as being potentially inferior in job-related tasks on the assumption that stereotype threat applies to those tasks in addition to GRE exams.
The value judgments ("something wrong with them") are something you fabricated, not something from my post.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw-a-Scientist_Test
2: http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_librar...
I agree. I don't want to founder ;-) But most businesses fail when founders founder, right?
Sorry for the tasteless play on words. But who knows maybe it inspires someone somewhere.
I don't think Trunk is asserting that encouraging women to do startups "co-opts free will". I think her main complaint is that it is bad advice for most women, i.e. many women who take such advice will be less happy than they otherwise could be.
She's been very public and candid about her personal life (quite possibly overly so), if you want to look into it.
One thing I have noticed in open source work is that men tend to be willing to take on more risk than women when it comes to projects. Computer development personnel are, in the corporate world, about 1/3 women but less than one out of fifty developers in open source is a woman. Those women who are in open source tend to get there through a paying job, while for men, we tend to possibly find a job through work in open source.
What this tells me is that women are choosing different approaches and different paths. It's not that they can't. It's that they don't want to.
Another complaint I have heard over and over from women in open source is that there is nothing more annoying than being asked over and over "so what do we need to do to attract more women into our field?" There is a similar sense of frustration expressed in the article.
But I think women, in part because of a certain stereotype of what womanhood or motherhood should be (I think the signal from the media that such a huge number of mothers are stay-at-home is hard to ignore), and in part because of the collective sum of the world's signals, make startup career paths or STEM career paths in general less plausible for women than they should be, and less plausible than for men.
Stability most probably influences women towards defined career paths. But the mental calculus they do in making this decision might not be well informed. Even if any particular startup fails, if you're good you can join another one, or enter a larger company if need be. An entrepreneurial skill set is much more resilient to outside forces than other career skills. I think this message isn't quite communicated as well as it should be.
Frankly, I think all career paths should feel more plausible for everybody. I hear that in Iceland, there is no trouble with reinventing yourself and trying a completely new career three or four times.
I'm much more interested in spreading the attitude that one can do what one wants and be who one chooses to be than achieving exact gender population parity in every given sub-field.
As I have said we need more family-run micro-businesses where both parents spend most of their work time at home. In my ideal world a lot of businesses would be run out of the home (as is the case in most of the world, but zoning laws can make that hellishly difficult in the US).
Stability most probably influences women towards defined career paths. But the mental calculus they do in making this decision might not be well informed. Even if any particular startup fails, if you're good you can join another one, or enter a larger company if need be. An entrepreneurial skill set is much more resilient to outside forces than other career skills. I think this message isn't quite communicated as well as it should be.
And yet, how many stay-at-home moms have their own part-time businesses? I am betting a majority. The difficulty that they have re-entering the workplace later I think is tragic because:
1) These women have entrepreneurial skills that they don't value sufficiently and that the prospective employer doesn't value sufficiently and
2) This leads to devaluing the experience of having a household business.
We have amazing problems in this country due to our worship of the education system as the path to economic success, and the idea that you have to go back to school to switch careers. This is another thing we need to work on because it chains everyone, man and woman, to early decisions in life.
I choose not to play by these rules. I, as a man, work from home full time. I encourage others to do the same. I have my own business. More recently my wife is talking about joining a small startup business (good for her).
I'm much more interested in spreading the attitude that one can do what one wants and be who one chooses to be than achieving exact gender population parity in every given sub-field.
That's exactly right.
TC is grasping at straws trying to stay relevant.
However, the 'equal opportunities don't lead to equal outcomes' argument is often used as an excuse to ignore inequality - if we all pretend we've all got perfectly equal access to opportunities, we can attribute any difference in outcomes between groups to group preferences and call it a day.
Yes, I'd expect that in a world where access to opportunity was truly equal, the gender balance of founders would still be skewed. But that doesn't imply that there's equal access to opportunity in tech today, and it certainly doesn't mean we can say 'no gender problem here' and stop thinking about the ways we inadvertently discourage women from doing what we do.
I just call it pure cowardice.
When we honestly can't tell and the outcome is important, I think it's reasonable to proceed as if the problem is bias. First, because to just assume it's natural differences and be wrong means you're screwing up people's lives and supporting an unfair system. And second, because historically we have fallen back on natural differences in ways we now realize are total bullshit.
See, for example, the Confederate Vice President's "Cornerstone Speech": "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."
If you're going to call something cowardly, I'd favor people who argue for continuing the (favorable to them) status quo on the grounds that it's intrinsic to the universe. There's not much bravery in justifying a system that's working well for you.
What really gets my goat is how people willfully ignore or marginalize anyone in the "victim" group who doesn't toe the line. For example, look at the editor's note for this article: "Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Penelope Trunk, writer and founder of Brazen Careerist. Her opinions are her own."
I took a look at the past 30 guest contributor columns, and not a single one of them was prefaced with "Her opinions are her own" (not even the $100,000 green card article had Techcrunch distancing itself like this). This is the CYA mentality that kills honest debate and rushes in stupid policies.
What I don't hear is the argument that "women want to run startups and they are being blocked from the field". That would bother me. But a skewed outcome, by itself, is not a problem that needs to be fixed... and why shouldn't there be some scientific rigor applied to social meddling?
I am of course not trying to fix other people's voluntary decisions. But I would like to fix a system that unfairly limits the options that people have. So if you're arguing for more freedom of choice, we're on the same side.
If you would like to apply scientific rigor to your political choices, go to it. If you would like to fund me sufficiently so that I can bring my level of rigor up from "best I can do" to "finding the Higgs boson" then I will happily cash your checks. Until then, I'll press on with what I've got.
Arguing that all action should stop until the data is perfect ignores that we are talking about real people's lives here. Around the time of the Civil War, people didn't say "Hey, let's wait a few hundred years until we can determine for sure whether or not, as the slaveholders claim, negroes are inherently inferior." Some people decided slavery was wrong, and worked to put an end to it. The same goes for women's suffrage, which isn't even 100 years old in this country. There is no particular reason we should default to the status quo if we lack data: it has been wrong before, and there's no reason to think it's perfect now.
* If you asked a slave what prevents him from being free, he/she can point at the specific individuals and institutions restricting his freedom. The slave owner, the laws.
* If you asked an American woman in 1919 what is holding back her right to vote in federal elections, she can clearly point at the US constitution.
In both cases, these situations were (rightly) fixed. On the other hand, not even the gurus of HN can come up with a coherent explanation why there aren't more women in tech startups. It's not like women are marching in the street demanding that we repeal the ban on female CEOs. The current outcome is a result of voluntary decisions. I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect a higher standard of evidence before we start telling people "you think wrong".
FWIW, I also find it lamentable that the tech industry is a sausage-fest. But that's my problem. If you told my partner that she's broken because she doesn't want to work in technology, she'd tell you to f*ck off and go meddle in someone else's life.
You shouldn't stuff your partner's clothes full of straw like that. Nobody is saying that she in particular is broken. But plenty of women are willing to talk about how they've been discouraged or treated unfairly. See., e.g., http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/why.html.
You are welcome to see your feelings about the gender imbalance as only your problem. I see it as a collective problem, one where the data is sufficient to warrant action, and I aim to do something about it.
Whether or not you like the current outcome (and I don't proclaim to support it or even believe that it will be the same in 50 years), you cannot credibly argue that today, in the western world, women do not have legal parity with men. It's been a rough history but here we are (finally). Further policy changes are no longer the realm of gaining legal equality but pure social engineering based on your esthetic preferences for what you (possibly fancifully) believe gender participation ratios in various activities should be. Like the poster that kicked off this particular subthread, I believe this goal requires quite a lot more scrutiny than the first-wave feminist goal of legal equality.
My aesthetic preferences aren't for equal outcomes. They're for people to have equal opportunities. They don't right now. I aim to change that. I am, however, sometimes willing to use outcomes as one proxy for opportunities until we have significant proof that we have solved all the problems of opportunity.
I'm all for scrutiny. However, I think it should be equally applied. If one only scrutinizes challenges to the status quo, then it's not honest intellectual inquiry. And it's especially suspicious when it comes from somebody who benefits from that status quo. Like the poster that kicked off this particular subthread.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. How will you know when we arrive at equal opportunities? How do you know that they don't have equal opportunities already?
Legal equality is straightforward and very easy to measure. "Opportunity" is highly subjective. There's a bunch of college kids at OWS protests complaining about their self-inflicted lack of opportunity because they can't get a job in Social Studies. Clearly measuring by outcome is inadequate, yet it's the concrete measurement we as a society keep coming back to.
This is why I think it's quite reasonable and necessary to apply scientific rigor to social engineering projects. And to accept that some of these issues will be things that we simply cannot change in the short term; culture changes because old people eventually die.
Of course, that's ridiculous. But for the same reason that your suggestion is. You're applying an impossibly high standard to an approach you disagree with, while giving the status quo a pass.
That you don't see a problem isn't proof that there's no problem. That you don't know how to change something is not proof that change is impossible. That you don't want to fix something isn't a reason to tell other people not to try.
As it is, we have a history of millennia of oppression of women. When my grandmother was born, women weren't even allowed to vote. Men and women didn't enroll in college in equal numbers until '87. Achieving equal opportunity is going to take a while. Until then, doing nothing isn't being fair, it's supporting an unfair system.
What makes it especially tricky is that outcomes influence opportunities. Female legislators and CEOs are still seen as anomalous by many, and that will continue until there are more of them.
A lot of women believe that they have been frequently discouraged from STEM jobs and leadership roles (see, e.g., http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/why.html), so a counterbalancing public encouragement might go a long way to solving the problem.
Look, sometimes people do real, obvious, correctable things that result in inequality. There's nothing 'alleged' about these things, and correcting them isn't an 'unendable initiative' - usually, all you've got to do is be a little more self-aware.
A case in point - a startup I co-founded a few years back was all-male for a while, and without getting into the details, we didn't always maintain a sophisticated level of conversation around the office. We didn't change our habits after we hired a couple of female college students part-time.
Later, I found out our part-time employees were uncomfortable with our office banter. Not cool, since this was their first exposure to startups and the type of people that work for them. When I found out about this, my unendable initiative to fix the problem was a quick email, which took care of it. (Still irritated that I didn't pick up on this earlier.)
That's it - no systematic bias in the other direction, no big bureaucratic programs by government authorities, just being aware enough of your surroundings to not be an asshole. You can do it too.
But completely honestly, why did you even develop this kind of culture in the first place? Don't you think you should have prevented the whole situation in the first place?
Of course I should've prevented the whole situation in the first place, but I wasn't on the ball enough to realize it was a problem. I wasn't consciously trying to shape company culture at all, which is why it developed on its own in a suboptimal way.
Nobody will really notice or care until someone with a different worldview starts having to work closely with them and stuff starts bleeding through.
When it goes on for too long, people may get angry and resentful when trouble starts, and then you have a much quieter but more insidious mess...
What? No, I've never seen this happening from the inside! Of course not! I'm a perfect angel!
I think I'm the only person who is infuriated by Penelope Trunk's article in TechCrunch Titled "Stop telling women to do startups" It moves up to the top of HackerNews very quickly, and I'm a little disappointed by the comments in the article. The title is pure nonsense first of all, and while there are maybe two points that I could agree with, it overall is a very poorly constructed argument. As a 20-something starting her career, I would hate for this type of talk to become a trend amongst women, because this logic cannot influence the next gen of women movers and shakers.
1. Women have choices and they aren't choosing startups because they want to have their own children: FALSE women are not empowered to balance the work life continuum. For men, the startup legend is one they would like to fulfill--a la the Pirates of Silicon Valley. For Penelope Trunk, she would rather be soft on the women who are itching to live life with a less exciting career (quite contrary to her title of "Brazen Careerist").
2. Raising Money and Running a Startup is Hard, so don't just tell anyone to do it!: FALSE women should be empowered to make these decisions and push themselves into riskier situations. In fact women who have partners with a stable income and have children should feel even more empowered to launch their own company (like so many women on this list have done) WHY CAN'T THEY BE RISKY! Why can't they work their ass off and succeed--or fail? I tried to start my own company, tried to raise money and failed miserably and guess what, I'm probably WAY more clever now because of that.
Saying that women have a natural imperative to raise children is horrible backwards. Women are the only ones who can give birth, but they are also capable of building great ideas, great work environments, great products and great companies. I'm horribly disappointed in this piece.
Why encourage women to start startups? 1) Because starting your own company is the hardest and potentially most rewarding career choice available and 2) Because women aren't doing it as frequently as men. It's that simple.
The article I read was about talking the talk versus walking the walk. And being aware that sacrifices will have to be made. And that people have a mind of their own and most of the people take the route of less sacrifices.
Honestly, nowadays in western world anybody can do just about anything if they put their mind and effort towards it. And acting as if women don't do startups as per some kind of society's disapproval is weak.
I was raised by an emancipated woman, who was a truck driver 40 years ago. I see the same kind of women around me. They are few, but they command respect and admiration.
And there is this other kind, too busy writing and debating to even get anything done.
My point? The author shared her experience of walking the walk in contrast to others who in a Victorian fashion talk the proper talk.
Ah, but why do you think that is? It's not the really legend they are chasing, for the most part. Men are competitive, driven to be successful, make lots of money, and driven to take risks because women reward decisive, winning, wealthy, successful risk-taking men with more attention than losers and boring, predictable guys. This drive to succeed is partly biological (higher testosterone, for example) and partly social conditioning reinforced by the behavior of the women they have known in their life.
In contrast, men aren't especially attracted to success. It's not unattractive, but they care more about beauty and personality. Most women know this, which is probably one reason why people turn to outside "empowerment" and other paternalistic encouragement and positive reinforcement to affect female behavior. Meanwhile, women are choosing fields and careers that interest them, like psychology, biology, and education, or that will result in a high-status profession like law or medicine.
Despite rhetoric to the contrary, evidence points to women caring about male attention and caring about having children and a family.
[women] are also capable of building...
I think that by now it is more or less conclusively proven that women are capable of a great deal. Humans are highly adaptable and throughout history both men and women did whatever they could to survive and raise their children. The question is what do women really want? What will make them happy?
I have a startup. I love startups. So should everybody else love startups too? Not at all.
A more direct question: roughly 50% of people are females. Should 50% of startup founders be female?
I don't think so, but I find it difficult to continue the conversation past this conclusion. The reason I don't think so is that I know that my judgment on how cool startups are doesn't extend to everybody else. I intuitively feel that being a founder involves complex traits and personal decisions that I cannot fathom. To simply say the ratio should be the same sounds wrong. It sounds like the same kind of mental error that makes me want to believe everybody should be in startups. Likewise to say that women should not be in startups sounds wrong also. Or to say startups should have more women in them than men. Each possible conclusion is undefendable.
You could try to attack this problem by taking it the level of personal choices: assuming women are rational actors making informed choices, why do so many choose not to be in startups? Is it the environment? The difference in the sexes? Chemicals in the water?
Of course, that doesn't work, because once you try to start making general assumptions about the behaviors of millions of people you're going to start stereotyping and using guesswork. It can't be helped.
So at the end of the day I understand that other people don't want to be founders. And I accept that. Heck, for all I know the people who are not in startups are the smart ones, and I'm the guy who has something wrong with him. Not only am I not sure how to reasonably investigate this issue, I'm not even sure I have my head screwed on well enough to know what a good or bad outcome is.
I think it's one of those things that you can endlessly argue about, and I choose not to. If folks want to discuss why Person A made her personal decision not to stay in the startup or tech world, we could do that. But when generalizing to all women, and to all startups, in my opinion it's just too much abstraction to be a tractable issue.
This is like the reverse of the probabalistic fallacy that the 100th coin flip will be affected by the fact that the previous 99 flips landed on heads. If you know for sure that your coin isn't biased the probabilities on the 100th flip is 50/50 but gosh, at that point wouldn't you question your assumptions and take a closer look at the coin?
That's exactly what I was going to say.
With regards to the article, everyone can bash Penelope Trunk all they want, but the fact remains that she's right. As an entrepreneur and adviser, she is correct.
People are always complaining about the lack of women in certain fields or the gender imbalance in science and technology--there are even organizations like "Change the Ratio" trying to affect that imbalance. But here's a question no one ever asks: is it in everyone's best interest to have more women in science, technology and business?
It drives me insane when people say that the whole child-rearing argument is sexist. No, it isn't sexist. That's one major thing that separates women from men--the former have the ability to carry and give birth to children. Many women sometimes find the urge to suddenly have children, and you can't predict when or if it will happen.
When it comes to matters of the sexes, you can't ignore biology.
There are other, more equitable ways to sustain civilization besides having the women stay at home and rear children but it would require sacrifice from men that honestly, most seem unwilling to make. Or worse, men aren't cognizant of the full extent of the sacrifices that their partners are making for the family.
I say this as a gay woman that has dated men and am finding negotiating responsibilities and compromises in a same-sex relationship eye-opening to the mostly hidden inequalities in the ways hetero partners relate to each other and divvy up responsibilities. It's the little things that add up -- the assumption about who will pick up the kids from day care [[if a child is in daycare, the parents are presumably both working.. but why are there so many more moms picking up the kids than dads?]], who does the grocery shopping that week, who does the laundry... the default is too often the woman. There might be men on HN that read this that are very good to their partners and try very hard to create an equitable household and feel that this comment is unfair or doesn't reflect their own home situations. That may be true, but the chances are that if you took a very careful accounting over time and paid attention, you'd see a pattern that skews toward particular heteronormative conventions. It's just incredibly hard not to let our society's very rigid and prevalent gender roles creep into our relationships. I have a friend who considers himself a feminist and he is the one that is more vocal and careful about sharing chores than his wife. Why does that seem so noteworthy and laudable? If things were really fair, shouldn't that be more normal?
And I say this understanding that it's not all gravy for men either -- the expectations that are associated with being a man are often unfair and also cause unhappiness. Honestly, though, when it comes to things like resource and opportunity distribution, these differences tend to favor men (for instance, there's evidence that gender roles and expectations play a big part in the salary disparity between men and women.) I'd say that's a major problem. The article's author says that many women would rather work part-time and raise children and find that a fulfilling life. That's wonderful. The question I'd like to raise is, if they had the opportunity to work full-time or even do something demanding like a startup and still feel like they had the time and energy to raise their children well (perhaps because their husbands are willing to work part-time and pitch in more toward raising the kids), would they rather take that option? And if so, what can we do as a society to help make that a reality?
If it was equal, as the article highlights, you would see an even percentage of men taking time off work to raise their children. Giving birth is a very small part of being a parent.
Some anecdotal data points from my family: my ex runs a daycare that provides her a nice income. My older daughter works for her but has a side business making tutus for babies, which is an absurdly small business. She says it gives her something to do while she watches television and pays for her Starbucks addiction. However, it is real. She had to learn all about selling internationally. My sister is a traveling consultant in theater costume design. My partner is an artist.
I have done several startups. My son started a hardware startup and his share of the exit was in the high 6 figures. Our startups were hi-tech, but overall we were outnumbered by the women.
1) Men tend to take risks more than women.
2) Women tend to focus more on family than men.
Additionally, I would add, that it's likely that the bulk of businesses owned at any given time in history, counting part-time businesses have always been owned by women. Indeed the great influx of women into the work force in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had to do with industrial processes undermining their businesses!
This idea got her some pageviews last year and she's been rewriting the same article over and over again ever since:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/09/women-startups-childre/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-47140168/are-startups...
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/16/blueprint-for-a-wom...
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/29/woman-problem-what-woman-p...
And now, of course, today's link bait. As with other trolls, the best thing to do is to just ignore her.
Kudos, I guess, for her omitting (or TechCrunch excising) the advice about how women who really want to succeed should get plastic surgery, focus less on work and more on capturing and keeping a man.
That "Blueprint" post reads so much like satire that I actually read the entire thing, only to discover the woman was dead serious. "It's no small feat, but Botox and Restylane will be your best teammates in this part of the adventure." For real?? And that's not even the worst part of the post. Egad.
Anything for page views, I guess! :/
It's just interesting that it's fine to push men into potentially lucrative careers, but do the same for women and then there's tons of controversy.
She tries to offer a counterargument w/ what she's thinks is absurd: "Men could change the world by staying home with their kids and parenting them. Men would provide a totally different perspective as the lunchroom parent. They would ask for totally different after-school programming. Men would hire different babysitters and different SAT tutors. Because men are different than women."
As a father who does do a lot of this (although not a stay-at-home dad), actually we can have huge impact in these types of settings. I've literally had several other parents saying they wish there were more people like me involved as deeply as I am. I've single-handled been able to change the tone and attitudes of lot of interactions apparently. And based on the poor behavior I've seen from a lot of children of "executive" dad stay-at-home mom parents -- something clearly isn't working with their model.
People are pretty good at making choices for themselves.
With all due respect to the author, that's not consistent with reality. If that were the case I wouldn't have so much feedback in code reviews. We wouldn't have child protective services, the incarceration rates we have, poverty, high HS drop out rates (and not just for the Thiel money), etc.... People are generally really bad at making decisions w/o guidance. No one is saying hand hold, but provide some basic guidance so that people can see all potentially avenues.
We either see people saying "people should try running a startup" or "women should try running a startup". Thus, the author's point is that the latter is unnecessary because the former covers both bases.
But after ten years of ninety hour weeks, "special" weekend projects, perpetual release death marches, and striving to meet unrealistic deadlines, you know... I am really thinking of downshifting. Not for children, not for society's expectations, not because I can't make it in a man's world - but because I would really just like to take a long hot bath with a cigarette, a glass of wine, and some Chaucer, and then... leave and never come back to any of this rot.
So please don't tell me how you really feel about "women in startups" or whether there should be more of them or less of them or your pet theory about how two X chromosomes result in the inability to reason or to compete. I'm here to code and the rest is just not very interesting.
Everyone gets ground down by trying to get small companies off the ground. I don't know many people at all who think 90(!) hour weeks and death marches are a good idea, even at launch time.
Stop smoking, though. It's really bad for you.
Time enjoyed is time well-spent.
So I think it's a good thing to encourage anyone who doesn't meet the standard expected start up founder profile - whether it's women, or people who have been around the block a couple of times. They (we :)), might have good ideas, we might need to be reminded that can be done - and to be pointed in the right direction.
I do lots of activities where everyone is "different" than me in some way.
I work in fashion, though I definitely stand out from the typical fashion crowd. (Most people who meet me assume I'm a tradesman of some sort.) At my company I'm an ethnic minority of one. I'm also an ethnic minority at my primary hobby.
In my experience, it's mainly women who think "omfg, everyone is different from me, what'll I do?" Men just think "those people are doing cool things, I'd like to be like them."
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/16/blueprint-for-a-wom...
This should be enough to convince you that she is full of shit. She doesn't practice what she preaches and holds very strongly to the status quo.
She actively discourages women from entering the startup world, so no wonder she is annoyed that some people are trying to encourage women.
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/03/05/the-workplace-shoul...
She regards inequality and unbalance as a non-problem and generalizes that all women are the same.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/29/woman-problem-what-woman-p...
http://baileybear.hubpages.com/hub/Penelope-Trunk-Brazen-Car...
Listening to anything this woman says seems to do more harm than good.
Pretty much anyone who says "don't make the same mistakes I made" doesn't practice what they preach.
She actively discourages women from entering the startup world...
Your link does not support your claim. If you disagree, please quote some text from your link where she discourages women from entering the startup world.
(Your proto-bell-curve explanation has been mostly dismissed at this point, just like all the rest of the "variation" arguments: variation ends up being highly influenced by social and cultural factors. The variation in American boy's performance in school, for example, is partially a product of how shittily our schools serve poor African-American boys.)
The life that is left for men in her world sounds incredibly un-appealing. I am a sperm donor, a potential source of income as I pay her to produce children for me, or on the non-romantic side, I'm someone to trick into doing most of the work in a start up while she takes credit. Regardless, I am expected to work jobs that consume my entire life, prevent me from having a relationship with my children and my wife's goal is not to have an equal or communicative relationship with me: she's just trying to keep me happy so we'll both be in our kids lives. That makes it my responsibility to be happy, and if I'm not it is a world-ending failure on my part. Have we seen Mad Men? The lesson from that show for me was "Holy Crap, that sucked!"
Humans are social creatures; any effective change will not be the product of individual behavior in isolation from all others. She takes as given: "nothing can change except my behavior" and then optimized under a set of terrible circumstances. Unfortunately her optimizations make her life better at the cost of making other people's lives worse.
I had children younger than I intended. My kids had special needs. I could not count on their dad to help raise them (if I left the kids with him for two hours, it went disastrously, with children unfed and diapers unchanged). Their dad had a lot of fine qualities and was a dutiful provider, but, no, taking proper care of children under a certain age was just not one of his strong points. I happened to be extremely good at it. So I did it -- for the sake of my children, not for personal joy. Yes, I made a choice (like she keeps harping on). But, no, it wasn't a choice of the "gee, golly whiz, staying home and raising kids is all I have ever dreamed of my entire life and this is the fulfillment of a DREAM!!!" variety.
If I had been in a different situation with more support (or less demanding children and fewer health issues of my own), I would have preferred to have both a family and career. That option was simply not viable for me so I rose to the occasion and did right by my kids. And most of the time I am reluctant to talk about my views on the topic because I am leery of the potential to come across like this woman, who is doing all she can to set women back a few decades. The fact that women clearly make different choices from men hardly means those choices are rooted entirely in free will and the fulfillment of their dreams. A lot of it is rooted in "shit happens and then, if you are a decent, responsible person, you do right by your kids rather than indulging your personal whims, like it or not."
I don't resent my kids. I do resent the general lack of support that denied me other opportunities. And I've worked really hard to change my life. So I am not thrilled with the crap that routinely comes out of this woman's mouth.
But then she writes and behaves as though she understands how other people can, should or do work. And it's baffling.
As a career guidance person she is a charlatan and I have been long troubled that anyone would pay attention to her advice, much less pay for it.
I've spent quite a lot of time over the years reading books on "feminist"-related topics, etc. I fundamentally disagree with the strong emphasis put on promoting women's careers (at the expense of children -- America is doing a terrible job with regards to its children in so many ways). My general understanding is that cultures where women sought more hands-on support for helping raise kids and practical accommodation for the burden of bearing children (which is unique to women -- as far as I know the "Junior" scenario is still science fiction) have generally done better by women. The American feminist "don't tread on me"/"get the fuck out of my way and I'll show you!" approach simply fails to address reality.
My sister and I both graduated high school as STAR student and national merit scholarship winners. I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta (math honor society) and she was inducted into some other honor society. I, whoops!, was fertile Myrtle and had my first child the day after I turned 22. She went through years and years of fertility treatments and finally had a kid in her mid thirties. We have compared notes and she did a lot of reading with regards to women with fertility issues. Her conclusion: "Career women" are often the result of someone simply being unable to conceive (as was her case). Personality-wise, my sister was much more of the "I would love to stay home and raise kids variety" than I was. And, in fact, she left a very serious career to stay home for five years. The main reason she has a much more serious career than I have is that I happen to get pregnant a helluva lot easier than she does. My oldest son arrived 7 years earlier than I wanted and we skipped birth control like twice to get our second child. (I had to call my sister and tell her I was pregnant yet again while she was going through fertility. Ugh.) I was surrounded by women saying "we tried for 8 months for this one (pats belly)" or "we tried for two years for our second child, that's why they are so far apart".
I have the brains. I have the drive. I didn't have a supportive situation for doing both family and career. My husband used to joke that the kids didn't get the memo when we were "planning" when to have them (and he also used to tell people "if you don't want them, keep it zipped"). We were already married so it wasn't some tragedy that I turned up pregnant, but it also wasn't the way I had intended for my life to go. And in some ways, I am still paying for that. So I sometimes wish someone would put a muzzle on Ms. Trunk.
Anyway, thanks for your response. If I sound wrapped around the axle, rest assured any venom isn't intended to be aimed at you. Have a great evening.
I mean, I was trying to make that point obliquely (and somewhat more charitably), but yeah, basically.
> Combined with not understanding how fortunate she is.
To be sure, Penelope seems a bit oblivious to her privilege. It's nice when you have an ex-husband who's stand-up enough to do his share of the parenting. It's extra-nice when you can hoodwink the investors of your also-ran, cash-burning social startup into paying you an absurd salary as a founder. Having both career and family, even with just those advantages, becomes way easier.
I understand the frustration. We'll come up with a secret anti-Trunk handshake or something. Seeing her held up as in any way credible makes my blood boil a little more than it should.
Yes, I basically agree.
"Would you like to be childless or give up your career?" is a sucky choice, and if we are going to force women to make it I believe it is only fair that men be forced to make it to.
In some sense, men are asked to make this choice and men fairly often choose career over children. This doesn't necessarily mean that they do not reproduce. My grown sons have no relationship to their father. I am divorced. Our sons live with me. At some point after they became legal adults, my oldest son clearly spelled out to his father that he didn't view him in parental/affectionate terms and please don't have an delusions in that regard. Their father stopped trying to contact them after that. We are okay with that.
Their dad poured himself into his career. He thought he was doing the right thing. I have no idea how he feels about his lack of relationship to the kids but he did in some sense make a choice between the two. The fact that women (and children) are getting screwed by our societal norms/policies does not prove men really have it much better.
But economics does.
And yes, how many men would be happier if society didn't try to tie so much of their self-worth into career advancement (just as it tries to tie so much of women's self-worth into wife/motherhood) and gave them the respect they deserve if they decide to focus on their families?
Last I heard, when a man dies, it often plunges the wife into poverty. But when a woman dies, it often leads to the death of the husband within a year. And in spite of being over-represented among the "poor" and "chronically poor", women live on average several years longer.
Me thinks you have a rather one dimensional view of quality of life which I don't happen to share. Which strikes me as a bit odd coming from someone trying to advocate for stay-at-home dads.
Peace.
(Will add I did appreciate your remarks here and did upvote it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3341367)
So yes, I definitely agree with you in that quality of life is made up of so much more than your economic situation, but making enough to live on (with a strong emphasis on enough) is for a disproportionate number of women a source of unhappiness and unfulfilled aspirations. I suspect if we as a society were to attack the root causes for the gender gap in wealth and income, we'd also rectify some of the causes of unhappiness for both genders.
I am currently being evicted. My mother has informed me that due to my father's medical situation, I am not welcome to come home again. My two adult, unemployed special needs sons still live with me. I am deeply in debt and in very serious trouble. In some sense, I suppose I probably look like "the poster child" for all the financial issues your "typical" divorced homemaker can have. But it's really not that simple.
I have a deadly genetic disorder. So does my oldest son. I not only raised my sons, I also homeschooled them for many years. They both have a long list of special needs but are also incredibly intelligent. I nearly died about 11 years ago and this led to being diagnosed late in life with "atpical cystic fibrosis". All of this ultimately led to me getting divorced, in part so I would be in a position to save my life and get well. My sons were on the same page with me. My husband was on the same page with the doctors, who were all too happy to wash their hands of trying to get me well and just blame my genes.
I could not have gotten well without the ongoing dedicated care of my two sons, who were 11 and 13 when this journey began. I had their backing when most of the world was actively trying to talk me out of my crazy scheme to actually take care of myself. Getting well has destroyed me financially but had I not gotten well, I would likely be in worse straits by far, both financially and in overall quality of life. I have gotten off boatloads of drugs and the hole in my left lung has closed. I have been well enough to work a full-time paid job the past five years, which I really was never well enough to do before. The condition I and my son have is one of the more expensive, chronic medical conditions around. And though I have gotten myself basically health, there is no cure. For me, it will be a case of "management" for the rest of my life, but the answers I have come up with are vastly superior to anything else out there, both in terms of quality of life and in terms of financial impact. This miracle could not have been pulled out without the backing of my sons.
I wish there were easy answers with regards to the whole gender equality thing. I think of such things as a matter of "sexual morality" in that as long as heterosexual people have sex, children will result. Human need is a complex thing and cannot be boiled down to any one thing, not money, not length of life, not career success. Given the details of my situation, in spite of my current dire financial situation, I think I got the better deal in keeping the kids. If I get through this, a career can come later. But first I had to live. I've done that.
Perhaps it's time to go play a game. Examining my navel in public is an old habit that I like indulging but it often comes across as shocking, disturbing and problematic for other people.
Peace and have a great evening.
What's not to like about our current approach of factory farming children?
In my view the future (and I hate to say this on a VC's site) is in family-run micro-businesses, not startups. Both parents work from home at least part of the time (one or both may have part or even full-time jobs elsewhere), integrate child care into the realities of this life. Sure this won't work in every field but it will work in many.
The thing is by integrating everything as you put it, this tradeoff doesn't have to happen. However making that integration happen requires challenging our ideas of the role of capital and labor in our society.
And BTW Penelope has special needs kids too.
I was sexually abused by two relatives as a child. So I was not easy to deal with when I was younger. For one, I did not manage to be faithful to the man. He knew that and put up with my shit for two decades anyway, in part for the sake of the children. He never threw that in my face. He was very decent and compassionate about the whole thing. Plenty of men would have assaulted me for it.
His devotion to his career was not somehow all bad. He was career military and we never lived in fear of him being RIFFED at a time when a RIF was ongoing. Our marriage ended up being very traditional, a throw-back to the 50's. I would have preferred something that gave me more freedom, but I did always appreciate that he was a good provider, he was not a drug addict or alcoholic, and he never hit me. That may sound like a low standard, but it beats the molestation, rape and being slapped around by a drug addict that constituted parts of my childhood.
I have taken a class on homelessness and done volunteer work at a homeless shelter. The kind of intractable problems I have and my children have are exactly the kind of thing that leads one to homelessness. My spouse's military career, with excellent free medical benefits, was a big part of why we had a relatively stable middle-class lifestyle in spite of me and our oldest son having a life-threatening, very expensive medical condition which went undiagnosed for many years.
Feel free to talk trash about me, as I am here and choosing to air my dirty laundry. Please refrain from jumping to ugly conclusion about my ex. He is a decent man and he is not here to speak for himself. It's a rather ugly tactic.
Also, the odds are really high that Penelope Trunk's children are not half as challenging as mine. It's why I have a parenting site: For some years, my advice on how to deal humanely and effectively with extremely challenging children was valued in some circles, circles that included Harvard graduates and the like who still found themselves at wit's end. There is a lot more support for that on the web these days, but when I was actively engaged in such online communities, I was frequently the only individual in the discussion that had much in the way of meaty, substantive feedback for the most challenging situations.
Now please excuse Penelope while she repeatedly hits refresh on her blog stats for a few continuous hours to see how this post did for her site.
All comments Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2011 Thomas H. Ptacek, All Rights Reserved.
But I do think TP was unfair to PT. She's saying things that a lot of strong, smart women I know would agree with. For example: For the most part, women are not complaining about the lack of VC funding in the world. They are complaining about the lack of jobs with flexible hours. That is so true of the women I know that my guess is one would have to be at a statistical frontier to see anything different.
It's true, though: my comment was motivated as much by visceral contempt for Penelope Trunk than anything else. I could probably stand to keep that to myself.
Rarely if ever.
It's definitely not evidence that we've solve all gender bias issues in the high-tech startup world.
It's also odd to simultaneously state that women are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, but it's somehow damaging to present them with another choice they can decide on. Why, exactly, do we need to protect women against the awful specter of another option in life?
If anyone wants career advice that makes sense from a human perspective, her blog is a must-read. You just can't dish out career advice without considering human happiness and human nature as a whole.
I really thought that this kind of overly-simplistic "men do X, women do Y" was in the past now, but of course such things never die.
There was a time where it was generally believed women should stay at home and worry about the children rather than go to school, or vote. I am sure we will look back on this kind of advice in the same way.
I hope you see the irony in thinking that there is nothing stopping women from running startups, but they shouldn't want to, as women want to stay at home and look after the children.
While there certainly is help for women running startups, there is also still sexism at many levels.
There are lots of reasons why women still stay at home and look after the children other than genetics. One of the most obvious ones to me (from personal experience) is that men are looked down on if they are the primary carer for their children.
Institutial misogyny?
Unless something changed since October, she is living on a farm raising her kids.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/24/how-to-know-when-to-leave-...
1) She doesn't, as a comment below states.
2) I fail to see how your question makes any sense.
Tendency/Preference etc is not Absolute Law.
For example, a human's natural instinct is survival, yet there are still people willing to sacrifice their lives for others in danger, etc.
(I always hate it when someone takes some statistical observation and thinks it's very smart to point out that there are exceptions --or even worse, uses them to "prove" the statistical observation doesn't hold. Happens all the time in pedantic-land).
"""I really thought that this kind of overly-simplistic "men do X, women do Y" was in the past now, but of course such things never die."""
Overly simplistic? Just because there are counter-examples, and complex cases, doesn't mean that the generalization is overly simplistic.
To make sense of the world you have to generalize, that is not to give equal importance to a multitude of fringe cases.
"""I hope you see the irony in thinking that there is nothing stopping women from running startups, but they shouldn't want to, as women want to stay at home and look after the children."""
Nobody said "shouldn't", she said "wouldn't".
And, statistically speaking, most don't. Do you see equally as many women founders? Or do you think you can attribute that to some mysterious general sexist attitude that prevents them?
This is the 21st century. Are we really still talking about "natural imperatives"? If nothing else, note that women are having fewer and fewer children, later and later - clearly, they are feeling this "natural imperative" less and less.
Traditional gender roles are unfair to women wanting to have a career, unfair to men who want to stay home with the kids, and far more rigid than needed. Having some "standard patterns" makes sense, but there should be more than one, and the freedom to deviate from those.
I am puzzled by this sort of comment. There are certainly things that I do as a male that I consider to be built in behavior. I do not see any reason to think that women would not have similar.
The reason people object to the naturalistic fallacy in arguments on this topic is that it is typically used to argue for the status quo by people who benefit from the status quo.
If you would like to see an example of it in action, read the Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession and the Cornerstone speech. There you can see rich white people explaining how black people are natural slaves, unfit to any higher role in society. Which was certainly a convenient argument for them to make.
All I'm saying is that "everybody is the same" type positions ignore reality.
The root comment in this chain claims that women's natural imperative is to raise children, with the implication that encouraging women to do startups is therefore wrong. That's also an ethical stance, one justified by the naturalistic fallacy.
All animals, people included, have built-in behaviors. But that tells us nothing about what the right behaviors are.
I don't believe anybody is seriously opposing that position. I certainly am not.
It seems to me that you are seeing an argument where none exists.
I do think that "imperative" is a little strong. But males are biologically different from females in all species, and in all species this translates into behavioral differences. There's no such thing as a species where males and females don't show behavioral differences, and in particular in regards to mating behavior and reproduction.
Certainly humans, as a whole, in first world countries are failing to mate effectively. Children are being had later or not at all. But women still show a comparatively greater interest, despite this overall trend. It would be foolish to claim that the 21st century has made natural behavioral differences irrelevant.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39699 http://www.ted.com/talks/arianna_huffington_how_to_succeed_g...
Besides your counterpoint being blatantly wrong, I don't understand why something being an "affront" to what you feel is the entrepreneurial "spirit" is a valid argument at all.
It's like Christians saying evolutionary theory is an "affront" to Christianity. It very may well be, but that doesn't mean that evolutionary theory isn't correct or have merit.
I don't support any dogmatic approach into shaming people doing anything. People should have accurate information without distortion and lies. They should have different options presented them in a pro/con fashion. They should be able to be themselves without feeling bad about it. Only shaped by harsh reality and their own interests, not by the opinions and preconceived notions of other people.
Whoa there. I can't think of any position in this debate that can be strengthened by such a contemptuous statement.
Not to mention oxymoronic. "Raising a family" isn't "difficult and challenging"? Egad.
Agreed that raising a family is difficult and challenging.
I actually agree with the point about feminism being to some extent a prejudice of its own that makes some women feel bad about wanting what they want. But they're figuring it out. We're, what, 50 years into this? That's lightning-fast change. It's fine to let the pendulum swing back and forth a few times.
The more pressing question in the long run might be how we got into a situation where both men and women have to work full-time in order to have things (like a house) that a single-salary family used to be able to afford.
If by D/s you mean domination and submission - I'll take love between equals, thanks.
People (and in particular their brains) have not evolved significantly for a very very long time.
A lot of modern unhappiness is caused by people doing things which they are socially expected to do but which go against their primal urges.
The feminist movement is perhaps the classic demonstration of this. Many women feel that they should go and get that high-powered job etc. due to social pressure, but I think many of them would be happier if they didn't.
This problem isn't limited to women, of course. Men also feel social pressures to behave in more cooperative and less ambitious/aggressive ways and this causes issues for them too.
We have incredibly complex apparatus in our brain with a dedicated purpose of socialization. Empathy, language, and cooperation are things which humans would not be capable of if we didn't evolve to do them.
>If nothing else, note that women are having fewer and fewer children, later and later - clearly, they are feeling this "natural imperative" less and less.
On the other hand, maybe they are being misinformed and thus unwittingly making choices they later come to regret:
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/01/142725547/many-women-underesti...
[citation needed]
There is no evidence that women naturally want to only raise children. And the implication that a woman who doesn't want spend all their life at home is a 'unnatural' woman, and there is something wrong with her, is a terribly, false, harmful meme to spread.
I find this comment offensive, since it spreads a meme that's completly against the Hacker ethic, which values meritocracy above pety ideas like gender, race etc. I'm flagging this comment.
>There is no evidence that women naturally want to only raise children.
Do you see what you did there? You (perhaps unconsciously) inserted "only" in the parent's statement, completely changing its meaning. Then you attack your modified statement as being sexist. Furthermore, nothing in OPs statement implied there was something wrong with a woman who chose differently.
Discussions on subjects like these would be much more productive if we could just take statements at face value without assuming all kinds of implied sexism.
You have part of a point about my "only" comment. However there is no evidence that women (and not men) want to naturally raise children. There is no evidence that there is anything "unnatural" about a woman (or man) who doesn't want children.
It doesn't mean the same thing doesn't apply to men, its just that this particular misconception applies to woman so that's where she's focusing her argument.
Natural vs unnatural is a complete red-herring. I agree that we all should stop using that word in discussions like this. It carries too many connotations and it implies beliefs that I don't think anyone has (that someone that deviates from "natural" behavior is wrong).
Certainly most women don't, but motherhood and founding startups are both such difficult jobs that it would be difficult to do both at the same time.
Trunk believes that more women are choosing not to do startups. That's not exactly the same thing as saying it's their "natural imperative". Because then those who choose otherwise are being "unnatural".
Also, the "natural imperative" thing implies that our current state of affairs is somehow the only possibility. Maybe the way investment works is currently broken somehow.
It's demeaning to suggest that women who choose not to do startups lack free will.
Treating individuals as mere instances of categories is a bit absurd, isn't it?
> You just can't dish out career advice without considering human happiness and human nature as a whole.
This is an article that doesn't just say, "keep in mind not all women want to do a startup". It says, "stop encouraging women to do startups!" Parent post then links this advice to the fact that "human nature must be considered when we give advice". So it links the inaccurate assumption that "human nature" implies "all women want to have babies", which is about analogous to the assertion that all people are attracted to the opposite sex, to an endorsement of the article's premise - that nobody should ever be encouraged otherwise.
The downmod you gave me is actually because of my tone. Feel free in that regard. I've observed the Hacker News community to have an incredibly low tolerance for sarcasm as an argumentative device.
The title is "stop telling women to do startups". I think the distinction is critical. (Perhaps this is her own strawman, but I think its important to get correct where she's coming from). Telling someone what to do is saying you know better than them, that somehow they're choice is sub-par and they need to be corrected. That's what she is ranting against. The implied assertion that women who choose to downshift their career must be doing so because of hidden sexism, not because they simply choose to.
Hello, naturalistic fallacy! How surprising that you came to visit when a bunch of dudes are talking about what they think women should do!
If someone's going to make blanket assertions like this then they ought to be able to back them up. She hasn't.
It showed that single women in their 20s were earning as much, if not more, than similarly skilled men. But those earnings, relative to men, declined as they started getting married and having children.
So yeah, it would have been nice of her to cite it, but the data is out there.
The market has spoken, and it is still funding mostly men that are willing to drop everything and relocate to NYC or Silicon Valley (who hopefully have minimal business experience so they can be convinced to give up more equity than they should). The things she lists as disqualifiers all apply to me, except the "being a woman" part.
So, um yeah, Penelope is pretty much wrong right out of the gate.
However, to be successful, you'd need to find part-time work that mom's where inherently better at. Or to put it better work that can't easily be done, by single guys in developing countries.
If you can't figure out a way to do this, the target demographic will be crowded out by people from countries with very low cost of living (which is starting to happen with stock photography).
Before someone says it, I don't mean to imply that developed countries deserve these jobs any more than developing countries. I'm just pointing out that a job site for moms fails if moms can't compete.
The women who are choosing not to do start ups aren't choosing not to in order to stay at home or work part-time. They are choosing to continue working for other people, never trying out their ideas. We are all poorer for it.
Additionally, of course, plenty of people argue that more men should take on a greater share of household tasks and primary responsibility for raising children. Men even just taking the paternity leave to which they are already legally entitled could do great things for gender equality in the work place.
I don't think that's totally true. Certainly there are plenty of non-rich, middle-class women who are at home raising children full time.
That's one way of interpreting it. Another way of looking at is that "working for other people" is not the negative you imply. Working for other people may be something women choose over entrepreneurship as a good way to get the work/life balance they want.
There are 2.5 as many male entrepreneurs as female Companies started by female entrepreneurs do not survive as well a companies started by male after the first 5 years. Female entreperneurs are distributed across industries much less than men The three biggest industries that women acupy accounts for 91% af all companies tarted by women. 1/4 of female entrpreneurs have emploees after 5 years (male 1/3)
I only knew this life path existed due to working at an early age in the family company. I know of 2 other women that went and set up their own businesses after working there too.
All female entrepreneurs will probably find they had some unusual serendipitous exposure at an early age into the world of business. A moment they can trace back to where their interest was sparked. A helpful mentor, boss, teacher, a particularly interesting class etc. Somewhere they were talked to about the beginnings of a business.
Miss out on this moment and there's little else for women as a point of reference to join the business world.
Young males tend to look at peers and see this route implied far more clearly. Many men choose the startup route without ever having first hand experience of it.
I'm a female running a startup, I wouldn't want to be invested in just because my gender is under-represented. I want it to be because my plan, idea and execution is intelligent and strong.
From my experience, women are more likely to bootstrap for longer and look to take on a lower level of investment.
Perhaps more offers of micro investments would naturally fit in with the types of businesses that women are already running.
There seems to be a big gap in investment, it's either fiercely fought incubator places offering around $15k or the traditional VC route of $100k+.
Where's the middle ground for those that don't like the "go big or go home" attitude but want to "start small, stay stable" - I think that's where the majority of female entrepreneurs sit.
I will continue to lean on everyone I know. One of them might break loose and go on to do something interesting, and then I will feel good about it. It might even improve the situation as a whole for the rest of us.
I work for a startup in another industry (wholesale insurance) and 90% of our staff are female. People work 8:30-5 Mon-Fri and rarely do any overtime. If there's a programming/development project which needs to be done, I estimate how it will take and we decide if it's worth the cost, including the opportunity cost of what we could have worked on instead.
If tech startups were run properly, with sensible deadlines, fixed hours and no 'crunch sessions' (if you need these on a regular basis, your project management is broken) they would probably attract a far wider range of people.
I think it's a matter of semantics; no one (at least in these pro-woman-startup posts) is telling particular women that they need to do a start up. They are encouraging women to go into a male-dominated field.
I strongly believe that evolutionary biology sas on-average gifted men and women with different types of strengths; and while cultural idiosyncrasies have exasperated the 'problem' of a dearth of women in engineering, etc; there is also the issue of playing to our natural strengths and preferences.
So, of course women (and men) should do whatever the hell they want; and be encouraged in that regard, and, discouraged from falling into stereotypes.
This comment from the article gets at the heart of what the author is trying to say. Behind the desire to single out women as a group that needs a special invitation to pursue a career doing startups are two assumptions: 1) that women actually want a career doing startups and 2) that they do not feel empowered to pursue that course on their own.
The author simply isn't comfortable making those assumptions, which point of view is completely valid given the subjectivity of the topic.
"Here is a Blueprint for a Woman’s Life which I published. It is full of recommendations for how to make choices based on what we know women really want for themselves. It does not involve getting VC funding."
Hmm. It's kind of weird for anybody to pretend they can tell anyone else how to live their life, since figuring out how to life your life in your own way is what makes it your life and not someone else's. But whatever. Let's read a bit into this thing and see what she talks about...
She posted a list of things all women should be doing with their life. Here's the list verbatim (from http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/08/16/blueprint-for-a-wom...):
1. Do less homework.
2. Get plastic surgery.
3. Go to business school right out of the gate.
4. Start early looking for a husband seriously.
5. Milk maternity leave for all it's worth.
6. Guard your marriage obsessively.
7. Practice austerity.
8. Do a startup with a guy.
9. If you can't get men to do a startup with you, do a lifestyle business.
10. Homeschool. Your kids will be screwed if you don't.
11. Spend money on household help and Botox to keep more doors open longer.
12. Break the mold in your 40s.
Before you liberal feminist sissies get all huffy, she clearly states "I know that's not good for feminism. But none of this post is." So please don't fret over whether or not she's setting women back by 60+ years as she is probably typing this story from the kitchen.
(p.s. this is the woman who did the tweet about having a miscarriage during a board meeting - http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/06/penelope-...)
I didn't read past the first few paragraphs.
>On top of that there is evidence that the members of the VC community go out of their way to attract women. Of course, this makes sense. VCs look for underserved markets. Women are likely to address different markets than men, and since there are so few women founders compared to men founders, it’s likely that women are addressing an underserved market.
and then this:
>Whoever started the TED Women’s conference is pathetic.
Uh, ok. Right on TED Women's webpage they say that "Over the past several years, a flood of fascinating data from the worlds of education, microfinance and more has shown an essential link between investing in women and girls and economic growth, public health, political stability."
And it goes on to state that TEDW wants to explore those 'underserved markets' to borrow the author's words, in greater detail, -behavior that she just got finished praising.
But whatever, I'm nitpicking. I think the general thrust of most of her arguments have merit. Women often choose to disengage from the business world to realize life goals that make them happier than what business success can offer them. What guy hasn't had this dream? To be sure, it's probably a different dream. For women, it may involve having children and raising a family for some. For me, it might be throwing caution to the wind and traveling the world. Bottom line is that I think there are some very basic 'non-business' aspirational lifestyles that humans of all walks of life wish they could engage in at different times. Biology and culture have conspired to offer women one of them up on a silver platter if they so choose. Many do, and there's nothing wrong with that.
EDIT: I don't know how scientific this is, but just an ironic post I came across browsing just now. Check out #2 on the list:
http://www.rense.com/general95/regrets.htm
I think this would be an interesting study to formalize and conduct, don't you?
As most people with children will be able to tell you, all of those things are vapid and empty compared to spending time with your children. Perhaps many women choosing to stay home raising families instead of pursuing careers have found something more rewarding to do with their time.
Yes, for some. Come to think of it, spending time with the kids is probably the number one reason men downshift (by choice) as well.
What is complicated and not fully understood by me is how accurately we have accounted for women who voluntarily choose to downshift in all of the 'glass ceiling' statistics. I think that the glass ceiling is very real, but I just wonder how trustworthy the stats are. It's complicated.
It's very rational when you consider that it's consistently been shown that women are more likely (notice I said likely) to place a higher value on non-monetary compensation.
My wife gets the dismissive smile and nod from career women whenever she answers their obligatory "what do you do for a living" question.
This makes her feel bad for raising our children.
This only lasts until I point out that these career women get the awesome privilege that men have enjoyed for hundreds of years: slaving away for some overseer, pushing paper in a cube and staring blankly at fluorescent lights, having distant relationships with your own offspring, and dealing with office politics for 30 years, then dropping dead.
Families also get the added benefit of having their children raised by a rotating crew of $10/hr wage slaves at some cut-rate daycare from infancy, in exchange for about what a 2nd house would cost, because dad isn't likely to want to stay home either.
The neighborhood also "benefits" by being an absolute ghost town during work hours, so people who are doing the work of raising children are left bereft of any sort of neighborhood support (remember when you could just let kids run wild outdoors, or your mom stopping next door for coffee?).
The fulfillment angle of no-parent society is pretty slim I think.
Raising kids is about the only fulfilling thing left in the world that anyone you know is likely to do. Families with no full time parent (mom or dad, mind you) is a bizarre and frightening development.
seriously, do you think that maybe different people are made happy by different things? i know men and women who have no interest in having a romantic relationship, let alone raising a family. do they occupy some horrible THX1148-style monochrome existence for fulfilling their lives by doing things?
At work they have one organization about Women in Tech. That does nothing besides call out the misconception that women need help for some reason.
In my previous country that would outright illegal. You know, sexism. Here it's seen as a great thing. Well, we didn't have minorities guettos on every city either...
There doesn't need to be any equality. Everyone is already equal and can decide to start a startup whenever they wish.
That's how it's always been. There are the talkers (they're usually the academics as well) and then there are the doers-the ones that don't scream their opinion every chance they get, but if you ask them for advice they'll be full of real world experience to share with you. This article does raise a lot of good points though. I usually ignore posts with opinionated titles, but I'm glad I read this one.