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How is this fair?

Why does it need to be fair? This isn't grade school... (For the record, I don't think this article is unfair but I don't see why that would matter.)

Doesn't it qualify as "sexism"?

No... How would this be sexism (discrimination based on gender)?

if you saw "men" instead of "women" you'd have totally different stories and the big S word: sexism.

Huh? There's no reason to highlight "The Men of YC". There's nothing remarkable about a bunch of guys trying to get tech startups off the ground. Women are typically underrepresented in this group, so this is noteworthy.

Plus, the ideas might be good for business but it's very very "girly".

Websites that cater to women are few and far between, women are typically willing to spend a lot of money on these types of sites, and it shouldn't be suprising that women develop businesses that they themselves would want to use. If you haven't noticed most startups tend to be a bunch of geeky guys developing geek-related crap that only geeks are really interested in. Same difference.

Also the journalist is a woman...

And? Isn't that appropriate? I'm sure the article would be fine if a male journalist wrote it but you shouldn't be suprised that a female journalist was hilighting sucessful women in tech.

Your weird interpretation of sexism is baffling.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Sure, it'd be nice to live in a world where the genders of the founders didn't matter, but we don't. Almost half the Internet population is female, yet there are very few sites catering to them. This is dogfooding, plain and simple. I would never dream of launching a site to connect consumers with the perfect pair of high heel shoes, but there's probably a massive market for such a service.

Women will get attention because they're the minority, and because they pursue business opportunities that don't occur to male geeks. If we had Eskimos launching sites, they'd get covered too.

There's a massive market out there that isn't getting served by the rank and file tech entrepreneur. More power to whoever finds a way to exploit it. Crying 'reverse sexism' strikes me as simply pathetic.

Huh? There's no reason to highlight "The Men of YC". There's nothing remarkable about a bunch of guys trying to get tech startups off the ground.

This is true. From an information theoretic perspective, this story more interesting than the converse would be. However, I've been told many times that information theory and probability is not a defense against charges of sexism.

For example, consider the question "do you plan to have children soon?" From an information theory perspective, it provides useful information when making a hiring decision. And the information is more notable for a woman than for a man, since a woman who gives an affirmative answer is far more likely than a man to vanish from the workforce. Yet it's normally considered sexist to ask this question, particularly if you ask the question only of women.

How do you reconcile this difference?

I am sorry but I will say that sexism is gone when EVERY trace of it will have disappear

Amen. But given that we aren't there yet, why are you complaining about an article which has women in it instead of the four hundred that don't?

To be honest I haven't read the others (I am totally apathetic about the Y combinator startup thing). But I'd have to the premises if they were "10 men who are awesome", trust me I would smite it as strongly as here. If none of the articles mentioned any of the women shown there this is also a problem but I truly believe it won't be solved by countering with a gender specific article (I wrote a longer post on that when I answered ktothemc ).

if they were "10 men who are awesome", trust me I would smite it as strongly as here.

You must not read much tech news if you're not doing that kind of smiting several times a day.

The key difference is that most of tech news is about a group of 10 people who happen to be men, not articles about 10 men and how awesome it is that they are men.

Your comment ironically reveals why we need to have stories like this.

"The key difference is that most of tech news is about a group of 10 people who happen to be men...."

It's not a group of 10 people who happen to be men. It's more like 8 or 9 of them happen to be men and 1 of them happens to be a woman. If the community keeps perceiving and portraying itself as so homogeneous, how will young women recognize that they can have a place here too?

That's always the refuge: you're interested in equality alone. But it's really not true, because (if you're being honest with yourself) you reacted emotionally, not logically, and enough so that you decided to post on the internet about it to let everyone else know how you feel.

It's just an article about a notable subgroup. Would you be annoyed if it was (as another poster amusingly points out below) Minnesotan or Indian founders? Local Texan sons done good out west? University of Subterranean Boston alumni notes? It's clear you're peeved because, for whatever reason, you don't like "identity politics" and you pigeonholed this as being an example.

Well, get over yourself. It's not. It's about women with startups. Being underrepresented (wildly so, relative to the population) I think women constitute a "notable" subgroup. You don't?

Hi thank you for taking the time to read my answers.

Well as a matter of fact I really answered rationally... Well at least I hope I did. If you want to read my real motivation, beyond the immediate answer here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3779310

I am French, and I tell you what, I'd just HATE an article that would say "Some French that are really good in tech.". I want to be integrated in the society, I want people to simply ignore my country of origin, I'm not ashamed it's just not relevant to the fact that I am an engineer or an entrepreneur, just as being a women, black, chinese or anything different than white american male!

I was nodding my head to ajross's little armchair analysis but when you said you were French a little light bulb went off.

This is just hearsay and stray recollections of things I've read, but doesn't France, officially at least, have a very different approach to equality than the US? I believe that it is illegal in France to recognize racial or gender differences in official contexts, is that true? This might cause a French person to view such an article as in bad taste and as an impediment to equality.

In the US there is long history of affirmative action and other remedial measures and I think the current culture reflects that. When you have a group as underrepresented as women in tech are, then the tendency is to try to boost them by whatever means necessary. Being an American I tend to agree with this approach but I can see the opposite side.

I guess you could ask what is the effect of articles like these? Are they doing more good by encouraging people to view women in tech as an accepted fact or are they entrenching the status quo by calling it out as it if were something special? I think the former effect outweighs the latter.

Edit: the lightbulb went on, not off. ;)

As you say in France we are taught not to see the differences. Indeed it is illegal to recognize any racial differences (gender differences are accepted in most scenarios ). You cannot be asked what is your ethnicity when you apply for a job. When I say to my american friends that I don't "see" color they don't believe me and they call it a racist thoughts. Months passing I realize that apparently very few people in the US want true equality, they want their own version with gender/ race specific advantages to fight the unfairness of history, which is very real.

As for the effects, I personally don't have the answer either, even if I try to draft possible outcomes (in another comment in this thread taking the finnish school example). From what I have read in the tech crunch article the encouragement had a weird effect in the Y Combinator selection: they may have managed to introduce "femininity" in tech but not "women". As somebody pointed out in another comment none of the women are technical founders...

But thanks for staying open minded, I believe that's how solutions are found: everybody listen to each other and a better understanding begin to take shape after a while, hopefully my indigenous perspective will help :).

Equality is still the goal, or it is supposed to be. It's not quite fair to say that very few people want true equality. They are aware of the circumstances in which they live and they are aware of history (to varying degrees for both, of course).

Like I said, I favor the American approach but I cannot say for sure which is better. Racism is far from gone in France according to my French acquaintances. Job applications may not ask your authenticity but I am told having the right type of name is often very valuable. Of course, once it comes to personal interviews it doesn't matter so much what is on the application.

I believe when some government departments collect demographic information they are also not allowed to collect ethnic information.

Public culture (in the media) in France does seem much more homogenous to me than in the US.

I didn't even know that there were that many women in YC. It's only been in the past month that I've stumbled onto women founders commenting on HN. I'm thrilled to find this article. I believe that women are underserved by software because the field has been dominated by men, too often making software targeted at other men.

It's great that the ideas are girly. They know what they want better than we do. If more women are going into YC now than before, than I'll bet PG and the gang can hardly wipe the grins off their faces thinking about all the money they're going to make.

Women technical founders are here. We just don't broadcast it, you generally make the assumption when reading a comment that it is from a guy unless specified otherwise. Try reading the next comment post assuming each comment is from a woman and see if that changes how you read it. Probably not?

Assuming that people respond or project because of gender is part of the problem, that does not make it so that everybody does it. Try reading this like it is from a person. See how that changes it.

> Assuming that people respond or project because of gender is part of the problem

Having had a chance to a/b test this, the real problem is that they do actually do this, not that people simply assume they do.

It's real, it happens. Either start learning about how it effects people or continue going through the world blind to these issues. Your call.

Your ultimatum and passive agressiveness combine so well with your a/b testing claim. That really makes me see how people that assume others respond or project because of gender are part of the problem. You are clearly caged in by all that scientific data that is one day to be published and reviewed. Good day.

I'm going to ignore all your tone arguments and merely mention there's quite a bit of scientific research on this if you happen to be interested in learning. Feel free to search for it.

Privilege blinds. Waking up to what you have a hard time seeing can be hard. Good luck. Or not, if you'd prefer things stay as they are.

Yes, I completely agree with you. I was directly responding to the parent, who was making the assumption that all posters here are male.

What? The only posters I've found interesting are the identifiable ones.

If I read a site with a large female userbase I might expect an unknow commenter to be female. Hacker news? Not so much.

15% of the time you'd be wrong.

Which is better than 85%.

When anyone has identified themselves as a founder, I look at their profile, their business and their blog. There has been no uncertainty.

I'm sure there are a lot of great anonymous posters here but I don't follow them.

I'm really sorry, but this ticked off my code-review OCD and I couldn't help myself.

You could use "Bla bla bla {0}, because {0} and {0}".format("women") to avoid using a tuple of "women". Or, if you're stuck with old Python, just use %(noun)s three times and format with {"noun": "women"}.

That made me laugh!

I was hoping the compiler inside everybody's brain would be able to detect this minor inefficiencies and correct them on the fly. And yes, I was using Python2.7, I wanted to use 3.0 but the sexist libraries haven't been updated. (Just joking).

But thanks for pointing that out!

the ideas might be good for business but it's very very "girly"

This is one thing that jumped out at me too at first blush, but thinking on it more, while it may be the case I don't know that it's actually objectionable. Some of the more "girly" opportunities are still untapped by the mostly-male founder base, and if women choose to tap them, isn't that just good business sense on their part?

I am a woman who just applied to Y Combinator with a "girly" idea. I admit to feeling a little odd about it. I almost wished that I were applying with a more gender-neutral idea. On the other hand, I'm convinced that the idea is worthwhile, and it's not the sort of idea that I can envision a group of 20-something men pursuing. I think it's only natural to ask yourself what you might understand better than your competition. (In fact, that's a question on the Y Combinator application!) I suppose I'm trying to argue that sliverstorm is right here.

Of course, some of it is just that women are more likely to be interested in girly things, and people in general tend to want to start companies that they are personally interested in. I don't see why that's a problem.

I would totally invest in/work on "girly" ideas. It's a big market of big spenders that hasn't yet been reached effectively. Pinterest shows us the latent demand is phenomenal. If I knew anything at all about women I would jump in this market as well.

This is push-and-pull. It's step-by-step. We don't get to the magical destination you're talking about immediately. If this generation of female entrepreneurs happens to be more focused on female target markets, that's fine by me if it means women in the next generation look up to them and realize that they can be founders too.

I agree, but it always bugs when I see articles that speak about a gender or a group of people.

I believe it's part of a broader problem in the US. I come from another culture in Europe and that puts me in a position where I am able to analyze things from very close but still with a great deal of distance. Also forgive me for my english mistakes it is hard to develop long thoughts in a language which is not your mother language!

In the US there is a culture of the celebration of differences. It's true at every level in every aspect of the organization of the society here (I live in the US). I can take a very simple example: schools. In the US the "different" students which happen to be defined by the school administrations as the smartest students have it very easy: they are put aside from the rest, put in special classes, get incredible scholarship. The "normal"(again, by the definition of the administration) students are ignored.

Now take the example of the Finnish schools. In these schools the rule is: everybody should be at the same level: equal. [http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...]. They have no standardized test to set the "normal" and "different" kids apart, they are very little homework.

Guess what happens next ? US pupils are just killed in the tests and Finnish students are far ahead.

This example can be extended to the case of women and to many more. By celebrating the excellence of some you only reinforce the sexism because of very complex externalities, that are not fully understood from the point of view of social sciences. I truly believe that creating role models is a curse, not a cure for the problem of women absence in technologies. This subject would merit a bigger post than mine but that's my thoughts put simply.

Sorry for the digression, thank you if you read until here :).

I understand that this must seem like an alarming difference, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. For nearly a century after the end of post-Civil War reconstruction we had nominal equality but vast inequality that was all too real. Technically colorblind laws that granted the right to vote based on whether your grandfather could. Poll taxes designed to disenfranchise people who couldn't afford them. "Seperate but equal" schools that were in no way equal.

"I don't see color, I just see qualifications" was often the very first claim by a hiring manager at a company where everyone but the janitor was white. As a result, claiming to be colorblind convinces no one. People believe you will hire and promote members of disadvantaged minority groups only when tangible evidence from the makeup of your staff proves it.

I understand your distate for the situation, but it's kind of like you came in to the theater in the middle of the movie. People here are like this for very good reasons. Are there problems as a result? Sure. But things are the way they are as a result of responding to a situation that was even worse.

If Finland is aiming for equality, they are doing a terrible job. They have huge gaps between immigrants and non-immigrants, much bigger than the US.

They just have fewer immigrants so the overall effect is small.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416977

My thoughts were similar. If you want equality between the sexes, just stop exposing the inequalities. Treat everyone the same. An article about "women in tech" makes no sense, it just promotes thinking about "men in tech" and "women in tech". If I were a woman running a company, I would prefer not to be featured in an article like that.

I think these kinds of contradictions are more common in the U.S. than elsewhere. I have always wondered: if race plays no role, why does it figure as a question in the census and in most college applications?

>My thoughts were similar. If you want equality between the sexes, just stop exposing the inequalities

Pretending inequalities don't exist doesn't get rid of them. The only people who benefit from this line of thinking are those that are in privileged positions to begin with.

>If I were a woman running a company, I would prefer not to be featured in an article like that.

There goes that line again... I'm sure women can speak for themselves on this matter.

> If I were a girl I would certainly feel kind of weird...

The moment this or a similar statement is about to come out of your mouth, just stop yourself. There is no possible way a sentence that starts out like this will be anything but close-minded and/or self-serving. If women have a problem with women owned businesses being about "woman" things, they can say so. Do not presume to speak for other women from your place of privilege.

It's a fair a point but baby steps are required. A group of women founders doing women-y things is far better than no women founders. These will open the door for others in the future.