Damn, Girl: New York Has Almost Double The Female Founders

Although boys have outperformed girls in exams in maths at 16 here in the UK for the last three years, girls had outperformed boys at maths for the decade before that.

You're not arguing that men and women are "just a bit different" so much as you're arguing that people should conform to gender roles which don't necessarily apply.

What about gay people in tech - Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Ben Ling? Shouldn't they have been playing with Barbie dolls, or My Little Pony or whatever at a young age too?

"The lack of women in tech (and lack of women in science and math in general) starts at a very young age - while boys are immersed in video games and girls are having afternoon tea with their dolls. I doubt those 5-year-olds are influenced by the way women in tech are reported."

I don't quite understand this. First, girls play video games. Everyone plays video games. Second, are you saying that portraying female founders in sexist terms is immaterial because whatever explains women being rare in tech has already taken effect after the age of 5?

That would imply that sexism in media only merits attention at all if children 5 or under can see that media. I think that's pretty unlikely.

And what about being a decent human being to the women who are already here? I mean say for the sake of argument that we go along with this theory that something utterly irrevocable happens at the magical age of 5. Doesn't a perfunctory nod to public decency still require that, if a woman in technology says "this article about women in technology does not portray people like me in the way I would prefer," anyone who is not in that category should acquiesce, or at least show a baseline level of respect for the request?

When I was a raver, and I saw stories in the media about ravers, and I told my non-raver friends "yeah that doesn't quite correspond to reality," they were curious to hear what the reality was. When, as a first-generation American with British parents, I spot some unrealistic British character on an American TV show doing something no British person would ever do, if I point this out to Americans, they tend to listen.

I think you have to just show respect for the fact that somebody in the category that the article was about disagrees with the depiction of the category. I think that's (no pun intended) categorical, and the larger issues of sexism are irrelevant here. I think that's just common courtesy, even leaving aside your argument that media only has an effect on the mental attitudes of children, and/or that the whole thing is a done deal by age 5 anyway so why bother -- OK honestly I have no idea what your argument was there. But I made a good-faith effort to tackle it and I think any discussion of women in tech should show a token level of courtesy, just on the offchance that they turn out to be human beings after all.

Actually, both those songs have misogynistic lyrics too. The JT song includes the line "Don't need no L'Oreal 'cause bitch you're bad as hell." Maybe referring to women as "girl" is just a bad jump-off point.

ah, but is it actually "by" david guetta, or is he just more business savvy than most pop producers?

Of course not, but it's Disneyland for engineers and you don't get people from other professions flocking to work there. My girlfriend is a med student and she wasn't a fan of a suggested move to the Valley. My friends in finance dream of Wall Street, those in arts wouldn't trade Broadway for anything and all the fashionistas only hold Paris above 5th ave and SOHO.

To understand what really motivates people, it's much better to look at what they do in the real world. Sure, there have always been women getting CS degrees, but how many of them go out and become programmers or tinker with technology, electronics and hardware late at night because they want to? The people who do that have been the engines behind technological advancement and growth throughout human history. And they've been mostly males. Saying that men tend to be more interested in technology than women doesn't mean that women's interest in CS is purely fixed. It just means that there will always be statistically more males tinkering with technology than females. And those statistical disparities will always ensure that the majority of tech-heavy, companies, and inventions will be led by men.

Comparing 1984 to 2002 in CS is ridiculous. Nothing dropped precipitously. CS grew astronomically, and it attracted more new males than females, but still there are far more women doing CS now than then.

Do non-divisive comments not require "very hard data"?

You realize that we create bias if we adopt stricter scrutiny of some hypothesis over others.

So any explanation besides "Oh my they're being oppressed" is deeply offensive?

"Computer professionals" are not regulated or licensed, so the term may be too ambiguous to have a meaningful discussion.

But your average engineering or computer science major at a reputable program has to take far more difficult math than your typical premed.

Look through the requirements for medical school admission, and you'll see many do not require more than a single year of calculus.

UCSD, for instance, even provides an easier track of calculus and physics for biology majors, perfectly acceptable for medical school, but unacceptable for math, physics, or most computer science or engineering majors.

http://ucsd.edu/catalog/curric/BIOL-ug.html#major

Yes, I know that anyone is allowed to read a book on PHP and hang out a shingle as a "computer professional", so if you're including them, then sure, I guess the average doctor has a better handle on math. And honestly, I'm glad that this kind of freedom exists in the world of software. But I hope you realize that the math background of a typical CS major from a good university greatly exceeds what is required to go to med school.

I don't think that statement is supported by the facts; for example, only 6 of more than 100 Nobel Prize winners in Medicine are women[0].

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phys...

These social conditioning arguments are always non-sequiters. At some point you have to ask yourself, what conditions society? Something has to create the condition where people begin to notice that engineering and tech is kind of a male thing and, say, nursing, is kind of a female thing on average. Something must have created that original pattern for people to notice it. It doesn't just come out of the ether. Once the pattern exists, it's probably reinforced, but you can't tell me that with all the effort that goes into getting girls into STEM, the tide wouldn't have been turned by now had the phenomenon been based purely on nurture. Plus, you see this pattern all over the world. And it's always evident that there's bias in this argument because nobody gets upset when somebody points out that most elementary school teachers are women. And that leads me to think that there's a lot of people (of the female variety) who deep down believe that what men do is superior to what women do. And that's sad, because it's entirely untrue.

Many cities like to claim this, but NY barely makes the top 10. For example, Dubai has way over 75% foreign residents. And cities like Toronto and Sydney are both statistically and anecdotally more culturally diverse.

I'd be more interested in the number of fashion/wedding startups in NY and the percentage of females who run said startups. Huge stereotype and completely unfounded, but it wouldn't surprise me either.

A female population of 52.5% explains the effect for dating, but not for founding companies. The difference is because it's the surplus that matters for dating but the entire population for founding.

Suppose that 42.5% of the population are women in a marriage or committed relationship, and then by definition 42.5% are also committed men. That leaves 10% of the population as single females and 5% as single males, and there's your 2:1 ratio for dating, created by just the small female surplus.

Would that hold for founding companies? I don't think so. Any of the 52.5% females could start a business, as could any of the 47.5% males. The small excess of women doesn't create a 2:1 ratio here. (There may be some correlation, that married and settled women are less likely to start a business, but the population ratio can't explain the entire outcome.)

The data above doesn't support that - there's only about a 2% difference.

Here's the proof, all the single ladies, all the single ladies, are on the East Coast: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/30/...

Ms. Wilson's pedigree includes Phillips Exeter, Harvard (twice!), Merrill Lynch, and Louis Vuitton. That list says a lot about the NYC ecosystem. How many people with her background are going to make their way to SV to try a pure-tech play?

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alexandra-wilkis-wilson/0/17b/84...

Please don't confuse "professional" with fancy taste or cold-weather clothing,