Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
What the hell? I feel like I'm watching a US TV commercial.
"Whoops honey, if I didn't have my sports cap on I'd probably lose my head."
"Oh dear, you lovable oaf." Mother and daughter shake heads at retarded male
Right now we have this myth that companies are machines and parts are largely interchangeable, and that gender doesn't matter in the functionality of the part. I call this a myth because it is a model we use to think about business and make sense of it, even if it isn't literally true. Gender does matter. Parts are not interchangeable. And it might be better to think of companies as ecosystems rather than machines.
The question I have for women in tech is: If you could start a business that would different about the way it would be run? Forget all models of how things are done. What would you change?
I think that's where the solution is.
The onus here isn't on women. And the right solution is not to preferentially favor women in the tech field. What you'll end up with is a situation where asshole misogynists consider themselves even more justified in treating women in tech as second class citizens. This time because "they only got there through charity".
The solution is simple. People in tech need to treat other people in tech like human fucking beings, regardless of gender, race, or age. And more importantly, when we see people treating others based not on the quality of their work but on superficial qualities like gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or what-have-you we need to call them out on it. Loudly. Publicly. Repeatedly.
But I would comment, that increased diversity (whether it is gender/race/age/etc) always yields benefits as you have a more diverse range of viewpoints to draw from. So it is always a problem when one group is over(or under) represented in a given area.
It's not equal to have proportional gender representation in only desirable jobs.
>When I did the research for a book called The Myth of Male Power I discovered a Glass Cellar that holds far more men than the Glass Ceiling. The Glass Cellar consists of the hazardous jobs and the worst jobs (minimum security, low pay, bad conditions). The hazardous jobs-or Death Professions-result in 93% of the people who are killed at work being men. Of the 25 professions that the Jobs Rated Almanac rates as the worse professions, 24 have in common the fact that they constitute 85% or more males (welders, roofers, etc.).
http://www.warrenfarrell.com/labor_day_art.htm
Also need to consider the other costs externalized on marginalized men. Men are ~5 times more likely to die from suicide. Men are more likely to be homeless. They are more likely to be pariah of society. They live 7 years less than a women when a century ago the difference was 2 years. These are all costs externalized on men based on the traditional idea that men are strong/privileged and need to "man up".
But consider this. We're experiencing the first generation of men that will be less educated than their fathers. Women are outpacing men in college education and literacy rates and this divide continues to grow. If we continue to systematically approach "gender equality" from such a lopsided perspective we're all going to hurt as a society. We're on the path to resembling Eastern Europe. Where the social cost of being a man is so high they are disproportionately dying and creating a gap in eligible bachelors.
http://www.econ.upf.edu/~apesteguia/Gender_Teams.pdf
"Looking across the performance distribution, we find that for undergraduates, three women teams are outperformed throughout... For MBA students, at the top, the best performing group is two men and one woman."
http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...
"The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better."
http://www.20-first.com/968-0-lbs-study-shows-addition-of-wo...
"The optimal percentage for the gender balance of men and women on teams is 50:50. Neither men nor women flourish when in a minority on teams. When in a minority, women tend to network outside whereas men tend to become less motivated. Having a slight majority of women on teams (about 60%) improves the self-confidence of the team."
I think the evidence is pretty clear. Anecdotally, I've seen the best performance out of mixed teams. All men teams and all women teams generally don't work out so well.
Uh? The 3 excerpts you quote say 3 different things.
However "if many stock speculators believed Kay and Shipman, firm stock prices would jump upon hiring more female execs, making most CEOS quite eager to hire more women execs. There would be a boom in female execs and Kay and Shipman would not have bothered to write their oped. Since that didn’t happen, I’ve gotta believe most speculators don’t believe those studies, and so I shouldn’t believe them either. If you think otherwise, go speculate."[3]
Here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is and rake in the returns, laughing at the sexists all the way to the bank.
[1]This oped mentions sources http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07... for example.
[2] http://www.catalyst.org/press-release/73/companies-with-more...
[3] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/femfirmfinance.html
I'm not objecting to this proposal in any way - nothing wrong with more investors - but there's no doubt in my mind that the female tech entrepreneurs who'll benefit from this will have worldviews very similar to their male counterparts.
If you really want diversity of viewpoints, you'll need to discriminate on harder-to-nail-down concepts like socioeconomic class or culture.
He's told me that he's gotten some shit from people because of his profession. From other guys who aren't nurses. Weird, huh? But I've seen more hostility or unintentionally discouraging behavior towards female programmers from male ones than he's mentioned ever encountering from female nurses, so in that regard it's less of a problem.
Yet he's also mentioned that the number of males in the field is increasing, and that there are, in fact, efforts being made to get more men into the field.
Why would a limited labor pool for any profession be a good thing? And why should I believe that the current distribution in a very young field represents a natural equilibrium?
None of which has anything to do with programming. I don't know if you think you are being clever or if you are just repeating a talking point, but either way it's a derailment that has been addressed a hundred times before if you cared to do a little bit of homework.
It's interesting how the original article throws something at least kinda new into the mix, but this whole thread just heads right back to the same old grounds.
Why is it a problem that nursing is dominated by women?
The problem is that people believe nursing is supposed to be a woman's job, and that a male nurse is thus unmanly for freely choosing to become one.
These beliefs are wrong. They are sexist. Full stop.
An indicator of the prevalence of these beliefs is the dominance of women in the nursing profession. This is hard, factual, statistical data that we can point to; it's easier to parse than qualitative data, such as stories of males laughing at male nurses for their profession.
It is a chicken-and-egg problem. Are blacks more likely to be criminals, or does the expectation that blacks become criminals increase the number of blacks being investigated for crime, leading to a higher rate of discovery? Is it because blacks are systematically discouraged from getting an education, which tends towards lower incomes and higher likelihoods of becoming criminal?
These are statistical truths. Absolute? Hardly; they're still mere statistics, which always lie. But statistics are closer to the truth than the dubious anecdotes we had before. They can demonstrate the existence of bias, even if that bias cannot be causatively tied to sexism. And in the end, that demonstration is more proof than the inverse position, the position that the nursing profession should be biased towards women, which really only has the above-mentioned sexist beliefs to fall back on.
Those are value judgements, they cannot be "wrong". You can judge them as wrong, but that's just one value judgement on top of another. There is no way to even hold a discussion between them on that ground.
> An indicator of the prevalence of these beliefs is the dominance of women in the nursing profession. This is hard, factual, statistical data that we can point to
This is hard, factual, statistical data that doesn't support your conclusion. Maybe women really do have a stronger preference for nursing jobs, or they are socialized that way, or those jobs fit their schedule better, or they like working with other women so they congregate in jobs already dominated by other women, or..., or some combination of the above.
Why take one piece of data and jump to the least charitable explanation? Sexism is just one of very many possible causes.
> Are blacks more likely to be criminals, or does the expectation that blacks become criminals increase the number of blacks being investigated for crime, leading to a higher rate of discovery?
Again, or both, or neither. Or both but maybe some other factor completely dwarfs those two you mention, rates of single motherhood come to mind.
Uh, of course it's a value judgement. That's the entire point of calling out sexism.
Do you disagree that they're sexist, or do you disagree that a sexist belief is wrong?
> This is hard, factual, statistical data that doesn't support your conclusion.
I'm pretty sure I said that. In fact, I'm pretty sure I spent two entire paragraphs on that.
Tech is supposed to be meritocracy.
Anyone here who would discount other's because of perceived charity is shortsighted at best and ignorant asshole at worst.
All we are supposed to care about is can you code and/or help our business.
Being red/white/magenta or whatever gender or permutation there of shouldn't enter into the conversation if Tech is really the "meritocracy" it claims itself to be.
Obviously money won't necessarily hurt but anyone who has ever paid attention on HN or even to the Tech industry as a whole should know about "dumb money."
who cares how much you can raise if you can't figure out what to do with it
You can't have a proper meritocracy if the prospective field don't have access to the same level of opportunities. Women get ostracised from I.T. fairly early on (i.e before education has finished).
What evidence have you found that suggests that women are systematically ostracized from I.T.?
If I got leared at and hit on all the time when I'm just trying to get shit done I'd feel like I wasn't welcome either.
Are you just trying to enforce a burden of proof here? Or do you seriously not think that woman are ostracised in I.T?
I was referring world wide, not just U.S.
I suspect, yes, in some countries asian's are ostracised from upper management.
It's pervasive in everything, even in the names of stuff. E.g. there's a recent programming language that calls its interpolated strings "G-Strings". That's the class name in the code. A method for finding out the length of the "G-String" was added, called "size", in addition to the existing one called "length". So...
assert "----V----".size() == 9
We often say in the Perl world that objects that are ported to Moose "grow antlers." Arguably this is at least as female-hostile statement since only male moose grow antlers and therefore it establishes a male-normal perspective.
Agreed but how do you define the same level of opportunities?
Suppose the opportunity is "work hard, every day, 12 hours every day from when you are 20 until you are 40 and then retire as a billionaire." There is nothing stopping women from taking that opportunity. But women who do lose something that men who take that opportunity do not lose, namely the ability to really have a family with kids of one's own.
There's societal misogyny. The number of women I've met who refuse to try to do something technical because they're female or blonde has long boggled my mind. That's probably not the tech industry's fault.
But it does mean there aren't the same level of opportunities. If someone whacks your shin with a crowbar before you do your figure skating, that just ain't a meritocracy, no matter how fair the judges are.
>But it does mean there aren't the same level of opportunities. If someone whacks your shin with a crowbar before you do your figure skating, that just ain't a meritocracy, no matter how fair the judges are.
That's true too, but what I am getting at is that when we talk about women in technology startups (which is really the subject of the article and many discussions here on HN) I don't think that's what's really going on.
Rather I think that what is going on is that in the area of startups, the entry fee is much higher for women, and the lifestyle demands sacrifices of a sort that men don't have to make. The bigger question in my mind is how we solve that structural problem.
Agreed. But I don't think that's a battle worth fighting just in the tech industry. There are rights for women that can be fought for in general: better protections against sexual harassment, better requirements for maternity (and paternity) leaves, etc. (Google found me this: http://www.now.org/issues/wfw/empledge.html )
Tech could strive to be a leader here: an industry that's more friendly to women than any other. But it would be setting an example for the rest of the nation, rather than making it a purely tech-industry-specific issue.
This doesn't solve the essential issue of Sexist Men Exist, but really... the only way to solve that is, ironically, conversation.
Those things you mention strike me as band-aids. Sure they'd help but wouldn't it be better to rethink the way we emphasize the separation of work and family and the separation of work and home?
Replace "company" with "society" and you have a deal. If you want to start at the company level, that makes sense to me; I'd argue that most startups are, by necessity, run according to an ecosystem model.
> Those things you mention strike me as band-aids.
I am not, unfortunately, a political genius and my suggestions are not the best possible. If something better and actionable comes along, I am more than happy to back it.
But asking 300 million people, let alone 7 billion, to "rethink the way we" do anything is a fairly gargantuan task. Some of us have already changed our minds. Others will need convincing. Still others will not be convinced.
It just might be that women generally get so late into the tech game that there are just far fewer of them who are any good and have any experience.
I know a few amazing women in tech, but only a few. I don't think my experience is unique.
Hopefully people like Merissa Mayer will change that.
I don't see anything wrong with helping people be more comfortable in tech, when the typical format does not work for them.
If it's the latter, then I'm all for fixing that problem. But if it's the former, then it may just be the case that women don't' want to be in tech. I try encouraging my sister to learn about programming and computers all the time, but she'll have nothing to do with it. It has a certain, ah, stereotype when you're good at that stuff that she'd rather avoid (although she's smarter than I am and could probably learn it very quickly).
This is one of those "fish don't have a word for water" problems to some degree, beyond the misogyny that so often exists in tech. Part of the problem is that there is this stereotype of the tech "nerd" who is socially awkward, doesn't shower, works 70+ hours a week. That serves as a roadblock for guys to get into tech as well, but it's far easier for guys to overcome it than women. The fact that women are much less likely to find that stereotype desirable is used as a reinforcement of the notion that "girls just aren't well suited to the tech lifestyle". But the "tech lifestyle" is not an absolute, it's just a semi-arbitrary tradition. And it forms the core of just as much of an "old boy's club" as, say, traditions of cigars, scotch, and golf do in other activities. Or, more so, traditions of strip clubs and casual acceptance of pornographic representations of women, which is also a thing in many corners of tech.
Self-reinforcing stereotypes are part of the problem. The way that women are treated as outsiders and 2nd class citizens is part of the problem. The fact that women who are interested in tech and talented are turned off by the stereotypes and the culture is part of the problem.
Pinker devotes an entire chapter of the book to gender, and the first half of that chapter to workplace equality. His thesis here is that a lack of 50-50 gender equality in a given profession isn't necessarily indicative of discrimination or unfairness, unless you believe in the blank slate. That is, unless you discount the possibility that women, on average, are interested in different things than are men. He goes on to present a vast amount of evidence that such differences in preference do exist, regardless of cultural conditioning.
This isn't to say that discrimination is non-existent. Many of us have seen (or heard) enough to know that it's alive and well. The point is that we shouldn't arbitrarily strive for perfect 50-50 equality. There will always be fields in which men and women outnumber each other by large margins, and that's okay. The best we can do is to try and stamp out discrimination wherever possible.
2) who's even suggesting that we need a 50/50 gender balance? Where are you getting this straw man from? All McClure has asserted is that there should be more women in tech, and given our 9:1 M:F ratio... there's a lot of room to move before we even start to discuss whether 50/50 is an appropriate ratio.
Also, I'm not attempting to refute Dave McClure or anyone specific. I never claimed that he claimed we should strive for 50-50 equality, so it's unfair for you to accuse me of a straw man. I'm just making reference to an argument that happened to affect my personal view on the matter. This topic has come up again and again on HN and in tech-related blogs, and I think it's a very common viewpoint that any deviation from a 50-50 distribution is attributable to discrimination.
Regardless, I agree with you that that current ratio is overly-extreme, and that we can do better.
If you look globally, there are countries where that isn’t the image, and in fact, their numbers are dramatically better. I was recently speaking with some of our Oracle engineers from China and they pretty much have a fifty-fifty split of men and women. And they think it’s sort of odd that we don’t.
http://www.txchnologist.com/2012/breaking-the-brogrammer-cod...
Also, from a scientific perspective, this is a disastrously imperfect experiment. You cannot rule out the effect of the genes unless you control for that. Looking at a group of people who are physically different AND culturally different , then arbitrarily concluding that any differences are the result of cultures is about as unscientific as it gets.
As to the second point, humans are not very genetically diverse. Of course there are enough differences that we can sometimes conclude that a particular person's genes come from an ethnic group, but it's not as nearly as varied as even other primates. Basically, we hit a genetic bottleneck sometime in the past 100,000 years. So it's far more likely to be a result of culture than genes.
I recommend against holding up pop-science cults of personality if you would like people to take you seriously.
See what I did there? Evidence or bust.
However, something I took away from this that really surprised me was how little money Dave started with and how little he still has. Don't get me wrong, I would kill to have $300k in the bank, much less $600k+, but I've always assumed that angel investing (despite the small investments) was a game for the incredibly wealthy and I wouldn't be able to invest until I was in my 30's and had exited with more than a few million in the bank. When he points out that anyone with more than $10k lying around can be the next big angel investor, it really jumped out at me. I've never considered investing $5k or so into something I really believe in when $5k-$10k is all I have saved up... However, as he said, it would be hard not to get my money's worth by investing in startups. I'm glad he conveyed how easy it is to become an angel because otherwise I would have never considered it until I had plenty of "fuck you" money.
This industry is regulated and McClure sorta completely glossed over it.
I would be an angel investor if I was allowed. I would have been doing it for the past 4 years, and I would have much enjoyed doing that. I had 6 figures and 20 years of startup experience and was ready to write checks.
I just never found a way around the need to get accreditation. (Note when you have a successful exit you have cash in the bank, but that doesn't mean you necessarily have a $250k a year job, or $1M in the bank!)
Maybe in the bay area there are lawyers who can set you up to do this even despite the regulations... I dunno.
But this seems to be a glaring omission on his part. Or maybe the law has changed recently and that's why his program could now work.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/04/...
This isn't a problem you can throw money at.
> According to them its the culture and insensitivity towards women thats causing skewed gender ratios.
There are a multitude of problems, and they all need to be tackled, just because one solution doesn't solve all, doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
> This isn't a problem you can throw money at.
I would rephrase that as:
This isn't a problem you can just throw money at.
So, okay, let's go. Throw money at me. I'll make more cool stuff with it. I'm mostly a "plumbing" sort of person, but I've been known to make actual top-level user interfaces on occasion too.
Well? Who's with me?
Is this about women in tech, or is this some nebulous thing about startups? Because I'm all for the former, and don't really worry so much about the latter.
Why don't you read the article?
In the US you need to have an income of greater than $200k/year or assets not including your home of over $1 million in order to be an accredited investor. [1]
You don't have to be an accredited investor to invest in startups, but it does open up the company to additional annoying reporting requirements such that almost all advisors suggest staying away from such. From info on his own assets that he's posted in the past, it seems Dave's chosen to skirt said law himself, but it seems quite brash to (without disclaimer) push others to do the same.
http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=35d8764e...
You can blow all that money gambling if you want, but you can't invest it in startups. (At least not as an accredited investor... and places like angel list will only deal with accredited investors.)
Just think, if you are a teenager or college age girl, what women programmers do you currently look up to? They exist, but they need to be more visible to break the perception that "women don't become programmers"
[1]: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/175064/forbes-c...
It's a cultural thing, which we're loth to admit. We look around and say, "We treat women the same around here", not thinking for a second that maybe that's the problem.
I run the Hackbright Academy, a hacker school for women, and I ask all applicants what compels them to apply to our program. Invariably, part of every story is the idea that they were intimidated out of the field in college or high school by their male peers. Whether or not that's the grand reason for the disparity, it's still something that shouldn't be a reason at all.
From the comments, I can only assume not.
He's asking women in tech to act as angels for other women in tech.
This does not seem to be what anyone here is responding to.
And come to think of it, I haven't seen many black or hispanic coders lately. They probably need to impose their demands on the industry as well.
Just kidding. I'm against quotas for oldsters like me, or any other supposedly marginalized demographic. I look for people who simply excel at writing code and building products, which anyone can do if they devote themselves to the craft.