I'm genuinely interested in whether people have theories about why this might be, and whether any women considered attending but decided not to? Or is this simply a real life manifestation of the HN community?
In general, if I were a woman, I would have felt pretty unwelcome at the event, in general: of my small amount of wandering around during the breaks, I saw one attendee wearing a shirt with the text: "SELECT * FROM girls WHERE free_sex=TRUE;". More distressingly, I saw a speaker (Ben Horowitz [1]) wearing a shirt with the text "No bitch-ass-ness" on it; I suspect that this may have been a cultural reference that I missed, but that sure does seem as unwelcoming as a shirt that would say 'man up and do it' might.
The content was, in general, high quality. I wish that the experience, however, had been designed to avoid shutting out half of the population. A good start for making Startup School more inclusive would be to adopt something along the lines of the Conference Anti-Harassment Policy [2]; I hope that Y Combinator will do something along those lines next year.
[1] Yes, I know. This is part of Horowitz's persona: he wants to come off as 'edgy', compared to, for instance, Ron Conway; he wants to show that he's hip and with it. For instance, as I recall, he used the word 'fuck' a few times during his speech. This is fine; now we get it! You're one of us! You can be edgy without being a dickhead.
[2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassmen...
The issue with role models is a great point though. But how to fix? If there are no female YC alumni with great stories about working all nighters, how to get someone on stage without risking positive selection?
The whole ethnicity balance was pretty far out there, too. Considering it was held in Silly Valley, I would have expected to see far more of a mix, but that didn't seem to happen, either.
I wonder, are both observations the same effect in action or something else entirely?
Id be curious if the gap was smaller watching the webcasts?
People think "women aren't interested in this", which leads them to think "well, since women aren't interested, we don't have to try to be inclusive at all", which leads to them behaving in ways that mean women don't feel welcome and hence aren't interested in participating.
I'm not saying you're guilty of that process - but the "women aren't interested" trope can be rather pernicious.
Thinking about it YC's focus on hacker-founders adds another % into the mix too, the percentage of women programmers - I think it's simply math, multiply through and you get the absurd weighting seen at SUS.
but it's not different from being a minority in any other situation. you're going to have to work twice as hard to prove yourself, and there's going to be twice as much pressure to be that 'role model' for others.
We should also keep in mind that this community has always been aligned more with the engineering side of entrepreneurship and less on the all the other equally important functions, which tends to make the community somewhat insular and under-represented.
Your view is welcome but please take care with comments such as 'women in general take less risk than men'. The second statement you make may be a fact but your first statement comes across as a cause for this fact, and there is no data that suggests this. My personal experience, as a woman, would be quite the opposite: women make more risks than men. Would that because of my gender bias and who I spend time with talking about such things as risk, on a deep enough level to for to consider it substantial? Quite probably, which is why I would never make such a statement to back up a fact.