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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I do. People often ask about the number of female founders we fund. It would be interesting to know whether it's low because of something about startups, or just a reflection of the larger pool from which they're drawn.

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Out of interest, how many female founders applied in the last round? That seems like far more useful+reliable data than this poll.

>> "People often ask about the number of female founders we fund."

Do they ask how many black people get funding? How many Christians? How many blind people?

Asking such questions seems a bit irrelevant at best, and accusatory at worst to me.

I don't know. We don't ask.

Actually, when a magazine interviewer asked Jessica about the percent of women among ycombinator-funded founders, I was very interested in her answer. Not because I suspected YC of bias - I didn't - but rather because I thought this percent would say something about the risks and rewards of small technical startups as perceived by women. Being a technical woman working on a startup idea, this information seemed useful to me: a possible glimpse into my personal future.

I think it may have more to do with the latter. A quick Google Scholar query of "why is computer programming dominated by males" provides some interesting results, including an abstract with the key finding that "men had more confidence in using computers than did women even when statistically controlling quantitative ability. In fact, female CS majors had less computer confidence than did male non-majors." (Beyer et al., 2003)

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