On The Information and How We Operate
jessicalessin.com
jessicalessin.com
However, here we have a case that, due to the editing of a quote (despite the intentions of the person that modified the quote), we didn't previously know what was actually said, and that's extremely disingenuous and misleading to a reader.
The writer goes on to say:
"The reason was simple. The "these" didn't refer to anything. The paragraph that preceded it referred to Mark Zuckerberg being a hacker and it immediately followed a question about what would be lost if YC encouraged more women to be startup founders."
[...]
"In many cases "these" is an important word. But in this case, we decided it wasn't because it didn't refer to a specific group of women and was in response to a question about women in general."
Removing "these" and the context completely changed the meaning. It leads the reader to believe that the narrative is about females in general. But, with "these" included, and the correct context, it is clear that this is about females who are not programmers.
In the final analysis, editing quotes is bad form.
The statement that the preceding paragraph referenced Zuckerberg and thus the "these" had no contextual meaning is unbelievable to me.
Q: What about lowering the bar for women? A: Take a hacker like Zuckerberg, he started when he was 10. There's nothing we can do to help these women.
What seems more reasonable?
pg responded to a question about women by referencing Zuckerberg then in an entirely separate and new thread started being misogynistic?
-or-
Pg responded to a question about women by describing what a hackers path looks like then came back to more directly answer the question.
Jessica Lessin is too smart a person to be confused here. I'm calling bs.
Humans are designed to think tribally. Not fooling yourself for your cause makes you an outlier.
1) the "pool of potential startup founders" is programmers,
2) it's non-discriminatory and self-selecting, and
3) women are underrepresented in this pool because it's hard to get 13 year old girls interested in programming, and
4) rather than encouraging women to become startup founders it would be better to fix that 13 year old girl problem
This debate about whether he was referring to "just programmers" is a complete red herring. Programmers == startup founders, to him.
The really damning quote is this:
If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it own their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now.
Repeat: pg literally said it would be better to discourage women from starting startups now.
Not "these" women. Not "non programmer" women. All women.
......
The problem is not that pg is some huge sexist. It's that he's defensive. He's passing the buck 10 years up the chain, saying that's where the problem lies. In CS curriculum or something.
But in actuality, parents and educators could just as well say that 13 year old girls don't have enough 23 year old female hacker role models to look up to.
So perhaps YC, PyCon and the industry as a whole could be more proactive. For example by spotlighting and giving extra support to the best examples of female hacker role models, and connecting them with girls.
Not by discouraging women from starting startups now.
It's like getting upset that there are no 5'2 guys playing in the NBA. Although height is not a job requirement, if you don't have it it is highly unlikely that you will get the job, unless you can demonstrate that you have other skills to make up for height (speed, highly accurate shooting, and a 5' vertical jump for example). To bring the analogy back to ycombinator, I'm pretty confident that a woman that shows up with only 6 months experience hacking, but she already has a decent chunk of her product built, that the ycombinator crew will consider her application very seriously, because she would have already demonstrated that her lack if experience was not a handicap to her hacking.
The problem with pg's statement, which I quoted directly, is that he blames 13 year old girls and middle schools and gives industry a pass. We're already non-discriminating and self-selecting. The problem is getting girls into code, and god knows how to do that.
Parents and teachers might have a response to that. Where are the female hacker role models for the 13 year old girls to look up to?
That's one of the proactive things industry can do. Shine the spotlight on positive role models. Counteract brogrammer culture at conferences and in companies, too. That requires active intervention, not just an open door policy.
And that was the whole question he was responding to -- not just whether we're actively discriminating against women, but whether there's something more proactive we should be doing.
Just pointing his finger up the line and saying "it's their fault" is kind of disappointing.
b. I know a certain number of woman who were 13 roughly 10 years ago. None is now working in programming, or that I know looking to start a company. Several are in the technically demanding field of architecture. One is an RN, which requires a good deal of intelligence. All seem reasonably happy with their choices.
c. For it may be hard to see in the world of HN, but programming, let alone programming as founder of a startup, is not the be-all and end-all of vocations.
This is why I try to avoid reasoning by analogy. Every analogy is flawed, but some end up making the wrong point entirely.
Height is a physical attribute that cannot be influenced (without questionably unethical means) from any age. A better analogy would be someone picking up a basketball for the first time at 25 and expecting to play at an NBA level.
I agree with everything else you said though.
> If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. It’s already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that.
I don't think he meant to say that women should be specifically discouraged from starting startups. And that interpretation does not fit with the rest of what he said in the interview.
He said it's "too late" for women at this stage, if they haven't been hacking since 13. What part of "too late" suggests that pg thinks there's more proactive stuff we can do?
pg's point is clearly that we're fine and the problem lies 10 years up the line because middle school isn't doing enough to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking, because god knows how the heck you do that. It's passing the buck.
FWIW, whatever point you are trying to make was lost the second you started 'literally quoting' PG in your post. As it turns out, changing a few words here and there and putting emphasis where it suits your agenda happens to be an egregious misstep in having empathy for someone's position and being heard yourself. Makes me sorta sad to see this behavior continue well after it's been explained thoroughly.
Your choice though.
This is a bit of a naive sentiment. Quotes, unfortunately, aren't always provided in easily-digestible form. This is particularly the case in informal, spoken-word interviews -- which seems to be the situation here.
Most people, when faced with questions they don't know in advance, speak in very ungrammatical, broken sentences. They interrupt themselves, they use the wrong words because they don't have the time to pick better ones, and (as pg said) they sometimes stop talking when the interviewer understands what they're trying to say.
If you're listening to these interviews, they make sense because it's slower, and you can usually intuit their mood, watch their body language, and figure out the point they're driving at. Transcribed without edits, it'll probably need a few re-reads, and you'll question their ability to communicate. I'd bet a lot of spoken interviews would fail the Turing test.
For an example of this, listen to a few random interviews with people who aren't in the business of public speaking on a news network, or tune in to a game and listen to the sportscasters. Imagine you were reading it exactly as spoken, and imagine how difficult it would be to make sense of it.
Thus: editing. It's entirely reasonable for a journalist to make small transcription edits for clarity. Readers get confused or irritated or bored if they need to struggle to make sense of the interview. It's entirely ethical if the edits don't change the meaning of the quote. That's what happened here -- but do we know it was necessary unethical? (As opposed to being negligent?) Well, as with the quote itself, we need to look to the context.
It's uncertain to what degree the nature of the interview was made clear to pg. He says it was clearly communicated as one thing, and Jessica Lessin says it was clearly communicated as another. We can't really know without seeing the actual communication between them.
If we assume that Lessin's account is accurate, and the discussion was intended to be used as an interview, then it's reasonable to assume those pieces would be polished up and pushed out at some point. It's also reasonable to assume the removal of "these" was an honest mistake, for the reason The Information gave; it referred to a group that pg didn't explicitly mention. It's also reasonable to think that the person making the edits thought it would be obvious pg was referring to female startup founders, since the question to which he was responding does explicitly mention it.
With this assumption, and since it was a different publication that raised the controversy, I can very easily see it as an honest mistake -- in other words, negligence. Lessin and The Information owe pg an apology for that.
Now, it's within the realm of possibility that the quote was altered intentionally, which would be highly unethical. But again, if they wanted to do that, they probably would have pointed it out themselves, rather than waiting for ValleyWag to do it.
For what it's worth, I call myself a feminist and at this point I really super don't give a shit about this controversy. PG isn't my favorite, and hanging this whole thing on a single word in a single sentence seems fraught. If that's his fig leaf, he's entitled to it.
Call it a misunderstanding, miscommunication, whatever. It's a distraction from the actual issue under discussion, the dearth of women in tech and what we as an industry can do to fix it.
Editing improperly is very bad form indeed - particularly, editing without telling the reader that you've done so, in the form of "..." for omitted text, and "[ ]" for inserted text .
What pg actually said was, "We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years."
Lessin is saying removing "these" doesn't change the meaning. I think that's absurd, to put it mildly.
A1: There's nothing we can do to help women become hacker-founders.
A2: To help women become hacker-founders, we have to start with the group we'd be admitting in 10 years.
the "these" changes it from: "women can't be helped" to "you can't fix the problem for this generation, you can only fix the problem for the next generation"
One says "it's a problem of gender" the other says "it's a problem of sequencing"
The second one says 1) solutions may exist and 2) they require lead time.
The first one says solutions don't exist.
The second one implies that it is or might be a solvable problem. The first one implies that it is an innate gender difference.
To be fully fair, the sincere mea culpa does still occur sometimes and we've even seen it here on HN with some startups/founders who fucked up, but it happens so rarely now that when I see those exceptions that prove the rule they are surprising, which is sad.
Ignoring the human element, this sort of non-apology response isn't even a good strategy if you look at things in a purely Machiavellian way. "Yeah, sorry, I fucked up, I'll fix this" gains you a bunch of goodwill, repairs reputation and trust (so long as you aren't fucking up constantly). OTOH, the typical "Nah, I wasn't wrong, here's why you're wrong to think that" or "I'm sorry you were offended by the thing I did" response does nothing but make you look like an immature ass, so why pursue this strategy? Even in borderline cases where you still think you were kind of right, just fucking apologize and move on! It is clearly the +EV move.
As a non-subscriber to The Information I previously had a fairly neutral view of them as I just sadly sort of accept selective misquoting as the way things work now, but reading this "How We Operate" thing skewed my view harshly negative.
To be fair most of the people directly involved in this ruckus don't come out of it looking all that well; but The Information did say the interview was on the record and did tell Graham that it was getting published and didn't get pushback. The fact that Valleywag was able to stir up a controversy and garner a massive amount of traffic off the back of PG's somewhat inept handling of a sensitive question ( that he knew was sensitive ) does no credit to Valleywag, even if it is their business model.
Those people who slotted this into their preexisting models of reality and tried to use it as a teaching opportunity may feel rather threatening to some. which may mean they need to rethink their tactics; but may just mean that some people feel threatened whenever the topic of gender equity is brought up.
Now I get that what PG was saying was not nearly as inflammatory as it was made out to be by Valleywag. However, it did bring to light some unconscious bias on his part; and I get that that is very hard to acknowledge and correct, especially when you have to do so in the full glare of hostile publicity. I do hope the PG can take some time to reflect and to reach out to some of the people who have substantive criticisms of his thinking on this topic.
note: I'm not saying that he needs to turn ycombinator into a feminist reeducation camp, just that he needs to _listen_ to what some of his critics are trying to point out to him.
note the second: I've been participating in HN for 6 years or so; and I have to say that the level of reflexive sexism I've seen in the comments this past week is making me think I should abandon my account.
I've had the same feeling as well, although it really started during "Donglegate". A few misogynist groups joined HN to spread their filth, and the commenters here lapped it up and even joined in on the harassment.
I'll warn you: You will only notice it more and more, to the point where you wince before clicking into a thread because you know the kind of comments people will make. It's... disheartening, to say the least.
I say it was misogynist filth because it was. Not everyone's comment is equal. I'm not going to treat someone with respect if they spout garbage about how women have no place in programming; how men have "logical brains"; how they wish for the days when they could crack jokes about breasts without all those uppity 'females' ruining the place. A spade is a spade, and those comments were filth that didn't deserve the bytes they were served through. You might as well be asking me to be nice to the KKK as they claim black people are an inferior race.
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is, though. You're chiding me for attacking those groups and complaining that I'm setting up any child conversations to be hostile, but you use the last sentence of your reply to attack me, all while contributing... nothing. I mean, there's not really anything in your comment. Was there something I should be responding to, specifically?
So I suspect that in a perfect world with no discrimination the proportion of sexes in each field of work will not be equal, and this is important to keep in mind in industry self-flagellation sessions. Our industry is educated enough to buy heavily into feminism, but nature has a way of confounding all breeds of egalitarians.
The progressive explanation for these differences is that they are all culturally determined. I am not convinced that is a parsimonious explanation of the data. I suppose this makes me evil.
For what it's worth, there's also well documented cognitive differences in human subpopulations. Progressives also believe that these differences are all due to culture. I'm not convinced that human groups which evolved apart for 80,000 years in differing circumstances should be exactly equal in all ways modulo culture. Again, I'm evil. But also remember the overlapping bell curves. That's what I'm arguing the global distribution of talents in human subgroups looks like.
I haven't been to /pol or /r/mra much, but I suspect that they do deal in some suppressed truths in addition to a lot of adolescent noise and filth, if only because the forbidden truths are juicier.
[1] https://controls.engin.umich.edu/wiki/images/2/25/Overlap.gi...
And yeah, you're evil — not because you believe those things (that would make you merely ignorant) but because you revel in the fact your beliefs are problematic.
But, much like your beliefs, your comment brings nothing to this discussion. It's a lot of unsourced, pseudo-scientific nonsense hidden behind a veil of verbosity.
http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/start-here/
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/
http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/
And although the common insult for people interested in human biodiversity is "KKK", much of the research is not being done by white people. For example, the Chinese are investing huge sums of money into unraveling the genetic basis of intelligence. See: http://edge.org/response-detail/23838
I suppose this is all "filth that isn't worth the bytes its served through" though...
Talking about biological differences upsets a lot of people and is very non-politically-correct.
The party line of the official 'social justice activist' seems to be that there exist no biologically determined differences between any subgroup of humans that you care to define, including between men and women.
Can you expand on that? Because from his actual quote I don't find anything unreasonable or biased about his opinions on this particular issue.
It seems to me like while pg is no longer guilty of being overtly anti-woman-in-technology, his reputation is now unfairly tarnished by this attention.
There are girls who start programming at that age, but they learn to mask it because peer pressure runs against them. It also makes assumptions about the socio-economic status of the household; being able to afford even a cheap computer for a child takes some doing even today. It's not an opportunity that everyone gets, and it's a sad fact that in most human cultures scarce opportunities are handed preferentially to boys.
The thing is; and I think PG is aware of this, ycombinator is missing out on good opportunities because of false negatives in this particular area; and even more so because potential founders who happen to be female perceive that they aren't as welcome as they might be.
I think the best thing he could do would be to reach out to some of the people who are seen as his harshest critics ( specifically Shanley Kane and Ashe Dryden ) and open a dialogue with them.
The thing is that Paul Graham and YCombinator have accrued a level of influence and power that can be quite damaging if exercised blindly and he would I think understand the need to use that power responsibly. And in this case that means having some uncomfortable conversations and being challenged in ways that I'd guess he's becoming rather used to not being challenged.
But then you assume that PG isn't doing enough to support women. But that's just an unfounded assumption born out of nothing. The only reason why we're even talking about this is because of some mis-quote to begin with. It's frankly all a bit pathetic.
This is a much better explanation http://danilocampos.com/2013/12/explained-why-people-are-ang...
But given these two scenarios, what would you pick?
- team with great enthusiasm, communication, chemistry that has a cool idea and an interesting prototype. Tech lead has 4 years experience.
- team with weak enthusiasm, bad communication, keep interrupting each other. Tech lead has 10 years experience.
Maybe someone who has been through the process can speak to this?
The world needs less belief and viewpoint shaping and more free-thinking. Where this nonsense arises is when we put people into groups or they put themselves into groups. Be yourself.
For starters, no one is saying it's pg's job. The interviewer asked him if he felt there was anything he could be doing to get more women into YC.
Second, "encourage" does not mean "order someone to do something." No one is going to up women, putting their hands on their shoulders, shaking them, and telling them they must be developers! Instead, they're creating spaces that are welcoming and friendly to women. They aren't forcing them through the door; they're opening it for them and showing them all the delicious cookies inside.
> There are plenty of jobs that have many more women than men. Do you see massive outrage because the workforce is lacking in those jobs?
Yes. There are plenty of initiatives to get more men into nursing, fashion, and teaching. Just because you didn't take the three seconds to search for them doesn't mean they don't exist. You don't hear about them because, what a shocker, you aren't part of those communities. It's almost like you're on a website dedicated to tech culture or something!
For starters, no one is saying it's pg's job. The interviewer asked him if he felt there was anything he could be doing to get more women into YC.
Second, "encourage" does not mean "order someone to do something." No one is going to up women, putting their hands on their shoulders, shaking them, and telling them they must be developers! Instead, they're creating spaces that are welcoming and friendly to women. They aren't forcing them through the door; they're opening it for them and showing them all the delicious cookies inside.
Yes. There are plenty of initiatives to get more men into nursing, fashion, and teaching. Just because you didn't take the three seconds to search for them doesn't mean they don't exist. You don't hear about them because, what a shocker, you aren't part of those communities. It's almost like you're on a website dedicated to tech culture or something!
The question—as I read the articles surrounding this—was about the larger problem (of the continuing ultra-dominance of the tech industry by men) and what YC might be doing to improve the situation. (And the answer is…nothing?)
The bias here is the same thing that keeps female participation in OSS horribly low: the “meritocracy” involved is inherently biased toward young males because of the way that our society works as a whole. YC can't fix this, but there may be things that can and should be done to improve how it handles that existing bias.
So his statement is right—but the attitude is wrong and it is pure blame-shifting. Facts like this can be correct in the small, but wrong (not incorrect, but…ill-intentioned) in the large. The issue is about the larger problem, not the smaller problem. pg has been defending the smaller problem (the facts of the analysis) while ignoring the larger problem. At least in the articles I read this evening (I was on vacation last week when this apparently broken).
It's a systemic/societal problem, and YC certainly can't fix it on its own, and has limited ability to fix it in any case. They started doing something different with Watsi…maybe there's something they can do different for female founders (as pg himself has suggested that there's another essay coming, plus some announcements from YC in that direction in any case).
If there is a larger problem in society, that's not really PG's domain of expertise and we shouldn't expect it to be.
YC is in a position to help make a difference. It has disproportionately large mindshare in the tech industry. Maybe it's next non-profit needs to be something to address the gender imbalance in tech.
Personally, I don't know exactly what PG is doing to support women in technology right now. But from what I gather it's not nothing. He's probably doing more than any of us. Maybe you should get off your high horse and stop telling other people what they should be doing to solve the problem.
If that’s what you think I’m doing, then I have either failed to make myself clear or you have failed to comprehend what I’ve said. I’ll be charitable and assume the former.
1. There is no legal obligation for YC to change its selection criteria.
2. I am not looking to have YC change its selection criteria.
3. As long as YC has selection criteria that are inherently biased (as the YC selection criteria are[a]), the only thing that I’m saying is that they can’t pretend that the criteria aren't biased against women (and certain visible minorities).
I’m not on a high horse and telling YC to change things. I don’t expect them to be more “forgiving” of female founders not meeting their extant criteria. But it’s socially irresponsible to say that “I can't do anything about it, because the problem happened ten years ago.” I’m pointing out that while this is a thorny problem not of YC’s creation, there is an opportunity and perhaps a social responsibility that they have to encourage the people they fund to help fix this problem for the young women coming up five or ten years from now.
[a] As stated before: the bias behind the YC selection criteria is a fact, and it's admitted by PG himself in his response to this debacle. Selection criteria that expects someone to have ~10 years “hacking” experience prior to choosing YC is biased heavily in favour of people who already have accumulated advantages that permit them that exploration time (and are encouraged to do so in that particular direction) and against people who do not. This means that women are underrepresented because technical/engineering disciplines are not seen as “acceptable” for girls to do; certain visible minorities are underrepresented because, at least in America, race is strongly correlated to income and corresponding free time. These are facts.
It's not socially irresponsible for the them to answer why their aren't more women in YC today is because the problem happened ten years ago. That's just an answer to the question. It's likely a true and factual answer.
So there's a thorny program that they didn't cause. You don't expect them to change YC's selection process. But they have a social responsibility that's worth this much discussion?!? They have no more social responsibility than the rest of us. And they're already doing more than most of us.
The main thing that comes to mind is to do some marketing outreach to diverse pools of potential techie founders (Ada Initiative, PyLadies, etc).
Beyond activities like this, can pg or YC be held responsible for the preceding stages of the pipeline?
Sexism in tech is a very large problem, and like every other large problem, it's made up of many small problems. I think it's silly for pg to claim that there's nothing YC can do to get more women founders. No one's asking him to fix the whole thing — only to explore some ways that he could do his part to fix his small problem and get some more women founders through YC.
The problem is now that many many people are now reading as much as possible into everything that he saying. If he has an opinion, you don't know exactly what it is. But you'll analyze every word, every phrasing, and make up your own assumptions. That is all that is happening here.
I'll ask again: isn't it possible that he's right? There seems to be general consensus that girls do not get into computing science at a young age. So it makes sense there would be shortage of women with right ability at the right time for YC. There's nothing controversial about that. And short of inventing a time machine there isn't anything PG can do about that.
I know a lot of women in computing and almost none of them started as young as my male peers. These women code and some started their own companies. But they didn't do it in their late teens or early 20's because they hadn't even discovered it then.
You don't need to mold someone from adolescence in order for them to be a founder or a hacker. It's not something you have to grow up with.
PG is in the business of spending very small amounts of money on in the slim hope that a few of them will be wildly successful and return hundreds of times on that original investment in a relatively short time frame. He invests in people who move to the valley and live huddled together on peanuts and ramen. Those young people are a very small and specific subset of all people who can be founders or hackers.
But Otherwise I agree with you entirely.
The interesting thing in this case is that it makes them look incompetent.
One is used when genuinely accepting responsibility and the other is used like a wave after cutting someone off in traffic.
The answer is to reintroduce the classics into the educational system. Cursive, too.
Apparently they still don't think it referred to anything, which is completely mind-boggling.
The correct response here would have been to admit the mistake and apologize for it. As it is, it's hard to take them as any sort of serious journalists now.
This simply removes all credibility for this woman in my eyes.
"Hey, just by removing the word "these" we can make this quote look as though it refers to half the population!"
Yeah - how about this:
Original:
Just by this manipulation of a quote, a journalist has ruined trust in her journalistic integrity
Vs:
Just by this manipulation of a quote, a journalist has ruined trust in journalistic integrity
If you quote someone you quote them, you don't remove certain words because they don't "refer to anything". If you leave something out you put in "[...]".
What does "a bit around" mean anyway?
"Quotes are sacrosanct. They must never be altered other than to delete a redundant word or clause, and then only if the deletion does not alter the sense of the quote in any way. Selective use of quotes can be unbalanced. Be sure that quotes you use are representative of what the speaker is saying and that you describe body language (a smile or a wink) that may affect the sense of what is being reported. When quoting an individual always give the context or circumstances of the quote.
It is not our job to make people look good by cleaning up inelegant turns of phrase, nor is it our job to expose them to ridicule by running such quotes. In most cases, this dilemma can be resolved by paraphrase and reported speech. Where it cannot, reporters should consult a more senior journalist to discuss whether the quote can be run verbatim. Correcting a grammatical error in a quote may be valid, but rewording an entire phrase is not. When translating quotes from one language into another, we should do so in an idiomatic way rather than with pedantic literalness. Care must be taken to ensure that the tone of the translation is equivalent to the tone of the original. Beware of translating quotes in newspaper pickups back into the original language of the source. If a French politician gives an interview to an American newspaper, it is almost certain that the translation back into French will be wrong and in some cases the quote could be very different. In such cases, the fewer quotes and the more reported speech, the better."
http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=Accuracy#Quotes
Basically minimal editing is acceptable, so long as you remain very faithful to the original quote. If the original quote is too broken to be published, then don't quote it; instead paraphrase it in your own words.
I am more interested that in all the backlash, I haven't seen anyone trash Valleywag, which originally sensationalized the article in the first place. If Valleywag didn't add their hyperbolic rhetoric around the quotes, would we be having discussion?
Regardless whether you think PG meant these women to be those who apply to YC/choose CS as a major before hacking at 13, I think the greater point he's making (and one that is being lost here) is that STEM bias against women is systemic and starts much earlier than the YC interview process, board room or admissions desk.
Girls who are discouraged from STEM interests at 6 and 7 are less likely to pick up "hacking" at 13. This causes a ripple effect over time as fewer girls/women convert into STEM practitioners at each stage of growth, partly from additional gender bias and partly because we're starting at a lower number.
This is a real issue and I'm glad we're having a discussion about this. I just hope we don't lose sight of what matters.
I see most people taking Valleywag/Gawker being trash as a forgone conclusion. Take tptacek's top comment in this discussion two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977412
Anyway, I don't think this issue is as simple as women being pushed away from STEM fields at a young age. The gender discrepancies seen in different undergraduate STEM programs don't quite support that idea; women have a much stronger showing in the natural sciences than engineering or computer science.
There may be influences at a young age in play here (I strongly suspect that there are) but it seems to me that it is not as general as STEM.
Valleywag was clearly out for blood, and it sucks they don't care what PG meant, and PG very clearly didn't say women aren't hackers, even without the 'these'. The tone is absurdly clear.
The Information wasn't wrong to remove it from a grammatical standpoint, but hopefully their editors will walk away with a better understanding of how precise language can be. Frankly, I doubt PG or The Information saw this coming.
Why this has been a newsworthy event baffles me, but here we are.
Eric: "If there was just the pro-activity line of attack, if it was like, “OK, yes, women aren’t set up to be startup founders at the level we want.” What would be lost if Y Combinator was more proactive about it? About lowering standards or something like that? Or recruiting women or something, like any of those options?"
Paul: "No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23…"
hmm... that seems analogous to saying that it's proper behavior for a compiler to silently delete references to uninitialized variables.
He says it right here, in his second use of "these":
We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years.
And for more context prior:
Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us.
Even without context, "these" modifies women; it's a subset. Anyone who thinks "these women" is equivalent to "women" isn't qualified to be a journalist.
While I believe The Information made a mistake, and should have probably apologized a bit more succinctly, I don't think anybody - including PGs press agent who had the transcript - could have imagined that quote, in particular lighting this firestorm.
"Mr. Graham didn’t object to anything in the story, or the fact we published it in the first place, until Valleywag wrote about the story days later."
See, originally, the word "these" appeared where "[Square brackets]" appears in the above quote. However, since you don't have context for the quote, you wouldn't have known that "these" referred to "square brackets". So, I put "Square brackets" in square brackets to add clarity to the quote.
I hope I have shown you how useful square brackets are and I suspect that since you seem to be involved in journalism, which often involves quotes, you will find opportunities to use them!
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2271/what-is-the-...
If this is true, shame on you.
Incompetent: if really can't see how "these" changes the meaning, because it does. As a journalist, not realizing how a word can change the meaning and the idea of message, they might want to reconsider professions. I really don't know how much better to put it. It is like saying "as a programmer I don't understand why I need to put semicolons at the end of C++ statements, whitespace should just be enough!".
Malicious: they knew what they did and they wanted to create controversy. Well they sure did create controversy. Will they end up benefiting from it? Not sure yet. I suspect there is probably an agenda behind it all and "oh look, misogyny!". Not to say misogyny in tech should be downplayed or not payed attention to BUT this is moving the topic backwards and hurts it more than it advances it. Every Andrea Richards, every Ben Noordhuis case hurts the cause more than it helps. I've said it before (and probably copied it from someplace I don't remember) sometimes a cause's biggest detractors are its most ardent fans. Really the ones who are a little too ardent for the cause's good.
In summary, yeah, still can't decide which is which but I can see it some between those two -- incompetence and maliciousness.
Removing "these" from the a middle of a sentence is not nearly so easy. "These" generally refers to something and it can't be removed so easily just because an editor thinks that it can be. In this case, removing "these" changed the sentence to be a general statement about women from a statement amount a subset of women. This obviously should not be removed, regardless of the lack of a specific reference from "these". Leave the judgment to the reader.
How, exactly, is the edited version more clear?
The word in question, "these", refers to this sentence of the interview:
"We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years."
I think it's pretty obvious that he is referring to women that haven't been hacking for the past 10 years when he used "these". How else can you take that sentence to mean?
In hindsight, things could have been better communicated and better organized; but everything is better with hindsight. In the end, the mistake was corrected and we hopefully all learned something from this debacle.
Yet this post doesn't acknowledge it as such:
> We edited a bit around some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. Specifically, we edited a “these” from the quote. The reason was simple. The “these” didn’t refer to anything.
> ...
> Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. We’re happy for him to have clarified to the public.
No acknowledgement that they made a mistake. That's the sound of heels digging in.
I can't understand this. "Guarding oneself" should mean to be carefully watching one's own word in order to avoid saying bad things, right?
Then this would imply that these "bad things" are there, in the mind, but shouldn't be said, right?
And being "caught off guard" would mean that the person (here pg) would have lifted his own self-checker for a second, letting his "real thoughts" leak outside, is that right?
Then I plainly, furiously disagree with all the process:
- I disagree that pg has "bad (hear sexist) thoughts"
- I disagree that saying something about female founder is sexist
- I disagree that social issues should be solved by guarding oneself from saying misinterpretable things
- I freaking disagree with all this new trend, I believe it is an extremely dangerous experiment on human minds.
My theory is that the essays pg wrote against PC are the reason of the attacks he is experiencing right now.
I nearly moved to the USA 3 years ago. I am happy I did not and stayed in China because all in all I prefer China's censorship, which is plain and solid, right here, and doesn't hide.
If journalists want to help people through their craft with integrity, these kinds of modifications should be transparently pointed out to the reader.
Oh, wait! There's MLA formatting for that:
"We can't make . . . women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years."
If you remove text, you indicate that you've done so, like so:
"No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23" should have become "No, the problem is ... women are not by the time get to 23" Thus indicating to the readers that some information had been removed. It's still a bit of an ugly trick, but it's acceptable because it tells the reader that this isn't the full, in-context quote.
As I've said in previous comments, this is what can happen when people without journalistic training present themselves as journalists. They publish unaware of these rules. Particularly the subtle, nuanced rules - like inserting an ellipsis when removing text from a quote, or using brackets to indicate inserting text for clarity that the source didn't provide.
And so "the problem is women are not by the time they get to 23" blows up into a big firestorm -- first because the public trusted and assumed that these rules were followed, then later when we discovered that they were not.
It's unclear to me why they didn't just say "Oops, we did selectively quote and it appears we didn't handle it well. Our bad." It does appear to be an honest mistake made in ignorance.
Nobody will remember it in a few weeks and The Information probably snagged as many new subs as they lost because of the publicity. I highly doubt they were attempting to make PG look bad on purpose and it was the other pub that drew attention to it or really, nobody would know about the edit.
The whole thing is pretty silly, but I understand why PG is responding. It must be hard for some people to understand why there aren't more female founders, but that's not something he can change unless he decides to change his business, which is wildly successful... so why would he... ? People forget he runs a business and they think he just snaps his fingers and startups turn to gold regardless of the founders. He's always maintained it's all about the team. That will never change, male, female or robot.
The editor can't say "I am the editor and I have perfectly preserved pg's comments" knowing that valleywag will call him a sexist, when the editor knows him not to be one. If the editor thinks pg is, they should talk. I'm convinced by pg's rebuttal.
Let's concentrate on the slight against twenty-something women, because of course there's no such thing as hackers in their 30s, 40s or 50s, of either sex.
I don't know how old you are but if you're willing to rent a room with a bunch of other people and hack on code for peanuts and ramen then I wouldn't be so sure pg that would automatically reject you because of your age or gender.
If you look at the most successful startup companies' founders, many of them are kids who were already wealthy via their parents and had more resources to begin with. Not all, but many. Who goes to Harvard and Stanford after all?
It's hard to argue with science...
In fact, science is all about argument.
"These apples are bad because they have been laying in the sun for two days."
There is no reference to anything outside the sentence; "these" and "they" are sort of referring to each other, tying the sentence together.
So to me this is the most shocking revelation:
> Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us.
That's the equivalent of editing down the above sentence to say,
"Apples are bad because they have been laying in the sun for two days.",
and then start claiming that the interviewee is a schizophrenic because he's making general claims about all apples. :/
His use of venues that have been traditionally hostile to women, conferences and open source, to try to make his group look better is pretty disingenuous too.
this shouldn't be here, in two or three front page items. and this shouldn't have even been asked on that interview.
I see no such suggestion in the post that you are responding to. You seem to have misread it.
When you read the whole transcript, it's pretty clear pg is NOT just talking about a subset of women. He means women as a whole are underrepresented in the founder population because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in coding.
When the valleywag expose was first published, I thought the comments were pretty damning. pg's reponse really focused my attention on the omission of "these" and persuaded me that he was only talking about women "who aren't programmers." This convinced me that The Information are egregious hacks. After all, they omitted a word without an ellipsis and that's clearly wrong.
But now, perhaps motivated by my fascination, I took the time to actually read the full transcript. And it's clear pg is talking about all female applicants to YC.
Here's a fuller excerpt that traces the complete context of exactly what group of people pg is referring to.
--------
Eric: I want to circle back to women in YC. How much do you think YC needs to be proactive, has any moral obligation to be proactive about this, or anything like that?
pg (excerpts):
There’s a couple of reasons why there are not as many female founders...
If the reason we accept few female founders is that we’re biased against them, we would be able to tell this... I’m almost certain that we don’t discriminate against female founders...
The problem with that is... the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology...
If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it own their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13...
God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers...
You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like... You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon... That’s a self selected group of people. Anybody who wants to apply can go to that thing. They’re not discriminating for or against anyone.
[at this point Eric asks his question about how Y Combinator could be more proactive]
Paul: We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years.
--------
Conclusion: The entire time pg is referring "female founders" and the "pool of potential startup founders". His only reference to "programmers" is merely in describing the pool of potential startup founders. And women aren't in it because they weren't "hacking on computers at age 13".
So yes, absolutely pg made a gaffe in saying girls aren't hackers. That is in fact what he said, and is now pretending he didn't, and that it would be "absurd" for him to say it. But he did.
It's a sensitive topic, because women are underrepresented in YC and software engineering as a whole, so trying to nitpick the grammar in the interview is insensitive, and sends the wrong message. Rather than turning this into a debate, pg should have agreed with the spirit of the valleywag article while calling out the edits as an aside, and used this entire situation as an opportunity to increase awareness of the problem (which is a problem) by stating firmly that he is 100% willing to work with people who want to help increase women's presence in computing.
We'll see, maybe now his upcoming essay on women and coding will have more "proactive" things that can be done at the YC stage.
For one, 13 year old girls need more 23 year old female hacker role models.