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Comment by ceol | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain how the meaning of his statement changed so drastically from the inclusion of the word "these"? The question asked about women who are not founders, not women who are not programmers. It seems fitting to remove it, since it would feel out of place when quoted, but it seems the point of his statement is there.

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Q: What about lowering the bar now?

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"

Doesn't the second one still say it's a problem of gender? I'm not seeing how the introduction of the word "these" adds all of that additional stuff you're saying. All it does is take the statement from "all women" to "all women who we could recruit to be founders." But in the context of the discussion, he meant the same thing: He feels women do not want to be founders.

women who could be recruited as founders _TODAY_. Not ever.

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.

I guess what I'm saying is that going from the original interview to The Information's edit, his quote didn't lose meaning, because it didn't imply that pg thought women were genetically predisposed to hate tinkering with computers. Only when Valleywag got ahold of it and framed it to look like pg was saying that did it lose its original meaning and go from "there's a problem, but it's not YC's fault" to "the problem is genetic, womenz don't computer güd."

While I agree that sans controversy, the exclusion of "these' might not have been so important, I think that when reporting on issues like this that are apt to cause controversy, it is better to err on the side of caution and stay as close to the original quote as possible, in order to avoid situations such as this.

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