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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

pg is being disingenuous.

He did only refer to programmers. That's true.

But what he left out is that, he defined programmers as the "pool of potential startup founders". (You have to read the full transcript to notice that.)

So he is not actually referring to a subset of women. He very clearly says women as a whole are underrepresented as founders because they haven't been hacking since age 13 like the attendees of PyCon and open source committers, because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking.

It's completely clear when you read the transcript.

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I agree with this completely. PG basically said that the reason there are not many females in YC is that not that many qualified females apply. The interviewer then asked "what would be lost" if YC either lowered their standards for female applicants, or did more to encourage qualified females to apply. And PG basically (and perhaps unintentionally) dodged the question, and reiterated that there aren't as many qualified female applicants as male ones, because in some sense YC's 'ideal' candidate is a twenty-something who's been hacking for 10+ years, and more of those are male than female.

I'm not saying that PG is necessarily sexist or a bad person for saying all of this. But he did basically say that there aren't a lot of twenty-something females who have been hacking for 10+ years. And then he seems to sort of back away from that statement in "What I Didn't Say". In the original interview, he said "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." In "What I Didn't Say" he says "When I saw [the above quote] myself I wasn't sure what I was even supposed to be saying. That women aren't hackers? That they can't be taught to be hackers? Either one seems ridiculous." Basically, he was saying a less-crazy version of the first statement. Namely, that there aren't that many 20-something female hackers.

In summary, it seems like PG stated an inconvenient and perhaps unfortunate truth (and implicitly declined to get into what he could perhaps do to make this truth untrue), The Information reported it in a responsible way, and then ValleyWag re-reported it in a misleading and sensationalistic way. And then PG somewhat disingenuously claimed that he didn't say what he actually said.

Also, the irony is rich that all of this involves the guy that wrote "What You Can't Say".

Yup, you nailed it.

The bigger problem with pg's statement is not the 13 year old girl claim. It's that he fully blames them and middle school curriculum while giving YC, PyCon and the startup industry a pass. His stance is we already have an open door and are self-selected, so the problem must be up the line.

You're right, he dodged the question of whether we need to be more proactive, not just open.

Let's look back to the boys ten years ago who didn't start programming, because they didn't want to be socially ostracized and passed over as a potential romantic partner.

Are those boys to blame for their decision? If not, why are you campaigning to only push money in the direction of girls?

That's an interesting point, but it's orthogonal to whether PG was being disingenuous in "What I Didn't Say".

And I'm not campaigning to push money in any direction. That's a separate issue.

I agree that it's not obviously a bad thing if all these people who didn't become hackers (female or male) became something else that is socially valuable and makes them happy. But I'm also willing to consider the possibility that some women would have been happier and contributed more to society if they had become hackers, but didn't because they felt out of place or unwelcome when they tried to. And that if that's the case, then I'm at least willing to consider that maybe we as a society should do something about it.

All this having been said, I think that the level of vitriol PG has been subjected to is completely unfounded. I think it's unclear whether YC is morally obligated to lower its standards for female applicants, or to make special efforts to encourage them to apply. The first is fraught, since it implicitly means you're selecting less-qualified people over more-qualified ones (the Ivy League universities do this for disadvantaged minorities, Caltech notably does not), the second would be nice (and I think basically all top-tier universities in the US do this for disadvantaged minorities), but it's not clear to me that it rises to the level of a moral responsibility.

There are other ways of being proactive. I bet if you asked teachers and parents, they'd say 13 year old girls lack female hacker role models to look up to. They'd note how bro-y the hacker culture appears to be.

So perhaps our industry could make a greater effort to spotlight and support our very best examples of female hackers, and put them in closer touch with 13 year old girls. And to dial down the bro-iness of events and startup office cultures.

Those are examples of being proactive that have nothing to do with lowering standards. Pointing fingers elsewhere in the system is not that different from defending the status quo, because it's an interdependent system.

There are initiatives doing both of those things, luckily. Little Miss Geek, Technovation, et al for the first; and various changes including anti-harassment policies for the second (though some companies/events remain quite "bro"-y). Not to say there shouldn't be more of them, or that more hacker role models aimed at all genders and demographics in the early teens aren't needed. There are also more visible female tech role models than there used to be, from Marissa Mayer to Sheryl Sandberg -- but that doesn't stop 15 year old girls drawing a spotty, overweight, badly-groomed man as their idea of a "technologist" when asked. (source; Little Miss Geek TEDx talk)

I also want to point out on the lowering standards front, I'm a female hacker who's been coding since age 6, and I was rejected from YC. I'm actually proud of that fact in the light of this discussion. I'd hate the whole foundation of my startup to be the source of such rabid debate, and for folks to think I just got in because I'm a unicorn and we need more unicorns in tech.

it's amazing you have to scroll down this far to find someone actually thinking critically about the issue at hand rather than saying "they edited out the word 'these'! that's not how journalism works!". yes, they edited the quote. no, the original was not really much less sexist.

Agree w/ the first part but it's not sexist at all for him to note the demographics of the pool of talent he's choosing from.

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