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Comment by SloughFeg | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that neither this article or Paul's related December article ever address the most basic and seminal question about this in the first place: why is this a problem? Why is it a big deal if there are less female founders than male?

It seems like this whole discussion has been nothing but a bunch of posturing and vague half-solutions about an issue that I'm not sure even exists.

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As far as I can tell, it's a big deal because a lot of people hold as a normative axiom that the proportional representation of people groups (genders, nationalities, ethnicities, etc.) in organizations (businesses, governments, YC classes, etc.) ought to match their proportions in the general population. I suspect this is either an axiom, or a close conclusion from a broader axiom like egalitarianism.

As an axiom, there's not really a way to argue that it is illogical. You can only attempt to persuade the person to change their axioms.

I think this axiom only applies to inclusion in desirable groups or roles. It's hard to imagine even the most egalitarian thinker working to improve the male:female ratio among death row inmates, for example.

I don't know. I suspect many would think that. The disproportionately large number of African Americans in prison and on death row is certainly widely considered (by myself included) to be a bad thing. Of course, for me personally, I don't want it to be resolved by adding more people of other ethnicities to the group.

The issue is fuzzed when you consider less extreme cases than "death row inmates". That is something of a special case since there are many people who think that nobody should be a death row inmate.

A more normal case might be "gender imbalance among garbage collectors" Nobody is going to argue that this imbalance should be corrected by reducing the number of garbage collectors, since they like their trash to be collected. Would they instead argue that the imbalance should be corrected by adding more female garbage collectors? Doubtful. In practice, they will just ignore that imbalance completely. It won't be discussed.

Personally I think a great way to improve the ratio would be to get everybody off death row.

Lemma: Women-led companies are desirable.

Vivek Wadhwa is doing a bunch of research into the data. I don't have his report at my fingertips but fundamentally, not investing in women is not a rational move. Here's the media headline version:

"Women-led private technology companies are more capital-efficient, achieve 35 percent higher return on investment, and, when venture-backed, bring in 12 percent higher revenue than male-owned tech companies."

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-20/women-who-ru...

Conclusion: Women earn over 50% of degrees but start fewer than 3% of companies. If we accept that women-led companies do well, as per the data -- and yes, there are certainly caveats -- then this gap clearly shows there is a problem, in terms of inefficient use of investment if nothing else.

Hypothetically, that could be completely accounted for by women being more realistic of their chances of success at starting a company. So those who wouldn't have succeeded never bothered in the first place, skewing those statistics.

Not all women-led companies were started by women, too.

Correlation is not causation.

In this instance, the outcome is still desirable. If isolating fairly across all variables (and there are several at play!) means that higher company performance is tightly correlated to having a diverse leadership team, it's a competitive benefit to take advantage of that correlation. I doubt we could ever truly prove causation in this instance.

Startups that succeed do so by creating something that people need. It's a net win for society. Therefore, if there are women who have what it takes to start startups, but they don't, then that's a net loss to society. It's a net loss no matter why the women don't start the startup - real discrimination, lack of positive examples, perceived lack of opportunity, or whatever.

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