Thoughts on YC's Female Founders Conference
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But since it's relevant, I'll post them again here. TL;DR: I thought the conference was awesome and look forward to watching it streamed again next year. Here's my original comment:
This was a great conference. I didn't attend (I'm male), but I watched the livestream and learned a lot from the speakers.
I especially liked the conference because I learned about the female perspective. My wife isn't a startup founder, but has a similarly stressful job (flies F/A-18's in stressful, life-threatening situations), with similar hours (14hrs/day and often weekends), in a similar environment (male-dominated Marine Corps). I often wonder how she'll manage her work when we have kids...everything from pregnancy to making time for the kids when she's busy. It's easier for me since I work at home now, but she'll deal with the same challenges that some of the founders mentioned. And knowing her, she'll feel incredibly guilty for not being around.
Anyway, I enjoyed the conference, learned a lot, and look forward to it next year.
What good is it if women only know other women and men only know other men?
Minimize criticism of those who think this is sexism, while keeping its goal of both making a statement that there is inequality and providing inspiration to women - and still giving a chance to a few men understand how difficult can be to be on a environment dominated by the other gender.
Lets say a given women in tech event is phenomenally successful, that means that men are now precluded from attending a key event. Whether consciously or unconsciously men understand this and have a discentive to making the group phenomenally successful. The more successful it is, the worse the world becomes for the average man's career.
When it is x%/y% it puts things into a different category. In x%/y% all success is shared.
1) Men interested in attending these female focused events would have a vested interest in increasing both the size of the female event (-> more male tickets) and increasing the % of women at other events (-> more male tickets). If I, as a man, wanted to attend the YC female founders conference as it was just held, there is no way I can - so it isn't worth me spending any time on. If however, the event had an x%/y% structure, one of the ways I could gain admission would be to actively bring women into tech (I assume this would be a large part of the selection criteria by which the small number of men get admitted). Everyone's interests are now aligned.
2) The connections formed between the small number of men and the large number of women at x%/y% female events are connections that will act as a bridge to getting more women at the regular events. It's well demonstrated in organizational behavior that even small amounts of conscious cross department interaction leads to greater sharing of ideas and follow on connections in both groups.
2b) I'm concerned that most female focused groups are only creating in-group connections. Meaning the approach they're taking leads to B0->B1 and eventually B1->BN (where the existing tech scene is already at AN as a boy's club). Which is to say, they're creating a silo of connections. We shouldn't be looking at the problem as "How do we create the best shadow tech scene for women." But rather, "how do we make the tech scene gender neutral."
3) By making these groups x%/y% you put men in the tech scene in a more acutely aware state. "You can't go in there, it's women only" is easy to parse as a group of 'others.' Human psyches are pretty good at dealing with blanked exclusions -- its a rival tribe, which is fine, I have my own tribe. The situation of "You could go in there, but it's very hard to get in because they only let in x% men" makes the problem tangible, evaluative, and solvable. Long story short on this point, I think with x% men, men feel the exclusion in a stronger and more productive way. Men would feel excluded in a way that is more productive for society if events were x%/y%. In the current state of affairs, nobody can write a blog post titled "How I hacked my way into a men's ticket to the YC women's conference."
3b) Right now 90% of the tech scene has no skin in the game for getting in more women. Some may have philosophical beliefs or take a very long term view and thus work towards female events happening anyways. But, x%/y% would mean we can a much larger portion of the 90% working on the problem in a way that has tangible near term benefits for everyone.
Finally, we as a society only really permit discriminatory subgroups like this when the size of the subgroup is very very small. "Men in teaching," "Women in tech." By setting up "women in tech" groups as permitted discriminatory subgroups we are betting against these groups ever achieving parity. Because, when they do achieve anything even approaching parity they'll have to reconstitute. Think League of Women voters -- they're now a league of concerned voters of all genders, but their historical permitted discriminatory subgroup focus hampers their activities to this day. x%/y% means the group will never have to go through an identity crisis or a period where it is in the grey area of whether it is still acceptable to keep their historical membership barriers.
This is quite a different argument from lowering standards or affirmative action or whatever you want to call it. In fact, it is precisely the strategy YC used to bring its co-horts together. Back in 2005, VCs did not back many founders without an advanced degree (MA/PhD or MBA). As a result, it made sense to bring together (concentrate) a cohort, because the general peer group of VC backed CEO's would not have much in common with a 22 year old with no job experience. By bringing folks together that face similar challenges, you are not (per-se) giving these people special treatment or lowering standards; you're just providing a level os support infractructure that lets them "self-help" there way through many problems. It is actually critical that you don't "dumb down" standards, for this to work.
I think we are talking about a fairly different types of things. I'm talking about low-touch high n networking as you find in events, conferences, and meetups; I am not talking about high touch networking like accelerators and degree programs. Whether my suggestions are valid or not in the high touch scenario you're discussing, I don't know, as I haven't considered that case in sufficient depth.
Your suggestion of there being value in a separate network hinges on, I think, there being a fundamental incompatibility between the groups. 22yo vs 32yo MBAs have real structural differences in their lives that make divided self help a plausible solution. I just don't buy that the differences we're talking about are significant enough to create fundamental incompatibilities. "The female tech network" vs "The tech network" smacks of separate but equal to me.
I have no problem with female focused accelerators, but remember that YC doesn't systemically exclude MBAs to create a network of 22y.o.s.
I'm enjoying the discussion (minus the part where you try to dismiss my cases as unrealistic) as you're bringing up models and cases that I hadn't yet considered.
Is the goal to have two networks, or to achieve gender neutrality in the existing meta-network? I think our goal is gender neutrality.
This means that you seriously need to go meet more founders. There are probably as many non-tech founders who are men as tech founders. These founders(such as Alexis from reddit) have filled the role in a very similar manner as Jessica describes.
I'm very proudly the non-technical founder of reddit, which I've always been very frank about. I've got citations galore. Drafting the blog post right now.
http://alexisohanian.com/on-being-a-proud-non-technical-foun...
The main point made by people studying career imbalance between genders seems to be that it tends to do at a statistical level.
I've heard and seen times all kinds of founders, non-technical and technical ones, saying that their role is fetching pizza on launch day, fixing the toilet, answering the phone, calling angry customers or doing what ever job is required.
It's the job of the founder, and it's humbling not demeaning. You come up and build the initial product, you take care of the business, you grow the team and in the end if there isn't anyone else to do something, you do it yourself if needs taking care of.
One thing that was missing, though, was politics. Politics in the true sense of the word, namely, the power struggles in the tech society which give rise to the current status quo.
Also, she says, "No one pretended tech was a meritocracy". The thing is, tech is a meritocracy, and that's part of the politics of tech. Meritocracy, of course, is a joke. It is not a desirable state of affairs, because it should be obvious that "merit" is a false currency used to justify what is, rather than work toward what should be. It is the quintessential naturalistic fallacy.
It amazes me time and again how people can take the term seriously, which only demonstrates how dangerous it is. Such a blatant, perverted joke, a dystopia that some intelligent people mistake for a utopia. Wikipedia says this: "Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" was first coined in the 1950s. It was used by British politician and sociologist, Michael Young in his 1958 satirical essay, The Rise of the Meritocracy, which pictured the United Kingdom under the rule of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude (merit) above all else... In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group."
I still can't fathom how meritocracy can be taken as anything but a negative. I mean, the first question that comes to mind (or, rather, the second after "what is merit") is, "who has merit and why, and who does not?" Once this question is asked, it is immediately apparent that any attempt to paint "meritocracy" in a positive light is ludicrous.
I wish I could upvote this so many more times.
It honestly had never occurred to me that meritocracy could be a bad thing until I read Twilight of the Elites by Chris Hayes (yep, the same MSNBC host guy) [1], recommended to me by a friend. But after reading that book, which is one of the best written and edited books on econ/policy I've ever read, I'm fairly well convinced. He builds very much upon Michael Young's work, which he mentions many times, applying it to all sorts of examples of meritocratic failure in the modern day.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Elites-America-After-Meritocr...
Ay, there's the rub: what should we work toward? This issue almost never gets discussed, except by implication. We hear over and over how we "need more women in tech". But even if everyone agreed that we do, how much more is enough? Should we stop after reaching 33% women? 50%? 60%?
Often we hear the vague assertion that the percentage of women in tech should be close to the percentage of women in the general population—you can hear it echo every time the word "underrepresented" gets uttered—but this assertion is rarely justified. And indeed we can see how potentially absurd this criterion is by applying it to cases that don't serve the same political ends as "more women in tech"—i.e., by observing that women are "underrepresented" in prison, men are "underrepresented" in the daycare industry, etc. (Putting more women in prison isn't often offered as a way to stick it to the Patriarchy.)
The assumption that increasing the percentage of women in tech is virtuous—quite a different goal, mind you, from encouraging all interested parties (female or not) to pursue the subject—pervades our discourse, to the point where "improve the percentage of women in tech" and "increase the percentage of women in tech" have become synonymous. To see through this trick, simply consider the similar case of the percentage of college graduates who are female. Women currently constitute approximately 57% of college graduates; i.e., women are overrepresented by a gap of around 14% vs. men. The question then arises: what would it mean to "improve" this percentage?
We see in a flash that "equality" has nothing to do with it—I have never seen any mainstream source call for "improving the percentage of women among college graduates" by decreasing that percentage—unless, of course, by "equality" we mean that having women overrepresented among college graduates will help address other inequalities, such as the preponderance of male CEOs, male professors, and male billionaires. In this case, we simply return to the beginning: what should we work toward? Should we strive for proportional gender representation in every field of human endeavor? Unless men and women (and, indeed, all people) are perfectly identical, this is a prescription for eternal conflict—a fair characterization, I'd say, of our lamentable status quo.
The first thing is, as always, to think about the current situation, and analyze its politics. See who the parties are. What their interests are. Whether their interests are authentic, or merely a result of many years of social pressure. What power is in question? Who has it? Who doesn't? Why? Once you understand the politics (which isn't easy because we often confuse politics with authentic will, merely because we've been subject to that politics for so long that we don't know anything else), then you can have people argue over values and how they believe things should be.
This is one of the great unexamined claims of our time. It assumes that members of Group X are the best (or even good) advocates for the welfare of Group X. But if Group X is underrepresented in the halls of power, it does not follow that Group X would be better off if they had more influence. This is easy to see by setting Group X to minor children, whose representation in powerful positions is negligible, and indeed whose members are ineligible even to vote. But extending the franchise to five-year-olds isn't (to my knowledge) a top political priority, and rightly so. "Children's suffrage" would generally make children worse off, not better.
Rather than a dog-eat-dog free-for-all that pits Group X against Group Y and Group Y against Group Z, a sounder principle is this: for responsible government, the responsible must rule. Responsible rulers can balance the inevitably competing interests of different groups, using the time-honored but curiously unfashionable virtue of human wisdom. And while it is certainly the case that there are many wise and responsible women—and, indeed, not a few wise and responsible children—the assumption that all human subgroups are on average equally wise and responsible is completely unjustified. The trickery implicit in the phrase "excluded from a source of power" is thus revealed: just because a group is underrepresented in the halls of power, it does not follow that they are being "excluded" by anything.
How then to ensure that the responsible will rule? We arrive now at the key question. It is as yet unanswered. But it seems like a question worth working on...
Personally I found the presentations very entertaining and insightful - and even though I didn't have the opportunity to watch the panel to the end, I was struck by the impression that for the most part these were normal startup stories. That's a good thing, because it means while there is work to do when it comes to making the playing field fairer to women founders, we're at a state where the main issue is not "how to cope with my gender" but "how do we get our startup off the ground".
The area where I believe much more work is required is how we get more woman programmers started. The article touches very slightly on that, but then misses the mark:
> To get a male founder to admit he doesn’t write the code his startup depends on you have to twist his arm. With a female founder it’s the second sentence out of her mouth. As if to say “PS - don’t take me seriously”
A completely different way to read this is that people who code don't have a lot of status in circles of non-programmers. So a non-technical founder might in fact expect to be taken more seriously by professing hacking ignorance.
One reason why non-technical women founders are quick to volunteer that info might be a subconscious reflection of that nerd stigma, and of course that's probably a large reason why women don't become programmers as often as men in the first place. It seems to me that perception of social status is the core issue.
To be fair though it was a founders' conference, not a female hackers conference.
No, we took the video offline because one of the speakers hadn't realized the talks were being filmed. It will be back once we edit that one out.
That's an understandable (and appropriate) action on your part, but it makes me wonder: what would that speaker have said differently if they had known they were being filmed? And why?
As a non-technical cofounder, this is the truth. I'm not sure what expectations at large are, but I can corroborate this story and believe it should be most 'non-technical' cofounders expectation of reality.
Take out trash, buy office furniture, go on sales calls, arrange the company insurance plan, order dinner on late nights, line up investor meetings, talk to users... I could literally go on forever - those are off the top of my head from last week.
Technical cofounders (and employees) should be maximizing their impact by doing technical aspects - other founders should be selling, marketing, building the business, and sometimes have to order food, clean up the office, or go see the company lawyers/ accountants/ & run errands.
I also find that many of the entrepreneurs and founders I meet are incredibly humble (disarmingly so - the founders of Dropbox and Airbnb have zero ego). I don't know if there's any YC alumn who would say that Jessica is anything less than essential within YC.
My husband and I have a startup. Yes, he is the technical side of the team. As the CEO, I mainly shape the vision for the product, strategize on how we grow, and am in charge of marketing. When we discuss our technical strategies, learning how to code is not enough. The vision for the company guides the technical decisions.
Just because I don't sit and code our product also doesn't mean that I'm clueless about the major tech decisions we make. For example, in choosing whether or not to build our products with PHP or Python, I had to learn the pros and cons of each language, and then we made the decisions together. BTW, Python it is :)
During the talk, there was a push to have more girls who code. And rightly so, since women are grossly underrepresented. But for now, I actually think that it's great to have women who have the confidence to found companies without being technical. As Kathryn from The Muse explained, Alex, her co-founder learned how to code. Necessity is the mother of invention.
As for what I got out of the conference, in brief, I learned that the talks I loved were the ones where the founder was humble and matter-of-fact.
I find this whole line of reasoning a little off, given the stats mentioned in YC's blog here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/highlights-from-ycs-first-female...
The first paragraph mentions:
We’d originally planned to host the event at our office, which could fit about 150 attendees. 1,200 impressive applications later, we decided to move the event to the Computer History Museum where we could accommodate three times the people.
Given that all 450 accepted attendees were women, I can assume that some women were rejected. Would it have made sense to reject qualified women to this event in place of qualified men? Personally, I think not.
Well.. that started out pretty sexist.
Interesting that was the OP's response. I simply took it as her being humble, not diminutive - so for me, her message was clearly delivered - take pride in whatever it is you do and do it well, regardless of role or sex. Interestingly, after hearing her keynote I thought she was the "technical" co-founder (she had investment experience in a investment based company) and pg was the non-technical co-founder (he was the hustler and gained the attention of the developers they would fund and match them up with investors).
I think that this is a key point about that conference, and TED Woman. That and the implied paramount of sexism idea that if they let men talk, there are going to be chauvinist pig, because that’s indistinguishable from having a penis.
I'm still concerned that a Female Founders Conference would exclude men or people of other genders. Yes it's great to have a platform to stand as a woman, but what about trans* or non-traditional genders? Where do they go then? The whole idea of feminism is inclusion, which means including trans, queer and other genders and YES including men too.
>The whole idea of feminism is inclusion, which means including trans, queer and other genders and YES including men too.
Mainstream feminism doesn't agree, except for when someone wants to start an equal rights movement for another demographic, like men or GLBT. Then they start acting like patent lawyers.
I would suggest looking into egalitarianism, which lacks the gender supremacy aspect of feminism. You can continue to identify as a feminist, that's fine and 100% up to you...but you're going to spend more time fighting other feminists about what "feminism" means than doing anything else. :/
The problem nowadays is that feminism has turned into a splinter pile of infighting groups who, honestly, don't know what feminism is. Feminism has nothing to do with female superiority, it was simply put forward (along with queer theory, post-colonialism) as a framework to analyze society.