Sex and the Startup: Men, Women, and Work
modelviewculture.com
modelviewculture.com
If you wrote 3/4th of the startup's codebase and you're a female then you're not going to feel like a second class citizen. You're going to feel very much needed by the company and you're going to have the equity to show for it.
>men as stars who must be courted, and women as casual, lower- or no-value workers
What this article doesn't point out is that far fewer women are qualified to do the kind of tech work that is required to build a software start-up. This is not because women are less intelligent but rather because 10 or 15 years ago they bought into a stereotype that caused them to shy away from studying computer science. Now it seems they've finally caught on that 'geek is sheek' but they lack the decade or two of hard core computer science skills so all they can do is try to fulfill the more superficial roles within a tech company which means that for the large part they really are low-to-no value workers.
There are exceptions to this rule of course, some women can code very well, some women are expert graphic artists, have deep UX experience, are thought leaders in mission critical areas etc and I think those women are generally valued in the company to the same degree as the fetishized hacker.
Your qualification to make this statement is that you are a woman who has written 3/4 of the company's code, right?
Or are you performing a thought experiment and feeling good about the outcome so you figure that's good enough to substitute for fact?
Women didn't buy into the stereotype of the sociopathic gynophobic male who chooses to program computers because he can't talk to people, they were excluded from the market by the stereotype being used as selection criteria. Now there are enough women who are interested enough in an IT career that they'll put up with the trolls who infest IT, and as a result we're seeing more and more of the trollish behaviour outed.
Unfortunately due to the ingrained bias against women, these new employees are generally only allowed to feed from the edge of the trough: they are corralled into the superficial roles and prevented from providing any real value to the company.
There are exceptions to this of course, some employers are less gender-biased and allow the women to participate in the meritocracy of the technical workplace. Women feel valued in these companies because they are allowed to perform to their abilities, rather than expected to conform to the fetishised stereotype.
3/4 was just a number I pulled out of my ass, but the point is if you're bringing hella value to the company you get treated like you're someone they can't afford to lose no matter what your gender. For example if you have impressive github open source contributions, experience scaling distributed systems, strong web-dev skills, infosec skills, and you've been a core member at a venture backed startup or two then you can get a job as a lead developer. There is no gender discrimination at that level of experience.
You need to know a hell of lot more than just HTML/CSS/ and a scripting language/framework... you need to understand how the Internet works and how computers work in general at a deep level, and you need experience dealing with the kinds of technical challenges that a startup might face as it tries to grow towards web scale. I could name off some solid examples of women who fit this bill but there's no reason to name names.
Women are not excluded from the market because of a sterotype they're excluded because in general they don't have the actual skills needed to do the job, and the reason they don't have the skills is because they didn't grow up hacking computers. They didn't grow up hacking computers because 10 or 15 years ago they bought into the stereotype that computer hacking is something for nerdy guys only. It just wasn't cool to major in CS back then so not enough women were into it, and you just can't get good at this stuff without > 1 decade of experience minimum.
It is about stereotypes but it's women who were doing the stereotyping and were not getting CS degrees when they should have. Now they just don't have the skillset because they haven't been doing it long enough it's as simple as that
[citation needed]
You don't need to name names, just get those people to post their success stories, then point to those stories.
10 of 15 years ago is when I was watching the number of women in IT related degrees in Uni dropping significantly, mostly because of the harassment they were receiving and the attractiveness of other careers such as sewer maintenance over IT (aka "working with gynophobes"). They weren't buying any stereotype, they just didn't like being seen as sex objects that can write software. It was the men buying the stereotype.
The problem is that there are so few women in open source, so few highly qualified software women in general relative to the number of men. You can still meet them though at conferences and whatnot.
If women were being scared away from a CS degree because of harassment they should have taken that complaint to the Dean or something. You don't need college to achieve this anyway you just need determination and time. All the material you need to educate yourself is available for free.
>They weren't buying any stereotype, they just didn't like being seen as sex objects that can write software
You can say that about anything though.. there's no evidence that CS majors think of women as "just sex objects" any more than EE majors, math majors, or English majors. It sounds like you're just making excuses trying to blame men for women's decision to not take computer science seriously.
You can just as easily flip it around.. Perhaps many women felt that being associated with the stereotype of a "nerd in front of a computer" was would detract from their sex appeal.
You mean like every other organization in society?