What I've Learned From Female Founders So Far
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
This is a huge thing that people seem to ignore when arguing "against diversity" (I put that in quotes because I don't think anyone actually argues against diversity -- they couch it in terms of meritocracy and egalitarianism, saying that the best people should succeed regardless of race and gender, it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.) I think Sam does a great job of presenting this as a thing of 'greed' -- or, more charitably, economic rationality.
In my mind, there are only two real possibilities (or, perhaps more realistically, two ends of a spectrum):
1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that.
2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.
So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?
It's the biggest market inefficiency.
edit: You could also argue that the diversity in thinking and approach you'll get from woman could be very high. So perhaps they'll be more likely to start new kinds of companies in untapped markets.
> ... but if we only address the women aspect...
Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way.
But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.
As one of those 'privileged' minority males, I shake my head.
390,387 Whites (48.1%)
267,915 Asians (33.3%)
48,870 African Americans (6.1%)Honestly I think because the women's issue has been more front and center in attention as well as blog posts. So it's more "de la journée".
"We're a female minority-owned small business, so we get preferential treatment in bidding."
[1] http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit...
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/how-amer...
Women don't launch startups as often as men, and black people don't launch startups as often as white people, but these aren't necessarily for the same reasons, and there's no reason to think that the same advisors and mentors that can help achieve a goal of attracting more female founders would also be effective at attracting more African-American founders.
So it stands to reason that both of these things would be good things to do, but not necessarily as part of the same initiative. And it may be impractical for the same person or institution to launch multiple diversity initiatives at the same time and maintain institutional focus.
So I think the answer isn't to use this as a reason to critique initiatives aimed at attracting female founders. There's no reason the onus for other diversity initiatives should be placed on the people who are already devoting resources to recruiting female founders. Rather, I would suggest that you get involved yourself -- and also encourage others in the startup scene to get involved -- to devote equivalent energy to launching initiatives to recruit founders who are members of traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. The more the merrier.
No, I don't believe that is the argument.
The argument is "Let's not over-compensate for historical institutional racism/sexism, and, going forward, select the best candidates based on merit, regardless of gender or colour."
You can't eliminate these issues overnight, with a rule or two.
The push towards diversity is a straight forward reaction in an attempt to prove "yes we can" by moving the numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible. I'd guess that eventually the pendulum will swing back again. The reason the diversity tactic is used so much is because it's the only tactic that seems to actually produce results, artificial or not.
(This is a touchy subject. I'm not implying this initiative takes it "too far" or anything of the like...)
I agree, the problem is that over-compensation (pendulum swinging too far) inevitably leads to another party being alienated. Sometimes the people at the margins most affected are relatively powerful and aren't happy with the results. An example being anti-affirmative-action sentiment among white blue-collar workers. This can diminish the effectiveness of the diversity push.
I'm not saying the sentiment is justified; I'm saying it inevitably happens. It's a tough balance. We know that SV and the tech scene is a very male oriented culture. What happens with as that changes? There are bound to be losers.
How is this statement supposed to be read? Probably not like this
"We are going to fund people we otherwise wouldn't because they happen to be women and many successful startups are going to be funded by women."
Also, probably not like this
"We want to have 'more than a thousand dollars' because we want to have 'more than a million dollars' and many times 'more than a thousand' is 'more than a million.'"
If that's the case then it would be much better to simply say
"We want to fund the most successful startups and it would not be in our best interest to differentiate founders based on gender."
In fact, you could almost look at this as a startup-ish idea - finding an under-served niche, and making money from doing what nobody else is doing.
So I'm a little confused here, since no one who has participated would ever think this is even remotely close to true, I guess it's a rhetorical element.
But I can't quite figure out to what end. Maybe you could explain to me like I'm 5?
One heuristic is "Aim for as diverse a group of entrepreneurs because we don't want to miss any opportunities"
Another is "Fund people I've worked with, or come recommended by people I work with, because word of mouth is a better predictor that resume"
The first encourages diversity. The second discourages it, but is rational. It takes being very proactive to push for the first to win over the second, because you have to actively find something as strong as "Word of mouth from my network" to predict success. Bravo for YC pushing this agenda.
Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male. (Not sure about race, but it's probably true in Western countries). The majority of people interested in founding technology startups are probably white and male, and therefore the best people for starting a technology startup are white and male. You comment implies that it's wrong to state that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male, if you don't imply that, please make it clear.
If women are as skilled as men in, say, programming, then majority of best programmers are male.
>2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.
There's a third possibility: women and non-whites in Western countries are less interested in applying for venture capital. If that is the case, then in an equal world venture capitalists should invest less in startups founded by non-white women, because the majority of startups seeking venture capital are founded by white males.
The overall point is that you need to fix the root cause, not the effects of the cause. As long as women and non-whites are minorities in groups of people such as tech students, you should see less women and non-whites in tech student related phenomenon, such as technology startups.
This reminds me of all these communities like "AngularJS women", who try to get more women into AngularJS. I think that's pointless. Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men, you'll find that 50% of AngularJS developers will be female.
Understanding of this point is perhaps facilitated by also mentioning that the worst programmers are also overwhelmingly white and male, for the same reason.
More competent people and more incompetent people would be expected from the larger population, if competency is evenly distributed.
Part of the reason why women are less likely to become programmers and strartup founders is because of the lack of role models. Successful role models serve both to change ingrained cultural biases, as well as to inspire and encourage underrepresented groups to consider participation in new fields. There is no clear cause and effect, but rather a feedback loop (what we see affects our biases which then become even more entrenched). This is exactly the reasoning behind affirmative action, and why any fight against cultural biases should be at all levels.
fortunately, i am a warrior and don't really know any other way. otherwise, i'd have given up long ago.
Yes, and it's not a good thing for the entire industry to be dominated by a certain group, because then the industry will end up only serving the needs of that group.
If you truly believe that large sections of the the market are not being served then I'd recommend that you start targeting them, they are clearly under-tapped.
I'm struggling to interpret that sentence in a charitable manner. Could you clarify what you meant? Are you saying that, when it comes to development, male values/interests (whatever that could possibly mean anyway) are the only ones worth having and that women need to conform to them?
In actuality women and men do different things and have different interests. It's kind of crazy to pass up a better person just to get more women/men hired or to do something.
If you have to hire 10 people for a coding position and you have 100 applicants (10 male and 90 female) but the 10 male applicants are better (more qualified and better for the job) than the 90 female applicants then you should hire the 10 male applicant. There is no reason you should try to force it to 5 males and 5 females or even 9 females and 1 male. Just hire whoever is best regardless of gender.
Through contempt for the concept of meritocracy (even as an asymptotic ideal), and growth in identity politics, more and more people seem to view diversity and social engineering goals as more important than getting the best team in place for the job.
Maybe that's fine for a sclerotic bureaucracy, but for a startup in which everyone's effort counts, a single marginal hire is like a cancer - you simply can't afford it. Hiring needs to be focused on getting the best people for the job - diversity will arise as a consequence.
In the case where you've hired 10 males out of a pool of 90 females and 10 males, it's not unreasonable to suspect that maybe something is wrong with your hiring practices, is it? It definitely could be that everything truly was based on merit, however there could be biases in the hiring process of which you're not aware. Could this be what most of the people that you see as having "contempt for the concept of meritocracy" are actually thinking?
That said, there are good and bad ways of dealing with these sorts of issues. I generally dislike affirmative action like solutions, much for the same reason that Justice Clarence Thomas dislikes affirmative action. Solutions like blind auditions, that attempt to remove the biases, rather than negate them, are far better.
If the "anti-meritocracy" people simply want people and organizations to be less arrogant about believing they have a perfect selection process, I think that's a good thing. The biggest issue I have with the "anti-meritocracy" teams is this: the language that many people use seems calibrated to shame people for even using the word, or thinking of meritocracy as a ideal or target to aim for.
Anyone who's ever had to hire people for a startup is unlikely to feel terribly arrogant about their process, though - in my experience, people try to make it as systematic as possible and then improvise within that. Certainly, any adjustment to process that makes it less susceptible to prejudice or bigotry is a good step.
Obviously, "merit" is a function of a person's innate ability, education, effectiveness and fit in a particular role, and a million other factors. It's not an exact science. But it's a good thing for an organization to decide, at minimum, what does "merit" look like for this particular role or hire? (And, more broadly, what traits of "merit" are shared across the whole organization?)
The dictionary definition seems benign enough: "A system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement". I'm sure people would agree this is better this than racism, sexism, or straight up politics.
Women tend to outperform men in the general desirability of occupations[1]. In jobs like veterinary and psychologists, the competition is fierce and highly gender imbalanced in favor of women.
So in order to get more women into other fields like programming, lets favor men for occupations that has high general desirability. This will move men into occupations normally occupied by highly skilled and educated women, and move women into occupations with lower general desirability by which is otherwise male dominated.
Do not be against diversity, support this move today!
[1]: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-societ...
Before switching to CS, I spent a couple years in nursing school. Upon switching to CS, my dad told me "good, I didn't want a son that wiped asses for a living". I don't claim my experience had any equivalency to what females in tech go through, but I can attest firsthand that gender biases in choice of profession can be really hard to overcome even in the minds of the people you love.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/s...
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer...
As we do more events, we'll continue to reach out to women.
This sort of thing really, seriously annoys me. HN is a funnel for applying to YC. You do not need to "reach out to women." You need to stop shutting out the ones who are ALREADY here and trying like hell to participate in spite of frequently being stonewalled, being unable to get anyone to hold a private conversation with them, etc ad nauseum.
In some sense, I will probably rant a bit more about this on my personal blog today because I was already steaming mad about this before I logged in to HN to read this article showing how badly the people at the top are simply blind.
Are you really surprised, right after that "Glass wall" story was posted here about one woman's terrible tragedy of having to deal with a male executive who briefly talked to her in an office stairwell? Convincing herself the entire office was about to think they were having an affair?
And you're surprised men are less eager to approach women than men in tech?
FYI: I wrote some follow-up yesterday explaining more of the context: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-personal-...
I had my reasons for my conclusion. I do not believe they were an overreaction at all.
I don't think I've ever in my professional career observed someone being feverish and flushed and assume that it had something to do with sexual tension. Men just aren't that observant.
More likely, I would assume you were either sick or anxious because of some work-related conversation. Neither of which is a reason to be concerned vis-à-vis office politics.
Also, can I offer a suggestion to your problem? Couldn't you make up a little white lie and tell your coworkers that you had a very minor medical condition that resulted in being feverish and flushed often but that there were no other serious effects? No need to name anything, but that should take care of your worry about getting an email every time you sneeze and also deal with your concern about constantly having your obvious symptoms be misunderstood.
No, I am not overreacting. There is still more to the story and I plan on writing more in the future. If my point of view is not your cup of tea, it isn't exactly required reading. If it helps other people, good. I write in some sense for myself.
Thank you.
Or that even if all men really aren't observant enough, which is also a rather daring statement if I may say so, that still leaves room for women noticing it and communicating this more explicitly.
It's exactly the point I'm trying to make. I've never heard of anything like this happening, anywhere, ever. Even in casual settings. Nor have I observed that a normal response to sexual arousal is to be feverish and flushed.
To draw the type of conclusions that she is claiming, her coworkers would have to (1) be incredibly observant (2) reject all of the most plausible explanations for a very unlikely explanation and (3) care.
This is Ockham's razor.
I have a friend that is abnormally paranoid. He thinks everybody is out to get him and sees devious plotting from the most innocuous of situations. "those two guys at the water cooler are plotting to make me look bad at the meeting today" - type stuff.
Chances are they are not.
All I'm saying is that it sounds like fear of taking a wrong social step at work seems to be affecting her performance, not to mention increasing her anxiety.
It could perhaps be healthy to reconsider whether her assumptions are reasonable or not.
On the other hand; thinking that this kind of thing is never discussed is rather naive. There's plenty of people who are very observant about these kinds of things and will happily discuss them when the opportunity arises. We even invented a word for it: gossiping.
It could be due to something as simple as hormonal differences creating more interconnections between hemispheres or historical oppression having given rise to a form of power play that by it's nature needed to be concealed from men.
Whichever it is, it creates a different kind of sense-making and internal dialogue. Right here, you're taking that 'kind' of internal dialogue and branding it as the sort of tripe for which women deserve to be excluded by men.
That, even disregarding the fact that you accidentally wrote this to the author of said post, is exactly the kind of stuff sexism in tech is made of.
Genetics isn't destiny. We're more sophisticated than that.
Excellent. Can't wait to see what it is.
I've been banned a few times simply for strongly expressing an opinion contrary to HN ideology. I probably will be again for even bringing it up.
Is it merely contrary to HN ideology or something that's considered outside the realm of legitimate controversy in this community?
Some positions aren't going to be well-received no matter how well they are phrased, which is generally considered a good thing. We shouldn't have to continuously debate the idea that the universe is more than 10,000 years old, or that women should be first-class citizens in our society, for example.
I'm far removed from YC and the startup scene, but as an exceptionally intelligent black man I do have experience with scenarios that might lead one to feel that way. My advice is simply: don't feel that way. Be completely confident in yourself and abilities and ignore what others might be thinking. YC should not be seen as validation in any way, but as a stepping stone for your personal goals. In that light, the exact reasons you were funded are of no concern to your future success. Besides, I'm sure many a founder has been accepted for superficial reasons (being from the right school, having the right look, etc). If certain of your traits happen to match the current funding trends then so be it; consider it a stroke of luck and nothing else. I guarantee you the next white kid from Stanford that gets funded will not be sitting around wondering if he really belongs there.
I think people will complain about fairness even when they're not affected, because the tech community tends to have a strong knee-jerk reaction to this sort of thing. But it would be foolish to not consider diversity as one of many metrics to gauge how effectively one is avoiding costly biases.
The entire campaign is centered around encouraging women to apply more BECAUSE they can be good founders, not because they are women, and men feel bad for not including them.
EDIT: ahh sama beat me to it.
Competence knows no race, color, creed, gender, or nationality. It may be found in anyone. I'm greedy too, and want to receive the benefit of competent people of all kinds who are allowed to flourish and succeed. Here's Sam:
> We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women.
and
> Again, we don't do this for the sake of diversity. We do it because we want to get the best people, whatever they're like.
I'm probably not the only one who had to look this up :)
The right thing to do is fund the best concepts that exist. I don't care if they're all women founded or all men founded.
The reason there aren't more women founders is the real problem at hand. It might be that women are more risk averse. It might be that there's a stigma against girls who program. It might be that there's a large enough population of women who are more focused on finding Mr. Right than founding the right company.
I'm making up some numbers here, but if 1 in 5 companies are founded by women, then it wouldn't make sense to seek a 50/50 founding member gender breakdown in a YC class. That said, my guess is that more than 20% of companies you choose would be founded by women, because the women that did make it to the company founding stage are that much more likely to have the skill sets and the drive to be successful.
EDIT: The percentages in chart are # female founders accepted into YC / # founders accepted into YC. The 24% statistic in the article is number of startups with at least 1 female founder, so the chart may be biased lower than that statistic.
To me the entire "look like Zuck" is more than the physical look. It's the harvard attendance, of a certain age, and having certain interests and mannerisms as well as background.
Truth is if you go to an Ivy or top school and view the student body you will see a certain look and feel. Doesn't mean that people with the same look don't attend a state school or community college, doesn't mean there aren't exceptions at the Ivy, but the look and feel is definitely there. Perhaps they end up looking that way after the first week as they get assimilated.
There is no doubt that people respond to visual cues and assign halo to them rightly or wrongly. Or stereotypes whatever you want to call it.
Go ahead in and try to pitch YC looking like a guy who runs a wholesale company and is 58 from the lower east side in NYC and doesn't look the part. It would almost certainly be, for lack of a super clear winning idea, an uphill battle.
To me, regardless of gender, YC would only want those that were proactive and dedicated to join a YC batch. It seems pointless to encourage specific demographics that would not apply, to do so.
I think you're missing the point that there could be reasons that females (or any demographic other than white American males) do not apply to YC that are not correlated with building great companies.
For example it is plausible that woman feel alienated by the tech startup scene and avoid applying to accelerators. White males born might not have that feeling. So effectively their "bar" is lower.
If YC is trying to address that it seems like a smart business move on their part. They are reducing irrationality in the system.
I'd sure rather have an Elon Musk or a Mara Aspinall in YC than a randomly-selected person who already believes YC is the best (or only) way to do a startup.
There are two parts to this -- making YC as useful as possible to the best founders, and making sure the best founders know that and apply.
- http://www.buffettsecrets.com/rose-blumkin-nebraska-furnitur...
- http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/13/business/rose-blumkin-reta...
See: http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/19/women-hiring-ma...
i teach 8 year-old girls how to code in my free time and one of the biggest challenges to their success is re-wiring them to believe in themselves, in their critical-thinking skills, in their ability to solve problems. it seems they don't need a few mentor-role models: they need a chorus of people encouraging them and reminding them of their innate abilities. which leads me to believe—i can only extrapolate—that this must be what many boys (and men) experience on a quotidien basis.
i will never know, but i can help create that for myself and other women, particularly the wee ones. :>
Or he says: "I see a couple of guys walking down the street and I think, oh, they look like they'd make good founders or bad founders, right, as the case may be. [...] The right kind of nerdy. Like, these guys in this room are not suits, but they're not schlubs either. These are fierce nerds. You have to be somewhat intimidating looking, and that's what these guys are. [...] Yeah, yeah. They're like the kind of people Julius Caesar was afraid of." (http://www.wbur.org/npr/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon...)
Or that hilarious cherry-picked stat YC came up with: "at least one female founder." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/04...)
If YC people can't see this, that doesn't bode well for their self-critical thinking skills. (But at least Paul Graham's fairly open about what he thinks, and looks good compared to HN posters.)
Yeah, that bit was clearly bullshit. The assertion is
"Some percent of good startups are run by women" => "we want more startups run by women [to increase the number of good startups, because we will earn more]"
This line of reasoning is clearly ridiculous. Only if A) startups run by women had a higher chance of success and B) the VCs had no better way of judging startup merit than looking at probabilities tied to the gender of the founder would it make sense to explicitly recruit more women for the sake of increasing profits. It is immediately clear that the only way to get more good startups is to A) recruit more people in general (not just people of some biological characteristic) and/or B) have better selection metrics.
It goes like:
Assumption: There is a population of women out there who would be really capable of running a successful technology startup
Fact: Not many women do, whether this is because of VC bias, or women's own biases from social conditioning or whatever
Opportunity: encourage more women to start companies that we fund, we will have a competitive advantage by being among the first to mine this under-utilized resource while other VCs compete for the best male-run startups
>> other VCs compete for the best male-run startups
is possibly more accurately this:
>> other VCs compete for the best white male-run startups based within 100 miles of San Francisco
Here's another model of startup success:
1.) Part of your success is due to innate factors in your team: who you are as a person, how well you process information, how much relevant experience you have, how well you get along with teammates, etc.
2.) Part of your success is due to how people react to you, which includes both 2.a) how well they consciously perceive the qualities in #1 and 2.b) how they unconsciously attribute qualities of other people to you, based on categories or groups you may belong to (like woman, black, old, big-company employee, Java programmer, Lisp programmer, Ivy League grad, etc.)
Everybody does #2.b - it's part of our brain's short-circuit judgment wiring, and we couldn't function if we didn't. In psychology, the effect is called "transference". However, sama's saying that they want to investigate ways that #2.b may be conflating the accuracy of #2.a, and the fact that an applicant is a woman may make them inaccurately perceive the innate qualities that she brings to the table.
If you don't believe that unconscious factors may alter how well you process information about how successful a person is, I highly suggest you take an IAT here:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
The results were incredibly eye-opening for me, and oftentimes have been very eye-opening for many other people in positions of power.
On top of that, there's a feedback loop involved. Women have traditionally been at a disadvantage and it takes conscious effort to dig out of that hole. The only way to fight entropy in a system is by inputting work.
Finally, your statement presumes that YC isn't already "funding the best startups". Obviously, that approach -- the status quo -- hasn't been fair to both sexes. For the reasons above.
He explicitly states they believe they're missing out on some of the best startups by not funding more women founders.
I question the assumption that the perceived low female application numbers are due to prejudice. It could be due to differences in the predispositions to excel at different types of work between the sexes. Men and women are different. Why are so many professional basket ball players black? Racism? There is an implicit assumption in this and its validity is assumed. It is not being questioned.
The correct default assumption is that any two individuals are similarly capable. The burden of proof is on the person asserting that they're not. The presence of physical differences between men and women is no evidence that they're differently capable in terms of founding a startup. You would need specific data to that effect that accounted for the confounding factor of relatively low female participation in the startup scene.
And look, in the very article you're commenting on, the people best able to to analyze that have decided that women founders are worth pursuing. I'm guessing they know a bit more about it than you do.
There is no evidence that it is due to different predispositions, and even if it was, that would not necessarily mean that it would not give a high ROI to try to coax more into trying. The only realistic way of determining whether or not they can get a good ROI on encouraging more female founders is to try it and measure results.
It might even be that it would be profitable to encourage more female founders even if they as a group under-perform, if encouraging them mean you attract more of the best of them, as well as goodwill and PR effects.
The upshot is that barring evidence that an effort to increase diversity will lower ROI, any sensible VC ought to at least try from the point of view that there's a huge risk of losing out if they perform well and your competitors gain a reputation as more diverse and modern.
If the result of trying is data to support that women are somehow predisposed not to make good tech founders, then there'd be another discussion to have, but your argument above effectively boils down to "it could be they don't apply because they're predisposed against it, so let's not even try"
No the assumption is made further up stream than this. The assumption is that a 'low' (defined how exactly, compared to what, applying what rationale?) number of female applicants is evidence of prejudice.
I simply ask how you know. Id like to know what proportion of female applicants would indicate no such prejudice and how that is arrived at.
I also question the assumed 'correct' course of action is to prejudge based on gender in an effort to combat this apparent perceived prejudice based on gender.
This is a nonsense. It is a fashion. The likes of YC should know better.
But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women. All you have to do is read some of the comments on HN whenever a topic in this area arises. From some of the things I read in comments I seriously give pause on whether I should push my daughter in programming/tech. Some women can tolerate this hostility better than others, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I really think the problem is with the attitude of the modern young techy towards females. I don't know where it comes from or how to fix it. But it worries me.
To the extent that this is true, I think it could be backlash in response to pushing for more women in tech.
My youngest brother's high school has a girls only programming club, and a girls only robotics team (with no male equivalents). There was also a program where kids from his engineering class got selected for a summer electrical engineering program, with preferential selection for girls. He really wanted to do it and he definitely had the grades and ability, but all 3 kids who were selected were girls (who had lower GPAs and lower scores in the engineering class.)
He lives in a pretty rural area, so there aren't really a lot of options for him to get involved in something like a robotics team outside of school. I would have probably been upset if something I was really interested in was off limits because of my gender, and I can't really say how something like this would have affected me when when I was 14.
There's the same danger with VC. It's probably/hopefully an unconscious bias, but it's very tempting to want to invest in a "type" of founder that has succeeded often in the past - Young, white, male, Harvard/Stanford dropout, wears a hoodie, etc.
Every VC wants to invest in the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but the more we fixate on past successful archetypes, the more likely we are to (unconsciously) dismiss other possibilities.
It's my same gripe with the job interview process. Obviously every company wants to hire "the smartest, hardest-working people who are a good cultural fit". But how do you measure that in a way that's both accurate and efficient/scalable? You usually can't, which causes you to use certain heuristics which optimize for efficiency/scalability at the expense of considering everyone who might be a good candidate.
For example, the heuristic of using internal referrals for hiring works, because if you're a company like Google where everyone is smart, then smart people are likely to know other smart people, and since you're referring friends, it's likely they will be a good cultural fit. But obviously, in the long run internal referrals will lead to a very homogeneous culture, which can be good (everyone gets along) and bad (lack of diversity).
(This is one of the reasons that I hate the moderators reverting article titles to less descriptive ones.)
The program itself is just a quick HN scrapper combined with a naive bayes classifier which periodically runs and sends selected article titles to an IRC channel.
What I liked:
Listening, and acknowledging there is a problem, is an excellent first start. That's progress for YC, which up until now seemed to have its head in the sand.
The quick roll up of what you've heard most recently, also good, shows it's more than lip service.
*Acknowledging publicly that confidence shows differently for women than for men is enormous. I've had people try to claim I'm not confident in my product. Outrageous!
Some other thoughts:
Female founder events are nice, but let's see PG and the Old VC boys show up there too, so it isn't a pink ghetto.
Earmark your startup founders conference to be 50/50 male/female. Or some such realistic but achievable number.
Understand that women need special help fundraising. The signals, games, and rules are male created, and male oriented. Women are at a distinct disadvantage in the fundraising process as a result. I have found most women cannot give good fundraising advice, because they have not raised money, or have they invested money. Would love to see YC write about this, specifically for women. A rule book, if you will.
There's probably more, but as you keep engaging us, I'll keep thinking.
To those who might still be angry/cynical: This is a start. I believe we have to allow room for organizations and people to evolve and change their minds, lest we all freeze into pre-arranged points of view. I hope that doesn't happen, because the world needs all of us right now to tackle the challenges we face. Let's see what happens. This is more than we've seen out of the valley in quite some time.
Sarah Austin, is a co-founder at my company, Plexi, and she is invaluable to us from the standpoint of knowing what features are important and how to extract money from those features. Sarah doesn't write code. She looks at it from time to time, and she provides large data sets in spreadsheets that get codified later, but she doesn't speak Python which is what we run.
Sarah has one dozens of hackathons, and was SAP's Hacker of the Year last year. Again with out writing a single line of code.
To be honest the Author comments show how much more he has to learn about female founders, because I disagree with almost every assertion he makes.
And yes, I think PlexiNLP is a multi-billion dollar potential company.
-Brandon Wirtz CTO PlexiNLP http://plexinlp.com/
None are at the AirBnB/Dropbox/Stripe/Heroku/Reddit/Parse/Polvi stage yet, but everyone in YC knows of a few female YC participants who seem to be on the same trajectory.
Wait, is this implying that we're actually getting an upstream change in the HN codebase for the first time in $amount_of_time_I_am_not_aware_of_exactly?
Or perhaps some sort of cultural shift, like increased moderation and less tolerance for certain views? I can't see the latter going very well, but it's too early to tell anything.
Otherwise this is good news. However, when I read this...
Many emails pointed out that our website shows nearly all men; we'll fix that.
I was reminded of the following: http://www.snopes.com/college/admin/uwmadison.asp. Hopefully this won't just be a clumsy doctoring for PR purposes.
But we would prefer women?
What the hell is up with YC and positive discrimination?
Why would you want someone so easily broken? You know how many Asian founders I've seen marketed in aus startups? Very few. Doesn't bother me.
, in a controlled experiment the researchers conducted, identical business-plan videos were narrated by either male or female voices; respondents chose the plans presented by males 68 percent of the time.
2) Some men who could be great founders don't start startups.
2. part of being a good entrepreneur is managing your own psychology. women—and i anticipate raising ire when i say this—have much to learn in this regard. not simply because we are relatively new to worlds men have long-accessed and enjoyed (with the corresponding body of wisdom and experience that accompanies such things, including the management of one's own psychology, which is nothing more than self-mastery), but also because we sometimes lose focus along the way. we stop building and start arguing. this is a natural process and i believe an important one for us to collectively go through: the debating, the feeling-out of collective boundaries and external asks. but we are not organized, we sometimes get emotional to the point where we become unintelligible, uncommunicative or irrational, and lose credibility along the way. if you are to wage a war then you must find a way to unite around a common purpose, set your sights on victory and then take intelligent action, individual or otherwise. (coincidentally, we also need role models who are both vocal AND able to organize women.) alas, in our early stages we seem to spend a lot of time arguing. so: less bicker, more build. whether your own projects or community, every hour matters.
3. on YC-ness: how many female founders have worked very closely alongside a VC-funded YC-alum (who happens to be a white male)? i am a minority female founder who has experienced this, and was astounded. temporarily laying aside the argument of how to actually get in if you do fit that stereotype: the intrinsically, deeply supportive nature of this network is such that many of you, if exposed to it, would be tempted to apply. many of you would apply. it wasn't the contacts, or the advice, or the credibility it conferred (those things helped with everything from recruiting to raising $, of course—not to mention the comparative ease of getting meetings): what impressed me was this battle-hardened community offering the gift of time and emotional support to one another...generosity on a scale one rarely sees in any business context (qualities which i believe will only improve in the years to come, particularly as YC evolves to include more women). my conclusion? apply to YC. and i would suggest, if a group of mostly-white male geeks does not interest you, and i understand if that is the case, then apply to a female-oriented accelerator or better yet: assemble a group of kickass female founders, mentors and investors and start your own. (remember, the genesis of a good product is building something you need.)
4. food for thought: if there were a female version of YC, would you apply? would i? i am not sure i would. i do not live in a vacuum; the world i seek to conquer is a male-dominated world (at present); and part of self-mastery includes mastering one's environment, not creating a bubble within it. but it is an interesting thought-experiment and useful to ponder.
*btw, not making this about white vs non-white. that alone would be the subject of a 1k post thread.
The only thing YC really needs to care about is 1) getting the best possible startups to apply and then 2) for those companies to be successful.
#2 is pretty much immune to pressure-on-YC; YC has no control of YC startups, with only 2-10% common equity. #1 is explicitly the thing they are working on, so it seems unlikely "we will pressure you to accept more female founders if you don't accept more female founders by convincing female founders not to apply" would be a realistic threat.
But here's another way to look at it: Accepting more women applicants -- even if they don't fit YC's acceptance heuristic (which is, by definition, already an approximation for actual success) as well -- is not necessarily a bad idea. Sexism and other irrational biases are strongly fueled by bad intuitions, and people learn these bad intuitions by not seeing enough diversity in tech and/or founders. This is a situation that YC can improve.
This wouldn't be about lowering the bar. It's more like accounting for the "home field advantage" that males have long benefited from, and eventually eliminating the advantage by letting everyone play on a neutral field starting with their first game. (First person to come up with a better metaphor gets an upvote...)
(edit: and yes, I know @sama says YCombinator won't do that. But it's still worth considering!)
I've seen far too many women working very hard, initially quite successfully, to be "more like men" but too soon encounter agonies of the damned, failure, and even death. Be careful. Be very careful.
Suspect: Mother Nature long ago filtered out from the tree any women so easily distracted from being strong limbs on the tree. Motherhood is not inferior; the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world; good parenting is the crucial, most rewarding, and most important job in the world; what men do at work is not superior to what women, and essentially only women, can do with motherhood; everyone on HN had a mother who did a lot of important, hard work quite different from success in the world of work; what men do at work is to bring home money for what is really important, motherhood, family, home, etc. For a woman to concentrate on a startup is to neglect motherhood and, thus, to confuse means and ends.
Darwin will have the last word here: Currently in Western Civilization, the average number of children born to one women is less than 2.1 which means Western Civilization is voluntarily going extinct. In Finland the average is 1.5 which means that in 10 generations about 30 Finns will become 1. Finland did well fighting off the Swedes, Russians, and Germans but now is losing out to 'new' ideas on what women should do.
Some science is quite clear: Starting in the crib, the girls pay attention to people and the boys, to things. That difference continues. Girls pay attention to people because that is crucial for motherhood. Boys pay attention to things because that is crucial to the world of work. Don't confuse the two.
When it's your sister, wife, or daughter who gets seriously injured for life or gets killed, say, from suicide from clinical depression from stress from being pushed away from motherhood and into the world of startups, then you will understand why it is crucial to be careful.
Sure, at one time she told me "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women can do things, too. I want a career.". I believed her. I was naive.
Her mother was pushing her hard away from motherhood and into something challenging.
Although I didn't yet see the role of her mother, I had good reasons to believe in her: So, she was Valedictorian, PBK, Woodrow Wilson, 'Summa Cum Laude', Ph.D. And in many ways, in academics and also daily life, she was just hands down, flatly brilliant. She had the endurance of an ultra athlete and could go with so little sleep that so little for me would have me asleep standing up, literally.
Still, by the time she finished her Ph.D., she was in a clinical depression from the stress, never recovered, and died. Her sisters had similar struggles. It's tough to separate nature and nurture here: She got the nurture from her mother who had the nature but also got the nature from her mother. She likely got another dose of the nature from her father, a guy who for some years worked 20 hours a day except cut back to 10 on Sundays.
Solid evidence is that such vulnerability to stress is four times more likely for women than men.
There is a good reason for the expression "Nervous Nellie" because, from an expert, "women are much more emotional than men" and one way they are more emotional is that they are more nervous, more easily made afraid. Such nervousness and fear leads to stress leads to depression, clinical depression, serious problems, and sometimes death.
For a women in a challenging situation, have to exercise special care watching for signs of low self-esteem, stress, 'burn out', and depression. Some women can meet such challenges; too many can't; even some that very much look like they can, can't; these problems are much more likely for women; it's a very challenging situation.
My advice I repeat: Be careful. Be very careful.
Some people just flatly want to believe that "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women can do things, too." and want to and, then, do hate any suggestion of anything else and pass off any suggestion as some sexism. No, the caution I urge is based on hard experience. Be careful. I didn't say stop; I just said be careful.
"Careful"? Yes, for a women, have to watch for symptoms and problems that mostly would not have to watch for for men.
Be careful.
Sorry about your dream, largely unfounded, that women are just the same in startups as men and have just been held down and now need to be 'unleashed'. It's not just a dream, too easily it's a nightmare. Sorry about your dream. But if the woman is your sister, wife, or daughter, your dream can become a nightmare for you. You've been warned. Let the pop media have their fun pushing 'lean in', etc., but for your sister, wife, and daughter, be careful, be very careful.
If you want an explanation, then notice that Darwin's forces were there and having their effects for many tens of thousands of years before startups. and we don't know just what those forces were or just how they worked. Since we can't understand what those forces were, for making big changes now we are walking out on thin ice. Be careful.
Or, the world of work, and startups were created by men in ways convenient for men. And we should just assume that women will be comfortable in that world? Why assume? Or how many men would be comfortable in and fit in at a baby shower? How many men can do well at gossip? For 'social connections', men don't gossip; instead they communicate information (D. Tannen,'You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation'), and women communicate feelings and the rest of gossip. Men are from Mars, women from Venus, that is, they are so different they seem to be from different planets. They deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same (E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving').
Did I mention, be careful?