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.
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.