Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

One objection I have is with hackathons. From my observations most hackathons aren't particularly inclusive environments - they may do more harm than good.

Examples include the intense focus on competition and prizes (I didn't think it was a good idea for YC Hacks to explicitly advertise the prize of getting an interview), the fact that many hackathons now have applications processes where more applicants are rejected than accepted (so that the net effect is more exclusion than inclusion), and the general vibe of having to power through the night with redbull while cranking out code.

Most hackathons I've attended I've usually gotten this exclusive, rather than inclusive vibe. From my own experiences, the most exclusive hackathons have been the larger, more monied, more applied-to ones that have more applicants than attendees. The most inclusive hackathons have been smaller, intimate hackathons where the problem has been not having enough attendees!

EDIT (reply to below): I'm referring to the general feeling of inclusion vs. exclusion (of newcomers, people not sure if they fit the mold of <quote>hardcore<unquote> coders, etc.). The next step is to argue that exclusion discourages minorities from pursuing the field.

Why is competition a diversity problem? To me, the idea that aggressive competition selects for a specific age, gender, or ethnicity is itself problematic. Not to mention that I think that's not true.

Broadly speaking, competition definitely creates sex-based selection-bias. Men self-select into competitions more than women, and are more motivated by them.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201210/when-c...

https://www3.nd.edu/~wevans1/fresh_honor_seminar/vesterland....

I am not saying men are more capable, just more likely to self-select into the competition. Read up on what professional coaches of womens vs mens teams say.

We work in a deeply, irretrievably competitive industry. The ability to thrive in a competitive environment is a requirement at many, perhaps most, startups. Women perform in the industry just fine, but are victimized by the perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive.

Your question was, "Why is competition a diversity problem?" The answer is "science indicates that competition motivates genders differently". The fact that our industry is deeply, irretrievably competitive is (imho) part of why it's deeply, irretrievably gender-skewed.

(Caveats: you're right that women perform in the industry just fine. Also, many women are motivated and successful in competitive environments, and those women are negatively affected by perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive.)

No. The industry must be competitive. Companies compete in the market. People must stop promoting the fiction that women are poor competitors. That's a stereotype that just happens to be awfully convenient for male entrepreneurs.

While companies must compete to exist, I don't think that requires work environment or culture to be competitive in nature. Interactions between coworkers should be fundamentally cooperative and cooperation between companies (such as contribution to open source projects) can also benefit all involved. The tech industry is not a zero sum game.

If you're reading "competition" as a license to be an asshole to team members, then we agree, but think that point is banal.

Otherwise, I reject this argument. I see it as mostly waving off gender concerns. "Let's not address our broken perceptions about the capabilities of women, but instead think about how we can rework the entire fabric of the industry." I'm sure everyone's going to get right on that.

According to Google, compete means: strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others who are trying to do the same. I'm reading "competition" as a zero (or negative) sum game such as stack ranking for career advancement. In a competition you seek for others to fail.

I think that we already have a primarily cooperative industry culture and that stack ranking is a bad idea in general, not because of gender concerns. I disagree with your statement that this is "a deeply, irretrievably competitive industry" though perhaps we mean different things by "competitive". Seeking capital is, to a degree inherently competitive, but even early stage enraptures are more often than not willing to help each other succeed.

Considering the trail of idiocy and failure in tech, especially at C-Suite level, 'The industry must be competitive' is perhaps not a statement that overlaps with reality.

Competition is not a fetish. It's not a de facto solution that showers the world with good things. Quite often it makes people do unintelligent things for silly reasons.

It's actually a mythology. And it's perfectly fine to criticise blind adherence to it.

As for women in tech - I'm always fascinated that the pressure is one way. Why don't the fashion or beauty industries - which are hardly small or financially irrelevant - complain that so few men work in them?

I suppose there's a presumption that tech is very serious and important, and fashion and beauty are trivial, silly, and vapid.

Problem is, tech is often trivial, silly, and vapid too - as is a lot of business culture. How many products have been released that fundamentally fail to work? How many projects have veered off in surreal directions because innovation[tm]? How many episodes of Dilbert have there been now?

Perhaps it's the perception of seriousness and importance that's the real problem.

As a side note, fashion contributes around £26bn to UK GDP. It's very difficult to get hard facts how software compares, because the definition can include anyone selling anything from a website. But web design and app development on their own are much, much smaller.

Plenty of men work in the fashion and beauty industries. Where is your perception coming from that these fields have low male participation?

There's no question that women and men face different barriers in startups and tech. The null hypothesis is thus

(a) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially due to differences in how women and men are treated.

There's also no question that women and men differ biologically. The null hypothesis is thus

(b) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially biological in origin.

We thus have joint null hypotheses. Most commentators focus on a for obvious political reasons. Most contrarians focus on b, partially because a receives most of the attention, thus perhaps discounting a unfairly. But both a and b deserve consideration, and the burden of proof is on those asserting either ¬a or ¬b.

By stating that women are "victimized by the perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive", you've implicitly asserted that women are not in fact less competitive because of their gender, but rather are merely perceived to be so. You have thus placed the burden of proof on those who claim otherwise. In other words, by asserting a while discounting b, you have implicitly asserted ¬b as the null hypothesis.

You're in good company, of course: virtually the entire mainstream treats ¬b as the null hypothesis. Indeed, publicly supporting anything other than ¬b in the workplace is not only socially unacceptable, it is probably illegal. Unfortunately, it is also fallacious. The burden of proof is on those who assert that women's biology doesn't make them less competitive in startups and tech.

So, what evidence is there that women and men are equally well-suited to highly competitive environments? Bear in mind that nearly every highly competitive field (not just startups and tech) is now, and has historically been, dominated by men—including in far-flung locations without significant cultural contact. Contra the mainstream, ¬b is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.

It's interesting that it's only during discussions of race and gender that male nerds suddenly become receptive to social science. But in any other discussion, it's their rhetorical whipping boy. How convenient for them.

I'm receptive to social science in all relevant areas, but I don't particularly trust it, especially on politically sensitive subjects. (After all, even ultra-precise, mostly apolitical subjects like physics and chemistry often have trouble with replication.) The untrustworthiness of empirical evidence in social science makes deduction especially important.

In the case of sex differences, we need only one empirical result to determine the null hypothesis: male and female members of H. sapiens have different reproductive incentives. The null hypothesis then follows from an application of simple logic. That I do find convenient.

This doesn't mean the null hypothesis is always correct, of course. For example, there is strong evidence that mean IQ for men and women is virtually the same, which suggests the null hypothesis in this case is wrong. Neither need the null hypothesis conform to a "sexist" narrative; e.g., credible studies in cognitive neuroscience show that women are better on average at multitasking and verbal fluency. But the entire mainstream is committed to marginalizing the null hypothesis whenever it contradicts the politically correct narrative, logic be damned.

You are evidently a supporter of the mainstream, which is why you deride my [use of mathematical notation](https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/493116213803757568) instead of addressing the content of my comment. My respect for your technical work is high, though, and I know you're smart and thoughtful. I suggest grappling with the strongest arguments of those you disagree with rather than resorting to such puerile snark.

I suspect there is just a semantic difference. Women are certainly competitive. The framing of the competition matters, though. Broadly speaking, based on the tactics of professional coaches of women and psychological studies, competing for your teammates vs competing against your enemies motivates women more than men, respectively.

Since I seem to have ignited a huge sub-thread on competition, I'd like to clarify my intent. There are varying degrees and kinds of "competition." The competition I had in mind is the kind of competition associated with people pulling all-nighters for the entire weekend, loading up on Red-Bulls, and worrying about the best ways to pitch judges (and manipulate those pitches).

That kind of competition is generally unrepresentative of the "cooperative competition" of the tech industry.

This year, our theme for MHacks (http://mhacks.org) is that "Hackathons are for everone."

We've changed our advertising to focus on the first time hacker experience rather than competition, lowered the prize amounts, and have adapted our application to be as blind to experience as possible.

In my experience, smaller hackathons are actually much more exclusive because they tend to be much more homogenous due to the self-selection bias; whereas, at a larger hackathon with thousands of applications, we have the opportunity to focus our outreach to welcome a much more diverse audience.

Most but not all hackathons. I founded a hackathon and we made it a priority in our first planning meeting that women would be made to feel welcome.

I got up on stage at the event and said specifically what was acceptable and not acceptable behavior. I think if more hackathons did that there wouldn't be all the atrocities that I read about in Techcrunch.

This is really great. Obviously, we can't prevent every bad outcome, but I think sometimes people don't realize how little efforts like this actually go a really long way.

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