Women in Tech: The Silicon Ceiling | Hacker News Reader

Women in Tech: The Silicon Ceiling

huffingtonpost.com

7 pointsbootload15 comments

Interesting. I suppose that if this is really true, and you're confident that women are systematically undervalued by employers and VCs, you can exploit that opportunity.

If you don't think this is true, but you still feel some kind of partisan attachment to the idea that men and women will achieve equal results in equivalent endeavors, you'll probably write a Huffpo article about it.

I do.

Half my team is stay-at-home moms. The tech industry seems to believe that becoming parents has addled their brains. I'm pretty sure that engineering degrees from top colleges and a PhD in robotics from Oxford can survive formula and spit-up.

The stay-at-home part works even better. I think that most people only have about 4 hours of actual work in them -- the sort of serious analytical thinking required to write code. By working with stay-at-home parents, they happily give me 100% of that time every day, and I only compensate them for that much.

In contrast, most folks (myself included!) get paid 8h/day for only 4h of coding.

What's your point, again? Is it that the article was written in HuffPo, therefore it's wrong? Or is it that anyone who writes an article on gender imbalance must not really believe in it, because otherwise they'd be exploiting the problem, instead of wasting their time writing?

I'm just trying to figure out which logical fallacy you're advancing.

I think the point was something like "put up or shut up". If there's a lot of capable, motivated women out there who aren't getting the attention they deserve, then the best way to make the point is to go find them, hire or fund them, and make a lot of money which you can rub in the face of the people who ignored the female talent. (Similarly, one can tell people who bloviate about politics to go put money down on InTrade.)

That noone is doing such is weak evidence that, perhaps, the cause of the gender skew is not simply subtle endemic sexism as is often assumed. Note: This does not imply that the reason is something as trite as "women can't do technology", either.

That is: if it were true that expected talent/dollars is greater in women than in men, and this is widely known public knowledge, then why do no tech companies select for women over men in their own self interest?

Possible answers could include: 1) They do, but you realize it.

2) They do, but you don't know about it.

3) They don't, because the premise is false, because women are not undervalued.

3) They don't, because the premise is true, because women are not selected over men despite having a higher talent/dollar value.

4) They don't, because organizations of people are not rational economic decision machines, or values like "talent / dollar" are too vague to be pre-test predictive of individual productivity, or "self interest" is not necessarily defined by maximizing economic exchanges, or that men already in tech simply know other men better and so tend to work with other men.

If 4) is true, it's not equally true for every company. Meritocracy varies from one organization to another. And the more meritocratic organizations will tend to be more successful. So choice four is just choices one through three, delayed.

That's an obvious straw man, and it's an ad hominem too (you're suggesting that because the author hasn't done something about the problem, her argument must be wrong). What nonsense.

The author is a journalist, not a VC. What's she supposed to do? Fund female entrepreneurs herself? And the fact that she hasn't -- that she wrote this article "instead" -- that's supposed to indicate that she's wrong? And for that matter...how do you know that she hasn't started such a project? You don't.

In case you're unclear, you're suggesting that the first of the two logical fallacies I presented is correct. Rephrasing it doesn't make it more correct.

Is it that the article was written in HuffPo, therefore it's wrong?

No, but that there are very few opportunities best exploited by writing about them on Huffpo.

Or is it that anyone who writes an article on gender imbalance must not really believe in it, because otherwise they'd be exploiting the problem, instead of wasting their time writing?

Closer. In a free market, any legitimate complaint can be restated as a business plan. "This doesn't work as well as it should" = "I could do it better." "This is overpriced" = "I could dominate the market by selling it for less." "Women are underpaid" = "I could hire qualified women for less than you'd have to pay men."

"... One could blame the industry's flirtation with misogyny that may shun entrepreneurial women in the Valley away from attracting attention. Another culprit might be the infringing expectation the industry seems to borrow from the 1950s (as recounted by AMC's fictional hit show, Mad Men): If you're a woman, you might get noticed for your work as long as you're attractive, not particularly eccentric and generally easy for a company to wear ..."

There is one aspect of silicon valley, hi-tech businesses not covered in this description, Startups and Startup founders. Why don't more women create hi-tech Startups?

I've often wondered about this. You don't need permission. You don't have to ask anybody. All you need is an idea and even that doesn't have to be a good one. You do need to be obsessed with making things and you do need to have a technical background. You also have to find users and make something they want. It helps if you can make your Startup Ramen profitable. It's not as if it's Rocket-Science. None of those concepts are beyond either gender. You don't even have to even be extremely bright, just more determined than you competitors.

There is one other ingredient that you need as a hi-tech founder for a Startup and that's another co-founder. This might go some way to explain the lack of Startup companies founded by women. They simply can't find enough like minded friends with similar interests. Women need to found more tech companies instead of working in them and for them. If more Women created their own Startups, it might go some way to reduce the kind of inequity in established companies. There is risk, failure is the norm. So build that demo and become a master of your own tech destiny instead of offering lame excuses like the one above.

You don't need permission. You don't have to ask anybody.

Unless there is a fear that VC/angel funding will be denied because the founder is a woman...

Not sure if this is true, just a possibility.

"Where the Women Aren't?" -- They are not learing CS for sure. My Computer Science class, had about 2 women and 40 guys.

I am assuming you have to be an engineer, or very tech savy person to be able to be in startups as a founder, and it seems that the lack of women in the techrunch award show, was about right.

In another anectodal evidence, I could tell where there were women. At the Afterparty!

A lot more women. Mostly nobody's, and few of the usual vapid gdiggers, and social climbers.

Also, from the 8-9 people I talked to in the after party, only one was an engineer. The rest were 'wanterpenerous'.

Maybe it's the statistically well supported paradox that men are overrepresented at the extremes, both negative and positive extremes. And start-ups, for various reasons not limited to risk, are a kind of extreme case of (self) employment.

"Caterina Fake, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded photo-sharing site Hunch"..."Disclaimer: I had previously worked at Flickr, one of the companies mentioned in this article."

Kind of confused there.

Maybe the environments and rewards of startups appeal more to men than women, and changing this would require changing human nature. (hah!)

How boring.

All of these deplorable "women in tech" articles fall into the following camps:

1. I'm more feminist than you! (written by men)

2. We need a different perspective -- which of course means perspective provided by genitals, not, say, people from different cultures (e.g. tech Africans), or different original interests like design, music, or architecture

3. I want more people to date.

4. I want more people other than socially handicapped, unwashed men to speak to/befriend, who understand what I'm talking about.

5. I failed and the first potential explanation I came across was sexism, and I'm stickin' to it. [1]

6. It seems I'm different, and so if I don't theorize about why I'm different, and explain it away by sexism (e.g. lots of women would do what I do, if the world weren't so damned sexist!), I might have to admit I'm just weird and not like other girls.

7. Look at me, I'm a girl coder, that's like a unicorn but with boobs!

This article is a mixture of #2, #6 and #7. ("Yes, we do exist!" -- listing a healthy number of famous tech women, and acknowledging that it "barely scrapes the surface" -- hmm, wasn't the article about there not being enough? Oh wait, I get it, to be good enough for the author, the women can't just hold respectable titles in big companies, or write about startups, or head up super-lucrative tech blogs, they have to found startups. And yet, somehow, the evil "anti-founder" sexism that stops women from founding companies, doesn't extend to "anti-founder-news-coverage"?)

And they often fail to take into account things like: A) women who aren't attention-seekers go totally unnoticed by lists like these; B) computer science enrollment is not equal to people who work as programmers; C) many programmers, especially women ones, work in nontraditional jobs like nonprofits and education, with job titles that are not "programmer". Also, they often seem to set up an artificially narrow distinction to keep out many women who would otherwise ruin their hypothesis.

For example, this article in particular mentions Leah Culver, cofounder of Pownce, which was acquired by SixApart, but not Mena Trott, who co-founded Six Apart and obviously made a shitload more money than Leah -- as well as now being, in effect, her bosses' boss.

There are tons of other sucessful, low-profile women doing things that aren't traditionally called startups. Nobody talks about SixApart any more because they weren't bought, and the Trotts don't court attention. Those seem to be the main differences.

And beyond that...

None of these articles EVER consider that tech is a weird industry to go into, if you're not obsessed with it. In the tech industry, the majority of jobs are like Office Space.

It's hard and not very fun to to achieve a moderate level of success in our industry if you're a normal, well-adjusted person with friends and outside interests/responsibilities.

It's much easier to achieve a moderate level of success in other industries -- which pay more, and offer more perks that women are interested in.

That is, in other industries, you can work regular(ish) hours, and not be fanatically devoted to the latest practices, and not worry about being upstaged by the 16-year-old prodigy who's willing to work 18 hours a day and sleep under his desk.

Compare to biotech, which while being way more technical than all of the TC50 startups I've heard of, has many more successful women:

"While the industry is dominated by men in many aspects... by some objective measures — such as patenting, or likelihood to lead projects — women are actually doing better in biotech than at universities. One reason, scholars suggest, is the more fluid approach to science favored in the business world."

-- http://www.boston.com/business/specials/bio2007/articles/gen...

Biotech is more respectable. Biotech has more concrete rewards. Biotech probably has more people who are interesting to talk to outside of work. Biotech obviously has fewer annoyingly prodigious 16-year-olds, because the university book-learnin' is much more critical.

This was even true back in the days of Microserfs. Anyone read that? There was a joke in there about how the parking lots at biotech companies are always empty on weekends. And that the smartest woman in the valley worked in biotech.

No wonder biotech has more women.

But hey, let's light up the pitchforks and try to convince more women to do programming instead.

[1] (I've seen this one over and over. I was especially amused to hear a woman at OSCON claim that OSCON in general, Tim O'Reilly was specific, because her talk was rejected. I was on the committee and I had rejected it. It was a terrible proposal and she was a bad speaker. Men do this exact same thing as well, naturally, but they use other flimsy excuses than gender.)

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