For Stanford Class of '94, a Gender Gap More Powerful Than the Internet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's unclear to me why they think that SV is more meritocratic than anything else. Sports still seems much more meritocratic than SV. Any industry that depends so much on getting funding hardly seems like it would be especially meritocratic -- at least at first blush.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/12/the-meritocr...
As for where technology itself will "go" next, I have no earthly idea. But you're right that in 2014, the Valley is a salesman's world. If you can raise funding, the balance of power between tech talent and fundraising has never been better for you.
One thing to remember about Silicon Valley is that it's still suburban California. It's fucking provincial. It has orders of magnitude more money (and the house prices reflect it) but it's even more like that "Agrestic" suburb in Weeds than anything in contemporary Southern California.
I still remember, in the 1990s, Northern California thought of itself as "the Good California" because it wasn't the norm for 16-year-old boys to get Ferraris and 16-year-old girls to get boob jobs as birthday presents. In 2014, any perception that Northern California is culturally better in any way is false. Silicon Valley is a lot more brash than Hollywood is. I actually like most Southern Californians that I meet.
I'm finding, as I get older, that West Coast privilege is more irksome and obnoxious to me than the East Coast variety. Most Harvard and Yale grads are down to earth and, to be honest, most Stanford graduate (except MBA, which is sociologically Undergrad++) students that I meet, I like... but this Stanford Welfare that produces Snapchats and Clinkles has got to fucking stop before it brings humiliation to the very idea of technology and sets us back 25 years. As I get older I hate the hypocritical pseudo-liberal privilege of tech more than the stuffy, blue-blooded East Coast variety. People are surprised by this, but those supposedly stodgy and "conservative" investment banks are far better places to be a woman, or minority, or just over 40, than VC-funded tech in the Valley. Silicon Valley is just a depressingly dysfunctional society and, over time, I think people are catching on to the fact and are starting to say, "I don't want anything to do with that shit". That's a real problem, because there are a lot of people doing great work (inside and outside of Silicon Valley) in technology, and I'd hate for their efforts to be hindered or set back by these stupid distractions coming from a few bad Stanford apples.
I'm not trying to take away from your critcisms of the west coast. But claiming that the Ivy league universities are more humble on the east coast is just blatantly incorrect. It's a status token. Prestige is a big deal.
Personally, I found that Chicago tends to be more blue collar. They bring in a lot of the homeliness of the Midwest. It also connects transport, infrastructure, and manufacturing.
The more I read about Peter Thiel the more I see him as incredibly smart and incredibly anti-competitive. He is open to admitting to it, but it's not a healthy business strategy to do that. (As how we've seen Redhat and others succeeded with an open business)
Yeah, there are things I dislike about the East Coast. (Oddly enough, I'm moving to Chicago in January. I'm really looking forward to it.) I'm not a fan of DC's culture. As for Boston, I like the younger crowd a lot, but there's definitely a lack of progressivism that I see in Boston companies.
New York real estate is obnoxiously expensive, but yes, the people are more down to earth and less pedigree-obsessed than their counterparts in San Francisco. I won't pretend that pre-existing social class doesn't matter in New York; it's just not as big of a deal on a practical level. It matters if you're trying to get into nightclubs or exclusive parties, or to get your wedding published in the Times, but it doesn't infect your work life nearly as much. If you flash pedigree at your job too often, you become a pariah. I know a trader who was mocked after his wedding hit NYT, and I've known other people to be fired (in finance) for having too much visibility (for non-work "society" shit) in the press. Whereas in the Valley, you have to become a celebrity to have a career.
The difference between Stanford and Berkeley is founder with 30% (after the first round) vs. engineer with 0.5%. The difference between Harvard and Cornell is a $100k hedge fund job with a $20k signing bonus and a similar job with a $15k signing bonus.
On Chicago and the Midwest in general, I'd love to see the Midwest take off in technology, and I think it can. It's an underrated part of the country. I was just, for this purpose, comparing the blue-blooded noblesse oblige East Coast mentality to the monstrosity that's grown up in Silicon Valley (it's unfair to apply its stereotypes to the rest of the West Coast).
If you want to go for a beer sometime after you move in. I would be willing to do that. Also, take a look at the CJUG, we're pretty active. I've heard good things about the Erlang and ruby group. It also seems that the code and cans meetup group is taking off.
I've heard about it. I've experienced Minnesota winters and N. European winter, so it's not new to me.
If you want to go for a beer sometime after you move in. I would be willing to do that.
Sure. I'm michael.o.church at Google's email service.
I'm pretty excited about the move, even if people think I'm nuts for going in the dead of winter.
Numbers, please.
Fair point. Sports may indeed be fairer and more objective than other industries - results are easily measured, and are objective. And it's clear that the tech industry is far from perfect. However, tech does have several things that make it fairer than other industries:
* You don't need a degree to get into tech. Sure, it can help - the article here is about Stanford, one of the best places to study at - but the industry also has plenty of self-taught people. To at least some extent, talent can rise despite not having e.g. parents that can pay for college.
* The tools you need to self-teach are cheap, and getting cheaper. Personal computers are common these days. For comparison, some sports require almost no tools, but some do (e.g. skiing). Music is similar (some instruments are cheap, others not so much). But most careers don't work that way. You can't be a self-taught lawyer or doctor or soldier or social worker.
* Talent has the opportunity to present itself in an abstract way. You can create an anonymous github account and prove your skills, and no one would know any demographic information about you. Something similar has happened in classical music, with people performing behind curtains so as to remove any bias due to their gender or race, and it was very helpful there. For comparison, sports doesn't work that way - you have to see people when they compete, so racial prejudice etc. might still have an impact. In tech and classical music, while things aren't perfect, there is a fairly natural way to diminish such effects, simply let people only see the abstract result of their work.
* Some fields absolutely require a strong mentor, like in academia (perhaps also in sports? I don't know). This disadvantages people that have a hard time finding such mentors, either due to prejudice on the part of potential mentors, or just a lack of connections, or weak social skills. In tech, some people benefit from mentors, but there are also lots of examples of people that have never had a mentor and do very well.
* Telecommuting is much more common in tech than other fields, even if it isn't ubiquitous there. We have the technical capability to let people work from home in tech, in most roles, and it makes things fairer in many ways.
* You make a valid point that industries that depend on getting funding are less fair than others, all things being equal. However, tech has been driving down the amount of necessary funding, through open source software, things like AWS, etc.
Again, tech is far from perfect, and has many flaws. Still, it's worth mentioning the good aspects.
> You don't need a degree to get into tech.
As soon as the market draws back, the non-BA programmers are going to be shut out (and most will have to go to school). I wish it weren't that way, but that seems to be how these things work. The more pedigreed you are, the less you fall.
That said, a bit of blue-collar street smarts can also serve you well. The people who really take a dive are the middle-class earnest types who aren't high enough on the socioeconomic spectrum to be protected, but were never low enough to learn how brutal the world can be when resources are scarce and contracting.
> Talent has the opportunity to present itself in an abstract way. You can create an anonymous github account and prove your skills, and no one would know any demographic information about you.
You can get an engineer position, but you won't become a founder that way. There are no blind auditions to raise VC.
> In tech, some people benefit from mentors, but there are also lots of examples of people that have never had a mentor and do very well.
What would you call the guy who offers the first introduction to the first investor?
As I said before, I'm not saying anything is perfect, and there are plenty of flaws. I would say that more flaws exist in getting funded than in having a successful career - which is most people in tech in SV.
I read this yesterday; it's pretty jumbled. It's an article that jumps around a bit describing how a couple of the people from the Stanford Class of '94, specifically David Sacks and Jessica DiLullo Herrin, made a lot of money using the internet.
It doesn't really get into the reasons there are fewer female than male entrepreneurs from that class, at least not with any depth, and then it concludes by saying that people from that class are getting into internet startups now.
In 1994 when I was at the University of Florida, only one dorm on the entire campus had "Internet" access. But it wasn't web access, we only had telnet. The moldy dorm was 100+ years old and barely had air conditioning. They called it "Fletcher Island" because we were cut off from everyone else--there was maybe 6 of us guys on the whole campus that had Internet. And there was only one guy that knew how it worked--he never spoke, was very pale, and he lived like a hermit back in the dark corner of this ancient building. The air quality was so bad that I got sick and had to move out. Maybe 2-3 women lived under us but we never saw them because the hallways were locked to keep the sexes apart.
I am concerned about the role of women in Silicon Valley, so it was nice to see that the Times' reporter notes that few women "described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley." It would've been nice if this article had more statistics about what specifically happened to the class of '94
Is the gender gap really a bigger problem, or is it because men in tech think they are more likely to socially benefit from championing gender equality?
The gender gap is fairly unique to the tech industry and it is pretty extreme. My graduating class at Illinois for EE was 95% male.
The gender gap is every bit a society wide issue. When I was in middle school and high school, I didn't know a single girl who was interested in technology. This says that this issue begins when girls are young and is either something imprinted on them by society or something that is innate.
I haven't seen anything that suggests that our industry is more able to solve the gender gap than the race gap. Both of these problems have complex causes that extend far outside of the scope of what one industry can fix, but I don't see any reason to fixate on one at the expense of the other, which is exactly what we're doing.
>The gender gap is fairly unique to the tech industry...
This isn't unique to the tech industry at all. The gender gap is present in numerous blue collar professions--some of which pay very well (electricians, plumbers etc...)
>...and it is pretty extreme. My graduating class at Illinois for EE was 95% male.
And I'm sure you can find many equally extreme examples that demonstrate the race gap.
There are other gaps as well. Rural vs urban, rich vs poor, single parent vs 2 parent households. Yet none of these receive anywhere the press that the tech gender gap does.
There are well-known differences in brain structure, such as the portions of brain used for language. Women have an edge in verbal reasoning, while men in spatial.
Male IQ has more variability than female IQ, resulting in more men in both the top and bottom percentiles. This may explain why more men are executives, and why more men are homeless (that's just my suspicion). Studies have also found that male IQ is higher on average by (variously) 3-5 points. From my personal observations, men are more likely than women to focus intensively on one activity, to the exclusion of all others, like skateboarding, or surfing, or computer programming, or gaming.
Men weigh more than women, have more muscle mass, have 40-60% more upper body strength, and 25-30% lower body strength, though with training the gap narrows to 0-8% (so perhaps this difference is more cultural). Men outperform women in most athletic areas, though perhaps not in distance running. Women live years longer than men and have lower rates of mental illness.
Women and men earn equal pay when you control for the job worked, the hours worked, and the amount of experience. I believe a study showed that single male and female professionals with no dependents, equal time in the workforce, working equal hours, earned equal amounts. The pay gap arises because slightly fewer women work high-paying jobs, they work fewer hours per week / take more time off, and drop out of the workforce at higher rates (e.g. stay at home parent).
A good summary of research and sources are available in Wikipedia articles like "Sex differences in intelligence" and "Sex differences in psychology". Certainly do not take my word for any of this, and please correct me if I'm wrong.
Personally, I think we should make sure that every person is judged based on individual merit, and be encouraged and supported to pursue what they're interested in with no preconceptions. That's what equality means to me.
Anybody who does not think this is a significant problem, has no business participating in the creation of products for any human to usw in their lives. None.
Why not take "happiness with current quality of life" as one? Incorporate that into your survey, and see how many men and women report back as being satisfied and happy with their lives.
I don't have all the answers, but one answer is: because the women were doing other things. There seems to be this idea that women who don't go into engineering become "desperate housewives". In reality they become physicians or bankers or lawyers. The article actually mentions that.
The reality is that computing is a pretty anti-social activity. Yes, there are meetings and clients, but your main job is being glued to a computer screen, alone. Frankly, I don't think it is a recipe for happiness, and women are smart enough to recognize it. Also, women have more options - a major one becoming mothers. So less incentive to try hard, maybe? Even the article mentions that the famous female entrepreneur eventually dropped out to become a mother. Although of course in the next sentence they have to reframe it as "went to Austin for her husband's job" instead of "to become a mother". Can't have that.
I recently met a young woman who was torn between studying mathematics or becoming a social worker. I did not try to stir her towards maths, even though I myself have a maths degree. What argument could I have used, except the prospect of higher income? Frankly I think social workers are probably happier than mathematicians on average.
I'm pretty sure, for example, that women tend to be less concerned about the potential income of their profession.
I wouldn't be surprised if women are on average less antisocial than men, for the simple reason that women are desired by the world. Men wonder how to talk to women, women wonder how to avoid being talked to (great simplifications of course). So computing would on average be less attractive (in the days before facebook anyway).