YC Female founders conference wasn’t about women in tech | Hacker News Reader

YC Female founders conference wasn’t about women in tech

medium.com

2 pointspritianka6 comments

"And they happened to be all women. To me, that’s diversity at its finest."

Nice conference and all, but a rather puzzling take on the concept of "diversity".

Fair point - I wasn't very clear. Often diversity is simplified to gender or race, etc. In my definition diversity means including people who look, think, act, work and study different. I expected YC to be unidimensional with this conference and have people who are exactly like their typical accelerator applicant - young, white males, working on very technical products and startups - except female, attend.

However, when I met the other attendees I saw that YC had transcended that uni-dimensional idea and brought in people from all walks of life, technical or not, local or not. I think that's a multi-layered definition of diversity. YC did a great job of expanding itself from "tech startup incubator" to a facilitator of dreams, technical or not, startuppy or not.

Does that make more sense?

More importantly, it's not even really about women, at least from the presentations I saw. I.e. it's women sharing experiences and giving business advice, rather than giving business advice specifically for women. That's something a lot of similar events do, which might be useful to a limited extent, but I feel like more often than not it causes women to not get the same quality of advice that men get.

I don't think I fully understand. Is your perspective that the presentations and advice were useful because the speakers were qualified? Or are you saying that because it was not targeted to women, the advice was not as helpful?

What I was trying to say is that when people host these types of events, a lot of them spend all of their time on issues that are specific to women (e.g. sexual harassment), rather than giving advice on how to be successful in business in general. So I was saying it's good to see events like this that don't fall into that trap.

E.g. in college I took a semester long class on women and entrepreneurship, and the entire class ended up being about issues like maternity leave and the glass ceiling. How to actually start a successful business never even came up. So while this kind of stuff is certainly important to know about, I can't help but feeling like for the vast majority of the students, who were female and for whom this was probably their first and maybe last exposure to entrepreneurship, that this was actually a huge disservice to them. And this is sort of a pattern that I've seen come up again and again.

You are right. I totally agree with you! We need to focus on building and the how-tos on that rather than "problems women face". Too much discussion of the things that are wrong without a discussion of how to be a bad-ass despite them demotivates many people.

I once read an article about how bad the sexism is in the tech industry (particularly for startup founders) and it completely bummed me out. It didn't do me any good to hear of all the horrendous stories, it only demotivated me.

Luckily enough, our customers were busy emailing me about the product and various things and I had to snap out of it and get on with building my company :p

Reply on news.ycombinator.com