11 ms·

How One Hardware Startup Solved Silicon Valley’s “Woman Problem” (2015)

33 points by mattiemass 11y ago

SlashmanX 11y ago
That whole 'mosquito' thing is very odd. From reading it seems that this was a sexist remark and women everywhere have had to deal with similar comments when in actual fact it's nothing to do with her being a woman, moreso the fact that in her role, she was a tiny bit annoying. Anyone in that role, man or woman, would've had a similar 'nickname' just from the nature of the role itself
- steverb 11y ago
  It's possible it's a reference to her voice. But not having met her, I don't know. It's also possible, that were she a big burly guy they might not have treated her the same way. Either way, it sounds like the place handled it appropriately, which is awesome.
  - oh_sigh 11y ago
    > It's also possible, that were she a big burly guy they might not have treated her the same way. Sure, but he may have just been referred to as a meat head, a dumb lug, etc. Also, the lady was in charge of enforcing safety rules. People almost always hate that person, even if they are saving their asses. See how OSHA reps are treated on job sites as an example.
    - steverb 11y ago
      Definitely true. Heck, I hate the OSHA guy myself, and the union enforcement guy, and anyone else who it seems is trying to keep me from just getting shit done.
  - digler999 11y ago
    > were she a big burly guy Is that really a gender issue, or is it a threatening-demeanor issue ? What if she were a vociferous, large black woman who had an aggressive, threatening personality ? Still a woman, but at least as big of a "perceived threat" as a "big, burly guy". What if she were a rail-thin effeminate homosexual male ? Lower perceived "threat level", perhaps would have earned her the same nickname ? one of the many issues that makes this gender-division thing murky is that a lot of the time, but not always, men are physically larger and more aggressive. I suspect that more testosterone generally yields higher aggressiveness (and I've experienced this first-hand after weight lifting at the gym and generally feeling more aggressive ). My point is, its human nature to defer to a more aggressive human, and while gender typically has some correlation, it could be the aggressiveness (not always the gender) responsible for womens' collective withdrawal from the field.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
techdragon 11y ago
So ... can we men get a gender neutral term for "mansplaining" ? Men are not the only ones who do this. Yes the name comes from a male biased behaviour in the tech community but I have witnessed plenty of this out in about in non tech fields... "oh your an man, there's no way you would understand" or starting to explain something before asking if I need an explanation how it works, because why would a man ever need to know how a thing, like say a sewing machine, worked... Calling it "mansplaining" (which is in my iPhones dictionary!?) does nothing to help stamp out this behaviour as undesirable. It arguably provides excuses for women to engage in the behaviour since they aren't "men" how can they be "mansplaining", and contributes to its continued existence by allowing this "mode of interaction" to continue regardless of gender. Other than that. Awesome company, and I hadn't heard of the product despite having a need for something like that. So I may buy that milling machine in the future which is pretty cool.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >women to engage in the behaviour since they aren't "men" how can they be "mansplaining", Stuff like this is really bothersome. Another example is when a woman is clearly being a misogynist, but thinks that's impossible because she's a woman too. The worst and most sexist things I've ever heard were from white professional women who think the rules don't apply to them, epsecially if they are discussing younger more attractive women or poorer, less educated women. And in the workplace no less! I think we live in an absurd level of PC pressure and I think that partly explains why guys like Trump are doing so well in the polls. People are just sick of navigating this stuff and its all fairly arbitrary. Ignoring this isn't doing anyone any good, especially the Democrats who keep losing elections. Not sure what the solution here is, but I hope the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. The fact that 'mansplaining' is in the iphone dictionary is especially odious. Its a straight up slur. Being a tonedeaf know-it-all knows no gender.
  - parenthephobia 11y ago
    > Another example is when a woman is clearly being a misogynist, but thinks that's impossible because she's a woman too. Do you mean misandrist, perhaps? Misogyny is literally about hating women. A woman can be a misogynist, but only by hating women. A woman (or a man) that hates men is a misandrist. Somebody who hates people regardless of gender is a misanthrope. > The fact that 'mansplaining' is in the iphone dictionary is especially odious. Its a straight up slur. Being a tone-deaf know-it-all knows no gender. Of course mansplaining is a slure. Misogynist is a slur as well. That is the point of that sort of word.
alvern 11y ago
Coming from a machining background, the product they have created is a $2000USD mini mill with the largest tool being a .125" endmill. Their specs list a precision of .001". Now is that TIR, X/Y travel, or backlash? The work envelope is 5.5x4.5x1.35 which is small. This looks like a purpose built PCB mill. Does PCB manufacturing require a $2k+ mill? Is sampling a PCB not cheaper?
- jordanb 11y ago
  Haha yeah they could have just re-branded a Sherline mini mill, had better specs, and even paying retail for it they would have made a healthy profit at $2000 a pop.
- ISL 11y ago
  If they can make it easy for someone to use, and they get more than $2k of value from the thing, everyone wins.
- jkot 11y ago
  Affordable mill is not new idea for startup. This one used Atari :-) http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell
sawyer 11y ago
This is not a company where micro-aggressions will fly. This seems like such a toxic philosophy to me. One of the worst things you can do for a workplace is stifle honest conversation and criticism, and this focus on not "micro-aggressing" will do just that - the way it has in colleges over the last few years.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Businesses are not colleges.
  - escherize 11y ago
    Right, businesses collapse under their own weight when you stifle honest conversations.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      No, they don't. Go to the Fortune 500, start at the top, and spot the first company where you can have "open, honest conversations" in the manner of a college dorm.
      - beeboop 11y ago
        I don't think people are advocating for blatant sexism and harassment you see in dorms. They are advocating that a company shouldn't have an essay-length corporate policy on what their personal definition of a "micro-aggression" is and how you need to change your every day speech to remove vocabulary that 0.000001% of the population finds offensive and complains about on their tumblr page. I am frankly disappointed with how obtuse you are being about this. I expected more from someone like you.
        tptacek 11y ago
        "Don't call team members names, and don't make jokes about their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or age." doesn't require an essay-length policy. I think I just did it in one sentence. I don't know what to do with your last sentence. What would disturb me is if someone here believed I was sanguine about gendered hostility in the workplace.
t0mbstone 11y ago
The article states that they get more male applicants than female, but then it also states, "Women know where the women are" and that they have a relatively equal ratio of male/female employees. So basically, they "solved" Silicon Valley's "Woman Problem" by turning away a large number of qualified male applicants and hired from the smaller pool of females. Sounds like gender discrimination to me. A truly non discriminatory workplace would have a ratio of male/female employees that was in line with the ratio of qualified male/female applicants (even if that meant more males than females). Just saying.
- bryondowd 11y ago
  more applicants != more qualified applicants You leave out the possibility that the smaller pool of female applicants happened to have more of the highest quality applicants. That could potentially be explained by more quality filters being in place on women before ever reaching the application stage. What those filters might be isn't really important, but I could come up with several possibilities. They would be pure guesses, of course. Edited to add: This effect of course would decrease greatly as you scale up. For instance, imagine there are 700 men and 300 women looking for jobs in your area, and women have been pre-filtered somehow such that they skew to high quality significantly more than men. You can hire the best 50 people and end up with more women than men, but by the time you are hiring the top 600 people, you're going to have more men than women. So, this works for a smaller operation better than a larger one, at least for creating an observable result. That said, perhaps changing the hiring practices of many larger companies would have an eventual secondary impact on these mysterious filters.
  - t0mbstone 11y ago
    The problem is that it sounds like one of the factors they are using to determine whether or not someone is "qualified" is whether they are a female. The article clearly states: "It starts with the hiring process. Applestone doesn’t just pick through the applicant pool that comes to her; she goes out and actively looks for qualified women." So she is ignoring the male applicants and is actively looking for women instead. That's pretty much the definition of gender discrimination.
ameister14 11y ago
Ah, good. The problem is now solved. Silicon Valley is saved.
jeffdavis 11y ago
They should lead with their business successes (even if not profitable, they can talk about customer satisfaction, compelling use cases, differentiation, and growth), and follow up with "and we are also a great place for women to work, and we think other businesses can be, too". If you choose business as a battleground, then you are implicitly setting up the success criteria as business success. So leaving that out and just focusing on hiring ratios and employee happiness feels incomplete.
- Dain42 11y ago
  It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other. There was an excellent segment that talked about almost this exact thing on Reply All a few weeks ago. If you skip to the second half, I'd recommend listening to it. They talk about how businesses benefit from diversity, how diverse groups perform better and get better results than groups chosen just on "qualifications", and they also address the annoyance at the fact that "success" and "diversity" are seen as competing goals, in stark rejection of evidence. They also talk about how things that don't seem like a big deal can really wear minority employees down: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar/
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    "It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other." Offensive? We're not even allowed to disagree with you about meta-level issues now? Nobody is being insulted or harassed, no one is being subjected to prejudicial remarks about any facet of their being -- and yet it's still, somehow, offensive?
    - Dain42 11y ago
      By saying, "Pushing to get more even representation is at odds with business success or product quality," which is often outright stated and even more often pretty directly implied, people are basically saying, "Those 'diverse' people are inherently poorer workers with worse quality output." That's the subtext, and that's what I think is kind of offensive about that line of argument.
peterwwillis 11y ago
"It’s also no accident; a commitment to gender diversity is at the core of the company’s DNA." Some people make the tech industry gender imbalance out to be primarily driven by sexism/misogyny, when I think this article makes clear it's more about chauvinism and bias. If everything goes well, in the future we will have a balance of gender in the tech industry. But we will still be left with elephants in the room. People associate with, and hire, people like themselves. That extends to gender, race, economic status, education, sexual preference, religion, etc. The fact that this company has zero black employees is probably not because they're racists - it's more likely due to personal bias, which drives both hiring and corporate culture. I don't think this company has solved a problem. They're hiring based on bias just like all the white male-led tech companies. They just have a slightly different angle. (Or at least, that's what I get from the article, which may have been written with a very specific spin)
- reefoctopus 11y ago
  >If everything goes well, in the future we will have a balance of gender in the tech industry. Why are you so sure of this? What if the natural balance is 80% male? There are many industries where this is the case. Even if businesses become increasingly discriminatory against male applicants, it isn't going to change that those who spend time learning the requisite skills are more likely to be men.
  - peterwwillis 11y ago
    First off, there is no natural balance to an industry, because they aren't natural. They do have norms, though. Second, saying tech businesses are going to become 'increasingly discriminatory' against men is like saying that after desegregation and the civil rights movement we got 'increasingly discriminatory' against white people sitting in the front of a bus. Third, there's no scientific/factual basis for why men might spend more time learning tech skills. It's not like 80% of men around the world sit around all day thinking about debugging kernel drivers. More than likely it's social conditioning and gender stereotypes that lead to the impression that men are simply more interested in, or better at, technology-related skills. If you don't believe in gender stereotype, imagine if your mother taught your sister how to work on the family car, and told you to go back inside and play with your tea set because your pretty clothes might get dirty, and that this happened when your brain was still forming a very early world view.
Kenji 11y ago
An article about micro-aggressions on top of HN. I'm done. Seriously, I'm done. This is it. What are we, a technology & engineering community or a community of whiny crybabies, self-loathing men and assertive feminists? I want to write more on this article but I'd rather not. It speaks for itself. This article is the exact opposite of respectful interaction of the sexes. EDIT: Is this a parody?
jldugger 11y ago
> It starts with the hiring process. So this hardware startup solves the problem by making it that much harder for everyone else.

33 points by mattiemass 11y ago

That whole 'mosquito' thing is very odd. From reading it seems that this was a sexist remark and women everywhere have had to deal with similar comments when in actual fact it's nothing to do with her being a woman, moreso the fact that in her role, she was a tiny bit annoying. Anyone in that role, man or woman, would've had a similar 'nickname' just from the nature of the role itself

steverb 11y ago
It's possible it's a reference to her voice. But not having met her, I don't know. It's also possible, that were she a big burly guy they might not have treated her the same way. Either way, it sounds like the place handled it appropriately, which is awesome.
- oh_sigh 11y ago
  > It's also possible, that were she a big burly guy they might not have treated her the same way. Sure, but he may have just been referred to as a meat head, a dumb lug, etc. Also, the lady was in charge of enforcing safety rules. People almost always hate that person, even if they are saving their asses. See how OSHA reps are treated on job sites as an example.
  - steverb 11y ago
    Definitely true. Heck, I hate the OSHA guy myself, and the union enforcement guy, and anyone else who it seems is trying to keep me from just getting shit done.
- digler999 11y ago
  > were she a big burly guy Is that really a gender issue, or is it a threatening-demeanor issue ? What if she were a vociferous, large black woman who had an aggressive, threatening personality ? Still a woman, but at least as big of a "perceived threat" as a "big, burly guy". What if she were a rail-thin effeminate homosexual male ? Lower perceived "threat level", perhaps would have earned her the same nickname ? one of the many issues that makes this gender-division thing murky is that a lot of the time, but not always, men are physically larger and more aggressive. I suspect that more testosterone generally yields higher aggressiveness (and I've experienced this first-hand after weight lifting at the gym and generally feeling more aggressive ). My point is, its human nature to defer to a more aggressive human, and while gender typically has some correlation, it could be the aggressiveness (not always the gender) responsible for womens' collective withdrawal from the field.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

techdragon 11y ago

So ... can we men get a gender neutral term for "mansplaining" ? Men are not the only ones who do this. Yes the name comes from a male biased behaviour in the tech community but I have witnessed plenty of this out in about in non tech fields... "oh your an man, there's no way you would understand" or starting to explain something before asking if I need an explanation how it works, because why would a man ever need to know how a thing, like say a sewing machine, worked... Calling it "mansplaining" (which is in my iPhones dictionary!?) does nothing to help stamp out this behaviour as undesirable. It arguably provides excuses for women to engage in the behaviour since they aren't "men" how can they be "mansplaining", and contributes to its continued existence by allowing this "mode of interaction" to continue regardless of gender. Other than that. Awesome company, and I hadn't heard of the product despite having a need for something like that. So I may buy that milling machine in the future which is pretty cool.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>women to engage in the behaviour since they aren't "men" how can they be "mansplaining", Stuff like this is really bothersome. Another example is when a woman is clearly being a misogynist, but thinks that's impossible because she's a woman too. The worst and most sexist things I've ever heard were from white professional women who think the rules don't apply to them, epsecially if they are discussing younger more attractive women or poorer, less educated women. And in the workplace no less! I think we live in an absurd level of PC pressure and I think that partly explains why guys like Trump are doing so well in the polls. People are just sick of navigating this stuff and its all fairly arbitrary. Ignoring this isn't doing anyone any good, especially the Democrats who keep losing elections. Not sure what the solution here is, but I hope the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. The fact that 'mansplaining' is in the iphone dictionary is especially odious. Its a straight up slur. Being a tonedeaf know-it-all knows no gender.
- parenthephobia 11y ago
  > Another example is when a woman is clearly being a misogynist, but thinks that's impossible because she's a woman too. Do you mean misandrist, perhaps? Misogyny is literally about hating women. A woman can be a misogynist, but only by hating women. A woman (or a man) that hates men is a misandrist. Somebody who hates people regardless of gender is a misanthrope. > The fact that 'mansplaining' is in the iphone dictionary is especially odious. Its a straight up slur. Being a tone-deaf know-it-all knows no gender. Of course mansplaining is a slure. Misogynist is a slur as well. That is the point of that sort of word.

alvern 11y ago

Coming from a machining background, the product they have created is a $2000USD mini mill with the largest tool being a .125" endmill. Their specs list a precision of .001". Now is that TIR, X/Y travel, or backlash? The work envelope is 5.5x4.5x1.35 which is small. This looks like a purpose built PCB mill. Does PCB manufacturing require a $2k+ mill? Is sampling a PCB not cheaper?

jordanb 11y ago
Haha yeah they could have just re-branded a Sherline mini mill, had better specs, and even paying retail for it they would have made a healthy profit at $2000 a pop.
ISL 11y ago
If they can make it easy for someone to use, and they get more than $2k of value from the thing, everyone wins.
jkot 11y ago
Affordable mill is not new idea for startup. This one used Atari :-) http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell

sawyer 11y ago

This is not a company where micro-aggressions will fly. This seems like such a toxic philosophy to me. One of the worst things you can do for a workplace is stifle honest conversation and criticism, and this focus on not "micro-aggressing" will do just that - the way it has in colleges over the last few years.

tptacek 11y ago
Businesses are not colleges.
- escherize 11y ago
  Right, businesses collapse under their own weight when you stifle honest conversations.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    No, they don't. Go to the Fortune 500, start at the top, and spot the first company where you can have "open, honest conversations" in the manner of a college dorm.
    - beeboop 11y ago
      I don't think people are advocating for blatant sexism and harassment you see in dorms. They are advocating that a company shouldn't have an essay-length corporate policy on what their personal definition of a "micro-aggression" is and how you need to change your every day speech to remove vocabulary that 0.000001% of the population finds offensive and complains about on their tumblr page. I am frankly disappointed with how obtuse you are being about this. I expected more from someone like you.
      - tptacek 11y ago
        "Don't call team members names, and don't make jokes about their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or age." doesn't require an essay-length policy. I think I just did it in one sentence. I don't know what to do with your last sentence. What would disturb me is if someone here believed I was sanguine about gendered hostility in the workplace.

t0mbstone 11y ago

The article states that they get more male applicants than female, but then it also states, "Women know where the women are" and that they have a relatively equal ratio of male/female employees. So basically, they "solved" Silicon Valley's "Woman Problem" by turning away a large number of qualified male applicants and hired from the smaller pool of females. Sounds like gender discrimination to me. A truly non discriminatory workplace would have a ratio of male/female employees that was in line with the ratio of qualified male/female applicants (even if that meant more males than females). Just saying.

bryondowd 11y ago
more applicants != more qualified applicants You leave out the possibility that the smaller pool of female applicants happened to have more of the highest quality applicants. That could potentially be explained by more quality filters being in place on women before ever reaching the application stage. What those filters might be isn't really important, but I could come up with several possibilities. They would be pure guesses, of course. Edited to add: This effect of course would decrease greatly as you scale up. For instance, imagine there are 700 men and 300 women looking for jobs in your area, and women have been pre-filtered somehow such that they skew to high quality significantly more than men. You can hire the best 50 people and end up with more women than men, but by the time you are hiring the top 600 people, you're going to have more men than women. So, this works for a smaller operation better than a larger one, at least for creating an observable result. That said, perhaps changing the hiring practices of many larger companies would have an eventual secondary impact on these mysterious filters.
- t0mbstone 11y ago
  The problem is that it sounds like one of the factors they are using to determine whether or not someone is "qualified" is whether they are a female. The article clearly states: "It starts with the hiring process. Applestone doesn’t just pick through the applicant pool that comes to her; she goes out and actively looks for qualified women." So she is ignoring the male applicants and is actively looking for women instead. That's pretty much the definition of gender discrimination.

ameister14 11y ago

Ah, good. The problem is now solved. Silicon Valley is saved.

jeffdavis 11y ago

They should lead with their business successes (even if not profitable, they can talk about customer satisfaction, compelling use cases, differentiation, and growth), and follow up with "and we are also a great place for women to work, and we think other businesses can be, too". If you choose business as a battleground, then you are implicitly setting up the success criteria as business success. So leaving that out and just focusing on hiring ratios and employee happiness feels incomplete.

Dain42 11y ago
It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other. There was an excellent segment that talked about almost this exact thing on Reply All a few weeks ago. If you skip to the second half, I'd recommend listening to it. They talk about how businesses benefit from diversity, how diverse groups perform better and get better results than groups chosen just on "qualifications", and they also address the annoyance at the fact that "success" and "diversity" are seen as competing goals, in stark rejection of evidence. They also talk about how things that don't seem like a big deal can really wear minority employees down: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar/
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  "It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other." Offensive? We're not even allowed to disagree with you about meta-level issues now? Nobody is being insulted or harassed, no one is being subjected to prejudicial remarks about any facet of their being -- and yet it's still, somehow, offensive?
  - Dain42 11y ago
    By saying, "Pushing to get more even representation is at odds with business success or product quality," which is often outright stated and even more often pretty directly implied, people are basically saying, "Those 'diverse' people are inherently poorer workers with worse quality output." That's the subtext, and that's what I think is kind of offensive about that line of argument.

peterwwillis 11y ago

"It’s also no accident; a commitment to gender diversity is at the core of the company’s DNA." Some people make the tech industry gender imbalance out to be primarily driven by sexism/misogyny, when I think this article makes clear it's more about chauvinism and bias. If everything goes well, in the future we will have a balance of gender in the tech industry. But we will still be left with elephants in the room. People associate with, and hire, people like themselves. That extends to gender, race, economic status, education, sexual preference, religion, etc. The fact that this company has zero black employees is probably not because they're racists - it's more likely due to personal bias, which drives both hiring and corporate culture. I don't think this company has solved a problem. They're hiring based on bias just like all the white male-led tech companies. They just have a slightly different angle. (Or at least, that's what I get from the article, which may have been written with a very specific spin)

reefoctopus 11y ago
>If everything goes well, in the future we will have a balance of gender in the tech industry. Why are you so sure of this? What if the natural balance is 80% male? There are many industries where this is the case. Even if businesses become increasingly discriminatory against male applicants, it isn't going to change that those who spend time learning the requisite skills are more likely to be men.
- peterwwillis 11y ago
  First off, there is no natural balance to an industry, because they aren't natural. They do have norms, though. Second, saying tech businesses are going to become 'increasingly discriminatory' against men is like saying that after desegregation and the civil rights movement we got 'increasingly discriminatory' against white people sitting in the front of a bus. Third, there's no scientific/factual basis for why men might spend more time learning tech skills. It's not like 80% of men around the world sit around all day thinking about debugging kernel drivers. More than likely it's social conditioning and gender stereotypes that lead to the impression that men are simply more interested in, or better at, technology-related skills. If you don't believe in gender stereotype, imagine if your mother taught your sister how to work on the family car, and told you to go back inside and play with your tea set because your pretty clothes might get dirty, and that this happened when your brain was still forming a very early world view.

Kenji 11y ago

An article about micro-aggressions on top of HN. I'm done. Seriously, I'm done. This is it. What are we, a technology & engineering community or a community of whiny crybabies, self-loathing men and assertive feminists? I want to write more on this article but I'd rather not. It speaks for itself. This article is the exact opposite of respectful interaction of the sexes. EDIT: Is this a parody?

jldugger 11y ago

> It starts with the hiring process. So this hardware startup solves the problem by making it that much harder for everyone else.