25 ms·

Female founders who've had a great 2016

88 points by swiss2008 10y ago

dominotw 10y ago
Links to the lists 1. https://techcrunch.com/gallery/18-more-female-founders-whove-had-a-very-good-2015/slide/1/ https://techcrunch.com/gallery/18-more-female-founders-whove... 2. https://techcrunch.com/gallery/21-female-founders-who-killed-it-in-2015/slide/1/ https://techcrunch.com/gallery/21-female-founders-who-killed... I looked up people from first list on linkedin to see what path they took to end up there. One commonality that immediately obvious is studying at Ivy league/private university. Perhaps a more inspiring new year list would have been " where you are born doesn't seal your fate list", but thats not clickbait enough. 1. Alex Depledge - University of Nottingham and the University of Chicago 2. Minnie Ingersol - Stanford University and Harvard Business School 3. Tracy Young - California State University-Sacramento 4. Melody McCloskey - University of California, Davis 5. Robin Chase - MIT and harvard 6. Angie Nwandu - ? 7. Payal Kakadi - MIT 8. Maran Nelson - UT austin 9. Adi Tatarko - ?? 10 . Christina Lomasney - Harvard and University of Washington 11. Piraye Beim - Cornell 12. Valerie Wagoner - Stanford 13. Hooi Ling Tan - Harvard and Bath 14. Maria Ressa - ? 15. Danielle Morrill - ?
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Sometimes it feels like upward mobility is limited in the very institutions we uphold as breaking those boundaries.
  - bsder 10y ago
    Partially. But I suspect it's more a case of attending one of those expensive institutions signals "Having the freedom to fail." If you attended one of those institutions, you have backup if things blow up. People whose parents struggled to send them to college aren't starting startups. They're probably paying off loans and attempting to bank money for 5-10 years. At which point, they probably start a family and still won't be starting a startup.
    - unclebucknasty 10y ago
      I don't know about this theory. There is no shortage of people, including right here on HN, who've founded businesses. I'd like to see the rate at which alum from these schools found businesses vs everyone else; also, the percentage of successful founders in both groups. I do think that parentage counts in other ways, including as part of the overall network to which these folks have access.
    - morgante 10y ago
      Where do you get these assumptions from? My parents absolutely could not have afforded to pay for college without extremely generous financial aid. Thankfully, that's exactly what elite universities provide. I know plenty of other people who are interested in tech and startups who come from similar circumstances. Also, for the record, if people's parents are genuinely poor then they will not have any loans from an elite university. It's all grant money.
      - dominotw 10y ago
        'Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles'[1]. We already have an accurate system of measuring privilege in form of parent wealth. 1. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-college-admissions-2013102945841711416.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-...
        morgante 10y ago
        I'm not disputing that many students at elite universities have wealthy parents, but you can't just claim that anyone who went to an elite university automatically has wealthy parents. For one thing, it's very unfair to the people who have worked hard to get there despite not having wealthy parents.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Both of those linked lists are from 2015. Yes, there is overlap.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  I agree on a general level. The bay area tech scene is nearly as credentialist as the finance industry at this point. However... Danielle Morrill did it without a degree at all. She jumped into a super early startup with friends and was an early employee at Twilio, too. Her story is worth hearing: https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode-39-segment-founder-peter-reinhardt-mattermark-ceo-danielle-morrill https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode...
  - dominotw 10y ago
    http://www.femalefounderstories.com/danielle-morrill.html http://www.femalefounderstories.com/danielle-morrill.html > While I was growing up, my dad worked on startups in the financial services industry. > Eventually my dad started his own company and I worked for him from age 13 to 19. >I was extremely rebellious at this point and, despite scoring a 1390 on the SAT and a high GPA, I didn't apply to any colleges at all. Not exactly an underdog story. Almost nobody on the planet get this type of deal. Forget about jumping in with startup founders, I don't think most people know one in real life.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      That part of the story wasn't in the podcast :/ Still, I'm glad to see a non-conformist on this list :)
- morgante 10y ago
  I'm sick of hearing this meme that Ivy league universities automatically mean you were born wealthy. Top universities have, by far, the most generous financial aid you can get out there.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - rubicon33 10y ago
    I'm really skeptical that the financial aid you speak of is as accessible as you think it is. Speaking completely anecdotally, someone very close to me chose not to go to Stanford, simply because her family couldn't afford it. And that was with a scholarship. I've never asked her about financial aid, and if she investigated it. My guess is though that she fell into the category of middle class... aka, too rich to qualify for financial aid, too poor to afford $100K+ a year college.
    - closeparen 10y ago
      Upper middle class, maybe. This can happen when your household income is $200k. Not $55k (national median) and certainly not below. Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class. The line where this happens is a lower income in mediocre private schools, and a higher income on good ones.
      - chongli 10y ago
        Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class. They've got this thing nailed down to a T. Upper/middle kids can't go because their parents can't afford it. For a variety of reasons, lower income kids can't get the marks to get in to these schools so they never reach the point where financial aid would matter. This lets these schools preserve their elite enrolment while providing nominally generous support.
malloreon 10y ago
Will techcrunch publish a similar list for non-white founders?
- blowski 10y ago
  That's the problem with these kinds of lists - why not lists for gay founders and over-60s founders and disabled founders? Making lists of people in groups that suffer discrimination doesn't do any harm, but it's not clearly helpful either.
  - Melchizedek 10y ago
    It's especially unhelpful to make lists of people who don't really suffer from discrimination but instead enjoy various privileges, such as women and certain minorities. And the ones that _do_ suffer discrimination, such as the over 60s you mention, receive zero attention and don't have the support of a massive bureaucracy and hordes of virtue signalers.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    That an initiative to correct an imbalance doesn't correct all imbalances is hardly an meaningful criticism. It's true: there aren't enough technology entrepreneurs of color, and probably not enough disabled founders either. Start the thing that helps those cohorts, by all means.
- deleted 10y ago
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thesimpsons1022 10y ago
why is it so applauded that privileged women do well. Look at these people, from the most privileged backgrounds possible who worked at places like Mckinsey. Yet because they are women we somehow pretend they had it hard. Give us a list of people who aren't from the most privileged backgrounds possible, regardless of gender or race.
- exstudent2 10y ago
  It's extra annoying that they've co-opted the Rosie the Riveter iconography. As if these people know anything about blue collar labor (male or female). The people on this list, Techcrunch publishing the list, and it showing up on the HN front-page basically sums up why I (and others) view "women in tech" as little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard.
  - dang 10y ago
    > little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard There's obviously a good point to be made about class here, but when you optimize for provocation rather than exploration, that's ideological battle. Not only is that not thoughtful discussion in its own right, it damages that possibility for the rest of us. In other words, comments like this are actively destructive to Hacker News, regardless of the position they argue for—indeed, the thing they damage most is thoughtful discussion of their own argument. We wouldn't ban an account for a single comment like this, but we've explained this to you many times and asked you to stop abusing HN this way. Since you can't or won't stop, we've banned your account. These topics are divisive enough even without commenters coming to the well to poison it, and HN's requirement for thoughtful discussion is easy enough to follow for anyone who consciously chooses to. Edit: There are other comments in this thread making a similar point about class but more in the form of inchoate rage. Obviously, inchoate rage is not thoughtful discussion, so those comments also break the site guidelines. Yet I'd rate them as less abusive than this one. One can still connect with the human feeling behind them, which is exactly what is missing in the hardened ideologue reciting predefined positions.
xkiwi 10y ago
I lookup your list due to curiosity. So far I am on the third one, and I learned few thing from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ #1 Y Combinator hosted a Female only founder conferences in the year of 2015. Where is the Male only founder conference? #2 She explain why her spirit animal is a beaver in the video 23:13. Later she explained how a small honey beaver can take down the lion king. The method is "run between it's leg, and bite it in its balls."
- closeparen 10y ago
  >Where is the Male only founder conference? TechCrunch Disrupt? [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-diversity-problems-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2016-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-diver...
  - xkiwi 10y ago
    There is a big differences between "Not enough" and "Female Only". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diadksUjDm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diadksUjDm4
    - burkaman 10y ago
      Social dynamics often make it so that "nearly all male" is actually not that different from "male only". If you have better ideas about fixing the inequality, a lot of people would be very interested. I haven't watched your video, but "this female only conference is a good idea" does not mean "all female only events are always great ideas".
    - belorn 10y ago
      A bit of side note, but in the video the organizer give a few examples of profession that the girls can become from studying science and the first one they mention is veterinarian. When asking the girls themselves, they too say veterinarian as the reason to study science. Veterinarian is a profession which got around 90% women and only 10% men, with a trend that predict all women and no men in a few years. Kind of ironic example of gender equality activism.
dmsv 10y ago
I always feel sad when I see these lists. I've always heard once we have female founders then we will see companies that are useful to women. But all those companies looks so useless to me. I think the problem is that they're targeted toward rich women. I hope someday people will create companies for poor women.
- kobeya 10y ago
  Most valley startups are targeting rich/privileged people as customers. They have money. I don't there is anything unique about this batch of companies in that regard.
- deleted 10y ago
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- bsder 10y ago
  It is hard to get funding for a company that targets the non-rich. Your only option is to grow that company organically. And organically grown companies aren't going to make a "Top N List" of anything until they're so big that it doesn't matter anymore.
- Joeboy 10y ago
  I thoroughly agree about some of these (artisanal tampons, eyebrow pomade), but Open Bionics is a great thing and some of the others definitely look like worthwhile ventures.
  - cbeach 10y ago
    To claim Samantha was the founder of Open Bionics does a massive disservice to the CEO, Joel, who is the guy that actually came up with the concept (before Sam joined as a "bizdev" person). It's Joel who had been making bionic hands since his teens, and who spoke at the Hacker News London conference about his work. But hey ho - I suppose we have important social engineering to do...
    - dang 10y ago
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stanislawyer 10y ago
"The stats are nowhere near where women need or deserve them to be" Why would these women deserve success? Their backgrounds look like they've had everything handed to them from birth and yet we're supposed to root for them to have even more handouts? How about the thousands of poor founders who didn't raise VC because they weren't a culture fit? I hope 2017 is the year when we put to rest all of the mainstream media pushing a feminist agenda and focus more on individuals regardless of their background and the cool things they can achieve through raw talent (not their parent's money).
danso 10y ago
I support these kinds of lists. Like #BlackLivesMatter, the focus on a purportedly disenfranchised group doesn't mean that the "main" group doesn't matter -- but it's an acknowledgement that we see plenty of representation of the main group -- in this case, men -- by default. Unless you believe that there really are no barriers specific to women (and it doesn't necessarily have to be sexism) and that women just are terrible at business/tech, why see such lists as threatening to non-women? Note: There's a (very gray) "View All" button in the top-right of the slideshow. I was just going to complain about the hypocrisy of stuffing a list of purportedly successful women into a photo slideshow in a cynical attempt to increase page views.
- cbeach 10y ago
  I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way. Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait? Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead? To me this is like entering female athletes into the paralympics on the basis of their gender. Without any evidence of their consent.
  - throwaway4891a 10y ago
    There's a happier, less-dramatic sane-area leaving out overt misogyny and social-justice warrior cry-bully behavior. Also, in hiring there needs to be process removal of as many cognitive biases (ie blinding resume names/personal details) as possible to foster as fair of a messy ordeal as humanly possible. Another issue is the promulgation and veneration of taboo, protected groups as being automatically special proportional to an university-proscribed, identity/attribute(s) neoliberal caste system. Bollocks. I think such lists come from a positive intention for there to be less arbitrary discrimination and to motive likely-targeted/underrepresented individuals to succeed. I'm not sure how a special list helps motivate people with fundamental confidence, but instead may temporarily confer false confidence based on non-skill attribute(s) except by an inkling of almost getting on a generic list.
exstudent2 10y ago
BLM is a group that represents economically disadvantaged people. This list is pulled from the upper most echelons of society. Do you think it's ok to represent the wealthy as somehow oppressed? Please don't take my question as an attack, I'm genuinely curious how people who support these initiatives view wealth.
- tptacek 10y ago
  BLM is a group that exists to call attention to the ways that American society structurally devalues the lives of African Americans, most significantly by stubbornly assuming that African Americans killed by police officers (and by their surrogates, such as homeowners patrolling their property with firearms) represent justifiable homicides. It is not primarily an economic justice movement and cannot therefore reasonably be attacked on the grounds you're attempting to attack it on. This is, obviously, a tangent not relevant to article. 'danso was drawing an illustrative parallel, between the (implied) "All Lives Matter" rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, to "where's the men-only event" rebuttal to women-in-tech initiatives.
  - exstudent2 10y ago
    I'm not attacking BLM. I support it. This list however I don't support because the members are from wealthy backgrounds and are being presented as needing extra help.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      It's not even a valid observation about BLM.
      - exstudent2 10y ago
        We're way off topic but again I support BLM and do feel economics play a role.
        tptacek 10y ago
jimmywanger 10y ago
> We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance?
- throwaway4891a 10y ago
  TC rarely covers non-tech fields unless there's a tech aspect. Plus, we're talking about TC.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  The teaching and nursing industries both talk about gender imbalance in their own industry communication channels. The fact that tech receives all the attention in tech-oriented news outlets should be no surprise.
- megablast 10y ago
  > Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance? It isn't, they are, and have been for many years. Maybe you should read more nursing or teaching sites?
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    The lack of female engineers has made it into mainstream media. Why hasn't the lack of male educators or nurses? Doing a google search for "top 50 female tech*" returns many results. The same for male teachers or male nurses returns crickets.
- dang 10y ago
  This has been covered ad infinitum by HN flamewars and is eternally off-topic. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 and the links there. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260599 and marked it off-topic.
awt 10y ago
Would you say men have plenty of representation in K-12 education? Or in University, where more women than men attend? Or white men in the NBA? What about men being overrepresened in successful suicide attempts?
- dang 10y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 and marked it off-topic.
facepalm 10y ago
"we see plenty of representation of the main group -- in this case, men -- by default." So where is the list of male founders who kicked it in 2016? I would be less bothered by such lists without the undertone of "we need such lists because of sexism".
- dang 10y ago
  Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 and the links there. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 and marked it off-topic.
  - facepalm 10y ago
    Why do you make me off-topic and not the comment I replied to who started it by claiming over representation of men? Anyway, have it your way...
234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
I'm waiting for the list of successful female garbage collectors and sewer technicians. There's a place gender balance is even worse, virtually _100%_ men, but I don't see any big pushes to diversify those fields. Those two jobs also make a surprising amount of $$$ too.
- tomlock 10y ago
  Is there a ycombinator style site for sewer technicians you regularly check?
  - droidist2 10y ago
    There are plenty of non-programmer/startup articles posted regularly on HN, often about societal and demographic trends, politics, and history. Even on the topic of sewers and plumbing: The sewer men who changed the war: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021971 Why Copenhagen Has Almost Perfect Water: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10790058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10790058 The Nano Membrane Toilet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895347
    - tomlock 10y ago
      I'm not sure its representative of the interests of sewer technicians, or the contemporary issues they are concerned about, though. Op is "waiting for a list".
- dang 10y ago
  Sorry, but rehashing this for the 10,000th time is seriously off topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873 Classic flamewar tedium doesn't belong on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HaveCourage 10y ago
If this list was "Young founders" or "xyz state founders" no one would bat an eye. Please let men and women be differently abled. Equality is the opposite of specialization. Specialization is power in a complex world. Video on that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNz5WXwKHsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNz5WXwKHsU Sexual dimorphism has outcompeted equality. Equality lost.

88 points by swiss2008 10y ago

Links to the lists 1. https://techcrunch.com/gallery/18-more-female-founders-whove-had-a-very-good-2015/slide/1/ https://techcrunch.com/gallery/18-more-female-founders-whove... 2. https://techcrunch.com/gallery/21-female-founders-who-killed-it-in-2015/slide/1/ https://techcrunch.com/gallery/21-female-founders-who-killed... I looked up people from first list on linkedin to see what path they took to end up there. One commonality that immediately obvious is studying at Ivy league/private university. Perhaps a more inspiring new year list would have been " where you are born doesn't seal your fate list", but thats not clickbait enough. 1. Alex Depledge - University of Nottingham and the University of Chicago 2. Minnie Ingersol - Stanford University and Harvard Business School 3. Tracy Young - California State University-Sacramento 4. Melody McCloskey - University of California, Davis 5. Robin Chase - MIT and harvard 6. Angie Nwandu - ? 7. Payal Kakadi - MIT 8. Maran Nelson - UT austin 9. Adi Tatarko - ?? 10 . Christina Lomasney - Harvard and University of Washington 11. Piraye Beim - Cornell 12. Valerie Wagoner - Stanford 13. Hooi Ling Tan - Harvard and Bath 14. Maria Ressa - ? 15. Danielle Morrill - ?

akhilcacharya 10y ago
I couldn't agree more. Sometimes it feels like upward mobility is limited in the very institutions we uphold as breaking those boundaries.
- bsder 10y ago
  Partially. But I suspect it's more a case of attending one of those expensive institutions signals "Having the freedom to fail." If you attended one of those institutions, you have backup if things blow up. People whose parents struggled to send them to college aren't starting startups. They're probably paying off loans and attempting to bank money for 5-10 years. At which point, they probably start a family and still won't be starting a startup.
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    I don't know about this theory. There is no shortage of people, including right here on HN, who've founded businesses. I'd like to see the rate at which alum from these schools found businesses vs everyone else; also, the percentage of successful founders in both groups. I do think that parentage counts in other ways, including as part of the overall network to which these folks have access.
  - morgante 10y ago
    Where do you get these assumptions from? My parents absolutely could not have afforded to pay for college without extremely generous financial aid. Thankfully, that's exactly what elite universities provide. I know plenty of other people who are interested in tech and startups who come from similar circumstances. Also, for the record, if people's parents are genuinely poor then they will not have any loans from an elite university. It's all grant money.
    - dominotw 10y ago
      'Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles'[1]. We already have an accurate system of measuring privilege in form of parent wealth. 1. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-college-admissions-2013102945841711416.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-...
      - morgante 10y ago
        I'm not disputing that many students at elite universities have wealthy parents, but you can't just claim that anyone who went to an elite university automatically has wealthy parents. For one thing, it's very unfair to the people who have worked hard to get there despite not having wealthy parents.
minimaxir 10y ago
Both of those linked lists are from 2015. Yes, there is overlap.
xiaoma 10y ago
I agree on a general level. The bay area tech scene is nearly as credentialist as the finance industry at this point. However... Danielle Morrill did it without a degree at all. She jumped into a super early startup with friends and was an early employee at Twilio, too. Her story is worth hearing: https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode-39-segment-founder-peter-reinhardt-mattermark-ceo-danielle-morrill https://soundcloud.com/akharris/startup-school-radio-episode...
- dominotw 10y ago
  http://www.femalefounderstories.com/danielle-morrill.html http://www.femalefounderstories.com/danielle-morrill.html > While I was growing up, my dad worked on startups in the financial services industry. > Eventually my dad started his own company and I worked for him from age 13 to 19. >I was extremely rebellious at this point and, despite scoring a 1390 on the SAT and a high GPA, I didn't apply to any colleges at all. Not exactly an underdog story. Almost nobody on the planet get this type of deal. Forget about jumping in with startup founders, I don't think most people know one in real life.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    That part of the story wasn't in the podcast :/ Still, I'm glad to see a non-conformist on this list :)
morgante 10y ago
I'm sick of hearing this meme that Ivy league universities automatically mean you were born wealthy. Top universities have, by far, the most generous financial aid you can get out there.
- deleted 10y ago
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- rubicon33 10y ago
  I'm really skeptical that the financial aid you speak of is as accessible as you think it is. Speaking completely anecdotally, someone very close to me chose not to go to Stanford, simply because her family couldn't afford it. And that was with a scholarship. I've never asked her about financial aid, and if she investigated it. My guess is though that she fell into the category of middle class... aka, too rich to qualify for financial aid, too poor to afford $100K+ a year college.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    Upper middle class, maybe. This can happen when your household income is $200k. Not $55k (national median) and certainly not below. Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class. The line where this happens is a lower income in mediocre private schools, and a higher income on good ones.
    - chongli 10y ago
      Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class. They've got this thing nailed down to a T. Upper/middle kids can't go because their parents can't afford it. For a variety of reasons, lower income kids can't get the marks to get in to these schools so they never reach the point where financial aid would matter. This lets these schools preserve their elite enrolment while providing nominally generous support.

malloreon 10y ago

Will techcrunch publish a similar list for non-white founders?

blowski 10y ago
That's the problem with these kinds of lists - why not lists for gay founders and over-60s founders and disabled founders? Making lists of people in groups that suffer discrimination doesn't do any harm, but it's not clearly helpful either.
- Melchizedek 10y ago
  It's especially unhelpful to make lists of people who don't really suffer from discrimination but instead enjoy various privileges, such as women and certain minorities. And the ones that _do_ suffer discrimination, such as the over 60s you mention, receive zero attention and don't have the support of a massive bureaucracy and hordes of virtue signalers.
- tptacek 10y ago
  That an initiative to correct an imbalance doesn't correct all imbalances is hardly an meaningful criticism. It's true: there aren't enough technology entrepreneurs of color, and probably not enough disabled founders either. Start the thing that helps those cohorts, by all means.
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thesimpsons1022 10y ago

why is it so applauded that privileged women do well. Look at these people, from the most privileged backgrounds possible who worked at places like Mckinsey. Yet because they are women we somehow pretend they had it hard. Give us a list of people who aren't from the most privileged backgrounds possible, regardless of gender or race.

exstudent2 10y ago
It's extra annoying that they've co-opted the Rosie the Riveter iconography. As if these people know anything about blue collar labor (male or female). The people on this list, Techcrunch publishing the list, and it showing up on the HN front-page basically sums up why I (and others) view "women in tech" as little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard.
- dang 10y ago
  > little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard There's obviously a good point to be made about class here, but when you optimize for provocation rather than exploration, that's ideological battle. Not only is that not thoughtful discussion in its own right, it damages that possibility for the rest of us. In other words, comments like this are actively destructive to Hacker News, regardless of the position they argue for—indeed, the thing they damage most is thoughtful discussion of their own argument. We wouldn't ban an account for a single comment like this, but we've explained this to you many times and asked you to stop abusing HN this way. Since you can't or won't stop, we've banned your account. These topics are divisive enough even without commenters coming to the well to poison it, and HN's requirement for thoughtful discussion is easy enough to follow for anyone who consciously chooses to. Edit: There are other comments in this thread making a similar point about class but more in the form of inchoate rage. Obviously, inchoate rage is not thoughtful discussion, so those comments also break the site guidelines. Yet I'd rate them as less abusive than this one. One can still connect with the human feeling behind them, which is exactly what is missing in the hardened ideologue reciting predefined positions.

xkiwi 10y ago

I lookup your list due to curiosity. So far I am on the third one, and I learned few thing from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ #1 Y Combinator hosted a Female only founder conferences in the year of 2015. Where is the Male only founder conference? #2 She explain why her spirit animal is a beaver in the video 23:13. Later she explained how a small honey beaver can take down the lion king. The method is "run between it's leg, and bite it in its balls."

closeparen 10y ago
>Where is the Male only founder conference? TechCrunch Disrupt? [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-diversity-problems-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2016-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-diver...
- xkiwi 10y ago
  There is a big differences between "Not enough" and "Female Only". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diadksUjDm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diadksUjDm4
  - burkaman 10y ago
    Social dynamics often make it so that "nearly all male" is actually not that different from "male only". If you have better ideas about fixing the inequality, a lot of people would be very interested. I haven't watched your video, but "this female only conference is a good idea" does not mean "all female only events are always great ideas".
  - belorn 10y ago
    A bit of side note, but in the video the organizer give a few examples of profession that the girls can become from studying science and the first one they mention is veterinarian. When asking the girls themselves, they too say veterinarian as the reason to study science. Veterinarian is a profession which got around 90% women and only 10% men, with a trend that predict all women and no men in a few years. Kind of ironic example of gender equality activism.

dmsv 10y ago

I always feel sad when I see these lists. I've always heard once we have female founders then we will see companies that are useful to women. But all those companies looks so useless to me. I think the problem is that they're targeted toward rich women. I hope someday people will create companies for poor women.

kobeya 10y ago
Most valley startups are targeting rich/privileged people as customers. They have money. I don't there is anything unique about this batch of companies in that regard.
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bsder 10y ago
It is hard to get funding for a company that targets the non-rich. Your only option is to grow that company organically. And organically grown companies aren't going to make a "Top N List" of anything until they're so big that it doesn't matter anymore.
Joeboy 10y ago
I thoroughly agree about some of these (artisanal tampons, eyebrow pomade), but Open Bionics is a great thing and some of the others definitely look like worthwhile ventures.
- cbeach 10y ago
  To claim Samantha was the founder of Open Bionics does a massive disservice to the CEO, Joel, who is the guy that actually came up with the concept (before Sam joined as a "bizdev" person). It's Joel who had been making bionic hands since his teens, and who spoke at the Hacker News London conference about his work. But hey ho - I suppose we have important social engineering to do...
  - dang 10y ago

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stanislawyer 10y ago

"The stats are nowhere near where women need or deserve them to be" Why would these women deserve success? Their backgrounds look like they've had everything handed to them from birth and yet we're supposed to root for them to have even more handouts? How about the thousands of poor founders who didn't raise VC because they weren't a culture fit? I hope 2017 is the year when we put to rest all of the mainstream media pushing a feminist agenda and focus more on individuals regardless of their background and the cool things they can achieve through raw talent (not their parent's money).

danso 10y ago

I support these kinds of lists. Like #BlackLivesMatter, the focus on a purportedly disenfranchised group doesn't mean that the "main" group doesn't matter -- but it's an acknowledgement that we see plenty of representation of the main group -- in this case, men -- by default. Unless you believe that there really are no barriers specific to women (and it doesn't necessarily have to be sexism) and that women just are terrible at business/tech, why see such lists as threatening to non-women? Note: There's a (very gray) "View All" button in the top-right of the slideshow. I was just going to complain about the hypocrisy of stuffing a list of purportedly successful women into a photo slideshow in a cynical attempt to increase page views.

cbeach 10y ago
I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way. Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait? Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead? To me this is like entering female athletes into the paralympics on the basis of their gender. Without any evidence of their consent.
- throwaway4891a 10y ago
  There's a happier, less-dramatic sane-area leaving out overt misogyny and social-justice warrior cry-bully behavior. Also, in hiring there needs to be process removal of as many cognitive biases (ie blinding resume names/personal details) as possible to foster as fair of a messy ordeal as humanly possible. Another issue is the promulgation and veneration of taboo, protected groups as being automatically special proportional to an university-proscribed, identity/attribute(s) neoliberal caste system. Bollocks. I think such lists come from a positive intention for there to be less arbitrary discrimination and to motive likely-targeted/underrepresented individuals to succeed. I'm not sure how a special list helps motivate people with fundamental confidence, but instead may temporarily confer false confidence based on non-skill attribute(s) except by an inkling of almost getting on a generic list.

exstudent2 10y ago

BLM is a group that represents economically disadvantaged people. This list is pulled from the upper most echelons of society. Do you think it's ok to represent the wealthy as somehow oppressed? Please don't take my question as an attack, I'm genuinely curious how people who support these initiatives view wealth.

tptacek 10y ago
BLM is a group that exists to call attention to the ways that American society structurally devalues the lives of African Americans, most significantly by stubbornly assuming that African Americans killed by police officers (and by their surrogates, such as homeowners patrolling their property with firearms) represent justifiable homicides. It is not primarily an economic justice movement and cannot therefore reasonably be attacked on the grounds you're attempting to attack it on. This is, obviously, a tangent not relevant to article. 'danso was drawing an illustrative parallel, between the (implied) "All Lives Matter" rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, to "where's the men-only event" rebuttal to women-in-tech initiatives.
- exstudent2 10y ago
  I'm not attacking BLM. I support it. This list however I don't support because the members are from wealthy backgrounds and are being presented as needing extra help.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    It's not even a valid observation about BLM.
    - exstudent2 10y ago
      We're way off topic but again I support BLM and do feel economics play a role.
      - tptacek 10y ago

jimmywanger 10y ago

> We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance?

throwaway4891a 10y ago
TC rarely covers non-tech fields unless there's a tech aspect. Plus, we're talking about TC.
matthewmacleod 10y ago
The teaching and nursing industries both talk about gender imbalance in their own industry communication channels. The fact that tech receives all the attention in tech-oriented news outlets should be no surprise.
megablast 10y ago
> Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance? It isn't, they are, and have been for many years. Maybe you should read more nursing or teaching sites?
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  The lack of female engineers has made it into mainstream media. Why hasn't the lack of male educators or nurses? Doing a google search for "top 50 female tech*" returns many results. The same for male teachers or male nurses returns crickets.
dang 10y ago
This has been covered ad infinitum by HN flamewars and is eternally off-topic. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 and the links there. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260599 and marked it off-topic.

awt 10y ago

Would you say men have plenty of representation in K-12 education? Or in University, where more women than men attend? Or white men in the NBA? What about men being overrepresened in successful suicide attempts?

dang 10y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 and marked it off-topic.

facepalm 10y ago

"we see plenty of representation of the main group -- in this case, men -- by default." So where is the list of male founders who kicked it in 2016? I would be less bothered by such lists without the undertone of "we need such lists because of sexism".

dang 10y ago
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13261688 and the links there. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260049 and marked it off-topic.
- facepalm 10y ago
  Why do you make me off-topic and not the comment I replied to who started it by claiming over representation of men? Anyway, have it your way...

234dd57d2c8db 10y ago

I'm waiting for the list of successful female garbage collectors and sewer technicians. There's a place gender balance is even worse, virtually _100%_ men, but I don't see any big pushes to diversify those fields. Those two jobs also make a surprising amount of $$$ too.

tomlock 10y ago
Is there a ycombinator style site for sewer technicians you regularly check?
- droidist2 10y ago
  There are plenty of non-programmer/startup articles posted regularly on HN, often about societal and demographic trends, politics, and history. Even on the topic of sewers and plumbing: The sewer men who changed the war: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12021971 Why Copenhagen Has Almost Perfect Water: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10790058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10790058 The Nano Membrane Toilet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895347
  - tomlock 10y ago
    I'm not sure its representative of the interests of sewer technicians, or the contemporary issues they are concerned about, though. Op is "waiting for a list".
dang 10y ago
Sorry, but rehashing this for the 10,000th time is seriously off topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873 Classic flamewar tedium doesn't belong on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HaveCourage 10y ago

If this list was "Young founders" or "xyz state founders" no one would bat an eye. Please let men and women be differently abled. Equality is the opposite of specialization. Specialization is power in a complex world. Video on that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNz5WXwKHsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNz5WXwKHsU Sexual dimorphism has outcompeted equality. Equality lost.