7 ms·

Startup boot camp Y Combinator illustrates dearth of women in tech

38 points by ssclafani 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
tkahn6 16y ago
Either on the whole females are fundamentally less capable of excelling in mathematical subjects or it's a societal thing. I believe it's the latter. I think the article hit it on the head: "girls are often told that's OK and try something else, but boys are encouraged to work harder." Math is fun because it's challenging and part of my motivation comes from my peers', parents', and teachers' expectations that I excel. I think the problem rises from a combination of: "Math is hard... let's go shopping!" and more insidiously "Physics is hard... let's go to English class!" I've seen a few really smart girls get frustrated with physics or chemistry, give up, write it off, and then focus their effort on english or history or some other humanities class.
- SlyShy 16y ago
  Girls have dreadfully few role models too, and certainly aren't properly encouraged by mainstream culture to cultivate ability in the hard sciences and mathematics. I think it'll get better in future generations, however. I've spoken to a lot of programmers who are now raising daughters who are curious, tech literate, and not afraid to act smart. That ought to be encouraging. It's certainly a problem in this generation though. I was just at the Minneapolis Hacker News meetup, and it was 100% male.
- gruseom 16y ago
  My favorite professor was a mathematician who did her doctorate at Zürich in the 1940s. Needless to say, for most of her career she was the only woman in the department. With the advent of feminism she would get called up frequently by activists or journalists asking her to comment on all the obstacles she faced as a woman (a request she steadfastly rejected), and also on how to get girls into math. Her routine answer to the latter was that if anyone had tried to "get her into math" she would have promptly dropped math and taken up embroidery. But my favorite story was when the controversy hit about the talking Barbie who said "Math is hard." She was phoned up and asked what she had to say about this. Her response: "Barbie is right."
marquis 16y ago
Speaking as a young woman in the industry whose startup has successfully turned into a solid small business and had to deal with condescending remarks from my male colleagues and clients (though very, very rarely on purpose), I would say it is due to both societal issues and the way computing is currently done. Another issue is that young girls just don't generally like to spend a lot of time alone, and technology is overall an isolating pursuit, at least while you hone your skills. It's pretty easy for me to sit down with my young nephews and hang out on the computer together, but my nieces get bored of staring at the screen and prefer to make things, so I get their attention more when we play with sensors and robots. I expect at some point technology will break out of the two dimensional confines, and young girls will pick up computing as much as they can excel at knitting and sewing, which I use primarily as an example of complex pursuits requiring attention to detail and logic but with a physical result. Give it time. Bring your girls up to love technology as much as your boys and they'll be participating equally but in different ways. Accept, and enjoy, that girls and boys approach technology with different goals.
- warwick 16y ago
  Could you give us some examples of condescending remarks that have been made but which weren't intended to offend?
  - saikat 16y ago
    One example - at a "nerd" event a couple weeks ago, one of the speakers said something to the effect of "it's really great to see all of you and your girlfriends at this event." Usually it's small assumptions like this. Another thing I've noticed, though without specific examples, is that people seem to assume girls at a hacker meetup aren't coders or will tend to give more attention to guys when discussions get technical. But of course this doesn't apply to everyone.
    - ahoyhere 16y ago
      The critical mistake is assuming that this is sexist. It's not. It's basic pattern-seeking, a simple and harmless assumption. Getting all up in arms over it is worthless! Everybody makes a million assumptions about other people every day -- you can't get around it, there are simply too damn many people that you come across to consider every one as if he/she were the first you'd ever seen. Sexism - and condescension - would imply they were saying things, or acting, in a way that said they didn't believe women were capable.
wheels 16y ago
Statistically founding a tech startup is at the intersection of two things which are primarily male-dominated at the moment: founding companies and IT. It's really only when they're multiplied together that it becomes so starkly biased towards males. My long standing theory on the tech front has been that the hook in the 80s and early 90s for kids getting into technology was computer games, which were largely marketed to boys. My little sister, however, was born in 1988, and by the time she was using a computer the primary hook was the internet, which (as I recall) young girls spend more time on than young boys. Like I had, she learned to program at a young age, knew HTML when she was 11, Java when she was 14, and so on. However, also like me, she had a lot of aptitude for music. I was fiercely discouraged from music. My parents saw it as a waste of time. Becoming a software engineer was respectable. Heck, I started college in 1997 when it seemed like about the best thing in the universe that a kid could go into. Now, my sister was encouraged in music. My mom moved 90 miles away so that she could go to a magnet high school for performing arts, my parents bought her a $3000 flute and drove her around the country to top conservatories for auditions when the time came. But even up to her senior year in high school she was considering a double major in physics and music, but the interest in physics was largely downplayed by my parents. Now, what happened there? Two kids, both good at mathematical stuff and music, same parents, wildly different parenting approaches. I don't think my parents in the meantime considered music any more useful – it was simply acceptable that she do something useless, while I had to do something useful. I think you see where this is going. In college I noticed this again – the computer science department was about 95% male, while the math department was only 50% male. The difference obviously wasn't in analytical abilities – I think anybody that could get through a math degree could get through a CS degree. No, the difference was that almost all of the girls were minoring in education and intending to become math teachers. I don't think that everything in the gap is nurture; there's probably some truth to chest-beating nature of starting a company, but the scales certainly are tipped heavily in the direction of boys by our upbringing.
- shadowhillway 16y ago
  $3000 is a sizable chunk of change for an instrument for a H.S. student but only moderate in the range of flute prices.
todayiamme 16y ago
Something that bothers me whenever something like this comes up is that children are assumed to be one dimensional beings. I know for sure that at some level, be it proprioception or some difference in processing information, male and female brains are different. However, the catch is that those differences may not actually be that profound. Children as young as 3 can pick up gender cues from the environment and base their behavior on that. I know that I did. I just knew that I couldn't play with dolls. I knew I couldn't talk about babies and things like that. I knew I was expected to pick fights with other kids. I knew what my parents expected from me, and in order to seek their approval I did precisely that. There are so many subtle societal cues which govern behavior. You tend to only notice them when you are carefully paying attention constantly. They are undertones in conversations. It is how people look at you. It is what they first talk about. It is in their facial expressions, and somehow unconsciously we internalize them all. What is even more interesting is what happens when a child is gender variant. Societies response to such a child happens to be quite telling, and unfortunately for a child, at least, such things matter. It mattered to me and it matters for any child. At that age approval is everything. So is it surprising that more women don't go into tech? In the coming years when this generation grows up in an environment of different expectations and viewpoints. I think that there will be more women in tech, and they will wonder why women earlier didn't choose it as a career. The point is that kids must be respected and loved not confined as beings who have to grow into pre-defined roles. Only then can such things change.
ck2 16y ago
Only 14 out of 450 are women? That's just 3 percent. Yikes.
- ahoyhere 16y ago
  Paul invited me to apply for YC but I declined because I didn't want to move for 3 months. (I'm a girl.) I don't know if that is still in effect, but it is ridiculous, and more men than women will go to ridiculous lengths. Compare that percentage to a course I just finished teaching, 12 weeks on bootstrapping - how to make your first profitable product, on the side. I had triple the percentage of female students - 4 women out of 50 participants. They were all 30 or older. I am reaching women that no seed fund will reach, and they are going to be successful. I expect that percentage to grow.
  - pbiggar 16y ago
    > I don't know if that is still in effect, but it is ridiculous, and more men than women will go to ridiculous lengths. It isn't ridiculous, it's the whole basis of the program. I did the program last winter, convinced that I could do it just as well from home. I'm now convinced of the opposite: doing a successful startup (excepting side-project type startups, which are valid but different) requires being in the valley. It may be ridiculous in the sense that it is a hardship, and if you think men will go through this hardship more than women, then I think we know why the numbers are so skewed.
    - ahoyhere 16y ago
      This will get me downvoted in flames but... ... yes, it's a hardship. It's a hardship that is, in a sense, one way to ingrain into you certain beliefs, by taking away your familiar surroundings and making you part of the lifestyle / surrounded by people doing the same thing. Just like the military. And religious orders. And cults. The idea that I proposed to pg at startup school could have been a real business, that earned real money. I didn't have to be in the valley. I looked at my life and realized that it would be asinine to pick up and move on the argument of somebody who if I moved, I could succeed. And, lo and behold, look at where lots of successful web-based businesses come from: Georgia, Brooklyn, Chicago... Yes, if you want to climb the suicidal face of the mountain, if you want to grow big and get bought, maybe you need connections more than great ideas, great understanding of people, or great chops. But then again, maybe you don't. And yet again, if you want to create a business that charges real money, it doesn't matter where you are - and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
temphn 16y ago
The most informative thread on the Internet on this subject is probably this one: http://www.plos.org/cms/node/75 http://www.plos.org/cms/node/75 That's an extremely informative, citation dense conversation which took place in the aftermath of the Summers/Barres imbroglio a few years ago.
nailer 16y ago
My wife works in an industry dominated by women and gay males. AFAICT, nobody in this industry thinks this is for any reason other than women and gay males being interested at the work and few straight males being interested. People get that, as a whole, gender and sexuality shape your interests. There's no scare articles about something being wrong with the industry, or large companies trying to hire straight male quotas, but where they exist, people like them and appreciate them for what is frequently a different and refreshing focus. And as a straight male, I'm OK with this.
- studer 16y ago
  So what industry is this, and who are their customers?
  - nailer 16y ago
    1. Fashion. 2. Anyone who wears clothes (from streetwear brands like All Saints that do jeans and t shirts to D&G to bridalwear to millinery to anything in between).
    - nmftt 16y ago
      There's a lot to say on this subject but basically it comes down to this: What you think of as fashion is designing or observing women's high fashion and not something like traditional tailoring, watchmaking or other more male oriented fashion. There are straight men even in women's high fashion, but generally in higher positions. You also have straight men in all parts of outdoor clothing or sportswear, which is more utilitarian but most of the time still has a higher price point than fast fashion. Why men's high fashion is more conservative than women's is another story. That being said. While women's gender role are stricter, men's gender role is much less questioned. Probably because of the disadvantages being less measurable.
      - nailer 16y ago
        > What you think of as fashion is designing or observing women's high fashion If by you meant me specifically, that's clearly not true. See the post you replied to.
roundsquare 16y ago
Random thought comes to mind: Does anyone think that Dan Brown novels might help get more women into Math/CS? They have a tendency to have female techies. I know at least one woman who was inspired by one of the novels to learn a bit about crypto.
- TimeForThis 16y ago
  Most of the sci-fi I've read have great female role models. Dan Brown is an awful writer so would be better to push better writers - get their films made! :)
- TimeForThis 16y ago
  Most of the sci-fi I've read have great female role models. Dan Brown is an awful writer so would be better to push better writers - get their films made! :)
ja27 16y ago
There aren't very many women going into tech because there aren't very many women in tech. Male or female, when a kid is picking a college or major, they tend to listen to their friends (and maybe even family). If none of their female friends are considering Computer Science, it's an uphill battle to sell a girl on that. I don't think most teens care as much about this as parents, but if they can't see positive role models already in that field, it's even harder to consider that field. I don't think it's getting much better soon. My daughter's on a First LEGO League team (4 boys, 2 girls) and we see lots of teams without a single girl on them. Our local Girl Scout council got a grant to fund several First LEGO League teams. We've tried to work with them to mentor any new teams but no success. (Now, maybe an all-Girl Scout team is unrealistic, but it has been done.)
starkfist 16y ago
Taking a cue from Philip Greenspun, maybe the real question is: why are there so many men? In my experience, at least half the people in "tech" are miserable. HN.YC focuses on the winners, not the losers. For every young startup hotshot, there are 1000 middling software engineers working on connecting the invoice database to the PO database and wishing they never got into the field in the first place.
david927 16y ago
YC is somewhat infamous for having a bias. Their reputation is that if you're not a college-aged Caucasian male, you need not apply. Of course, there is a dearth of women in tech, but I think it has to be exacerbated by this kind of subconscious preference.
OasisP 16y ago
Why are so many people equating math with programming with science? There might be some bleed between the subjects, but Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, none of these strike me as requiring particularly high level math skills.

38 points by ssclafani 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Either on the whole females are fundamentally less capable of excelling in mathematical subjects or it's a societal thing. I believe it's the latter. I think the article hit it on the head: "girls are often told that's OK and try something else, but boys are encouraged to work harder." Math is fun because it's challenging and part of my motivation comes from my peers', parents', and teachers' expectations that I excel. I think the problem rises from a combination of: "Math is hard... let's go shopping!" and more insidiously "Physics is hard... let's go to English class!" I've seen a few really smart girls get frustrated with physics or chemistry, give up, write it off, and then focus their effort on english or history or some other humanities class.

SlyShy 16y ago
Girls have dreadfully few role models too, and certainly aren't properly encouraged by mainstream culture to cultivate ability in the hard sciences and mathematics. I think it'll get better in future generations, however. I've spoken to a lot of programmers who are now raising daughters who are curious, tech literate, and not afraid to act smart. That ought to be encouraging. It's certainly a problem in this generation though. I was just at the Minneapolis Hacker News meetup, and it was 100% male.
gruseom 16y ago
My favorite professor was a mathematician who did her doctorate at Zürich in the 1940s. Needless to say, for most of her career she was the only woman in the department. With the advent of feminism she would get called up frequently by activists or journalists asking her to comment on all the obstacles she faced as a woman (a request she steadfastly rejected), and also on how to get girls into math. Her routine answer to the latter was that if anyone had tried to "get her into math" she would have promptly dropped math and taken up embroidery. But my favorite story was when the controversy hit about the talking Barbie who said "Math is hard." She was phoned up and asked what she had to say about this. Her response: "Barbie is right."

marquis 16y ago

Speaking as a young woman in the industry whose startup has successfully turned into a solid small business and had to deal with condescending remarks from my male colleagues and clients (though very, very rarely on purpose), I would say it is due to both societal issues and the way computing is currently done. Another issue is that young girls just don't generally like to spend a lot of time alone, and technology is overall an isolating pursuit, at least while you hone your skills. It's pretty easy for me to sit down with my young nephews and hang out on the computer together, but my nieces get bored of staring at the screen and prefer to make things, so I get their attention more when we play with sensors and robots. I expect at some point technology will break out of the two dimensional confines, and young girls will pick up computing as much as they can excel at knitting and sewing, which I use primarily as an example of complex pursuits requiring attention to detail and logic but with a physical result. Give it time. Bring your girls up to love technology as much as your boys and they'll be participating equally but in different ways. Accept, and enjoy, that girls and boys approach technology with different goals.

warwick 16y ago
Could you give us some examples of condescending remarks that have been made but which weren't intended to offend?
- saikat 16y ago
  One example - at a "nerd" event a couple weeks ago, one of the speakers said something to the effect of "it's really great to see all of you and your girlfriends at this event." Usually it's small assumptions like this. Another thing I've noticed, though without specific examples, is that people seem to assume girls at a hacker meetup aren't coders or will tend to give more attention to guys when discussions get technical. But of course this doesn't apply to everyone.
  - ahoyhere 16y ago
    The critical mistake is assuming that this is sexist. It's not. It's basic pattern-seeking, a simple and harmless assumption. Getting all up in arms over it is worthless! Everybody makes a million assumptions about other people every day -- you can't get around it, there are simply too damn many people that you come across to consider every one as if he/she were the first you'd ever seen. Sexism - and condescension - would imply they were saying things, or acting, in a way that said they didn't believe women were capable.

wheels 16y ago

Statistically founding a tech startup is at the intersection of two things which are primarily male-dominated at the moment: founding companies and IT. It's really only when they're multiplied together that it becomes so starkly biased towards males. My long standing theory on the tech front has been that the hook in the 80s and early 90s for kids getting into technology was computer games, which were largely marketed to boys. My little sister, however, was born in 1988, and by the time she was using a computer the primary hook was the internet, which (as I recall) young girls spend more time on than young boys. Like I had, she learned to program at a young age, knew HTML when she was 11, Java when she was 14, and so on. However, also like me, she had a lot of aptitude for music. I was fiercely discouraged from music. My parents saw it as a waste of time. Becoming a software engineer was respectable. Heck, I started college in 1997 when it seemed like about the best thing in the universe that a kid could go into. Now, my sister was encouraged in music. My mom moved 90 miles away so that she could go to a magnet high school for performing arts, my parents bought her a $3000 flute and drove her around the country to top conservatories for auditions when the time came. But even up to her senior year in high school she was considering a double major in physics and music, but the interest in physics was largely downplayed by my parents. Now, what happened there? Two kids, both good at mathematical stuff and music, same parents, wildly different parenting approaches. I don't think my parents in the meantime considered music any more useful – it was simply acceptable that she do something useless, while I had to do something useful. I think you see where this is going. In college I noticed this again – the computer science department was about 95% male, while the math department was only 50% male. The difference obviously wasn't in analytical abilities – I think anybody that could get through a math degree could get through a CS degree. No, the difference was that almost all of the girls were minoring in education and intending to become math teachers. I don't think that everything in the gap is nurture; there's probably some truth to chest-beating nature of starting a company, but the scales certainly are tipped heavily in the direction of boys by our upbringing.

shadowhillway 16y ago
$3000 is a sizable chunk of change for an instrument for a H.S. student but only moderate in the range of flute prices.

todayiamme 16y ago

Something that bothers me whenever something like this comes up is that children are assumed to be one dimensional beings. I know for sure that at some level, be it proprioception or some difference in processing information, male and female brains are different. However, the catch is that those differences may not actually be that profound. Children as young as 3 can pick up gender cues from the environment and base their behavior on that. I know that I did. I just knew that I couldn't play with dolls. I knew I couldn't talk about babies and things like that. I knew I was expected to pick fights with other kids. I knew what my parents expected from me, and in order to seek their approval I did precisely that. There are so many subtle societal cues which govern behavior. You tend to only notice them when you are carefully paying attention constantly. They are undertones in conversations. It is how people look at you. It is what they first talk about. It is in their facial expressions, and somehow unconsciously we internalize them all. What is even more interesting is what happens when a child is gender variant. Societies response to such a child happens to be quite telling, and unfortunately for a child, at least, such things matter. It mattered to me and it matters for any child. At that age approval is everything. So is it surprising that more women don't go into tech? In the coming years when this generation grows up in an environment of different expectations and viewpoints. I think that there will be more women in tech, and they will wonder why women earlier didn't choose it as a career. The point is that kids must be respected and loved not confined as beings who have to grow into pre-defined roles. Only then can such things change.

ck2 16y ago

Only 14 out of 450 are women? That's just 3 percent. Yikes.

ahoyhere 16y ago
Paul invited me to apply for YC but I declined because I didn't want to move for 3 months. (I'm a girl.) I don't know if that is still in effect, but it is ridiculous, and more men than women will go to ridiculous lengths. Compare that percentage to a course I just finished teaching, 12 weeks on bootstrapping - how to make your first profitable product, on the side. I had triple the percentage of female students - 4 women out of 50 participants. They were all 30 or older. I am reaching women that no seed fund will reach, and they are going to be successful. I expect that percentage to grow.
- pbiggar 16y ago
  > I don't know if that is still in effect, but it is ridiculous, and more men than women will go to ridiculous lengths. It isn't ridiculous, it's the whole basis of the program. I did the program last winter, convinced that I could do it just as well from home. I'm now convinced of the opposite: doing a successful startup (excepting side-project type startups, which are valid but different) requires being in the valley. It may be ridiculous in the sense that it is a hardship, and if you think men will go through this hardship more than women, then I think we know why the numbers are so skewed.
  - ahoyhere 16y ago
    This will get me downvoted in flames but... ... yes, it's a hardship. It's a hardship that is, in a sense, one way to ingrain into you certain beliefs, by taking away your familiar surroundings and making you part of the lifestyle / surrounded by people doing the same thing. Just like the military. And religious orders. And cults. The idea that I proposed to pg at startup school could have been a real business, that earned real money. I didn't have to be in the valley. I looked at my life and realized that it would be asinine to pick up and move on the argument of somebody who if I moved, I could succeed. And, lo and behold, look at where lots of successful web-based businesses come from: Georgia, Brooklyn, Chicago... Yes, if you want to climb the suicidal face of the mountain, if you want to grow big and get bought, maybe you need connections more than great ideas, great understanding of people, or great chops. But then again, maybe you don't. And yet again, if you want to create a business that charges real money, it doesn't matter where you are - and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

temphn 16y ago

The most informative thread on the Internet on this subject is probably this one: http://www.plos.org/cms/node/75 http://www.plos.org/cms/node/75 That's an extremely informative, citation dense conversation which took place in the aftermath of the Summers/Barres imbroglio a few years ago.

nailer 16y ago

My wife works in an industry dominated by women and gay males. AFAICT, nobody in this industry thinks this is for any reason other than women and gay males being interested at the work and few straight males being interested. People get that, as a whole, gender and sexuality shape your interests. There's no scare articles about something being wrong with the industry, or large companies trying to hire straight male quotas, but where they exist, people like them and appreciate them for what is frequently a different and refreshing focus. And as a straight male, I'm OK with this.

studer 16y ago
So what industry is this, and who are their customers?
- nailer 16y ago
  1. Fashion. 2. Anyone who wears clothes (from streetwear brands like All Saints that do jeans and t shirts to D&G to bridalwear to millinery to anything in between).
  - nmftt 16y ago
    There's a lot to say on this subject but basically it comes down to this: What you think of as fashion is designing or observing women's high fashion and not something like traditional tailoring, watchmaking or other more male oriented fashion. There are straight men even in women's high fashion, but generally in higher positions. You also have straight men in all parts of outdoor clothing or sportswear, which is more utilitarian but most of the time still has a higher price point than fast fashion. Why men's high fashion is more conservative than women's is another story. That being said. While women's gender role are stricter, men's gender role is much less questioned. Probably because of the disadvantages being less measurable.
    - nailer 16y ago
      > What you think of as fashion is designing or observing women's high fashion If by you meant me specifically, that's clearly not true. See the post you replied to.

roundsquare 16y ago

Random thought comes to mind: Does anyone think that Dan Brown novels might help get more women into Math/CS? They have a tendency to have female techies. I know at least one woman who was inspired by one of the novels to learn a bit about crypto.

TimeForThis 16y ago
Most of the sci-fi I've read have great female role models. Dan Brown is an awful writer so would be better to push better writers - get their films made! :)
TimeForThis 16y ago
Most of the sci-fi I've read have great female role models. Dan Brown is an awful writer so would be better to push better writers - get their films made! :)

ja27 16y ago

There aren't very many women going into tech because there aren't very many women in tech. Male or female, when a kid is picking a college or major, they tend to listen to their friends (and maybe even family). If none of their female friends are considering Computer Science, it's an uphill battle to sell a girl on that. I don't think most teens care as much about this as parents, but if they can't see positive role models already in that field, it's even harder to consider that field. I don't think it's getting much better soon. My daughter's on a First LEGO League team (4 boys, 2 girls) and we see lots of teams without a single girl on them. Our local Girl Scout council got a grant to fund several First LEGO League teams. We've tried to work with them to mentor any new teams but no success. (Now, maybe an all-Girl Scout team is unrealistic, but it has been done.)

starkfist 16y ago

Taking a cue from Philip Greenspun, maybe the real question is: why are there so many men? In my experience, at least half the people in "tech" are miserable. HN.YC focuses on the winners, not the losers. For every young startup hotshot, there are 1000 middling software engineers working on connecting the invoice database to the PO database and wishing they never got into the field in the first place.

david927 16y ago

YC is somewhat infamous for having a bias. Their reputation is that if you're not a college-aged Caucasian male, you need not apply. Of course, there is a dearth of women in tech, but I think it has to be exacerbated by this kind of subconscious preference.

OasisP 16y ago

Why are so many people equating math with programming with science? There might be some bleed between the subjects, but Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, none of these strike me as requiring particularly high level math skills.