8 ms·

XX Combinator

39 points by jonpaul 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
TimeForThis 16y ago
I'm all for affirmative action where it's done carefully but I think in this case, it should be more about encouraging and highlighting women in tech. Women need role models in tech and a lot of women would probably flourish more easily working with other women in tech. Although you can be gender-blind to a certain extent, you do know if the person you're working with is a man or a woman and you have cultural stereotypes to uncondition yourself from. However, I don't believe forcing a mono-gendered environment is going to help narrow the gap between male & female techies and may just widen it instead. It also sounds like they're tackling problems traditionally associated with women, i.e. family responsibilities. Why assume this is a woman's problem in the first place? Even if the majority of women are primarily responsible for the family, sticking with that premise will only further that view and excludes men who are responsible primarily for the family.
zitterbewegung 16y ago
Its sort of ironic that Jessica Livingston is on the ycombinator team. Is she not a hacker? I really don't think she isn't...
- presidentender 16y ago
  Please stop stacking your negatives. I can't read that last sentence.
  - zitterbewegung 16y ago
    Sorry it should read "Isn't jessica livingston a hacker because she is part of ycombinator?"
bdr 16y ago
How about a women-only hacker space? That might create more female founders (of any age) in the long-term. Also, one thing Tereza mentioned, that "women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing", could be seen more as a problem to be addressed than a constraint to be worked around.
- mctavjb9 16y ago
  I'm all for women hackers/entrepreneurs self-organizing on an informal level and comparing notes, but I must confess that I have the same visceral reaction to women-only hacker spaces that I did to girls-only math classes when I was in 6th grade. Whatever floats your boat, but I've always believed that it shouldn't be about lacking a Y chromosome, it should be about doing the hacking/learning the math. I may be in the minority of the minority, but I would much prefer to build my business surrounded by people with a diversity of perspectives who could provide flashes of insight that would never occur to me as a typical INTJ scientist (although not a typical 30-something female, clearly). Narcissistic nutcases-- there are plenty of both genders-- are a fact of life. I believe that the status quo is not going to evolve much through anything that can be construed by naysayers as affirmative action. Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done. Laura Finton, founder of oneforty and a Tech Stars grad is a great example. She started her company as a single mom with young kids as a solo founder with no programming skills. Even though I'm not a Twitter person at all, I take my hat off to her. She's taking the time to tell her story to the Boston entrepreneurial community and leading by example.
  - TimeForThis 16y ago
    > Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done. I don't think it's that simple though. For a majority change, positive feedback is required along the lifecyle from knowing nothing to loving it and having entrepreneurial aspirations. I think the main problem is the mostly invisible peer pressure to do something else - not the peer pressure to not do something. This is why more female role models are needed and more tech-oriented schooling from a young age and more gender neutral literature, etc.
jergosh 16y ago
Waiting for XXX combinator...
- jrnkntl 16y ago
  I had that idea some time ago but looking at the problems of regulation I let it go. I guess there isn't really a real platform for this that isn't bloated with bots, spam and ads.
jrnkntl 16y ago
If so, we need to rename Y Combinator to XY Combinator.
- nehan 16y ago
  Is that even necessary? It already is XY Combinator -- only 14 women out of 450 people in ycombinator total -- 3.1%. That's pathetic.
  - sp332 16y ago
    YC is not anti-women, or whatever. They're biased toward traits that correlate with gender. They're not biased against women specifically or intentionally. It's incidental. The proportion of the general population that has applied to YC is vanishingly small. There is plenty of room for incubators with different priorities, and different intentional and incidental biases. Do you think YC is adversely affecting the startup landscape?
  - petercooper 16y ago
    How does that tie up with the application rates? If only 2-5% of applicants were women, the end result merely reflects reality. What percentage of people in YCombinator are black, gay, Muslim, or otherwise? Would low percentages of people with these labels be "pathetic"?
    - nehan 16y ago
      What reality? Even if that were the case, I think it's worth questioning why only 2-5% of applicants are women.
  - hnal943 16y ago
    This sounds like critism, but you are you critising? Women? Y-Combinator? "Society?"
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
psyklic 16y ago
So ... encourage 40yo women to enter the space by lowering the barrier of entry? Doesn't this seem sub-optimal for investors?
- TimeForThis 16y ago
  Where does it say to lower the barrier of entry?
  - psyklic 16y ago
    The assumption is that these women are just as capable as Y Combinator applicants, but that the program is biased against them. Even if you believe this, any time you restrict the applicant pool arbitrarily (by gender/etc), you will lose some of the best applicants. For example, you will likely at least double the great applicants by allowing 40+ y/o males to enter as well. Hence, it just doesn't make sense as an investor to participate in "XX Combinator."
    - TimeForThis 16y ago
      I still don't get that this means 'lower the barrier' though. Doesn't it mean raise one impenetrable barrier, i.e. XY? If the same number of XXs exist then the number will still be the same but fewer people will apply. If more women apply as a result of good PR about it being woman-friendly then they still may not get accepted on the same grounds as any other.
w00pla 16y ago
Really? There are always complaints about women in technology. Yet when I spent my Saturday nights in an underground lab, there weren’t a lot of women in the lab. The bar and social spots on the humanities side were full of them though. Is it okay to have double standards? If we make women only organizations to promote things, is it okay if we make men only organizations? If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?
- diN0bot 16y ago
  i think that's what the article is trying to say. 22-yr-old women are not going to spend their nights in an underground lab (jesus christ!). a 40-yr-old woman has a different perspective and capability. X-only in terms of constituents is always dangerous, of course. groups should aim to create a specific culture where Y is not tolerated, but where individuals are free to join the community within the constraints of the culture. eg, hacker news.
  - tibbon 16y ago
    Why shouldn't the 22-yr old woman spend their nights hacking like we do? The article just dismisses women kicking ass in their 20's because they, "like to be experienced first" or something like that? Then totally dismisses their 30's due to children. Guess what, if you're serious about running a business then children are often hard to fit into that picture. You can't have everything. I can't imagine waiting until my 40's to start hitting the ground running as fast as I can. Nor should women. The women I know who have done various accelerators, including y-combinator, were hackers and not interested in having children immediately. They were more interested in doing amazing things as goal #1
- sprout 16y ago
  I think organizations to get men into teaching and nursing would be valuable. Teaching especially. When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink. I think you're mostly making a strawman argument. I don't know what your opinion on the matter is, but I think that most self-described feminists would agree that a dearth of men in teaching is just as much a problem as a dearth of women in engineering.
diN0bot 16y ago
i think there's likely a minimal activation number where if there aren't enough women in a particular hacker space then the women who do come by don't stick. as a woman myself, being a 40-yr-old entrepreneur makes sense in a dozen ways. one less important but rather interesting way is that one is more likely to be interacting with 40-yr-old males. i must say that most young men are rather self-minded. male hackers traditionally develop group process and team-supporting after a prolonged technical and super-independence+confidence phase. women tend to develop differently. once everyone matures and self actualizes interaction becomes awesome :-)
- starkfist 16y ago
  This will sound supremely sexist, but... I currently work in an office with tons of women. Whenever you read something about gender in the workplace, there is a lot of talk about how women are team-oriented and cooperative. However, in my experience this is not true at all. The women in my office are shockingly mean to each other... not a day goes by without someone sobbing and fleeing to the women's restroom. At companywide events, the talk is always about who did what backstabbing maneuver to whomever else, why this woman doesn't deserve this promotion, i can't believe she wore that to the office, she's probably sleeping with the VP of Sales, etc etc.
  - bitwize 16y ago
    As a rule, women tend to be more socially engaged -- but there's two sides to every Schwartz: an upside and a downside, and the downside here is a certain degree of cattiness and backstabbing that even my female friends complain of. (I tend to hang with particularly forthright people.)
  - nmftt 16y ago
    Too me it sound like a symptom of too many women at the same level and inability of management to handle the situation. I've worked with both male and female sports teams, and I would say that there's about the same amount of friction. I do think that men generally are raised with more "teamwork" in mind, i.e. more men do team sports. Just seem like a reason to get more female managers.
samd 16y ago
You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services. If we had an adequate social support system there wouldn't have to be such a trade off between work and family.
- hnal943 16y ago
  You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services. Who's the you in this sentence? The government? Investors? This strikes me as a tautology. Just about anyone would start a company if the risk and sacrifices involved were mitigated by a benevolent 3rd party.
- petercooper 16y ago
  You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services. Less of the "women" and more of the "people," please. Many men are involved in child care and housework in a significant way, and similarly have to make trade offs between work and family.
petercooper 16y ago
Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it. What does this borderline-sexist generalization even mean? First, there aren't enough women entrepreneurs. There aren't enough women VCs. There aren't enough women developers. Is there a quota? The beauty of our (Western) society (at this moment in history) is that people have the freedom to shoot for whatever they want independent of their race/religion/age/gender. Using people's physical or demographic characteristics to fill out some sort of social prescription is as offensive as it is misguided.
- dieterrams 16y ago
  There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can make it in technology. This is what we get to take for granted, and as a result, aren't really aware of. Girls trying to figure out what they want, out of the set of options that they think are viable/promising, don't have this benefit, and needlessly self-select themselves out. Really? Downvoted? I'd love to know what for. Is what I'm saying making people angry?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
    - dieterrams 16y ago
      Of course it hurts them to have a huge sector of the economy seem like it's not a viable option. People here seem to be using the fact that girls/women frequently "decide" against or don't "want" a career in tech to obscure the question of what determines why they decided that way or didn't want to pursue it, and whether those determinants are fair or beneficial. A more extreme example that demonstrates what's wrong with how you guys are using "free", "decided", "wanted", etc. would be something like a minority "deciding" against running for president in a country where the majority is racist against his kind, even if he is free to attempt it. Note that I'm not claiming any moral equivalence here, or that the problem of females self-selecting themselves away from tech is primarily the result of discrimination. But there's a real sense in which the decisions being made, and the ideas of what someone wants for themselves, are being generated in less than optimal conditions.
liedra 16y ago
I'm a woman and these sorts of things bug me. OK, so there aren't enough women in tech. Perhaps that's because they just don't want to be in tech! Sure I've had my share of "oh, well, there's no way you'd be good/no way you know what you're talking about because you're a woman" or similar sexist attitudes, but I don't want to work for those sorts of people anyway. IMO if you want to be in tech, you'll find a way to do what you want to do. People (all people! not just women!) who are motivated to do something will do what's necessary to achieve it. Sure it's nice to have another woman to chat to occasionally when you run into sexist jerks, but otherwise I get on just fine with people of any gender because I'm confident and know my stuff, work hard, and am pretty laid back. Probably helps that I grew up with the net a bit though (I'm almost 30) so am no longer horrified by gutter humour or swear words, or other "unladylike" things.
- hazzen 16y ago
  In my 3 years of TAing undergrad computer science intro classes, I am going to say you are wrong. The number of incredibly smart, gifted women who believed they were failing the course despite having some of the best scores was staggering. Many of them simply believed they were not good enough to compete with the loud-mouthed egotistical dicks in the class. They had no role models and no belief that they were good enough to compete with the guys who had been using computers since they were five. I am not saying this is a problem for all women or that it only affects women, but it is still a problem that needs to be solved. Role models help, encouragement helps, and having someone around to convince these students they aren't stupid helps. I would rather more women get into TAing intro classes than this program, but take what you can get.
  - liedra 16y ago
    Wow, that's really sad. :( Maybe it was the lack of loud-mouthed dicks in my courses, but all the women I met in my compsci degree who were doing well actually really enjoyed it and, well, did well. (Or perhaps it's how our courses were set up; there wasn't much opportunity for people to be dicks). I will admit, it can be quite intimidating as a woman to, say, start going to things like Linux Users Groups though; back when I first joined my local one (late 90s, early 2000s?) there were a lot of... intimidating people there. But there were also a number of women, and a few friends of mine also there, which was good for that moral support. But then again, these people are loud mouthed egotistical dicks to everyone that has an opposing view to them, usually, not just women (e.g. if they use emacs and you use vim, be prepared!). In these very charged environments it only really came up a couple of times: one of these that happened to me was one of the main examples used in the "women in linux howto" (which I'm not a fan of actually, because I think it causes a bit of a negative feedback loop), and was dealt with very well by both male and female members of the group. Curiously, due to that howto, I still get email from concerned guys hoping that I haven't been turned off LUGs for the rest of my life! I definitely think it's a great idea to have more women in tech, especially education, but I think that they need to feel like they have a passion for it. And all the incentives, etc. make for a bit of a bad taste in the mouth w.r.t. that :)

39 points by jonpaul 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

I'm all for affirmative action where it's done carefully but I think in this case, it should be more about encouraging and highlighting women in tech. Women need role models in tech and a lot of women would probably flourish more easily working with other women in tech. Although you can be gender-blind to a certain extent, you do know if the person you're working with is a man or a woman and you have cultural stereotypes to uncondition yourself from. However, I don't believe forcing a mono-gendered environment is going to help narrow the gap between male & female techies and may just widen it instead. It also sounds like they're tackling problems traditionally associated with women, i.e. family responsibilities. Why assume this is a woman's problem in the first place? Even if the majority of women are primarily responsible for the family, sticking with that premise will only further that view and excludes men who are responsible primarily for the family.

zitterbewegung 16y ago

Its sort of ironic that Jessica Livingston is on the ycombinator team. Is she not a hacker? I really don't think she isn't...

presidentender 16y ago
Please stop stacking your negatives. I can't read that last sentence.
- zitterbewegung 16y ago
  Sorry it should read "Isn't jessica livingston a hacker because she is part of ycombinator?"

bdr 16y ago

How about a women-only hacker space? That might create more female founders (of any age) in the long-term. Also, one thing Tereza mentioned, that "women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing", could be seen more as a problem to be addressed than a constraint to be worked around.

mctavjb9 16y ago
I'm all for women hackers/entrepreneurs self-organizing on an informal level and comparing notes, but I must confess that I have the same visceral reaction to women-only hacker spaces that I did to girls-only math classes when I was in 6th grade. Whatever floats your boat, but I've always believed that it shouldn't be about lacking a Y chromosome, it should be about doing the hacking/learning the math. I may be in the minority of the minority, but I would much prefer to build my business surrounded by people with a diversity of perspectives who could provide flashes of insight that would never occur to me as a typical INTJ scientist (although not a typical 30-something female, clearly). Narcissistic nutcases-- there are plenty of both genders-- are a fact of life. I believe that the status quo is not going to evolve much through anything that can be construed by naysayers as affirmative action. Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done. Laura Finton, founder of oneforty and a Tech Stars grad is a great example. She started her company as a single mom with young kids as a solo founder with no programming skills. Even though I'm not a Twitter person at all, I take my hat off to her. She's taking the time to tell her story to the Boston entrepreneurial community and leading by example.
- TimeForThis 16y ago
  > Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done. I don't think it's that simple though. For a majority change, positive feedback is required along the lifecyle from knowing nothing to loving it and having entrepreneurial aspirations. I think the main problem is the mostly invisible peer pressure to do something else - not the peer pressure to not do something. This is why more female role models are needed and more tech-oriented schooling from a young age and more gender neutral literature, etc.

jergosh 16y ago

Waiting for XXX combinator...

jrnkntl 16y ago
I had that idea some time ago but looking at the problems of regulation I let it go. I guess there isn't really a real platform for this that isn't bloated with bots, spam and ads.

jrnkntl 16y ago

If so, we need to rename Y Combinator to XY Combinator.

nehan 16y ago
Is that even necessary? It already is XY Combinator -- only 14 women out of 450 people in ycombinator total -- 3.1%. That's pathetic.
- sp332 16y ago
  YC is not anti-women, or whatever. They're biased toward traits that correlate with gender. They're not biased against women specifically or intentionally. It's incidental. The proportion of the general population that has applied to YC is vanishingly small. There is plenty of room for incubators with different priorities, and different intentional and incidental biases. Do you think YC is adversely affecting the startup landscape?
- petercooper 16y ago
  How does that tie up with the application rates? If only 2-5% of applicants were women, the end result merely reflects reality. What percentage of people in YCombinator are black, gay, Muslim, or otherwise? Would low percentages of people with these labels be "pathetic"?
  - nehan 16y ago
    What reality? Even if that were the case, I think it's worth questioning why only 2-5% of applicants are women.
- hnal943 16y ago
  This sounds like critism, but you are you critising? Women? Y-Combinator? "Society?"

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

psyklic 16y ago

So ... encourage 40yo women to enter the space by lowering the barrier of entry? Doesn't this seem sub-optimal for investors?

TimeForThis 16y ago
Where does it say to lower the barrier of entry?
- psyklic 16y ago
  The assumption is that these women are just as capable as Y Combinator applicants, but that the program is biased against them. Even if you believe this, any time you restrict the applicant pool arbitrarily (by gender/etc), you will lose some of the best applicants. For example, you will likely at least double the great applicants by allowing 40+ y/o males to enter as well. Hence, it just doesn't make sense as an investor to participate in "XX Combinator."
  - TimeForThis 16y ago
    I still don't get that this means 'lower the barrier' though. Doesn't it mean raise one impenetrable barrier, i.e. XY? If the same number of XXs exist then the number will still be the same but fewer people will apply. If more women apply as a result of good PR about it being woman-friendly then they still may not get accepted on the same grounds as any other.

w00pla 16y ago

Really? There are always complaints about women in technology. Yet when I spent my Saturday nights in an underground lab, there weren’t a lot of women in the lab. The bar and social spots on the humanities side were full of them though. Is it okay to have double standards? If we make women only organizations to promote things, is it okay if we make men only organizations? If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?

diN0bot 16y ago
i think that's what the article is trying to say. 22-yr-old women are not going to spend their nights in an underground lab (jesus christ!). a 40-yr-old woman has a different perspective and capability. X-only in terms of constituents is always dangerous, of course. groups should aim to create a specific culture where Y is not tolerated, but where individuals are free to join the community within the constraints of the culture. eg, hacker news.
- tibbon 16y ago
  Why shouldn't the 22-yr old woman spend their nights hacking like we do? The article just dismisses women kicking ass in their 20's because they, "like to be experienced first" or something like that? Then totally dismisses their 30's due to children. Guess what, if you're serious about running a business then children are often hard to fit into that picture. You can't have everything. I can't imagine waiting until my 40's to start hitting the ground running as fast as I can. Nor should women. The women I know who have done various accelerators, including y-combinator, were hackers and not interested in having children immediately. They were more interested in doing amazing things as goal #1
sprout 16y ago
I think organizations to get men into teaching and nursing would be valuable. Teaching especially. When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink. I think you're mostly making a strawman argument. I don't know what your opinion on the matter is, but I think that most self-described feminists would agree that a dearth of men in teaching is just as much a problem as a dearth of women in engineering.

diN0bot 16y ago

i think there's likely a minimal activation number where if there aren't enough women in a particular hacker space then the women who do come by don't stick. as a woman myself, being a 40-yr-old entrepreneur makes sense in a dozen ways. one less important but rather interesting way is that one is more likely to be interacting with 40-yr-old males. i must say that most young men are rather self-minded. male hackers traditionally develop group process and team-supporting after a prolonged technical and super-independence+confidence phase. women tend to develop differently. once everyone matures and self actualizes interaction becomes awesome :-)

starkfist 16y ago
This will sound supremely sexist, but... I currently work in an office with tons of women. Whenever you read something about gender in the workplace, there is a lot of talk about how women are team-oriented and cooperative. However, in my experience this is not true at all. The women in my office are shockingly mean to each other... not a day goes by without someone sobbing and fleeing to the women's restroom. At companywide events, the talk is always about who did what backstabbing maneuver to whomever else, why this woman doesn't deserve this promotion, i can't believe she wore that to the office, she's probably sleeping with the VP of Sales, etc etc.
- bitwize 16y ago
  As a rule, women tend to be more socially engaged -- but there's two sides to every Schwartz: an upside and a downside, and the downside here is a certain degree of cattiness and backstabbing that even my female friends complain of. (I tend to hang with particularly forthright people.)
- nmftt 16y ago
  Too me it sound like a symptom of too many women at the same level and inability of management to handle the situation. I've worked with both male and female sports teams, and I would say that there's about the same amount of friction. I do think that men generally are raised with more "teamwork" in mind, i.e. more men do team sports. Just seem like a reason to get more female managers.

samd 16y ago

You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services. If we had an adequate social support system there wouldn't have to be such a trade off between work and family.

hnal943 16y ago
You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services. Who's the you in this sentence? The government? Investors? This strikes me as a tautology. Just about anyone would start a company if the risk and sacrifices involved were mitigated by a benevolent 3rd party.
petercooper 16y ago
You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services. Less of the "women" and more of the "people," please. Many men are involved in child care and housework in a significant way, and similarly have to make trade offs between work and family.

petercooper 16y ago

Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it. What does this borderline-sexist generalization even mean? First, there aren't enough women entrepreneurs. There aren't enough women VCs. There aren't enough women developers. Is there a quota? The beauty of our (Western) society (at this moment in history) is that people have the freedom to shoot for whatever they want independent of their race/religion/age/gender. Using people's physical or demographic characteristics to fill out some sort of social prescription is as offensive as it is misguided.

dieterrams 16y ago
There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can make it in technology. This is what we get to take for granted, and as a result, aren't really aware of. Girls trying to figure out what they want, out of the set of options that they think are viable/promising, don't have this benefit, and needlessly self-select themselves out. Really? Downvoted? I'd love to know what for. Is what I'm saying making people angry?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - dieterrams 16y ago
    Of course it hurts them to have a huge sector of the economy seem like it's not a viable option. People here seem to be using the fact that girls/women frequently "decide" against or don't "want" a career in tech to obscure the question of what determines why they decided that way or didn't want to pursue it, and whether those determinants are fair or beneficial. A more extreme example that demonstrates what's wrong with how you guys are using "free", "decided", "wanted", etc. would be something like a minority "deciding" against running for president in a country where the majority is racist against his kind, even if he is free to attempt it. Note that I'm not claiming any moral equivalence here, or that the problem of females self-selecting themselves away from tech is primarily the result of discrimination. But there's a real sense in which the decisions being made, and the ideas of what someone wants for themselves, are being generated in less than optimal conditions.

liedra 16y ago

I'm a woman and these sorts of things bug me. OK, so there aren't enough women in tech. Perhaps that's because they just don't want to be in tech! Sure I've had my share of "oh, well, there's no way you'd be good/no way you know what you're talking about because you're a woman" or similar sexist attitudes, but I don't want to work for those sorts of people anyway. IMO if you want to be in tech, you'll find a way to do what you want to do. People (all people! not just women!) who are motivated to do something will do what's necessary to achieve it. Sure it's nice to have another woman to chat to occasionally when you run into sexist jerks, but otherwise I get on just fine with people of any gender because I'm confident and know my stuff, work hard, and am pretty laid back. Probably helps that I grew up with the net a bit though (I'm almost 30) so am no longer horrified by gutter humour or swear words, or other "unladylike" things.

hazzen 16y ago
In my 3 years of TAing undergrad computer science intro classes, I am going to say you are wrong. The number of incredibly smart, gifted women who believed they were failing the course despite having some of the best scores was staggering. Many of them simply believed they were not good enough to compete with the loud-mouthed egotistical dicks in the class. They had no role models and no belief that they were good enough to compete with the guys who had been using computers since they were five. I am not saying this is a problem for all women or that it only affects women, but it is still a problem that needs to be solved. Role models help, encouragement helps, and having someone around to convince these students they aren't stupid helps. I would rather more women get into TAing intro classes than this program, but take what you can get.
- liedra 16y ago
  Wow, that's really sad. :( Maybe it was the lack of loud-mouthed dicks in my courses, but all the women I met in my compsci degree who were doing well actually really enjoyed it and, well, did well. (Or perhaps it's how our courses were set up; there wasn't much opportunity for people to be dicks). I will admit, it can be quite intimidating as a woman to, say, start going to things like Linux Users Groups though; back when I first joined my local one (late 90s, early 2000s?) there were a lot of... intimidating people there. But there were also a number of women, and a few friends of mine also there, which was good for that moral support. But then again, these people are loud mouthed egotistical dicks to everyone that has an opposing view to them, usually, not just women (e.g. if they use emacs and you use vim, be prepared!). In these very charged environments it only really came up a couple of times: one of these that happened to me was one of the main examples used in the "women in linux howto" (which I'm not a fan of actually, because I think it causes a bit of a negative feedback loop), and was dealt with very well by both male and female members of the group. Curiously, due to that howto, I still get email from concerned guys hoping that I haven't been turned off LUGs for the rest of my life! I definitely think it's a great idea to have more women in tech, especially education, but I think that they need to feel like they have a passion for it. And all the incentives, etc. make for a bit of a bad taste in the mouth w.r.t. that :)