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This post may not seem very PC but here it goes. One thing to point out is that historically women have had different economic priorities than men, and usually

This post may not seem very PC but here it goes. One thing to point out is that historically women have had different economic priorities than men, and usually still do. In the Wild West for example, for a long time, there were 50 men to one woman, roughly the same gender ratio as in the early days of the internet and in open source software engineering today. When we see these long pervasive questions, it's worth asking why. Certainly gender roles have changed enough since the early 19th century that this can't be the only factor, or have they? At least in Western history, women have historically (and continue to today) looked for more security than adventure, and therefore tended to be very under-represented in cutting-edge fields and immature industries, while moving in later as things begin to stabilize. Women have historically run safe industries involving commodities everyone needs (thread, yarn, cloth), and take fewer risks. So my take here is that the start-up culture itself goes counter to what most women generally want: a stable supply of income structured in a way which is friendly to raising a family. This is a bug, as you say. But it cannot be solved with a little outreach or so forth because if more women wanted to be involved at these early stages of startups, they would be. A better approach IMO is to look at how something like open source software consulting and development can fit into a more integrated lifestyle where work and family life are no longer separate. This brings women into tech but on terms that are more in line with current career trends of career choices that women not only are making today but have in the past. This means focusing on economic opportunities which are conducive to this sort of integrated lifestyle and worrying less about CEO's of hot startups. I am also going to make a claim that may seem even more controversial: I am willing to bet that women are more likely to be self-employed than men, and that there may be a lot more women in tech, self-employed, than we know. We may simply be measuring wrong.

gcb 15y ago
By thinking that crap you will raise your kids with those misconceptions and they will be true. nothing is because of gender. Everything is because of social organization. No matter how much your logical brain wants to see otherwise.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Actually it's a question of considerable empirical debate, and the consensus answer to the nature or nurture question in general is "some of both". You are discussing political doctrine, not empirical science, when you make such bold claims.
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    One of the things to note is that before the industrial revolution, women literally ran some of the most important sectors of the economy. In medieval Iceland the cloth that they made was even legal tender. Talk about "making money" (literally)! I actually see modernist feminism as a response specifically to the fact that the industrial revolution largely completed an economic trend that had been going on since the late Middle Ages, which was the displacement of women economically and the taking over of these industries by men. Women, deprived of their historical economic place in Western society, had to find a new economic place, and the need for this was the catalyst for women's suffrage, the women entering the factories and schools, and the like. This lead to an extremely male-normal society, though, and it has meant that women are still suffering for that. The genders cannot be equal where one is normal and the other not. Note that Robbie Davis-Floyd documents in her (excellent) book "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" that in medical textbooks (at least in the early 90's when she was writing this one) that male figures were overrepresented among diagrams of healthy anatomy, while female figures were overrepresented among diagrams of disease. That doesn't mean that there aren't biological differences that don't come into play. But how those differences manifest is very much tied to culture. But culture is not without limits--- it is subject to functional imperatives, both biological and social in nature. Consider this: marriage, as an institution which centers around procreation and childraising, is more universally recognized in ritual practices than funerals are. There are social imperatives at work even when biological ones are not (certainly there is no biological imperative to get married). The social imperative there is in fact quite obvious when you start looking at differences between paternity and maternity considerations. Women are mothers if they have given birth. Men are fathers typically if they are recognized by society or the law as such, and this is only loosely tied to biology (even in the US today--- consider that 52% of never-married mothers never apply for child support, often out of a desire not to have further contact with the putative biological father, but in other cultures a child born out of wife-swapping or wife-loaning is always the child of the woman's husband). So a social imperative of managing paternity considerations and providing stable economic units for childraising often are decisive here.

gcb 15y ago

By thinking that crap you will raise your kids with those misconceptions and they will be true. nothing is because of gender. Everything is because of social organization. No matter how much your logical brain wants to see otherwise.

philwelch 15y ago
Actually it's a question of considerable empirical debate, and the consensus answer to the nature or nurture question in general is "some of both". You are discussing political doctrine, not empirical science, when you make such bold claims.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  One of the things to note is that before the industrial revolution, women literally ran some of the most important sectors of the economy. In medieval Iceland the cloth that they made was even legal tender. Talk about "making money" (literally)! I actually see modernist feminism as a response specifically to the fact that the industrial revolution largely completed an economic trend that had been going on since the late Middle Ages, which was the displacement of women economically and the taking over of these industries by men. Women, deprived of their historical economic place in Western society, had to find a new economic place, and the need for this was the catalyst for women's suffrage, the women entering the factories and schools, and the like. This lead to an extremely male-normal society, though, and it has meant that women are still suffering for that. The genders cannot be equal where one is normal and the other not. Note that Robbie Davis-Floyd documents in her (excellent) book "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" that in medical textbooks (at least in the early 90's when she was writing this one) that male figures were overrepresented among diagrams of healthy anatomy, while female figures were overrepresented among diagrams of disease. That doesn't mean that there aren't biological differences that don't come into play. But how those differences manifest is very much tied to culture. But culture is not without limits--- it is subject to functional imperatives, both biological and social in nature. Consider this: marriage, as an institution which centers around procreation and childraising, is more universally recognized in ritual practices than funerals are. There are social imperatives at work even when biological ones are not (certainly there is no biological imperative to get married). The social imperative there is in fact quite obvious when you start looking at differences between paternity and maternity considerations. Women are mothers if they have given birth. Men are fathers typically if they are recognized by society or the law as such, and this is only loosely tied to biology (even in the US today--- consider that 52% of never-married mothers never apply for child support, often out of a desire not to have further contact with the putative biological father, but in other cultures a child born out of wife-swapping or wife-loaning is always the child of the woman's husband). So a social imperative of managing paternity considerations and providing stable economic units for childraising often are decisive here.