4 ms·
It's also condescending towards the women. It's really hard to shake the internal feeling that perhaps you only got featured because of your gender, and not you
by jlees 15y ago
It's also condescending towards the women. It's really hard to shake the internal feeling that perhaps you only got featured because of your gender, and not your brilliant idea, as well as the external perception that that may be the case. I don't think posts like this benefit either audience, in fact.
A hard working guy with a world-changing idea shouldn't be overlooked in favour of a mediocre woman who is remarkable because she is a woman.
- ktothemc 15y ago@jlees That is why I have not written a "women in tech" article in six years. But I think the benefit of showing that there are women doing interesting things at Y Combinator to other prospective women founders outweighs the downside that you mentioned.
- ktothemc 15y agoI also think that Y Combinator's application process and brand is so meritocratic that it deflects the effect you're talking about.
- jlees 15y agoYes, but Techcrunch choosing to explicitly feature the women from YC, not the interesting ideas from YC, creates the effect -- that's what I'm referring to. Mind you, being in YC may minimise the impostor syndrome.
- ktothemc 15y agoTC has written a dedicated post to virtually every single YC startup from every batch for the last several years. We did about a dozen posts on Demo Day alone this week. So writing one article that points out that YC is more diverse than it used to be out of the 100 or so we will probably ultimately write about companies from this class seems reasonable to me.
- jlees 15y agoIn which case, I'd love to see companion articles on other types of diversity to remove this debate entirely.