I was there, and the #1 thing I noticed was that of 11 presenters, exactly one was a woman; and of the CEOs telling stories, zero were women. It was, uh, not e

I was there, and the #1 thing I noticed was that of 11 presenters, exactly one was a woman; and of the CEOs telling stories, zero were women. It was, uh, not exactly an experience full of female role models. The 'fewer than one in ten' ratio may be true of startups in general, but the way to balance out the gender divide is to provide more role models, not to magnify the status quo: I was pretty unhappy to see such an exclusionist panel. In general, if I were a woman, I would have felt pretty unwelcome at the event, in general: of my small amount of wandering around during the breaks, I saw one attendee wearing a shirt with the text: "SELECT * FROM girls WHERE free_sex=TRUE;". More distressingly, I saw a speaker (Ben Horowitz [1]) wearing a shirt with the text "No bitch-ass-ness" on it; I suspect that this may have been a cultural reference that I missed, but that sure does seem as unwelcoming as a shirt that would say 'man up and do it' might. The content was, in general, high quality. I wish that the experience, however, had been designed to avoid shutting out half of the population. A good start for making Startup School more inclusive would be to adopt something along the lines of the Conference Anti-Harassment Policy [2]; I hope that Y Combinator will do something along those lines next year. [1] Yes, I know. This is part of Horowitz's persona: he wants to come off as 'edgy', compared to, for instance, Ron Conway; he wants to show that he's hip and with it. For instance, as I recall, he used the word 'fuck' a few times during his speech. This is fine; now we get it! You're one of us! You can be edgy without being a dickhead. [2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Policy http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassmen...