This whole thing is a fascinating demonstration of the power of contextualization to color one's perception of the facts. When you read the whole transcript, i

This whole thing is a fascinating demonstration of the power of contextualization to color one's perception of the facts. When you read the whole transcript, it's pretty clear pg is NOT just talking about a subset of women. He means women as a whole are underrepresented in the founder population because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in coding. When the valleywag expose was first published, I thought the comments were pretty damning. pg's reponse really focused my attention on the omission of "these" and persuaded me that he was only talking about women "who aren't programmers." This convinced me that The Information are egregious hacks. After all, they omitted a word without an ellipsis and that's clearly wrong. But now, perhaps motivated by my fascination, I took the time to actually read the full transcript. And it's clear pg is talking about all female applicants to YC. Here's a fuller excerpt that traces the complete context of exactly what group of people pg is referring to. -------- Eric: I want to circle back to women in YC. How much do you think YC needs to be proactive, has any moral obligation to be proactive about this, or anything like that? pg (excerpts): There’s a couple of reasons why there are not as many female founders... If the reason we accept few female founders is that we’re biased against them, we would be able to tell this... I’m almost certain that we don’t discriminate against female founders... The problem with that is... the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology... If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it own their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13... God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers... You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like... You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon... That’s a self selected group of people. Anybody who wants to apply can go to that thing. They’re not discriminating for or against anyone. [at this point Eric asks his question about how Y Combinator could be more proactive] Paul: We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years. -------- Conclusion: The entire time pg is referring "female founders" and the "pool of potential startup founders". His only reference to "programmers" is merely in describing the pool of potential startup founders. And women aren't in it because they weren't "hacking on computers at age 13". So yes, absolutely pg made a gaffe in saying girls aren't hackers. That is in fact what he said, and is now pretending he didn't, and that it would be "absurd" for him to say it. But he did.