11 ms·

I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up w

by parfe 13y ago

I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad. He comes closest to saying anything of substance with the paragraph: So how would you cause there to be more female programmers? The meta-answer is: not just one thing. People's abilities and interests by the time they're old enough to start a startup are the product of their whole lives—indeed, of their ancestors' lives as well...you probably have to go back to the point where it starts to become significant. The fact this post mentions no group currently working towards what pg says should be done really bothers me. It appears he has done no research. Groups exist which work towards that very goal of getting girls interested in programming so they become women involved in tech. What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/ http://www.girlswhocode.com/) What about Black Girls Code? (http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ http://www.blackgirlscode.com/) How would you get more girls interested in programming? I don't know much about girls specifically, but I have some ideas about how to get kids interested in programming. This came off similar to how Stephen Colbert jokes that he "doesn't see color". If you cannot be bothered to understand the very group you hope to address why even bother? How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)? I don't think he should have written this post. He put lots of effort into writing, but seems to have put very little thought or research into the actual subject. I guess he felt defensive about his character being sullied but I think he sufficiently addressed that issue already.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)? Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? The reason sexism-related stories fall down is not because of lack of interest or due to prejudice, but quite the contrary: too much interest, causing an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, and a subsequent sinking. This is HN. Come on, we should know better.
- cjbprime 13y ago
  > Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.
  - vezzy-fnord 13y ago
    I guess you could. Although I'm not sure how exactly an algorithm can be inherently prejudiced, that sounds rather postmodern. You can make one that is inefficient or apply one that isn't suitable to a given data set, and end up with skewed results. But an algorithm promoting prejudice by itself? I don't know. I always thought mathematics was neutral. Either way, it absolutely does not apply here. HN's algorithms sinking sexism-related stories is a side effect. The fact of the matter is it will sink any story that has an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, whether it's about sexism, Haskell or the Church of the SubGenius. This is the same logic as saying that encryption is evil because it can be used by terrorists to hide information. Encryption always does the same thing, it's fundamentally neutral, regardless of what's being encrypted. The same way HN's algorithms are fundamentally neutral, regardless of what happens to trigger their procedures.
    - cjbprime 13y ago
      I think you're overcomplicating it by insisting on isolating the algorithm from its owner and environment. No-one else was doing that. If you don't want to apply a label to the algorithm, how about "Foo Bar's decision to run Algorithm X against Dataset Y resulted in consequences that predictably increased prejudice, so it would have been better if he hadn't done it"? If that's okay, note that this is pretty close to what parfe said -- he's clearly upset at the fact that pg chooses to run an algorithm on Hacker News, rather than at the algorithm itself.
      - vezzy-fnord 13y ago
        I won't comment on the efficiency of the algorithm (although it is questionable). Let's assume that it's a bad design decision. Your logic behind it being prejudiced is still faulty, as it ascribes a fallacious cause. The algorithm merely shuffles page rankings based on two criteria: upvotes and comments, both of which are user-supplied. The algorithm does not support prejudice, it simply behaves in the fashion it is programmed to. You're completely ignoring all of the mundane stories that go down due to the same factors, and cherry picking the ones about sexism.
pg 13y ago
The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Actually by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black." And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces. And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch. The reason I didn't go into detail about it is that I'm not an expert on the topic. I wasn't going to write about something other people understand so much better than me just to send the message that I care.
- parfe 13y ago
  As written, the first paragraph lays out the situation of you being personally accused of sexism and the second paragraph starts with defending yourself against those accusations. I do not think you set the proper context to use the fact YC has a woman cofounder to defend yourself against accusations of sexism.
  - Tycho 13y ago
    The 'Some of my best friends are black...' cliche is only actually a problem if it is used to justify a racist statement. Otherwise it's a perfectly valid indicator of having non-racist character.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- zorpner 13y ago
  > And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces. That... is not an argument? There's ample evidence to show that members of underrepresented groups within individual companies/industries experience unconscious biases in hiring/ranking/etc, even towards groups of which they're a member.
redthrowaway 13y ago
It's not pg's job to equalize the gender ratio in programming, nor is it his job to get girls interested in it. Saying he thinks you need to reach girls young does not obligate him to go research what organizations are out there doing just that. He meant the post to be a statement of his position, not a rallying cry to fix a societal problem. You seem to have wanted the latter, not the former. That's fine, but it's not a failing on his part that he didn't write the post you wanted him to write.
- oskarth 13y ago
  Accidentally downvoted you, sorry about that. I meant to upvote it.
  - redthrowaway 13y ago
    No worries, I've done the same myself countless times.
  - arasmussen 13y ago
    ^ feature request...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pjg 13y ago
  I tend to agree. It certainly appears people are assuming just because pg wrote his thoughts on women in programming that he must somehow be held responsible until all problems - real or perceived - are alleviated in this domain. Don't blame the messenger.
- dspeyer 13y ago
  With power comes responsibility, and he has more than most.
tomasien 13y ago
I think you're reaching. Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist. He's not saying HE has women FRIENDS he's saying YC is actually RUN in a large degree by women, one woman in particular - the co-founder of Y-Combinator Jessica Livingston. Not to minimize the other women involved, but it's just particularly relevant that the founder of YC could as much be said to be Jessica as Paul. That's a huge distinction.
- parfe 13y ago
  >Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist. The first three sentences of his post disagree.
  - tomasien 13y ago
    It's a clunky transition, but the transition goes from "I (PG) have a female co-founder" to "here is the makeup of YC as it applies to women" in the second sentence of the second paragraph. He was accused both of being a sexist himself and of YC being sexist. I would say the "he is sexist" (for the sake of argument, let's assume that "sexist" means "particularly sexist" because it's hard to argue ANYONE is entirely innocent of being sexist) were pretty tenuous, but his attitude toward whether or not YC was biased toward men were pretty off. This does a great job of explaining the latter, which I feel were a legitimate problem.
  - tomasien 13y ago
    I'll give you this: "It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself" is a weak sentence. Yes, you having a female co-founder is strong evidence, but if you do sexist things then it doesn't make it any harder for me to argue you're sexist. The "it's hard to argue" part doesn't belong there, it belongs after he's not only explained who he chose to start YC with, but how YC and he have acted in relation to others in the industry, which stacks up extremely favorably.
pshin45 13y ago
(Posted on behalf of a friend) "PG, of the three female partners you mentioned, one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations. How many full-time or part-time YC partners actually advise companies on business strategy?"
- jl 13y ago
  This comment makes me so angry that it is difficult to remain calm, but I will try. You have this wrong. All three of us are in charge of so much more than you suggest here. We all participate in investment decisions and advise the companies on many different matters-- including business strategy. Since we started YC, there has not been one important decision we've made that I have not been a part of.
  - pshin45 13y ago
    (On behalf of the same friend) "That's good to know - I wasn't aware of that. I'm happy to hear this isn't the case, but I've heard this from YC founders many times which is why it was my perception."
    - kn0thing 13y ago
      Jessica is the reason Steve + I got into Y Combinator. It was her decision to give us a second chance after we were rejected (reddit would end up being one of the first breakout hits from YC). I wouldn't have just told Charlie Rose "All Hail Jessica Livingston" if her role were just "founder relations" -- without going into the roles all the partners (male and female alike) play in YC, that simplification is way off. http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-without-their-permission-charlie-rose-01-08-bjrx6l1bROGVbIYHxyj0Og.html http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-without-their-permission-cha...
      - _dps 13y ago
        ... and lest anyone think this is limited just to (the extremely helpful and insightful) JL, we (a recent-batch YC company) have been repeatedly and substantially helped on important strategy matters by KN and CL. Reducing their roles to "taxes" and "legal" misses the point completely; they are more like "finance strategy" and "legal strategy". Both have advised us on important structural decisions we made early in our company's life.
MrZongle2 13y ago
'The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"' Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends? Or is it up to the mob to define what "friendship" is?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends? No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X. Finding specific people of group X meet your bar from friendship, no matter how high that bar is, does not mean that you don't have a bias -- even potentially a very strong bias -- against people of group X, it just means that if you do some people have other characteristics that have weighed sufficiently in your favor to outweigh any general bias you have.
  - MrZongle2 13y ago
    'No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X.' Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then. I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then. I think the problem has nothing to do with the word "friend" but the word "prejudice". > I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned. So what? The fact that people in group X can earn any given position with you doesn't mean that they don't, just by the fact of being members of group X, start out in a worse position in your view. So, that people in group X may have earned the designation "friend" from you does not in any way prove that you don't have a prejudice, even potentially a very strong one, against group X.
DanBC 13y ago
One reason sexism stories get flagged off is because they attract hateful sexist idiots who spew vile nonsense. They are unrepentent and relentless. Flagging the threads is the only way to defend https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments from horrible halfwits.
- Crito 13y ago
  They also tend to have a poor comment:upvote ratio, which apparently is used to detect poor quality discussions and penalize them.
rdtsc 13y ago
> However, not the worst does not mean not bad. I can see you are trying to help the subject and advance the discussion forward. I wonder if it would be more productive to instead just criticize point by point pg's post (which I think was decent), instead write what you would suggest would be an alternative. You pointed to What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/ http://www.girlswhocode.com/) and another one and mentioned how he has done no research. Alright, what about CWC? What is your research? Instead of just shutting down point after point in the original post, maybe explain why you think GWC or BGC is a better alternative. > I don't think he should have written this post. Then we would have seen comments complaining about "PG has has this incident in a while and hasn't followed up, that is so typical of such and such ...".
xanados 13y ago
> The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" It bothers me unduly much that it has become a common meme that saying this amounts to saying "I am a racist!" That may be convenient pattern-matching, but if someone has friends that are black, that is definitely some evidence that they aren't racists. I think this really comes down to pattern-matching and goalpost shifting. There are many definitions of racism, and conflating them serves the purposes of people on both sides of the argument, which makes it an anti-useful rather than merely useless term. When someone says "I'm not a racist, I have black friends" they are referring to the casual/common definition of racism, which is that they judge individuals as individuals and not based on their membership of a racial group. Under this definition, calling someone a racist is essentially saying that they have views that are sympathetic to the views of extremist groups like the KKK. Under this definition, saying, "I'm not racist, I have black friends" makes perfect sense, because it implies that, even if they have tiny biases against people based on race, they are at least not so strong as to preclude having close personal relationships with them. Another definition of racism, used by people arguing against them, amounts to "everyone is racist in some ways, so it's basically always wrong to say you aren't a racist." (Obviously this is a caricature of another end of the spectrum, there are intermediate definitions) Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what. If this is the definition of racism you are using, there is literally no evidence you can provide other than to be black yourself to avoid claims of racism against black people. People who subscribe to this definition have had arguments with people who they believe to be self-evidently racist, yet who used "I have black friends," so many times, that it pattern-matches in their brain to "this person is a racist." This is an uncharitable view. Having black friends or black family members is Bayesian evidence that someone isn't racist as it is defined in casual discourse, and I think it's time that people stop pretending it's the opposite. Similarly, having a female co-founder is valid evidence that you view females as having the capability of equal business acumen to men, no matter how much people dislike the way the argument pattern-matches. Unfortunately, there is literally no way to be so careful with your language use to avoid this argument, because the issue has long, long since diverged from the norms of reasonable discourse. There will always be people on the side of "everyone is racist" who will just say, "He's just hiding his racist views by trying to use alternate terminology."
LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
Lenin would be proud of you Comrade! We are all equal after all.
mathattack 13y ago
When someone crushes the industry average in hiring an under-represented group, you really have to ask yourself what more can they do? Being specific - are you suggesting more outreach? Overpaying to take funding opportunities away from others? Lowering the bar? Offering more coaching to promising candidates?
reallyseriously 13y ago
Glad PG wrote this and equally glad this is the top comment so far. It appears PG hasn't yet learned that it will never be enough for some people. In anything he writes on this topic he'll leave out some group or state a point in a way that someone disagrees with. And then, all they'll do is attack attack attack. Even Seinfeld isn't immune: http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s
abalone 13y ago
There's also this gem. PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true." John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest." I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.
- CGamesPlay 13y ago
  Citation on that quote, for anyone else who was curious: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB121025688414577219 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB121025688414577219
- jammur 13y ago
  I think you misinterpreted that. PG said funding decisions aren't made based on similarity to the people making the funding decision. John Doerr is saying that sometimes one of factors in making a funding decision is similarity to other massively successful founders, not the people making the funding decisions. PG has been pretty open about the fact that pattern matching to other successful founders is very common.
  - makomk 13y ago
    The other massively successful founders are also incredibly similar to the people making the funding decisions, though - in fact, quite often they are the people making those decisions.
  - abalone 13y ago
    Do you really think that interpretation would improve PG's position? That pattern matching based on gender and race is "very common"? Are you implying that is ok so long as it's the race/gender of other founders? Thankfully PG does not actually take as extreme a position as Doerr. He merely downplays the existence of it in the VC community.
mafribe 13y ago
I can imagine that one reason "sexism related stories get flagged" is because they are rarely interesting, innovative or well though out. Such articles mostly repeat feminist/misandric boiler-plate amounting to little more than defending female privilege (e.g. no draft, longer life, many more opportunities to avoid having to work, better medical care, earlier retirement, more lenient sentencing for equal crimes etc, more social services, etc). I think a common term for this is "privilege blindness". Why would a thinking person want to read this again and again?
debacle 13y ago
Men learn at a certain point that we are not, in fact, women. We have different values, priorities, and hormones than women, and given the same scenarios we're likely to come to a different conclusion than a woman. So why would Paul try and talk from his zero years of experience as a woman and explain how to get more women in coding? Why not simply state "Please stop calling me a sexist, I don't like it, here's some facts about sexism at YC and in the industry in general." You're looking too deeply into this, I think.
- wanda 13y ago
  >You're looking too deeply into this, I think. That's what HN does. I dunno. Allow me to share some thoughts as a young woman. I had no problem getting into computer programming when I was young. I had no problem getting accepted to a high-ranking university and graduating mathematics. I had no problem completing a master's in computer science. I had no problem finding resources for programming because they're already there, written by men and women. They just don't have "women's" or "for girls" written on the cover in large, brightly-coloured, friendly script. So I don't really see what the fuss is about. Couldn't the low number of female computer scientists be due to the fact that not many girls are actually interested in such things? Maybe women can think and perceive what is around them for themselves, and don't need charities to show them the "hidden option" of programming? ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Addendum: before somebody jumps to the conclusion that I'm from a wealthy background, I'm working class, a humble chain-smoking serf. I'm from a bloody poor family and my CV has more bartending credentials than tech. I've never even dreamed of owning a current-gen Macbook, in stark contrast to every student I see these days, all seeming to have thousands of pounds worth of hardware without working a day in their lives. I've been using the same Linux machine for half a decade. Libraries are free. If you're interested in doing something and you have the aptitude, you don't need to be spoon-fed by liberals.
  - ceol 13y ago
    > Couldn't the low number of female computer scientists be due to the fact that not many girls are actually interested in such things? That really doesn't help anything. Why are they not interested? Are you saying something in the core of being a woman makes them not want to code? > spoon-fed by liberals. Something something true colors.
vbuterin 13y ago
> I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad. Suppose that you walk up to someone who earns $100,000 a year and donates 60% to charity, and you see that although he rarely goes on vacations abroad and lives in a 500 square foot apartment he does have a relatively new car. You then say "how could you? If you had gotten a slightly crappier car you could have saved $3000 and sent that off to fight malaria in Africa and saved someone's life! Do you really value that tiny dose of comfort above a human life?" It may be a valid moral point depending on your personal morality, but acting that way is absolutely useless if not counterproductive toward the general goal of getting more money donated to charity to fight malaria in Africa.

by parfe 13y ago

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)? Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? The reason sexism-related stories fall down is not because of lack of interest or due to prejudice, but quite the contrary: too much interest, causing an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, and a subsequent sinking. This is HN. Come on, we should know better.

cjbprime 13y ago
> Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  I guess you could. Although I'm not sure how exactly an algorithm can be inherently prejudiced, that sounds rather postmodern. You can make one that is inefficient or apply one that isn't suitable to a given data set, and end up with skewed results. But an algorithm promoting prejudice by itself? I don't know. I always thought mathematics was neutral. Either way, it absolutely does not apply here. HN's algorithms sinking sexism-related stories is a side effect. The fact of the matter is it will sink any story that has an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, whether it's about sexism, Haskell or the Church of the SubGenius. This is the same logic as saying that encryption is evil because it can be used by terrorists to hide information. Encryption always does the same thing, it's fundamentally neutral, regardless of what's being encrypted. The same way HN's algorithms are fundamentally neutral, regardless of what happens to trigger their procedures.
  - cjbprime 13y ago
    I think you're overcomplicating it by insisting on isolating the algorithm from its owner and environment. No-one else was doing that. If you don't want to apply a label to the algorithm, how about "Foo Bar's decision to run Algorithm X against Dataset Y resulted in consequences that predictably increased prejudice, so it would have been better if he hadn't done it"? If that's okay, note that this is pretty close to what parfe said -- he's clearly upset at the fact that pg chooses to run an algorithm on Hacker News, rather than at the algorithm itself.
    - vezzy-fnord 13y ago
      I won't comment on the efficiency of the algorithm (although it is questionable). Let's assume that it's a bad design decision. Your logic behind it being prejudiced is still faulty, as it ascribes a fallacious cause. The algorithm merely shuffles page rankings based on two criteria: upvotes and comments, both of which are user-supplied. The algorithm does not support prejudice, it simply behaves in the fashion it is programmed to. You're completely ignoring all of the mundane stories that go down due to the same factors, and cherry picking the ones about sexism.

pg 13y ago

The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Actually by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black." And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces. And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch. The reason I didn't go into detail about it is that I'm not an expert on the topic. I wasn't going to write about something other people understand so much better than me just to send the message that I care.

parfe 13y ago
As written, the first paragraph lays out the situation of you being personally accused of sexism and the second paragraph starts with defending yourself against those accusations. I do not think you set the proper context to use the fact YC has a woman cofounder to defend yourself against accusations of sexism.
- Tycho 13y ago
  The 'Some of my best friends are black...' cliche is only actually a problem if it is used to justify a racist statement. Otherwise it's a perfectly valid indicator of having non-racist character.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zorpner 13y ago
> And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces. That... is not an argument? There's ample evidence to show that members of underrepresented groups within individual companies/industries experience unconscious biases in hiring/ranking/etc, even towards groups of which they're a member.

redthrowaway 13y ago

It's not pg's job to equalize the gender ratio in programming, nor is it his job to get girls interested in it. Saying he thinks you need to reach girls young does not obligate him to go research what organizations are out there doing just that. He meant the post to be a statement of his position, not a rallying cry to fix a societal problem. You seem to have wanted the latter, not the former. That's fine, but it's not a failing on his part that he didn't write the post you wanted him to write.

oskarth 13y ago
Accidentally downvoted you, sorry about that. I meant to upvote it.
- redthrowaway 13y ago
  No worries, I've done the same myself countless times.
- arasmussen 13y ago
  ^ feature request...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pjg 13y ago
I tend to agree. It certainly appears people are assuming just because pg wrote his thoughts on women in programming that he must somehow be held responsible until all problems - real or perceived - are alleviated in this domain. Don't blame the messenger.
dspeyer 13y ago
With power comes responsibility, and he has more than most.

tomasien 13y ago

I think you're reaching. Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist. He's not saying HE has women FRIENDS he's saying YC is actually RUN in a large degree by women, one woman in particular - the co-founder of Y-Combinator Jessica Livingston. Not to minimize the other women involved, but it's just particularly relevant that the founder of YC could as much be said to be Jessica as Paul. That's a huge distinction.

parfe 13y ago
>Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist. The first three sentences of his post disagree.
- tomasien 13y ago
  It's a clunky transition, but the transition goes from "I (PG) have a female co-founder" to "here is the makeup of YC as it applies to women" in the second sentence of the second paragraph. He was accused both of being a sexist himself and of YC being sexist. I would say the "he is sexist" (for the sake of argument, let's assume that "sexist" means "particularly sexist" because it's hard to argue ANYONE is entirely innocent of being sexist) were pretty tenuous, but his attitude toward whether or not YC was biased toward men were pretty off. This does a great job of explaining the latter, which I feel were a legitimate problem.
- tomasien 13y ago
  I'll give you this: "It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself" is a weak sentence. Yes, you having a female co-founder is strong evidence, but if you do sexist things then it doesn't make it any harder for me to argue you're sexist. The "it's hard to argue" part doesn't belong there, it belongs after he's not only explained who he chose to start YC with, but how YC and he have acted in relation to others in the industry, which stacks up extremely favorably.

pshin45 13y ago

(Posted on behalf of a friend) "PG, of the three female partners you mentioned, one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations. How many full-time or part-time YC partners actually advise companies on business strategy?"

jl 13y ago
This comment makes me so angry that it is difficult to remain calm, but I will try. You have this wrong. All three of us are in charge of so much more than you suggest here. We all participate in investment decisions and advise the companies on many different matters-- including business strategy. Since we started YC, there has not been one important decision we've made that I have not been a part of.
- pshin45 13y ago
  (On behalf of the same friend) "That's good to know - I wasn't aware of that. I'm happy to hear this isn't the case, but I've heard this from YC founders many times which is why it was my perception."
  - kn0thing 13y ago
    Jessica is the reason Steve + I got into Y Combinator. It was her decision to give us a second chance after we were rejected (reddit would end up being one of the first breakout hits from YC). I wouldn't have just told Charlie Rose "All Hail Jessica Livingston" if her role were just "founder relations" -- without going into the roles all the partners (male and female alike) play in YC, that simplification is way off. http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-without-their-permission-charlie-rose-01-08-bjrx6l1bROGVbIYHxyj0Og.html http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-without-their-permission-cha...
    - _dps 13y ago
      ... and lest anyone think this is limited just to (the extremely helpful and insightful) JL, we (a recent-batch YC company) have been repeatedly and substantially helped on important strategy matters by KN and CL. Reducing their roles to "taxes" and "legal" misses the point completely; they are more like "finance strategy" and "legal strategy". Both have advised us on important structural decisions we made early in our company's life.

MrZongle2 13y ago

'The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"' Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends? Or is it up to the mob to define what "friendship" is?

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends? No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X. Finding specific people of group X meet your bar from friendship, no matter how high that bar is, does not mean that you don't have a bias -- even potentially a very strong bias -- against people of group X, it just means that if you do some people have other characteristics that have weighed sufficiently in your favor to outweigh any general bias you have.
- MrZongle2 13y ago
  'No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X.' Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then. I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then. I think the problem has nothing to do with the word "friend" but the word "prejudice". > I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned. So what? The fact that people in group X can earn any given position with you doesn't mean that they don't, just by the fact of being members of group X, start out in a worse position in your view. So, that people in group X may have earned the designation "friend" from you does not in any way prove that you don't have a prejudice, even potentially a very strong one, against group X.

DanBC 13y ago

One reason sexism stories get flagged off is because they attract hateful sexist idiots who spew vile nonsense. They are unrepentent and relentless. Flagging the threads is the only way to defend https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments from horrible halfwits.

Crito 13y ago
They also tend to have a poor comment:upvote ratio, which apparently is used to detect poor quality discussions and penalize them.

rdtsc 13y ago

> However, not the worst does not mean not bad. I can see you are trying to help the subject and advance the discussion forward. I wonder if it would be more productive to instead just criticize point by point pg's post (which I think was decent), instead write what you would suggest would be an alternative. You pointed to What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/ http://www.girlswhocode.com/) and another one and mentioned how he has done no research. Alright, what about CWC? What is your research? Instead of just shutting down point after point in the original post, maybe explain why you think GWC or BGC is a better alternative. > I don't think he should have written this post. Then we would have seen comments complaining about "PG has has this incident in a while and hasn't followed up, that is so typical of such and such ...".

xanados 13y ago

> The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" It bothers me unduly much that it has become a common meme that saying this amounts to saying "I am a racist!" That may be convenient pattern-matching, but if someone has friends that are black, that is definitely some evidence that they aren't racists. I think this really comes down to pattern-matching and goalpost shifting. There are many definitions of racism, and conflating them serves the purposes of people on both sides of the argument, which makes it an anti-useful rather than merely useless term. When someone says "I'm not a racist, I have black friends" they are referring to the casual/common definition of racism, which is that they judge individuals as individuals and not based on their membership of a racial group. Under this definition, calling someone a racist is essentially saying that they have views that are sympathetic to the views of extremist groups like the KKK. Under this definition, saying, "I'm not racist, I have black friends" makes perfect sense, because it implies that, even if they have tiny biases against people based on race, they are at least not so strong as to preclude having close personal relationships with them. Another definition of racism, used by people arguing against them, amounts to "everyone is racist in some ways, so it's basically always wrong to say you aren't a racist." (Obviously this is a caricature of another end of the spectrum, there are intermediate definitions) Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what. If this is the definition of racism you are using, there is literally no evidence you can provide other than to be black yourself to avoid claims of racism against black people. People who subscribe to this definition have had arguments with people who they believe to be self-evidently racist, yet who used "I have black friends," so many times, that it pattern-matches in their brain to "this person is a racist." This is an uncharitable view. Having black friends or black family members is Bayesian evidence that someone isn't racist as it is defined in casual discourse, and I think it's time that people stop pretending it's the opposite. Similarly, having a female co-founder is valid evidence that you view females as having the capability of equal business acumen to men, no matter how much people dislike the way the argument pattern-matches. Unfortunately, there is literally no way to be so careful with your language use to avoid this argument, because the issue has long, long since diverged from the norms of reasonable discourse. There will always be people on the side of "everyone is racist" who will just say, "He's just hiding his racist views by trying to use alternate terminology."

LekkoscPiwa 13y ago

Lenin would be proud of you Comrade! We are all equal after all.

mathattack 13y ago

When someone crushes the industry average in hiring an under-represented group, you really have to ask yourself what more can they do? Being specific - are you suggesting more outreach? Overpaying to take funding opportunities away from others? Lowering the bar? Offering more coaching to promising candidates?

reallyseriously 13y ago

Glad PG wrote this and equally glad this is the top comment so far. It appears PG hasn't yet learned that it will never be enough for some people. In anything he writes on this topic he'll leave out some group or state a point in a way that someone disagrees with. And then, all they'll do is attack attack attack. Even Seinfeld isn't immune: http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s

abalone 13y ago

There's also this gem. PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true." John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest." I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.

CGamesPlay 13y ago
Citation on that quote, for anyone else who was curious: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB121025688414577219 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB121025688414577219
jammur 13y ago
I think you misinterpreted that. PG said funding decisions aren't made based on similarity to the people making the funding decision. John Doerr is saying that sometimes one of factors in making a funding decision is similarity to other massively successful founders, not the people making the funding decisions. PG has been pretty open about the fact that pattern matching to other successful founders is very common.
- makomk 13y ago
  The other massively successful founders are also incredibly similar to the people making the funding decisions, though - in fact, quite often they are the people making those decisions.
- abalone 13y ago
  Do you really think that interpretation would improve PG's position? That pattern matching based on gender and race is "very common"? Are you implying that is ok so long as it's the race/gender of other founders? Thankfully PG does not actually take as extreme a position as Doerr. He merely downplays the existence of it in the VC community.

mafribe 13y ago

I can imagine that one reason "sexism related stories get flagged" is because they are rarely interesting, innovative or well though out. Such articles mostly repeat feminist/misandric boiler-plate amounting to little more than defending female privilege (e.g. no draft, longer life, many more opportunities to avoid having to work, better medical care, earlier retirement, more lenient sentencing for equal crimes etc, more social services, etc). I think a common term for this is "privilege blindness". Why would a thinking person want to read this again and again?

debacle 13y ago

Men learn at a certain point that we are not, in fact, women. We have different values, priorities, and hormones than women, and given the same scenarios we're likely to come to a different conclusion than a woman. So why would Paul try and talk from his zero years of experience as a woman and explain how to get more women in coding? Why not simply state "Please stop calling me a sexist, I don't like it, here's some facts about sexism at YC and in the industry in general." You're looking too deeply into this, I think.

wanda 13y ago
>You're looking too deeply into this, I think. That's what HN does. I dunno. Allow me to share some thoughts as a young woman. I had no problem getting into computer programming when I was young. I had no problem getting accepted to a high-ranking university and graduating mathematics. I had no problem completing a master's in computer science. I had no problem finding resources for programming because they're already there, written by men and women. They just don't have "women's" or "for girls" written on the cover in large, brightly-coloured, friendly script. So I don't really see what the fuss is about. Couldn't the low number of female computer scientists be due to the fact that not many girls are actually interested in such things? Maybe women can think and perceive what is around them for themselves, and don't need charities to show them the "hidden option" of programming? ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Addendum: before somebody jumps to the conclusion that I'm from a wealthy background, I'm working class, a humble chain-smoking serf. I'm from a bloody poor family and my CV has more bartending credentials than tech. I've never even dreamed of owning a current-gen Macbook, in stark contrast to every student I see these days, all seeming to have thousands of pounds worth of hardware without working a day in their lives. I've been using the same Linux machine for half a decade. Libraries are free. If you're interested in doing something and you have the aptitude, you don't need to be spoon-fed by liberals.
- ceol 13y ago
  > Couldn't the low number of female computer scientists be due to the fact that not many girls are actually interested in such things? That really doesn't help anything. Why are they not interested? Are you saying something in the core of being a woman makes them not want to code? > spoon-fed by liberals. Something something true colors.

vbuterin 13y ago

> I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad. Suppose that you walk up to someone who earns $100,000 a year and donates 60% to charity, and you see that although he rarely goes on vacations abroad and lives in a 500 square foot apartment he does have a relatively new car. You then say "how could you? If you had gotten a slightly crappier car you could have saved $3000 and sent that off to fight malaria in Africa and saved someone's life! Do you really value that tiny dose of comfort above a human life?" It may be a valid moral point depending on your personal morality, but acting that way is absolutely useless if not counterproductive toward the general goal of getting more money donated to charity to fight malaria in Africa.