12 ms·

Stanford's Women Won Just a Sliver of Silicon Valley

68 points by jashkenas 12y ago

patrickg_zill 12y ago
from the article: PayPal had a hard time hiring women, Max Levchin, another co-founder, later told a class at Stanford, “because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?” “The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,” he added. “The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.” Later, in an interview, Mr. Levchin said he had been speaking about diversity of programming backgrounds, not race or gender.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  What difference does it make? It's all about not being a narcissistic asshole. Whether you marginalize someone's opinion because they are a different sex, race, or computer science school than you doesn't matter. Be nice! Find compromise! "FP v. OOP" is not--contrary to the last decade of popular CS press--the make-or-break issue of project success!
pron 12y ago
“If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley” Is this PR, self-delusion intended to make the (powerful) speaker not feel bad, selective blindness or just mind-boggling ignorance? If it's the latter, how can society educate these people, who hold ever-growing power over us all? Of course, he could have meant "meritocracy" in its original, parodic, sense, in which case he's absolutely right.
- sedachv 12y ago
  > Of course, he could have meant "meritocracy" in its original, parodic, sense, in which case he's absolutely right. I had no idea about the etymology of the word (a good explanation from the man who coined it: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment). Thanks for the insight! I'm reading the Times Magazine profile of Mayer at Yahoo (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?action=click&contentCollection=Magazine&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe...) right now: "Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college."
  - vitd 12y ago
    It's hard to tell from the article what was actually said or meant. But to be fair to Mayer, Paltrow sends out a weekly newsletter (Goop) that contains lots of bad dietary advice, such as "toxin cleanses," and other pseudoscientific nonsense. She could have meant literally that Paltrow is uneducated about food and her food advice is harmful, so she didn't want her associated with Yahoo. That's certainly what I would meant done in Mayer's position.
- _random_ 12y ago
  Well, if you are a well-connected MIT/Stanford student, then you will definitely be judged based on your merits.
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  >Is this PR, self-delusion intended to make the (powerful) speaker not feel bad, selective blindness or just mind-boggling ignorance? Maybe it is none of the above? The fact that you have such a deep ideological belief that you can't even acknowledge the possibility that there are other options says more about you than the statement you are quoting says about the person saying it.
  - pron 12y ago
    The fact that large groups of people are grossly under-represented in SV categorically proves that it's not a meritocracy in the presumably positive sense that guy means it, and is very much a meritocracy in the true meaning of the word.
    - douche 12y ago
      If those large groups don't, on aggregate, pursue the merits that the meritocracy selects for, then yeah, you're going to see them under-represented.
      - lotso 12y ago
        So only white males actively pursue wealth and power in the US tech scene?
        douche 12y ago
        South and East Asian males seem to have done pretty well for themselves too.
        pron 12y ago
        Oh, are you're also a subscriber to "Social Darwinist Weekly"?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- juliangregorian 12y ago
  "Successful" people have always deluded themselves into believing they deserve their wealth and power, ffs, many of the kings and emperors of times past literally believed they were gods!
debacle 12y ago
I think it's important to acknowledge that men and women are treated different socially but are also different biologically. We should work to equalize representation and treatment from a social standpoint, but we also need to admit that the innate behavior of men could possibly play a huge factor in their roles in business. The factors themselves compound. We should not work to equalize men and women objectively. What we need to do is make sure that our daughters and sisters have the same opportunities that they would have if they were men, and aren't prejudiced by what society tells them to be.
- mkal_tsr 12y ago
  This short docu explores that a bit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE
- pron 12y ago
  > but we also need to admit that the innate behavior of men could possibly play a huge factor in their roles in business That's a terrible way of thinking about it. Unless some difference is proven to be biological, we should certainly assume it is not. That's how we deal everything else that has to do with technology: unless something is proven to be impossible, we try as hard as we can to achieve it. Some people believe cryonic re-animation is possible, and some people believe in indefinite extension of life or even uploading one's mind to a computer. If those notions are credible enough for technologists to put a lot of effort into achieving, then surely something as simple as equal representation for all groups in the seats of power is something we must work towards, no?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - debacle 12y ago
    > Unless some difference is proven to be biological Many differences have been proven to be biological. > unless something is proven to be impossible But what is your goal? Is your goal just for that number? What if parity is not better? What if the problem of parity is that there is something intrinsic in women that they're just not stupid enough to work 80 hours a week for 3-5 years to have a chance at a few million dollar exit? What if women just tend to not have the same values as men do during the time when their career priorities are most important? It's much more important that a woman can become a CEO if she has the skills and desire than that 50% of CEOs are women. > equal representation for all groups in the seats of power I think you start to tread into different territory here. While I don't believe that half of the women on the board of a company need necessarily be women, I do believe that half(ish) of the women on any sort of government body should be women.
lpsz 12y ago
It seems that at least a few of the graduates mentioned in the story gave up entrepreneurship to start a family (i.e. a traditional path.) It would be interesting to see if modern-day delay/avoidance of "family life" stage [1] may lead to a different outcome today. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/image/i5kUtaPYUPf8.jpg http://www.bloomberg.com/image/i5kUtaPYUPf8.jpg
- _random_ 12y ago
  Easy to guess: same money would be redistributed differently and there would be less of healthy kids (statistically speaking).
susan_hall 12y ago
The stories about the backlash against the diversity efforts at Stanford, circa 1994, are what Susan Faludi was talking about in her book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" which was published in 1991. That era saw a turning point, as various important factions in USA society withdrew their support from the project of advancing the role of women in society. The encouragement given during the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s disappeared in the 1990s.
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  >That era saw a turning point, as various important factions in USA society withdrew their support from the project of advancing the role of women in society. Like who?
  - electronvolt 12y ago
    Any prior Republican support for women's reproductive rights/etc. had dried up at that time because of their alignment in the '80s with the evangelical Christian right. In the '80s the party platform dropped support for the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights. Also, religious groups that were traditionally very liberal/voted Democrat (e.x. Catholics) on social issues also broke off from the Democrats over abortion and reproductive rights related issues over the course of the '80s, which isn't to say they were specifically /for/ those things at any point, they just became something more political in the '80s. I wouldn't really have said that 1991 was a clear date for the 'start' of that process, though. Perhaps more "When it got into full swing." The other thing is that the loss of large groups like the Catholics and the involvement of the Christian Right in general caused the Democrats to swing right as well, which means that even when the Dems were in power in the '90s their attitudes and the policies they enacted were often more conservative than they had been before RE: women's lib/rights/etc., even if they still supported most of the issues on paper.
    - imanaccount247 12y ago
      So an actually accurate statement would have been "some people are opposed to complete freedom on abortions". That's not quite the same as not supporting the advancement of women in society.
patronagezero 12y ago
I didn't realize it was a competition between the sexes. Pick your side and game on, then.
dropit_sphere 12y ago
...and all of the media.
gd1 12y ago
Remember, we're talking about the outliers here, the tail end of the distribution founding billion dollar companies. Here's a thought experiment. Take two normally distributed populations with the same mean. But one of them has a slightly higher standard deviation. How much higher does the standard deviation need to be before the combined population tails (at both ends) are dominated by the population with the higher standard deviation? You see men don't even necessarily need to have inherent (biological or social) advantages over women... they may just be more erratic and have a higher spread, and bam, they're producing both more serial killers and more geniuses. You can speculate as to why they might have a higher st. dev, but I think it is an interesting line of thought.

68 points by jashkenas 12y ago

from the article: PayPal had a hard time hiring women, Max Levchin, another co-founder, later told a class at Stanford, “because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?” “The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,” he added. “The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.” Later, in an interview, Mr. Levchin said he had been speaking about diversity of programming backgrounds, not race or gender.

moron4hire 12y ago
What difference does it make? It's all about not being a narcissistic asshole. Whether you marginalize someone's opinion because they are a different sex, race, or computer science school than you doesn't matter. Be nice! Find compromise! "FP v. OOP" is not--contrary to the last decade of popular CS press--the make-or-break issue of project success!

pron 12y ago

“If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley” Is this PR, self-delusion intended to make the (powerful) speaker not feel bad, selective blindness or just mind-boggling ignorance? If it's the latter, how can society educate these people, who hold ever-growing power over us all? Of course, he could have meant "meritocracy" in its original, parodic, sense, in which case he's absolutely right.

sedachv 12y ago
> Of course, he could have meant "meritocracy" in its original, parodic, sense, in which case he's absolutely right. I had no idea about the etymology of the word (a good explanation from the man who coined it: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment). Thanks for the insight! I'm reading the Times Magazine profile of Mayer at Yahoo (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?action=click&contentCollection=Magazine&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe...) right now: "Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college."
- vitd 12y ago
  It's hard to tell from the article what was actually said or meant. But to be fair to Mayer, Paltrow sends out a weekly newsletter (Goop) that contains lots of bad dietary advice, such as "toxin cleanses," and other pseudoscientific nonsense. She could have meant literally that Paltrow is uneducated about food and her food advice is harmful, so she didn't want her associated with Yahoo. That's certainly what I would meant done in Mayer's position.
_random_ 12y ago
Well, if you are a well-connected MIT/Stanford student, then you will definitely be judged based on your merits.
imanaccount247 12y ago
>Is this PR, self-delusion intended to make the (powerful) speaker not feel bad, selective blindness or just mind-boggling ignorance? Maybe it is none of the above? The fact that you have such a deep ideological belief that you can't even acknowledge the possibility that there are other options says more about you than the statement you are quoting says about the person saying it.
- pron 12y ago
  The fact that large groups of people are grossly under-represented in SV categorically proves that it's not a meritocracy in the presumably positive sense that guy means it, and is very much a meritocracy in the true meaning of the word.
  - douche 12y ago
    If those large groups don't, on aggregate, pursue the merits that the meritocracy selects for, then yeah, you're going to see them under-represented.
    - lotso 12y ago
      So only white males actively pursue wealth and power in the US tech scene?
      - douche 12y ago
        South and East Asian males seem to have done pretty well for themselves too.
        pron 12y ago
        Oh, are you're also a subscriber to "Social Darwinist Weekly"?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
juliangregorian 12y ago
"Successful" people have always deluded themselves into believing they deserve their wealth and power, ffs, many of the kings and emperors of times past literally believed they were gods!

debacle 12y ago

I think it's important to acknowledge that men and women are treated different socially but are also different biologically. We should work to equalize representation and treatment from a social standpoint, but we also need to admit that the innate behavior of men could possibly play a huge factor in their roles in business. The factors themselves compound. We should not work to equalize men and women objectively. What we need to do is make sure that our daughters and sisters have the same opportunities that they would have if they were men, and aren't prejudiced by what society tells them to be.

mkal_tsr 12y ago
This short docu explores that a bit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE
pron 12y ago
> but we also need to admit that the innate behavior of men could possibly play a huge factor in their roles in business That's a terrible way of thinking about it. Unless some difference is proven to be biological, we should certainly assume it is not. That's how we deal everything else that has to do with technology: unless something is proven to be impossible, we try as hard as we can to achieve it. Some people believe cryonic re-animation is possible, and some people believe in indefinite extension of life or even uploading one's mind to a computer. If those notions are credible enough for technologists to put a lot of effort into achieving, then surely something as simple as equal representation for all groups in the seats of power is something we must work towards, no?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- debacle 12y ago
  > Unless some difference is proven to be biological Many differences have been proven to be biological. > unless something is proven to be impossible But what is your goal? Is your goal just for that number? What if parity is not better? What if the problem of parity is that there is something intrinsic in women that they're just not stupid enough to work 80 hours a week for 3-5 years to have a chance at a few million dollar exit? What if women just tend to not have the same values as men do during the time when their career priorities are most important? It's much more important that a woman can become a CEO if she has the skills and desire than that 50% of CEOs are women. > equal representation for all groups in the seats of power I think you start to tread into different territory here. While I don't believe that half of the women on the board of a company need necessarily be women, I do believe that half(ish) of the women on any sort of government body should be women.

lpsz 12y ago

It seems that at least a few of the graduates mentioned in the story gave up entrepreneurship to start a family (i.e. a traditional path.) It would be interesting to see if modern-day delay/avoidance of "family life" stage [1] may lead to a different outcome today. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/image/i5kUtaPYUPf8.jpg http://www.bloomberg.com/image/i5kUtaPYUPf8.jpg

_random_ 12y ago
Easy to guess: same money would be redistributed differently and there would be less of healthy kids (statistically speaking).

susan_hall 12y ago

The stories about the backlash against the diversity efforts at Stanford, circa 1994, are what Susan Faludi was talking about in her book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" which was published in 1991. That era saw a turning point, as various important factions in USA society withdrew their support from the project of advancing the role of women in society. The encouragement given during the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s disappeared in the 1990s.

imanaccount247 12y ago
>That era saw a turning point, as various important factions in USA society withdrew their support from the project of advancing the role of women in society. Like who?
- electronvolt 12y ago
  Any prior Republican support for women's reproductive rights/etc. had dried up at that time because of their alignment in the '80s with the evangelical Christian right. In the '80s the party platform dropped support for the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights. Also, religious groups that were traditionally very liberal/voted Democrat (e.x. Catholics) on social issues also broke off from the Democrats over abortion and reproductive rights related issues over the course of the '80s, which isn't to say they were specifically /for/ those things at any point, they just became something more political in the '80s. I wouldn't really have said that 1991 was a clear date for the 'start' of that process, though. Perhaps more "When it got into full swing." The other thing is that the loss of large groups like the Catholics and the involvement of the Christian Right in general caused the Democrats to swing right as well, which means that even when the Dems were in power in the '90s their attitudes and the policies they enacted were often more conservative than they had been before RE: women's lib/rights/etc., even if they still supported most of the issues on paper.
  - imanaccount247 12y ago
    So an actually accurate statement would have been "some people are opposed to complete freedom on abortions". That's not quite the same as not supporting the advancement of women in society.

patronagezero 12y ago

I didn't realize it was a competition between the sexes. Pick your side and game on, then.

dropit_sphere 12y ago

...and all of the media.

gd1 12y ago

Remember, we're talking about the outliers here, the tail end of the distribution founding billion dollar companies. Here's a thought experiment. Take two normally distributed populations with the same mean. But one of them has a slightly higher standard deviation. How much higher does the standard deviation need to be before the combined population tails (at both ends) are dominated by the population with the higher standard deviation? You see men don't even necessarily need to have inherent (biological or social) advantages over women... they may just be more erratic and have a higher spread, and bam, they're producing both more serial killers and more geniuses. You can speculate as to why they might have a higher st. dev, but I think it is an interesting line of thought.