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What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women

114 points by Alex3917 12y ago

dang 12y ago
This post was briefly flag-killed by users. (That's what "[flagkilled]" means on a post.) We've unkilled it, obviously.
- jennita 12y ago
  Thanks for fixing that.
- owenwil 12y ago
  Thanks!
- Alex3917 12y ago
  It's pretty obvious why it was flag-killed, and not entirely unfair. But the reason I submitted this is that if you can get beyond the sensationsalist clickbaity sections then there are actually some good insights, and I think there is value in knowing how people who consider themselves to be outsiders perceive the world in general.
- SeoxyS 12y ago
  Curious, why the resurrection? Personally, I found the post distasteful, though not enough so to merit a flag. I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright. I think that does the women in our industry a disservice and exacerbates the problem.
  - smtddr 12y ago
    >>I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright. This only happens because the problem is constantly ignored. Personally, it's clear to me that nearly every single time anyone tries to talk about *ism in tech it degrades into a meltdown of horrible and/or needlessly pedantic comments. So much so that the actual problem never gets addressed. No choice but to try again and again; focusing harder and harder on examples. I do notice though, over a wide enough range of time, the conversations do very slowly inch towards maturity. And just think, if not even HN can handle the topic... what hope is there for anywhere else? Seriously, if anyone knows of another online community of mature discussion comparable to HN I'd like to know. Right now, HN seems to be in a class of its own in regards to quality of comments.
    - irishcoffee 12y ago
      was in a class of its own. religionism. People here (and everywhere google is a verb) ignorance is not only implied, but encouraged.
    - natural219 12y ago
      Hacker News is no longer really a community for serious debate or challenging insights WRT non-technology subjects. YCombinator's position as a public face of the tech industry sort of requires that submissions/comments, especially relating to gender issues, be whitewashed to some degree. The intelligent discoursers I know have all moved to communities like slatestarcodex, LessWrong, potentially-vile "neoreaction" sites (you can read Mencius Moldbug's writings for a primer), and other obscure parts of the Twitterverse. Your mileage may vary with any of these subcultures, and there is plenty of "toxic" content, but IMO the quality of discourse is vastly higher that what you'd expect on a typical Hacker News thread for anything not explicitly related to startups or programming.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        Just so I can be sure I understand this: you're suggesting that YC whitewashes gender topics off HN, so instead you discuss gender at LessWrong?
        jongraehl 12y ago
        Although I don't read LessWrong much any more, people always seemed willing to talk about their actual beliefs in depth. It's about as male-heavy as HN, I guess. There was, a long time ago, some controversy over 'here's what you need to do to get more women', which, as you'd expect, enraged a few folks.
        natural219 12y ago
        I actually don't read LessWrong itself, but I've interacted with lots of people and sub-communities that are associated with / spun off of the rationality movement. These were just rough pointers to directions I've followed to find higher levels of quality discourse. Ribbonfarm is another such community.
- laurenkay 12y ago
  Thanks for unkilling, but it's pretty ironic that a piece about Silicon Valley being a boys' club was flag-killed. With HN's prominence in SV, I really wish this were a progressive enough community to at least acknowledge the existence of sexism, and realize why articles like these continue to get written. Getting past the clickbaity photo that was used (we can save journalistic ethics for another night), this was a relevant profile of one type of startup that isn't well understood by SV. I'm glad the moderators viewed it as worth saving, but I really wish this community didn't need babysitting when it comes to discussions on sexism.
  - _tlf7 12y ago
    thanks so much lauren!! Appreciate you standing up for us - we were really upset this was taken off hacker news considering how deeply involved we are with this community.
  - jdp23 12y ago
    Ironic but not particularly surprising. It's almost like there are a bunch of guys here who don't like discussions of sexism.
- akamaka 12y ago
  I wish you hadn't unkilled it, because I ended up clicking on it. I stopped reading and flagged the article after getting to this part: There is, though, one thing these two founders are missing, and it is almost the sine qua non of the fabled Silicon Valley startup. They don’t have penises. This is trashy writing and flamebait, and I don't want to see in on HN. There is a vast library of quality literature on gender issues out there, and I think it's fair for us to reject articles that cannot rise above vulgarity.
- empressplay 12y ago
  Thank you for unkilling it. It might be mildly controversial but so are many stories that get posted on HN. It was unfair of people to use the spam-flagging mechanism to try to dispose of it. If they have an objection, they can make an argument in the comments. Thanks again.
- _tlf7 12y ago
  Hey this is [redacted] from the article. We are a part of this community - on hacker news every day - was sad to learn this has been flagged so much. This isn't an us vs them - we're all in this together. Hope by sharing our startup story more of you who were so offended by the article can see that we're just like you, hacking and hustling on a product we love.
JamesArgo 12y ago
>It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. In that sense, Silicon Valley culture echoes the Wolf of Wall Street culture in the ’80s and ’90s. Signal the right politics and even this nonsense gets upvoted. Scott Alexander wrote about why differences in outcome in highly technical fields might not imply a vast economically-counterproductive misogynistic conspiracy here:http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required-ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-gap/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required... Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals.
- webehere 12y ago
  > Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals. I think we should make a T-Shirt of that!
- logn 12y ago
  I like that article a lot. GRE Quantitative and SAT Math skew heavily toward men. And the SAT covers very basic reasoning skills that would be related to programming aptitude. GRE Quantitative covers topics essential to surviving a CS major. We should figure out where the educational system is failing women here. And we should also consider a new curriculum focused on programming, because traditional Computer Science isn't necessary for success as a tech worker. I've seen some colleges offer both a BA and a BS in Comp Sci which I think is smart, because in the BA they strip out physics, chemistry, calculus, etc which in my experience cause most CS majors to drop out.
  - learc83 12y ago
    What CS degree requires physics and chemistry ? Also I don't think a degree without calculus can really be called CS. How are you going to understand analysis of algorithms without at least a basic grasp of the concepts of calculus. A person who failed out of calculus definitely wouldn't have survived the rest of my CS program. I wouldn't advise anyone to do a CS degree with all the math stripped out. Sure you can build CRUD apps all day long without an understanding of math, but you don't need a degree to build CRUD apps. I think people who are happy doing that kind of work should skip college all together (or get a degree in something other than CS) and learn on their own or maybe do some kind of bootcamp.
raldi 12y ago
> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. I agree that parts of the tech world are really horrible, and I think we need to be doing everything we can to make women feel more welcome in our industry (not just for them, but for us), but isn't it at least a little exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley is the main "trench of the global gender war"? I'd think we'd be ranked after at least a couple of these: * The construction industry * The Bible Belt * The restaurant industry * West Africa * The movie industry * The Vatican * The sportswriting industry * The people who make Superbowl ads * Japan * The adult entertainment industry * The Middle East * Wall Street * Nepal * The upper echelons of American politics
- Hytosys 12y ago
  You aren't wrong that the author probably exaggerated with that sentence, but I think I am not alone in being awfully tired of your conversation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation EDIT: I guess I am alone.
  - raldi 12y ago
    I'm not saying the article should be dismissed; just that I think the author is overplaying her hand a bit in this one particular sentence.
    - Hytosys 12y ago
      We agree, then! Should have worded my thoughts carefully.
  - irishcoffee 12y ago
    Not alone, just on your own island here.
- nl 12y ago
  Most of the things you listed are places where women's rights are well behind those of men. I think those are all places that need to be fixed. But at the same time it's possible to think of the front line as being the place where the battle to move forward is being fought now, instead of places where little progress has been made. From that perspective talking of SV as a front line isn't wrong: if women can't be treated equally in the supposedly progressive environment of SV, then other places will be even further behind.
oldmanjay 12y ago
Some day someone will convince me that sexism can be fixed with more sexism. That day has not arrived.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deciplex 12y ago
  If you know that you will be eventually convinced of it, shouldn't you just short-circuit the process and start believing it now?
- epistasis 12y ago
  This is the same type of sloppy thinking that endorses "if you're so tolerant, why don't you accept my bigotry." It barely deserves a response, but I would like to point out that it is far more revealing of your ignorance of other people's experience than of any cleverness or wit on your part.
  - refurb 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure your response did nothing but attack the author and completely failed to counter the argument. Well done.
greggyb 12y ago
Does anyone have a good source for industry-wide ratios that relate to the ones given in the article? A couple examples: 2.7% of firms funded have female CEOs. How many of firms seeking funding have female CEOs? How many have a female cofounder rather than just looking at the CEO position? 80% of female founders used personal savings as their primary source of funding (it sounds like this is for the seed phase, but unclear in the article?). What is the industry-wide percentage? Female founded firms do 31% better on average (in an industry where average = a failed company what does this mean?). Is the sample size (which the article makes sure to tell us is far too small on a moral basis) large enough to make this statistically significant? Note: I am not trying to undermine the article - I don't have enough knowledge of the industry to say much. I am honestly looking for context for these numbers and wondering if anyone can help.
- Kalium 12y ago
  As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to contextualize them. For instance, you'll get a statistic about what percentage of funded startups have a woman co-founder but no information about what percentage of startups considered have a woman co-founder.
  - shard972 12y ago
    > As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to contextualize them. So the rule is to gimp data in order to fool people into believing things that may not be true?
    - Kalium 12y ago
      That's the cynical reading, yes. A more optimistic one is that people believe the numbers are scary enough that no context is needed.
kordless 12y ago
If you want to think forward about solving the challenges women face here, companies would do well to start taking a hard look in the mirror about how much they pay operations staff. Operations keeps the company humming along while it's simultaneously trying to fly off the rails of the rocket sled that is a startup. Unfortunately, a large quantity of dicks (literally) in SV think that operations positions are cookie cutter and can be filled by anyone hungry for a job. I can assure you from first hand experience that's not the case, and have seen many a company encounter additional struggles because they lacked (or lost) the operations support to keep the team together in hard times. Operation's positions are primarily filled by women. Women who work their asses off to keep the rest of the company fed when they are in crunch time. Women who ensure the office is warm, friendly and receptive to creative work. Women who make sure the ADD CEO is where they need to be on time to make deals happen. Women who understand the business better than most of the executives, because that's what's required to be good at helping the executives to get their shit together and get stuff done. And, sadly, these women doing operations are paid a fraction of what men are in other equally critical roles. Personally, I think it's time to fix this discrepancy. (Literally downvoted 2 minutes into posting this. Nice.)
- Kalium 12y ago
  Is it as hard to find a suitable operations person as it is a suitable engineer?
- hkmurakami 12y ago
  I'm genuinely curious -- does the women in tech movement advocate for improvements in the treatment of such operational staff (HR, admin, etc.) or is the narrative mostly limited to engineering (and maybe including product and marketing)?
  - Kalium 12y ago
    That will vary wildly depending on who you ask. A lot of attention and people are focused mainly on engineering, and we probably hear about those the most, but there is certainly a broader spread of attention too.
  - 12y ago
nsxwolf 12y ago
The cover art just sucks all the air out of the room. I immediately know you SV folks aren't going to get a fair shake in this article.
redwood 12y ago
Wish they'd mentioned Theranos
- ladytron 12y ago
  Theranos imo is a special case. It was founded by a woman with tons of family money and friends in high places. She did not need to play the funding game to get started. I doubt she would have held onto her position today if she had to use regular funding channels in the beginning. Most likely, she would have lost control of her company.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
Many of the concerns raised in this article are legitimate, and obviously aren't exclusive to tech. But the narrative presented by this article is not as compelling as it could be because the author relies so heavily on the experience of two founders whose struggle raising seed capital mirrors that of countless male founders. Is it possible that Glassbreakers simply isn't the $100 million/year investment opportunity the founders believe it is? The author devotes just a single paragraph to this possibility: > To be fair, there are many reasons Glassbreakers might not appeal to a Founders Fund or Andreessen Horowitz, or any of the dozens of other all-male VC partnerships on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, reasons that have nothing to do with sexist bias. It’s not likely to be a Facebook, or even a Houzz, the home-remodeling site launched by an Israeli husband and wife, financed by Sequoia and now valued at $2.3 billion. Glassbreakers is by definition “gender-gated,” thereby excluding 50 percent of potential users. It also presumes that many women do feel the need for female mentorship, when in fact there is quite possibly a significant cohort of working women who think they are getting along just fine without another woman’s advice. The author then minimizes this argument by pointing out that Uber founder Travis Kalanick was able to buy a San Fransico mansion when he sold a "now-forgotten" file sharing service. This has nothing to do with Glassbreakers, and anybody who stays in this game long enough will inevitably see more inexplicable fundings and acquisitions than can be counted. Good people and ideas go without funding and exits all the time. The Glassbreakers founders were able to raise $100,000 in seed money, which the article's author humorously refers to as "pre-seed." They were looking for half a million dollars in "pre-seed" funding, but a lot of companies have problems raising. It appears Glassbreakers has some traction (1,500 registered users) since launch, but without significantly more than this, raising $1.5 million might be difficult for the founders in today's ultra-competitive environment. Just because they want an 18 month runway doesn't mean that investors are obligated to provide it. Meanwhile, there are companies like Chronus (http://chronus.com/ http://chronus.com/) and MicroMentor (http://www.micromentor.org/ http://www.micromentor.org/) that offer mentoring software corporations can use to build their own mentoring programs for employees. There is also an ecosystem of firms like Insala (http://www.insala.com http://www.insala.com) that help corporations implement mentoring programs end to end. So if Glassbreakers is ultimately going to pursue revenue through corporate opportunities, which is allued to in the article, Glassbreakers has to prove that it can differentiate itself from and compete with what's already out there. Nothing in the article suggests that it has at this early stage.
colmvp 12y ago
> Zuckerberg, Gates, Thiel, Musk—these are our Carnegies and Morgans and Rockefellers, whose names will be on museum wings and university halls 100 years from now. And there’s not a female among them. Wow, yeah, it's crazy that a shortlist of four people of 316 million that none of them are women. Despite Asians having large representation in tech, should I be offended that none of those these heavyweights are Asian?
bbarn 12y ago
I would love to see the numbers of bootstrapped companies run/founded by women vs. those recieving investments. Until there are more women VC's, you're not going to see more women getting VC money. Why? Because purely evaluating a potential fundee on metrics alone will fail. VC's that use too much math and not enough "gut" will finance the wrong companies. The problem with that is, all the dudes got all the money, and human tendency is to think highly of things we most identify with. ergo, dude investors are more willing to go out on a limb on an idea if they can identify with the person giving it (currently, lots of white males). It's unfortunate, but it's not purely inequality, it's just a sad fact of human nature that we seek what's most alike us. It takes a particularly well educated, and self-understanding individual to look past emotional bias. The problem then becomes that others around them don't necessarily have that skill, so there becomes a cascading effect of lack of belief in something. (be that other investors, potential clients, or even quality employees) In effect, our prejudices create the successes on a larger scale that seed the next generation (of VC's, not generations of people) that's making the same emotional decisions. I don't have a solution. Maybe it's screaming about inequality, as some do, maybe it's succeeding in spite of it. I don't deny it's existence, but I just can't figure out how to change it. I think it just has to come down to each person realizing it in themselves and changing it. For me it was in round 4343239534 of potential front end developers, when a dorky looking hipster girl came in, and I realized half-way through her interview I had already set her up for failure because I'd assumed she was a poser. It took her being beyond great at what she did to make me realize that in myself, and let me tell you, that's an awful, awful feeling to have. When you're sitting there thinking you're a good person, fair to people, and realize you've made such a sweeping - and wrong - assumption about some one else because of their sex, race, lifestyle, whatever, it's really damn hard to accept it. I can completely see how people let themselves continue to ignore that little nudge in the back of their mind. It's not easy to change the way you think. TL;DR - Fucking sucks, and it's really hard to change, but it exists.
hagan_das 12y ago
"Gang-Bang Interviews"? Really? SV tech is getting the diversity shakedown hard these days. Plenty of other fields have sex ratios just as skewed. Why is tech getting the brunt?
- learc83 12y ago
  I've wondered that myself. There are plenty of other well paying jobs that are even more skewed than tech. Look at electricians, and plumbers to start. I don't see a constant barrage of articles lamenting on the lack of women electricians.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    How many articles do you see about electricians to begin with?
    - learc83 12y ago
      I think that's the point. The reason you see articles lamenting the lack of women in tech is because tech is currently a sexy career, while electrician isn't. My point is that if people really cared about improving women's lives, they'd be pushing for more women in skilled trades in addition to pushing for more women in tech. Unlike software development, being an electrician require an apprenticeship instead of college. Apprenticeships are paid and therefore more accessible to people with lower incomes. I'd argue that trying to improve the lives of less educated lower income women specifically is more beneficial than focusing on the smart, ambitious, college graduates (and future college graduates) who we are trying to entice into software development--women who would probably go on to high paying jobs in other fields anyway.
      - geofft 12y ago
        I'm a software engineer. I have a voice among software engineers, and not so much among electricians. I'll focus on the change that I have half a chance of making some progress on. I don't think this means that I don't really care about improving women's lives, any more than how, as a Linux user, me not writing Windows tutorials means I don't really care about improving user's lives. Why aren't there analogous articles written by electricians? You'd have to ask the electricians.
Thriptic 12y ago
I'm actually consistently surprised that gender bias is really a problem (although I'm out in Boston so perhaps I don't see it). I would have thought that economic incentives would have stamped this stupid behavior out ages ago. The idea that team-killing unprofessional behavior on this reported scale is being allowed to continue by investors / management, or that VCs and hiring professionals are purposely ignoring strong opportunities because of peoples' gender just strikes me as being so stupid and shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable. Is this really happening, or are these types of articles simply exaggerating the extent of the problem?
- MrDom 12y ago
  being so stupid and shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable. If something seems to good to be true, it usually is. When somebody writes an article alleging something too stupid to be believable, maybe you should be asking what the author has to gain by misrepresenting the truth?
- geofft 12y ago
  This is the same Silicon Valley where having Mahbod Moghadam is an asset. Revenue, especially in the form of VC, is so disconnected from productivity that massive inefficiencies can exist (provided you have the capital to power through them). You can build a sufficiently-successful company ignoring half your resumes. In some places it's way more than half, and there are biases to top-tier schools, biases to personal referrals, etc., and things work. Also the nasty thing about those sorts of biases is that they're self-perpetuating. If someone else previously hired you for a job you were well-suited for, you now have nice experience on your resume, a good referral, and usually connections. So a company hiring experienced local developers, or a VC firm judging founders by what they've built in the past, gets the result of everyone else's biases. There's also explicitly some allowance for mistakes if you look like you should have been and could still be successful, ranging from the acceptance of pivots to giving people funding even if their last exit wasn't so great. While useful, this also tends to defang the savagery of the free market significantly. This is not to say that anyone is guaranteed free money. There's certainly hard work required, and also certainly some blind luck. But the market won't shake out mistakes as quickly as you'd hope.
- 12y ago
birken 12y ago
These are always tough pieces to respond to, because there are certainly a lot of gender inequalities in the startup world. But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of the situation instead of just a description of its current state. They mention this particular pair of founders was turned down by YC and their trouble raising funding, but not any of the stats YC shares about how they have funded more and more female founders, and all of the outreach efforts they do. They mention Ellen Pao concerned a lawsuit, but then only say she is "at Reddit", instead of saying she is currently the CEO. The CEO! Also, they mention Peter Thiel and David Sacks are the new generation? I honestly didn't know who David Sacks was until I just looked it up. What about all of the partners at YC? What about Mark Zuckerberg? What about all of the non-sexist people?
- potatolicious 12y ago
  > "But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of the situation instead of just a description of its current state." I admire the leadership being shown at YC right now and the progress that has been made. But I'd caution against mistaking these accomplishments for trajectory. Just read the most upvoted posts in this very thread, and the number of men here who perceive that "women in tech" or feminism is a vendetta or war against men. While we certainly appear more willing to call out the most egregious and obvious sexism in the industry (see: the Tinder fiasco), there are an alarming of young, supposedly enlightened participants who are vocally and virulently against any kind of reform, and adamant in their belief that women are "shaking down" the industry with their rabid bands of "SJW" lapdogs. Note the sheer number of posters here who have completely not addressed any substance of the article and instead are focusing on how the tone is overly abrasive or the wording ineloquent. No, I'm not willing to optimistically call the trajectory upwards - I'm not sure if I'm willing to call the trajectory level.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    In all honesty, this article reads like a hackneyed retread of several dozen other articles I've read. It trots out the same statistics, quotes the same people, and so on. It's hard to take an article seriously when it feels like one giant repost.
jongraehl 12y ago
John Carmack's "we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want. It doesn’t matter what they look like." is pretty much all you need to say, over and over, until they give up. There are two problems w/ 'white male' dominated engineering fields (really, male, unless you insist on the slander that asian+indian are 'honorary white'). One is optical. It just looks bad to shallow thinkers who don't care to pause to find out what the pool of able+willing workers looks like. The other is that techies are too insecure about their value and virtue; they're inclined to actually respond in good faith to slanders like this one. Big mistake. You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone. Yes, everywhere I look around me are a bunch of guys. (maybe 10-20% women). Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.
- sami36 12y ago
  I disagree in part with the comment above, but why is this opinion being downvoted, wherever you stand on the issue ? Regardless of whether you take issue with the soundness of his argument, a dissenting voice should have a right to be heard. I'm sometimes amazed at the swiftness with which a different perspective is swept under the rug...in the same forums and TOPIC, nothing less, where inclusiveness, Capital I, is being discussed.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  When you say 'until they give up' do you mean women and minorities who want a safe and welcoming workplace? Or are you referring to a different 'they' than the one being addressed in the article you're replying to?
  - wyager 12y ago
    >women and minorities who want a safe and welcoming workplace? How are current software companies not "safe and welcoming"?
    - potatolicious 12y ago
PhoenixWright 12y ago
I really wish I could go to at least one site related to something I'm interested in be it sports, tech or gaming and not have to listen to this feminist propaganda.
- normloman 12y ago
  Yeah it would be nice to just enjoy distractions without my beliefs being challenged all the time. Why can't I ignore all the problems of society, and just read blogs all day?
michaelochurch 12y ago
Silicon Valley is where the future is allegedly built by people living in the past. For just one of a zillion examples: why's the place so expensive? Fucking NIMBYs who refuse to allow 21st-century housing density. Also, California isn't that liberal. It's what 1960s liberalism would be if drained of all its leftist color and its impressive work ethic, leaving just nostalgic remembrances of the hippie era. The '60s leftists stood for something (like, civil rights and economic equality) but their 2015-era California remnant just wants to live in some silly suburban watered-down hippy-dippy utopia (see: Agrestic in Weeds) that never existed and doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Unfortunately, the not-fit-for-life soft-skulls become the Prop 13 assholes and the hair-trigger NIMBYs who block new development (it might shadow the gluten-free tomato garden I would start if I actually had ambition!) and drive house prices through the roof. I like some people in California, for sure, but the Prop 13 NIMBY people should be forcibly relocated to the Pacific Garbage Patch... until we have something like The Raft in Snow Crash to put them on. In the same way, this supposedly innovative industry is run by people who still subscribe to the Mad Men playbook of gender relations, never mind the fact that the rest of the world (yes, even Wall Street!) has moved beyond that and the sort of disgusting behavior (such as the investors who come on to women during pitches, or otherwise attempt to use their positions of power for sexual access) described in this article would get a person fired, if not more.
throwaway6761 12y ago
Throwaway account given the topic. As someone who has been in the valley along while, the disrespect from women seems to come from a couple of angles -- the bro culture (define as you wise, Uber excels in this), racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst), and many of those that grew up outside the bay area. Some of us have been seeing each other as equals for years, judgement based on merit, but many a*holes still perpetuate issues. My data set -- several startups, a few big companies, bay area native; my wife non native, white, a number of large prominent technical companies. One of us in engineering, the other in project/program management. The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a difficult one.
- SafariDevelop 12y ago
  > racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst) > The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a difficult one. I'm not going to call you a racist, but the least you could do is provide examples or, at best, statistics to backup your allegations. None, but one, of the feminist accusations of the tech industry in the American media involved a non-white male. > caste loving people As if Americans are not caste-loving? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-dismissed/307274/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-di...
  - refurb 12y ago
    Nothing more ironic than someone trying to fight sexism by denegrating an entire race!
  - geofft 12y ago
    Anil Dash has a nice article talking about Indian-American culture that comes off as much less racist because he's reflecting on his own culture (which, incidentally, happens to be my own, and I can confirm anecdotally lots of what he says). https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats-not-being-told-9a36fb40530f https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats-no... (To be overly clear, I don't think the claim that all the H1-Bs are importing sexism is defensible, as phrased, and I certainly don't think Indian culture bears the majority of the responsibility here, compared to American culture. I'm just trying to offer a better and relevant claim.)
pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
surprise surprise... they think the same way of emotionally needy men with thin skin.
jecjec 12y ago
The front line of the gender war is the American courtroom, where men are subject to grossly unjust and discriminatory divorce and custody law.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  Turns out if you actually analyze the numbers, this turns out not to be the case.
- lkbm 12y ago
  In contested custody cases, fathers win about half the time. Granted, there's probably selection bias there. The custody issue is clearly a result of gender stereotypes. I'm a feminism in part because it's the one movement that's actively and effectively fighting against that root cause. I don't think tech sexism in SV is _the_ frontline, or that the courts are _the_ frontline, but they're both important fights. (SV might be the frontline _in tech_, but not in gender or sex equality overall, or even in the US.)
png_hero 12y ago
>Two founders got less funding then they wanted, sexism? The idea for the company seemed reasonable, after all. Maybe sexism. The more likely answer is: most founders get less money than they want, in fact most founders fail. There is under appreciated carnage in the founding game; acknowledgement of this, is one of the things that made PG such a fresh voice when he came on the scene years ago. That realism. reality is that the founder game is a suckers bet, and one that men take at a vastly, vastly greater degree than women. Men fail hard, and men themselves internalize the failure(most often) or blame larger forces outside of their control. Either response is fine (they usually don't blame "sexism" but they are plenty happy to blame other conspiracies). But, when it comes time to talley the toll on men, society is largely quiet, why? Males are disposable. Women, on the other hand, largely expect to be valued on the mere fact of their personage. They deserve respect for them being them. A noble belief, but one that does not exist in the hyper-competitive modern economy. >yeah, if I was a professor I'd give your business plan an A-... Does that mean you "deserve" funding? No. So, I could go on, but until women start throwing themselves into the grinder at the same rate men do, the ratio of men at the top will always be lopsided. And I say this not as a man that is bitter (I actually won the game against all odds) but I say this as somebody who believes that women's strategies on a whole are better than men's. That is: men are stupid to take so much risk! It shouldn't be venerated! The true non-sexism is to realize that women's choices are valid (and probably smarter) and women are more than just "poorly performing men"
- sheepmullet 12y ago
  Spot on. Startups are a high risk industry and most fail. We sell young men a dream... And the same dream just doesn't appeal to young women.
rockmeamedee 12y ago
This is not a good article. It's badly written and shit for nuance. It divides things into a "Global Gender War" purely for the sake of heightening the mood."Look at these terrible gang-bang interviewers!" is all it has to say. There is no mention of the massive amount of work women are doing in the space, and when there is, it as an example of how terrible they are being treated. Here is a women-led company that offers peer mentoring, but they too are struggling because of gender bias. It calls Model View Culture an "acid-penned, widely read website". MVC is actually doing the social justice work and newsweek calls them "acid-penned". It puts fucking Vivek Wadhwa up as a better example of feminism than the actual women fighting for their humanity. Vivek Wadhwa isn't a good person, in general he's just a terrible male ally. (what he says just in _this piece_ is disrespectful to women, see http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy-feminists http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy-feminists) There are no humans in the piece, only victims and demons. Two examples of struggling women-led startups, and a female VC who was forced to touch a penis. These are women in SV according to newsweek. This is as badly thought out and less researched than that Rolling Stone article. One of the subheadings is "Asking for It" as a pun on women asking for money. That's an actual rape joke.
plikan13 12y ago
Attitudes towards women in IT environments would become a little more relaxed if a fair number of programmers would have the courage to stop denying and come out of the closet. There, I said it.
camperman 12y ago
"Shanley Kane is a young tech industry observer and founder of Model View Culture, an acid-penned, widely read website on which she routinely exposes and excoriates the white brogrammer establishment. " That's a very kind way of describing her. Here's another, far more accurate, way: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/12/10/the-madness-of-queen-shanley/ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/12/10/the-madness-of-qu...
- tptacek 12y ago
  I love the idea that the most accurate way to describe someone relies on a link to Breitbart. You were being ironic here, right? Well played: a trenchant commentary on the absurdity of personal takedowns.
  - camperman 12y ago
    "I love the idea that the most accurate way to describe someone relies on a link to Breitbart." I said 'far more accurate way' to describe 'Shanley Kane' - not just someone. The most accurate way is of course her Encyclopedia Dramatica page and her twitter feed. https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Shanley_kane https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Shanley_kane https://archive.today/HaMTn https://archive.today/HaMTn "You were being ironic here, right? Well played: a trenchant commentary on the absurdity of personal takedowns." Your balls dude. They're between your legs. Read the links. Shanley Kane is a horrible, profane, disgusting, rage-filled human being who is only tolerated in the tech industry because she's a feminist.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Yes, that's where I thought you were coming from.
      - camperman 12y ago
        Are you going to actually answer any of my points? Because you've answered none so far. Go on then. Post links to Kane's technical achievements, her positive influence for women in tech and why the industry is so much better for having her in it. I'll wait.

114 points by Alex3917 12y ago

dang 12y ago

This post was briefly flag-killed by users. (That's what "[flagkilled]" means on a post.) We've unkilled it, obviously.

jennita 12y ago
Thanks for fixing that.
owenwil 12y ago
Thanks!
Alex3917 12y ago
It's pretty obvious why it was flag-killed, and not entirely unfair. But the reason I submitted this is that if you can get beyond the sensationsalist clickbaity sections then there are actually some good insights, and I think there is value in knowing how people who consider themselves to be outsiders perceive the world in general.
SeoxyS 12y ago
Curious, why the resurrection? Personally, I found the post distasteful, though not enough so to merit a flag. I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright. I think that does the women in our industry a disservice and exacerbates the problem.
- smtddr 12y ago
  >>I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright. This only happens because the problem is constantly ignored. Personally, it's clear to me that nearly every single time anyone tries to talk about *ism in tech it degrades into a meltdown of horrible and/or needlessly pedantic comments. So much so that the actual problem never gets addressed. No choice but to try again and again; focusing harder and harder on examples. I do notice though, over a wide enough range of time, the conversations do very slowly inch towards maturity. And just think, if not even HN can handle the topic... what hope is there for anywhere else? Seriously, if anyone knows of another online community of mature discussion comparable to HN I'd like to know. Right now, HN seems to be in a class of its own in regards to quality of comments.
  - irishcoffee 12y ago
    was in a class of its own. religionism. People here (and everywhere google is a verb) ignorance is not only implied, but encouraged.
  - natural219 12y ago
    Hacker News is no longer really a community for serious debate or challenging insights WRT non-technology subjects. YCombinator's position as a public face of the tech industry sort of requires that submissions/comments, especially relating to gender issues, be whitewashed to some degree. The intelligent discoursers I know have all moved to communities like slatestarcodex, LessWrong, potentially-vile "neoreaction" sites (you can read Mencius Moldbug's writings for a primer), and other obscure parts of the Twitterverse. Your mileage may vary with any of these subcultures, and there is plenty of "toxic" content, but IMO the quality of discourse is vastly higher that what you'd expect on a typical Hacker News thread for anything not explicitly related to startups or programming.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Just so I can be sure I understand this: you're suggesting that YC whitewashes gender topics off HN, so instead you discuss gender at LessWrong?
      - jongraehl 12y ago
        Although I don't read LessWrong much any more, people always seemed willing to talk about their actual beliefs in depth. It's about as male-heavy as HN, I guess. There was, a long time ago, some controversy over 'here's what you need to do to get more women', which, as you'd expect, enraged a few folks.
      - natural219 12y ago
        I actually don't read LessWrong itself, but I've interacted with lots of people and sub-communities that are associated with / spun off of the rationality movement. These were just rough pointers to directions I've followed to find higher levels of quality discourse. Ribbonfarm is another such community.
laurenkay 12y ago
Thanks for unkilling, but it's pretty ironic that a piece about Silicon Valley being a boys' club was flag-killed. With HN's prominence in SV, I really wish this were a progressive enough community to at least acknowledge the existence of sexism, and realize why articles like these continue to get written. Getting past the clickbaity photo that was used (we can save journalistic ethics for another night), this was a relevant profile of one type of startup that isn't well understood by SV. I'm glad the moderators viewed it as worth saving, but I really wish this community didn't need babysitting when it comes to discussions on sexism.
- _tlf7 12y ago
  thanks so much lauren!! Appreciate you standing up for us - we were really upset this was taken off hacker news considering how deeply involved we are with this community.
- jdp23 12y ago
  Ironic but not particularly surprising. It's almost like there are a bunch of guys here who don't like discussions of sexism.
akamaka 12y ago
I wish you hadn't unkilled it, because I ended up clicking on it. I stopped reading and flagged the article after getting to this part: There is, though, one thing these two founders are missing, and it is almost the sine qua non of the fabled Silicon Valley startup. They don’t have penises. This is trashy writing and flamebait, and I don't want to see in on HN. There is a vast library of quality literature on gender issues out there, and I think it's fair for us to reject articles that cannot rise above vulgarity.
empressplay 12y ago
Thank you for unkilling it. It might be mildly controversial but so are many stories that get posted on HN. It was unfair of people to use the spam-flagging mechanism to try to dispose of it. If they have an objection, they can make an argument in the comments. Thanks again.
_tlf7 12y ago
Hey this is [redacted] from the article. We are a part of this community - on hacker news every day - was sad to learn this has been flagged so much. This isn't an us vs them - we're all in this together. Hope by sharing our startup story more of you who were so offended by the article can see that we're just like you, hacking and hustling on a product we love.

JamesArgo 12y ago

>It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. In that sense, Silicon Valley culture echoes the Wolf of Wall Street culture in the ’80s and ’90s. Signal the right politics and even this nonsense gets upvoted. Scott Alexander wrote about why differences in outcome in highly technical fields might not imply a vast economically-counterproductive misogynistic conspiracy here:http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required-ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-gap/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required... Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals.

webehere 12y ago
> Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals. I think we should make a T-Shirt of that!
logn 12y ago
I like that article a lot. GRE Quantitative and SAT Math skew heavily toward men. And the SAT covers very basic reasoning skills that would be related to programming aptitude. GRE Quantitative covers topics essential to surviving a CS major. We should figure out where the educational system is failing women here. And we should also consider a new curriculum focused on programming, because traditional Computer Science isn't necessary for success as a tech worker. I've seen some colleges offer both a BA and a BS in Comp Sci which I think is smart, because in the BA they strip out physics, chemistry, calculus, etc which in my experience cause most CS majors to drop out.
- learc83 12y ago
  What CS degree requires physics and chemistry ? Also I don't think a degree without calculus can really be called CS. How are you going to understand analysis of algorithms without at least a basic grasp of the concepts of calculus. A person who failed out of calculus definitely wouldn't have survived the rest of my CS program. I wouldn't advise anyone to do a CS degree with all the math stripped out. Sure you can build CRUD apps all day long without an understanding of math, but you don't need a degree to build CRUD apps. I think people who are happy doing that kind of work should skip college all together (or get a degree in something other than CS) and learn on their own or maybe do some kind of bootcamp.

raldi 12y ago

> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. I agree that parts of the tech world are really horrible, and I think we need to be doing everything we can to make women feel more welcome in our industry (not just for them, but for us), but isn't it at least a little exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley is the main "trench of the global gender war"? I'd think we'd be ranked after at least a couple of these: * The construction industry * The Bible Belt * The restaurant industry * West Africa * The movie industry * The Vatican * The sportswriting industry * The people who make Superbowl ads * Japan * The adult entertainment industry * The Middle East * Wall Street * Nepal * The upper echelons of American politics

Hytosys 12y ago
You aren't wrong that the author probably exaggerated with that sentence, but I think I am not alone in being awfully tired of your conversation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation EDIT: I guess I am alone.
- raldi 12y ago
  I'm not saying the article should be dismissed; just that I think the author is overplaying her hand a bit in this one particular sentence.
  - Hytosys 12y ago
    We agree, then! Should have worded my thoughts carefully.
- irishcoffee 12y ago
  Not alone, just on your own island here.
nl 12y ago
Most of the things you listed are places where women's rights are well behind those of men. I think those are all places that need to be fixed. But at the same time it's possible to think of the front line as being the place where the battle to move forward is being fought now, instead of places where little progress has been made. From that perspective talking of SV as a front line isn't wrong: if women can't be treated equally in the supposedly progressive environment of SV, then other places will be even further behind.

oldmanjay 12y ago

Some day someone will convince me that sexism can be fixed with more sexism. That day has not arrived.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deciplex 12y ago
If you know that you will be eventually convinced of it, shouldn't you just short-circuit the process and start believing it now?
epistasis 12y ago
This is the same type of sloppy thinking that endorses "if you're so tolerant, why don't you accept my bigotry." It barely deserves a response, but I would like to point out that it is far more revealing of your ignorance of other people's experience than of any cleverness or wit on your part.
- refurb 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure your response did nothing but attack the author and completely failed to counter the argument. Well done.

greggyb 12y ago

Does anyone have a good source for industry-wide ratios that relate to the ones given in the article? A couple examples: 2.7% of firms funded have female CEOs. How many of firms seeking funding have female CEOs? How many have a female cofounder rather than just looking at the CEO position? 80% of female founders used personal savings as their primary source of funding (it sounds like this is for the seed phase, but unclear in the article?). What is the industry-wide percentage? Female founded firms do 31% better on average (in an industry where average = a failed company what does this mean?). Is the sample size (which the article makes sure to tell us is far too small on a moral basis) large enough to make this statistically significant? Note: I am not trying to undermine the article - I don't have enough knowledge of the industry to say much. I am honestly looking for context for these numbers and wondering if anyone can help.

Kalium 12y ago
As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to contextualize them. For instance, you'll get a statistic about what percentage of funded startups have a woman co-founder but no information about what percentage of startups considered have a woman co-founder.
- shard972 12y ago
  > As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to contextualize them. So the rule is to gimp data in order to fool people into believing things that may not be true?
  - Kalium 12y ago
    That's the cynical reading, yes. A more optimistic one is that people believe the numbers are scary enough that no context is needed.

kordless 12y ago

If you want to think forward about solving the challenges women face here, companies would do well to start taking a hard look in the mirror about how much they pay operations staff. Operations keeps the company humming along while it's simultaneously trying to fly off the rails of the rocket sled that is a startup. Unfortunately, a large quantity of dicks (literally) in SV think that operations positions are cookie cutter and can be filled by anyone hungry for a job. I can assure you from first hand experience that's not the case, and have seen many a company encounter additional struggles because they lacked (or lost) the operations support to keep the team together in hard times. Operation's positions are primarily filled by women. Women who work their asses off to keep the rest of the company fed when they are in crunch time. Women who ensure the office is warm, friendly and receptive to creative work. Women who make sure the ADD CEO is where they need to be on time to make deals happen. Women who understand the business better than most of the executives, because that's what's required to be good at helping the executives to get their shit together and get stuff done. And, sadly, these women doing operations are paid a fraction of what men are in other equally critical roles. Personally, I think it's time to fix this discrepancy. (Literally downvoted 2 minutes into posting this. Nice.)

Kalium 12y ago
Is it as hard to find a suitable operations person as it is a suitable engineer?
hkmurakami 12y ago
I'm genuinely curious -- does the women in tech movement advocate for improvements in the treatment of such operational staff (HR, admin, etc.) or is the narrative mostly limited to engineering (and maybe including product and marketing)?
- Kalium 12y ago
  That will vary wildly depending on who you ask. A lot of attention and people are focused mainly on engineering, and we probably hear about those the most, but there is certainly a broader spread of attention too.
- 12y ago

nsxwolf 12y ago

The cover art just sucks all the air out of the room. I immediately know you SV folks aren't going to get a fair shake in this article.

redwood 12y ago

Wish they'd mentioned Theranos

ladytron 12y ago
Theranos imo is a special case. It was founded by a woman with tons of family money and friends in high places. She did not need to play the funding game to get started. I doubt she would have held onto her position today if she had to use regular funding channels in the beginning. Most likely, she would have lost control of her company.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

Many of the concerns raised in this article are legitimate, and obviously aren't exclusive to tech. But the narrative presented by this article is not as compelling as it could be because the author relies so heavily on the experience of two founders whose struggle raising seed capital mirrors that of countless male founders. Is it possible that Glassbreakers simply isn't the $100 million/year investment opportunity the founders believe it is? The author devotes just a single paragraph to this possibility: > To be fair, there are many reasons Glassbreakers might not appeal to a Founders Fund or Andreessen Horowitz, or any of the dozens of other all-male VC partnerships on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, reasons that have nothing to do with sexist bias. It’s not likely to be a Facebook, or even a Houzz, the home-remodeling site launched by an Israeli husband and wife, financed by Sequoia and now valued at $2.3 billion. Glassbreakers is by definition “gender-gated,” thereby excluding 50 percent of potential users. It also presumes that many women do feel the need for female mentorship, when in fact there is quite possibly a significant cohort of working women who think they are getting along just fine without another woman’s advice. The author then minimizes this argument by pointing out that Uber founder Travis Kalanick was able to buy a San Fransico mansion when he sold a "now-forgotten" file sharing service. This has nothing to do with Glassbreakers, and anybody who stays in this game long enough will inevitably see more inexplicable fundings and acquisitions than can be counted. Good people and ideas go without funding and exits all the time. The Glassbreakers founders were able to raise $100,000 in seed money, which the article's author humorously refers to as "pre-seed." They were looking for half a million dollars in "pre-seed" funding, but a lot of companies have problems raising. It appears Glassbreakers has some traction (1,500 registered users) since launch, but without significantly more than this, raising $1.5 million might be difficult for the founders in today's ultra-competitive environment. Just because they want an 18 month runway doesn't mean that investors are obligated to provide it. Meanwhile, there are companies like Chronus (http://chronus.com/ http://chronus.com/) and MicroMentor (http://www.micromentor.org/ http://www.micromentor.org/) that offer mentoring software corporations can use to build their own mentoring programs for employees. There is also an ecosystem of firms like Insala (http://www.insala.com http://www.insala.com) that help corporations implement mentoring programs end to end. So if Glassbreakers is ultimately going to pursue revenue through corporate opportunities, which is allued to in the article, Glassbreakers has to prove that it can differentiate itself from and compete with what's already out there. Nothing in the article suggests that it has at this early stage.

colmvp 12y ago

> Zuckerberg, Gates, Thiel, Musk—these are our Carnegies and Morgans and Rockefellers, whose names will be on museum wings and university halls 100 years from now. And there’s not a female among them. Wow, yeah, it's crazy that a shortlist of four people of 316 million that none of them are women. Despite Asians having large representation in tech, should I be offended that none of those these heavyweights are Asian?

bbarn 12y ago

I would love to see the numbers of bootstrapped companies run/founded by women vs. those recieving investments. Until there are more women VC's, you're not going to see more women getting VC money. Why? Because purely evaluating a potential fundee on metrics alone will fail. VC's that use too much math and not enough "gut" will finance the wrong companies. The problem with that is, all the dudes got all the money, and human tendency is to think highly of things we most identify with. ergo, dude investors are more willing to go out on a limb on an idea if they can identify with the person giving it (currently, lots of white males). It's unfortunate, but it's not purely inequality, it's just a sad fact of human nature that we seek what's most alike us. It takes a particularly well educated, and self-understanding individual to look past emotional bias. The problem then becomes that others around them don't necessarily have that skill, so there becomes a cascading effect of lack of belief in something. (be that other investors, potential clients, or even quality employees) In effect, our prejudices create the successes on a larger scale that seed the next generation (of VC's, not generations of people) that's making the same emotional decisions. I don't have a solution. Maybe it's screaming about inequality, as some do, maybe it's succeeding in spite of it. I don't deny it's existence, but I just can't figure out how to change it. I think it just has to come down to each person realizing it in themselves and changing it. For me it was in round 4343239534 of potential front end developers, when a dorky looking hipster girl came in, and I realized half-way through her interview I had already set her up for failure because I'd assumed she was a poser. It took her being beyond great at what she did to make me realize that in myself, and let me tell you, that's an awful, awful feeling to have. When you're sitting there thinking you're a good person, fair to people, and realize you've made such a sweeping - and wrong - assumption about some one else because of their sex, race, lifestyle, whatever, it's really damn hard to accept it. I can completely see how people let themselves continue to ignore that little nudge in the back of their mind. It's not easy to change the way you think. TL;DR - Fucking sucks, and it's really hard to change, but it exists.

hagan_das 12y ago

"Gang-Bang Interviews"? Really? SV tech is getting the diversity shakedown hard these days. Plenty of other fields have sex ratios just as skewed. Why is tech getting the brunt?

learc83 12y ago
I've wondered that myself. There are plenty of other well paying jobs that are even more skewed than tech. Look at electricians, and plumbers to start. I don't see a constant barrage of articles lamenting on the lack of women electricians.
- saraid216 12y ago
  How many articles do you see about electricians to begin with?
  - learc83 12y ago
    I think that's the point. The reason you see articles lamenting the lack of women in tech is because tech is currently a sexy career, while electrician isn't. My point is that if people really cared about improving women's lives, they'd be pushing for more women in skilled trades in addition to pushing for more women in tech. Unlike software development, being an electrician require an apprenticeship instead of college. Apprenticeships are paid and therefore more accessible to people with lower incomes. I'd argue that trying to improve the lives of less educated lower income women specifically is more beneficial than focusing on the smart, ambitious, college graduates (and future college graduates) who we are trying to entice into software development--women who would probably go on to high paying jobs in other fields anyway.
    - geofft 12y ago
      I'm a software engineer. I have a voice among software engineers, and not so much among electricians. I'll focus on the change that I have half a chance of making some progress on. I don't think this means that I don't really care about improving women's lives, any more than how, as a Linux user, me not writing Windows tutorials means I don't really care about improving user's lives. Why aren't there analogous articles written by electricians? You'd have to ask the electricians.

Thriptic 12y ago

I'm actually consistently surprised that gender bias is really a problem (although I'm out in Boston so perhaps I don't see it). I would have thought that economic incentives would have stamped this stupid behavior out ages ago. The idea that team-killing unprofessional behavior on this reported scale is being allowed to continue by investors / management, or that VCs and hiring professionals are purposely ignoring strong opportunities because of peoples' gender just strikes me as being so stupid and shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable. Is this really happening, or are these types of articles simply exaggerating the extent of the problem?

MrDom 12y ago
being so stupid and shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable. If something seems to good to be true, it usually is. When somebody writes an article alleging something too stupid to be believable, maybe you should be asking what the author has to gain by misrepresenting the truth?
geofft 12y ago
This is the same Silicon Valley where having Mahbod Moghadam is an asset. Revenue, especially in the form of VC, is so disconnected from productivity that massive inefficiencies can exist (provided you have the capital to power through them). You can build a sufficiently-successful company ignoring half your resumes. In some places it's way more than half, and there are biases to top-tier schools, biases to personal referrals, etc., and things work. Also the nasty thing about those sorts of biases is that they're self-perpetuating. If someone else previously hired you for a job you were well-suited for, you now have nice experience on your resume, a good referral, and usually connections. So a company hiring experienced local developers, or a VC firm judging founders by what they've built in the past, gets the result of everyone else's biases. There's also explicitly some allowance for mistakes if you look like you should have been and could still be successful, ranging from the acceptance of pivots to giving people funding even if their last exit wasn't so great. While useful, this also tends to defang the savagery of the free market significantly. This is not to say that anyone is guaranteed free money. There's certainly hard work required, and also certainly some blind luck. But the market won't shake out mistakes as quickly as you'd hope.
12y ago

birken 12y ago

These are always tough pieces to respond to, because there are certainly a lot of gender inequalities in the startup world. But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of the situation instead of just a description of its current state. They mention this particular pair of founders was turned down by YC and their trouble raising funding, but not any of the stats YC shares about how they have funded more and more female founders, and all of the outreach efforts they do. They mention Ellen Pao concerned a lawsuit, but then only say she is "at Reddit", instead of saying she is currently the CEO. The CEO! Also, they mention Peter Thiel and David Sacks are the new generation? I honestly didn't know who David Sacks was until I just looked it up. What about all of the partners at YC? What about Mark Zuckerberg? What about all of the non-sexist people?

potatolicious 12y ago
> "But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of the situation instead of just a description of its current state." I admire the leadership being shown at YC right now and the progress that has been made. But I'd caution against mistaking these accomplishments for trajectory. Just read the most upvoted posts in this very thread, and the number of men here who perceive that "women in tech" or feminism is a vendetta or war against men. While we certainly appear more willing to call out the most egregious and obvious sexism in the industry (see: the Tinder fiasco), there are an alarming of young, supposedly enlightened participants who are vocally and virulently against any kind of reform, and adamant in their belief that women are "shaking down" the industry with their rabid bands of "SJW" lapdogs. Note the sheer number of posters here who have completely not addressed any substance of the article and instead are focusing on how the tone is overly abrasive or the wording ineloquent. No, I'm not willing to optimistically call the trajectory upwards - I'm not sure if I'm willing to call the trajectory level.
- Kalium 12y ago
  In all honesty, this article reads like a hackneyed retread of several dozen other articles I've read. It trots out the same statistics, quotes the same people, and so on. It's hard to take an article seriously when it feels like one giant repost.

jongraehl 12y ago

John Carmack's "we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want. It doesn’t matter what they look like." is pretty much all you need to say, over and over, until they give up. There are two problems w/ 'white male' dominated engineering fields (really, male, unless you insist on the slander that asian+indian are 'honorary white'). One is optical. It just looks bad to shallow thinkers who don't care to pause to find out what the pool of able+willing workers looks like. The other is that techies are too insecure about their value and virtue; they're inclined to actually respond in good faith to slanders like this one. Big mistake. You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone. Yes, everywhere I look around me are a bunch of guys. (maybe 10-20% women). Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.

sami36 12y ago
I disagree in part with the comment above, but why is this opinion being downvoted, wherever you stand on the issue ? Regardless of whether you take issue with the soundness of his argument, a dissenting voice should have a right to be heard. I'm sometimes amazed at the swiftness with which a different perspective is swept under the rug...in the same forums and TOPIC, nothing less, where inclusiveness, Capital I, is being discussed.
kevingadd 12y ago
When you say 'until they give up' do you mean women and minorities who want a safe and welcoming workplace? Or are you referring to a different 'they' than the one being addressed in the article you're replying to?
- wyager 12y ago
  >women and minorities who want a safe and welcoming workplace? How are current software companies not "safe and welcoming"?
  - potatolicious 12y ago

PhoenixWright 12y ago

I really wish I could go to at least one site related to something I'm interested in be it sports, tech or gaming and not have to listen to this feminist propaganda.

normloman 12y ago
Yeah it would be nice to just enjoy distractions without my beliefs being challenged all the time. Why can't I ignore all the problems of society, and just read blogs all day?

michaelochurch 12y ago

Silicon Valley is where the future is allegedly built by people living in the past. For just one of a zillion examples: why's the place so expensive? Fucking NIMBYs who refuse to allow 21st-century housing density. Also, California isn't that liberal. It's what 1960s liberalism would be if drained of all its leftist color and its impressive work ethic, leaving just nostalgic remembrances of the hippie era. The '60s leftists stood for something (like, civil rights and economic equality) but their 2015-era California remnant just wants to live in some silly suburban watered-down hippy-dippy utopia (see: Agrestic in Weeds) that never existed and doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Unfortunately, the not-fit-for-life soft-skulls become the Prop 13 assholes and the hair-trigger NIMBYs who block new development (it might shadow the gluten-free tomato garden I would start if I actually had ambition!) and drive house prices through the roof. I like some people in California, for sure, but the Prop 13 NIMBY people should be forcibly relocated to the Pacific Garbage Patch... until we have something like The Raft in Snow Crash to put them on. In the same way, this supposedly innovative industry is run by people who still subscribe to the Mad Men playbook of gender relations, never mind the fact that the rest of the world (yes, even Wall Street!) has moved beyond that and the sort of disgusting behavior (such as the investors who come on to women during pitches, or otherwise attempt to use their positions of power for sexual access) described in this article would get a person fired, if not more.

throwaway6761 12y ago

Throwaway account given the topic. As someone who has been in the valley along while, the disrespect from women seems to come from a couple of angles -- the bro culture (define as you wise, Uber excels in this), racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst), and many of those that grew up outside the bay area. Some of us have been seeing each other as equals for years, judgement based on merit, but many a*holes still perpetuate issues. My data set -- several startups, a few big companies, bay area native; my wife non native, white, a number of large prominent technical companies. One of us in engineering, the other in project/program management. The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a difficult one.

SafariDevelop 12y ago
> racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst) > The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a difficult one. I'm not going to call you a racist, but the least you could do is provide examples or, at best, statistics to backup your allegations. None, but one, of the feminist accusations of the tech industry in the American media involved a non-white male. > caste loving people As if Americans are not caste-loving? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-dismissed/307274/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-di...
- refurb 12y ago
  Nothing more ironic than someone trying to fight sexism by denegrating an entire race!
- geofft 12y ago
  Anil Dash has a nice article talking about Indian-American culture that comes off as much less racist because he's reflecting on his own culture (which, incidentally, happens to be my own, and I can confirm anecdotally lots of what he says). https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats-not-being-told-9a36fb40530f https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats-no... (To be overly clear, I don't think the claim that all the H1-Bs are importing sexism is defensible, as phrased, and I certainly don't think Indian culture bears the majority of the responsibility here, compared to American culture. I'm just trying to offer a better and relevant claim.)

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago

surprise surprise... they think the same way of emotionally needy men with thin skin.

jecjec 12y ago

The front line of the gender war is the American courtroom, where men are subject to grossly unjust and discriminatory divorce and custody law.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
Turns out if you actually analyze the numbers, this turns out not to be the case.
lkbm 12y ago
In contested custody cases, fathers win about half the time. Granted, there's probably selection bias there. The custody issue is clearly a result of gender stereotypes. I'm a feminism in part because it's the one movement that's actively and effectively fighting against that root cause. I don't think tech sexism in SV is _the_ frontline, or that the courts are _the_ frontline, but they're both important fights. (SV might be the frontline _in tech_, but not in gender or sex equality overall, or even in the US.)

png_hero 12y ago

>Two founders got less funding then they wanted, sexism? The idea for the company seemed reasonable, after all. Maybe sexism. The more likely answer is: most founders get less money than they want, in fact most founders fail. There is under appreciated carnage in the founding game; acknowledgement of this, is one of the things that made PG such a fresh voice when he came on the scene years ago. That realism. reality is that the founder game is a suckers bet, and one that men take at a vastly, vastly greater degree than women. Men fail hard, and men themselves internalize the failure(most often) or blame larger forces outside of their control. Either response is fine (they usually don't blame "sexism" but they are plenty happy to blame other conspiracies). But, when it comes time to talley the toll on men, society is largely quiet, why? Males are disposable. Women, on the other hand, largely expect to be valued on the mere fact of their personage. They deserve respect for them being them. A noble belief, but one that does not exist in the hyper-competitive modern economy. >yeah, if I was a professor I'd give your business plan an A-... Does that mean you "deserve" funding? No. So, I could go on, but until women start throwing themselves into the grinder at the same rate men do, the ratio of men at the top will always be lopsided. And I say this not as a man that is bitter (I actually won the game against all odds) but I say this as somebody who believes that women's strategies on a whole are better than men's. That is: men are stupid to take so much risk! It shouldn't be venerated! The true non-sexism is to realize that women's choices are valid (and probably smarter) and women are more than just "poorly performing men"

sheepmullet 12y ago
Spot on. Startups are a high risk industry and most fail. We sell young men a dream... And the same dream just doesn't appeal to young women.

rockmeamedee 12y ago

This is not a good article. It's badly written and shit for nuance. It divides things into a "Global Gender War" purely for the sake of heightening the mood."Look at these terrible gang-bang interviewers!" is all it has to say. There is no mention of the massive amount of work women are doing in the space, and when there is, it as an example of how terrible they are being treated. Here is a women-led company that offers peer mentoring, but they too are struggling because of gender bias. It calls Model View Culture an "acid-penned, widely read website". MVC is actually doing the social justice work and newsweek calls them "acid-penned". It puts fucking Vivek Wadhwa up as a better example of feminism than the actual women fighting for their humanity. Vivek Wadhwa isn't a good person, in general he's just a terrible male ally. (what he says just in _this piece_ is disrespectful to women, see http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy-feminists http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy-feminists) There are no humans in the piece, only victims and demons. Two examples of struggling women-led startups, and a female VC who was forced to touch a penis. These are women in SV according to newsweek. This is as badly thought out and less researched than that Rolling Stone article. One of the subheadings is "Asking for It" as a pun on women asking for money. That's an actual rape joke.

plikan13 12y ago

Attitudes towards women in IT environments would become a little more relaxed if a fair number of programmers would have the courage to stop denying and come out of the closet. There, I said it.

camperman 12y ago

"Shanley Kane is a young tech industry observer and founder of Model View Culture, an acid-penned, widely read website on which she routinely exposes and excoriates the white brogrammer establishment. " That's a very kind way of describing her. Here's another, far more accurate, way: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/12/10/the-madness-of-queen-shanley/ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/12/10/the-madness-of-qu...

tptacek 12y ago
I love the idea that the most accurate way to describe someone relies on a link to Breitbart. You were being ironic here, right? Well played: a trenchant commentary on the absurdity of personal takedowns.
- camperman 12y ago
  "I love the idea that the most accurate way to describe someone relies on a link to Breitbart." I said 'far more accurate way' to describe 'Shanley Kane' - not just someone. The most accurate way is of course her Encyclopedia Dramatica page and her twitter feed. https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Shanley_kane https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Shanley_kane https://archive.today/HaMTn https://archive.today/HaMTn "You were being ironic here, right? Well played: a trenchant commentary on the absurdity of personal takedowns." Your balls dude. They're between your legs. Read the links. Shanley Kane is a horrible, profane, disgusting, rage-filled human being who is only tolerated in the tech industry because she's a feminist.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Yes, that's where I thought you were coming from.
    - camperman 12y ago
      Are you going to actually answer any of my points? Because you've answered none so far. Go on then. Post links to Kane's technical achievements, her positive influence for women in tech and why the industry is so much better for having her in it. I'll wait.