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An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

• xtrumanx 12y ago
  Not quite what I was expecting with a post that begins with "An Open Letter to...". I've been trained to expect any such letters would be someone's way to make their grievances about some entity public. Now I need to go reflect on why I feel disappointed it was so positive. Haha, only serious.
  • itsdrewmiller 12y ago
    I had to reread it like 3 times to make sure I wasn't just missing the "call out" part of the letter. I think I am happy about it, though!
  • pconner 12y ago
    I like it. It's a nice change of pace. Not that there's anything wrong with negative open letters, but as you said, that seems to make up a majority of them.
    • saraid216 12y ago
      Only a majority of the ones that (1) make the news and (2) are explicitly called "open letters". There are actually tons of public missives on the internet full of positivity.
  • dlu 12y ago
    I had to reread the first part of it to make sure I was reading it with the right voice/tone
  • acjohnson55 12y ago
    I agree! I'm all about airing of grievances, but it's also good to see validation that previous such airings of grievances have led to advancement.
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• chaostheory 12y ago
  "I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university." Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high prestige areas like law, medicine, politics, or finance. Engineering in general is low prestige. It's akin to being a plumber or electrician plus extra educational requirements (high skill, high pay, low social status). Despite the maker movement, our culture at large still doesn't value science & engineering as much as other fields. Popular mainstream shows like Big Bang Theory don't help. On a whole shows like this just serve to further old stereotypes of everyone in our fields as being socially inept, ugly, weirdos. Is it a surprise that most females don't want to join our ranks after seeing that? Are there any quantitative measures on social status by occupation to validate (or invalidate) my guess?
  • Aaronontheweb 12y ago
    I heard an interesting theory on low female attendance in STEM this week: the fact that those fields are stereotyped as nerdy, "low prestidge" men. It keeps a lot of men, at least in the US, out of the field too. When I went through engineering school at least half of my classmates were from countries that have very different attitudes towards engineering. I'm sure there's some data out there breaking out US STEM graduates by country and see how that compares to other fields like arts and sciences - that'd be a good place to start a conversation around whether or not some Western countries have a cultural / stereotypical problem.
    • chaostheory 12y ago
      > I heard an interesting theory on low female attendance in STEM this week: the fact that those fields are stereotyped as nerdy, "low prestidge" men Can you give me the source?
      • Aaronontheweb 12y ago
        No? Literally an idea I overheard in a conversation.
• garrisondmr 12y ago
  I watched the FFC live and what struck me was that it was the same as any other founder conference except that it was a girl on stage instead of a dude. If we want to stop making gender a big deal then we need to stop making gender a big deal. There is no Male Founder Conference right?
  • nailer 12y ago
    I think people need people from a background close to them to really feel like 'yeah, that could be me on stage'. I don't think that's good or bad, just how it is.
    • colmvp 12y ago
      Is it easier for people to identify with gender than ethnicity? Let's say a conference has speakers and attendees that are predominantly white men. Should I relate because I'm a man even though I'm not white? Should a white woman relate because she's white even though she's not a man? It just seems weird to discuss disproportionate representation through only one lens.
      • pekk 12y ago
        Maybe this is too idealistic, but I would hope that conference attendees could relate because they are interested in the subject of the conference. It's disturbing that in practice, being a bird of a feather is exclusively defined in demographic terms. I have very little in common with most other people of my demographics, especially as pertains to my interests. I want disproportionate representation - by people who are interested in the subject and are not just there to sell something or whatever.
      • nailer 12y ago
        I think both. For some background to the following: I'm male, live in the UK, and am from Australia. I've been inspired a book on id software and a Sarah Chipps talk on failures - both showing that with all the people who are well known for making something awesome, there are a bunch of things you never hear about they made that didn't work out. I relate to it because I've made a lot of stuff that doesn't work out. I'm not American (like the id guys), and I'm not female, but the story of struggle resonates with me. I've been inspired by all the node people, because they were all just friendly people in 2011 and now it seems like they're all running node companies doing huge things. I feel inspired because they treated me like equals then, and I think I'd like to join them one day in having successful business. I've been inspired by Xero, because I met their founder at a conference once, and he was a nice person from the same part of the world as me, and now Xero are huge, despite being from New Zealand (which is even more remote than Australia).
• wallflower 12y ago
  I watched most of the FFC. Like Marc Andreesen has said, software is eating the world. YC is getting such critical mass now that entrepreneurs and idealists/pragmatists with world-affecting ideas are now applying for YC. Not necessarily because they'd heard of YC - but because someone they know who cares about them had heard about YC. YC, in my opinion, is getting to a point where it can help incubate world-changing ideas that don't necessarily sell technology to consumers directly but use technology to enable more efficiency or connection or empathy (or all of the above). Of all the presentations, Grace's was the best. I loved Grace Garey of Watsi's stories. About how every Tuesday night, about eight or ten of the world-wide team of Watsi, in every timezone (day, afternoon, morning) would always get together for a Google Hangout to talk about Watsi. About how she was at a busy bar in NYC with her friends and they were in the waning hours of an online contest to win $10k for Watsi. They were falling behind, and Grace had the gutsy idea to ask the bouncer to make everyone who came into the bar have to vote for Watsi on the contest site on their smartphone. They ended up winning by the scarcest of margins (1%) and the bouncer gonged a bell and the entire bar celebrated. Like Brian and Joe of Airbnb creating their own cereal, it was a gutsy move to make it to the next critical step (raising enough funds for some of the Watsi team to go full-time and all-in). And a little different. Congratulations to the YC team on making a ripple in the pond!
  • jsprogrammer 12y ago
    YC is still stuck in a world of ideas based on controlling others through the creation of debt and claiming lifetime ownership of others' work. That they are stuck there is not entirely unsurprising, nor is it unsurprising that there is a forming gender-class that is trying to emulate the functioning of that world. To me, continuing to carry out these decade[century, millennium?]-long ideas is not very world-changing. It may be progressive enhancement, but that has slowly been happening for awhile. The anecdote that you shared about the bar in NYC smacks of this old-world thinking: >the gutsy idea to ask the bouncer to make everyone who came into the bar have to vote for I'm still not quite sure if this is slavery or just tribal exculsivism. I don't know, maybe it's both?
    • voltagex_ 12y ago
• stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  What a sickening sycophantic declaration just to plug a very dangerous return to calendar-based contraception methods: http://www.readytogroove.com/the-cycle/appendix-a-the-sympto-thermal-method-for-pregnancy-prevention/ http://www.readytogroove.com/the-cycle/appendix-a-the-sympto...
  • notsony 12y ago
    I'm going to upvote you. It's a very good point you've made here. This founder is giving bad advice to women who don't want to get pregnant causing some women to ditch contraception like condoms... resulting in unwanted pregancices.
    • rdl 12y ago
      I think the "cycle tracking" stuff is usually more about "really want to get pregnant, having a hard time" vs "not willing to use one of the many other forms of birth control". (EDIT: although, this site does appear to promote it for preventing birth, too, wtf) (It is always kind of jarring whenever I see that, because whenever I think of reproductive health my first thought is "omg please please please no", but there apparently are people who want to get pregnant/have kids.)
• lucidrains 12y ago
  So much talk for so very little. Can we not just celebrate women in tech? We all share this world for a limited time, so who gives a fuck who wears a shinier hat. Its all a game, a game that moves our world towards a better place, a world where we can put down our hats and spend time with each other and allow our benevolent machines to take care of us.
• 3pt14159 12y ago
  Before you write a comment about why women are or aren't enrolled in STEM fields, please read the Wikipedia article on it. Every time someone says a generalization like "they just choose safer employment" or "high status something, something" without first reviewing a summary of the body of research into the matter, it's kinda pointless. It's like someone saying "here's why I think computers crash" but they've never read a book on HTML. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields
  • nitrogen 12y ago
    You wouldn't read a book on HTML to know why computers crash. A book on advanced C, maybe.
    • 3pt14159 12y ago
      You kinda missed the point. Someone reading a book on html night stumble upon a kinda sorta correct response.
  • schrodinger 12y ago
    Thanks, I found that to be a really good summary of a lot of possible explanations.
  • Mz 12y ago
    Much to my surprise, it doesn't seem to say anything really meaty about the role women play in terms of bearing and rearing children. Surprisingly, the header "Biological explanations" talks about spatial ability, not reproduction. Having read quite a lot about women's issues in order to figure out where my own life went wrong, I think failure to mention the burden women bear in this regard and how it impacts their careers is a substantial oversight.
  • mason240 12y ago
    Given the politics of any gender-issue related topic on Wikipedia, there is little reason to bother reading it, much less use it as an appeal to authority.
• stretchwithme 12y ago
  Carol Dweck has shown us that it is the belief that intelligence is fixed is a major problem. If children are told that failure is just part of learning and not indicative of potential, they keep trying until they master the material. Of course, if someone is uninterested in acquiring a particular skill, that's irrelevant. They may have exactly the same potential for learning, but just don't care. We should not be trying to make people pursue careers because we don't like the statistics. People should be free to follow their own desires. They know better than "society", whatever that is.
• ed_blackburn 12y ago
  I nearly didn't read because so often Open Letters are public complaints, usually passive aggressive in nature and almost always divisive. So Jennifer. Thank you. Thank you for restoring my faith in open letters. Or rather making me think hard before I pass judgement on something I've not even read. Saunters off, with tail firmly between legs.
• emcarey 12y ago
  The female founders conference is probably one of the best days of the year. I saw so many friends, women I know on the Internet, and I cried tears of joy three times during the speeches. It's hard to be what you can't see. Jessica and Kat have done an AMAZING job of putting female founders in front of us so we can look and say, hey you know, Kathryn Minshew did YC, I CAN DO IT TO. Even though our startup didn't make it into the last YC batch, we're applying again. We love the community, we love the yc philosophy and approach to building products and we want to inspire other women just like us to apply. Thank you for writing this letter and sharing what we all think, yesterday was incredible.
• tzs 12y ago
  She mentions her field of STEM (mechanical engineering) has a particularly low percentage of women among its members, and cites another site. On that site, there is this interesting list: 39% of chemists and material scientists are women; 27.9% of environmental scientists and geoscientists are women; 15.6% of chemical engineers are women; 12.1% of civil engineers are women; 8.3% of electrical and electronics engineers are women; 17.2% of industrial engineers are women; and 7.2% of mechanical engineers are women. Does anyone have an explanation as to why chemists and material scientists have such a relatively high percentage of women? The two highest are science, as opposed to engineering, so it could be that science in general is more women friendly than engineering, but even if we just look at the engineering disciplines on that list, there still is a big difference among them. Why would chemical engineering be much more women friendly than mechanical engineering?
  • crazy1van 12y ago
    Maybe women on average just prefer some jobs more than others? Really, I'm sure there are millions of factors that enter into to those stats -- about one for every woman because everyone woman is unique with her own goals and tastes -- but I think the occam's razor for this topic is that men and women on average have different preferences. Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers? The bottom line, whatever the reason for discrepancies, is in your daily professional life to treat both sexes the equally.
    • Retra 12y ago
      >Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers? Why would you compare socio-economic inequalities to taste in media? That would be like comparing national budgets to a lemonade stand and asking why we don't put the same effort into managing a 12-year old's summer business. These issues have entirely different scopes and priorities, and your comparison is invalid based on that alone.
• Animats 12y ago
  When computing went "social", I expected that women would play a much larger role. That didn't happen. The "social" companies are dominated by men.
• rgarcia3 12y ago
  Sorry ladies. It sounds like whining to me. Try Hispanic female in engineering during the 80s. I'm on my 2nd start-up in a competitive tech world. Each and every women at the FFC have had their struggles to get where they are today. So pull on your big girl pants and jump in - the water is fine - being a woman hasn't kept Tracy or Grace or Adora or Ruchi from being successful at what they do. That is the lesson that should be taken away from the day in San Fran. I went, I listen, I am inspired. Now I'm off my soap box and off to conquer my small part of the world. @vijilent
• jdhouse4 12y ago
  Perhaps next there will be a forum for older-than-30 founders?
• ninavizz 12y ago
  Could the guys on this thread please stop it with the "pipeline" discussion?! Few women actually cite that to be an issue. It's distracting. Listen more, talk less.