> As if women are so weak that they all they can do is just sit there at the door, sobbing "please let us in your industry".
Aaaaand straw man. Citation please. You almost made it, too.
The complaint has never been that there isn't gender parity; that's an indicator, not the substance. It's about as valid as Gallup polls are for political issues: which is to say useful for making large claims, but not useful for actually understanding those claims. We don't change minds on political issues by mashing a button on a Nintendo controller until the number goes from 40% to 60%; we talk to people.
The complaint is that women who are in the industry feel like they're being forced out of it. See: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Othering And also the rest of the Wikia.
(And I'm obliged to note that, despite the faulty premise, you're on target otherwise and I fully agree.)
Maybe men don't care about working at a beautify salon?
More likely though Real Men(TM) don't want to be hairdressers! That's only for flaming homosexuals!
Never underestimate the power of a good social taboo.
Now, given that there aren't a lot of gender taboos against women working on Wikipedia or in technology startups, then it seems to me that at least the latter has to be a career choice issue. I think there are very strong reasons to think that men value security and stability of employment less than women, and so are going to be overrepresented in environments which are more risky and less stable than women are. If this is a problem the question is what we do to compensate. Would Marissa Mayer have been able to put in 130 hour work weeks as a new mom? Of course not. That our industry demands such may in fact be the problem.
If hairdressing were a multi-billion dollar global industry and the foundation of almost the entirety of the future economy that would be more of a problem. Tech, however, is big, important, and getting bigger.
Medicine is a huge industry. Where I am from, women are 70 percent of entrants. They still get help with applications (women in medicine career days etc). They are more likely to take long career breaks and work part time. In the UK, where the tax payer pays for education + all treatment this is not cost efficient. I don't have a link but a recent bmj article showed over a career, 1.7 women cover the same hours as men excluding time off for illness.
If I was to suggest a "men in medicine" society I would be shunned for trying to make a new generation of 'the old boys club'. In fact, my club would probably be considered illegal due to discrimination. If I was to suggest that moves were made to make medical school 50:50 admission then I would be laughed at despite decades of pushing for increased female intake.
Men are often told we have the best of it but we also have the worst. Homelessness, drug abuse, assault, suicide, car accidents, alcoholism etc are all higher in men. When I did some time doing general practice (primary care) I realised that the amount of men aged 40-80 that live by themselves and are alone is huge in comparison to the amount of females.
Let's keep things simple.
Stop the social engineering. If more men go to school to be engineers then so be it. If a female is in your engineering class then she shouldn't be treated differently- she shouldn't have more chance of getting a job either if she gets the same grades.
If we "need" to push more women into tech then why shouldn't we push them out of other careers in the name of equality.
Edit:
For clarity, I don't believe that we should 'rebalance' medicine, I was being sarcastic.
At the same time it is interesting to see this statistic and it is evidence that women will enter an industry despite cultural barriers in that industry. There are subtle anti-woman biases in medicine which are far more pervasive than anything I have seen in the software industry.
For example, if you look at gender in diagrams in medical textbooks, male figures are more likely to represent healthy, normal body functioning while female figures are more likely to be used where the figure represents disease.[1] Self-degrading Real Men(tm) jokes[2] aside I don't see anything similar to that in the software industry.
The big difference is that medicine is a relatively stable industry and you don't have the huge pushes to release a product that you do in the tech industry. Physicians often are better able to set their own hours and decide how much to work than can software engineers working for Marissa Mayer. So for a woman wanting to have a stable, secure career which is friendly towards starting a family will find medicine very appealing and high tech startups rather threatening. On the other hand if Google was having trouble recruiting women now, I would suggest they have a problem.
[1] See "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd. This is also a wonderful critique of systemic sexism in modern obstetrics of a sort that does not go away with more women entering the field.
[2] such as Linus Torvald's "Real men don't use backups. They upload their work on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror them." Or things like "Real men use cat to write their source files." Obviously this is not suggesting these are normal models of operation.
However, if other industries and businesses are indications, as the industry matures, women will come. The internet used to have a 50:1 male to female ratio. Open source software engineering today has a similar ratio (compared to a 2:1 ratio in commercial software houses).
Maybe the issue is that women don't want to work in a risky and immature industry. Especially when that involves potentially deferring or even giving up on plans to have a family (something men do not have to do to participate in it). You can't be a new mother and try to raise your kid naturally (breastfeeding etc) and work 130 hours a week. It doesn't work.
Sure. But how many decades of unfair treatment and exclusionary culture are we willing to tolerate? Especially when you consider that tech is one of the most lucrative industries at present. How much money are people missing out on because of the exclusionary culture of tech? How much is the industry itself being held back?
1) Put in 130 hours of work every week except for 3 weeks vacation per year, and 2 months parental leave, and medical leave as required by law. Start when you are 20. When you are 40 we will give you a retirement bonus of 30 million dollars.
Is this exclusionary to women? I ask because I think the very clear answer is yes.
I don't think the key issues are in terms of an exclusionary culture. I think the key issues regarding startups are structural and expectation-based. I don't think it's any coincidence that Marissa Mayer waited until Google was a big mainstream company to get pregnant. So what do you tell a talented 28 year old woman who is thinking maybe about starting a family?
Look, working crazy hours is absolutely, positively NOT in any way a requirement for success in the tech industry. It's not even a very good way to get work done. But it is commonplace. And it is taken as a shibboleth within this industry. And it does exclude people, especially women but others as well.
What do you tell a talented 28 year old woman who is thinking about starting a family? What do you tell a 28 year old man who is thinking about starting a family? I'd say that if you do your homework, concentrate on learning, and work in a smart way then you can manage to make an excellent living working from home, which is fantastic for supporting a family, whether you're a guy or a gal.
It's a requirement for an engineering position in a technology start-up, which is a prerequisite for the top-tier success.
As for what to tell a 28 year old man. Most of them recognize that they may have to take their paternity leave late, or only take the minimum. But the fact that this is an option places the 28 year old man in a very different position than the 28 year old woman.
As for the crazy hours deal, I can't imagine many women taking that deal. I can imagine many women pressuring their husbands to take that deal though.
I'm 29, father of a 2.5 months boy. I work at a start up that is doing quite ok.
I took 20 days paternity leave when my kid was born plus a week paid vacation. I'm taking an extra month paternity leave as well in a month. Another colleague (male) is having a baby on the 27th this month, he'll do exactly the same.
I hardly work more than 40 hours a week (sometimes I get a call on Sunday to fix an important issue or something, but not regularly). I don't trade work hours (even if it includes pay) for time spent with my kid. I just don't. And you know what? I'm not shunned for it by my boss. Hell, during my wife's pregnancy, I had to take a lot of time off and work a part of it from home and he was actually proud I was putting my family first.
If your son had been born during a death march would you have considered trying to push the leave around a bit so as not to further burden your colleagues?
I have known men at financial services firms for example, who came in for a week during paternity leave to help out with a PCI audit, or took leave a week late because they were not replaceable quickly for an on-site visit with a consultant.
If you are working at a company where death marches are the normal development process you've got a lot bigger problems than being able to find the time for paternity leave. Run, run away from that job as fast as you can. There are tons of companies out there, even startups, hiring devs who won't work them to death.
I'm a bit disappointed that the state of this industry is still so immature. We've had all of these studies and all of this wisdom from experienced high-caliber devs on the best ways to go about developing software (and none of them include death marches) and yet here we are still bumbling around and fucking it up and folks like you have the audacity to call it not only normal but proper and expected.
I think there is a major reason why there are death marches.
You promise stakeholders and customers that a product will be ready to ship by a certain date. These things are very easy to underestimate. So in the end you have lots of extra bugs to fix, and you have a huge amount of tension between releasing the (buggy) software on time, letting the delivery date slip, and putting in whatever it takes to release something of acceptable quality on time.
Moreover pre-hyping releases is an incredibly easy way to get a lot of publicity for your product, so it is very common.
So the fundamental issue is marketing, and everything cascades from there. But even if it isn't a normal part of development at your firm, if it happened because something major was discovered last minute and required a lot of work, would you have considered postponing your paternity leave?
Compare this to biotech. Here you have elaborate licensing and safety studies (of dubious effectiveness these days) which occur between the initial product development and its release to market. If Novo Nordisk comes up with a new drug tomorrow, they can't even estimate a release date because of all the regulatory stuff that comes with it. So this slows the march to production down and prevents death marches.
So I think the issue with death marches is that they happen, not as a function of or product development, but as a function of PR and marketing, which leads to pre-hyping a specified day of release, and if you let it slip too much, you lose out on all that built-up hype.
So I am not saying they should be normal. I am saying they are systemic, and expected particularly in a start-up phase of a business.
My version of that was taking an afternoon to edit the wiki from home one day when my first daughter was born. (I took a few weeks off, then worked from home for a few more weeks).
And I'm a co-founder. People really do overwork themselves (myself included). The most important thing is to make sure you spend your time well. If that means sitting around for a week doing as little as possible, in between busting ass on the important stuff when it comes along, by all means it's more productive to chill out for a bit.
Part of the reason I took so long away when my daughter was born, was to set an example in the company that we can be more productive if we treat ourselves well.
No I wouldn't. I took all the time the law allowed me, and if I could have taken more, I would.
During paternity leave I only 'worked' one and a half day. And it was a special case that had nothing to do with work per se. I was invited to be a guest lecturer at a prestigious university here so I talked with my wife and she spent the day with my kid for me to prepare for it and then half day while I did it.
Only reason I did it was because I had already agreed to before hand (kid was born 2 weeks before expected) and it was a great opportunity for me. But if it was a week long affair, I would have cancelled it on the spot. I just don't care about money/career enough to miss important time with my son or help my wife out.
I would tell her to F- off if it was in my legal right to take the time off.
I know my wife would do the same.
I still don't understand how people still think 130 hour week, or working through paternity/vacation time is acceptable. I could understand if it was their own company, but for someone else? Really? Do you care so much about money/work status/climbing up the work ladder that you would put your own personal life on hold?
ps: maybe I'm a bit off the tech name world, but if it wasn't for HN I would have no idea who Marissa Mayer was, and to be honest, I'm sure in 5 days when it leaves HN I won't remember her name.
Why is it so hard for you to accept that many men simply don't find that acceptable?
I've left work in the middle of the day because my wife was hurt, or not feeling well. I've taken off time simply to take her to the doctor for "moral support" even though she was quite capable of going by herself. Either of us will take a kid to the doctor depending on who it's most convenient for.
It's not the 50's anymore. Most people with good relationships want to spend time together. I don't give a rat's ass if I get 30,50,100 million in 20 years for working ridiculous hours now. I could be dead by then. Right now I want to spend time with my family and that's worth giving up a lot of money for.
At the risk of repeating my self, the F- Off would still stand.
It is illegal to 'threaten' someone like that here. Sure, many people would cave and do it and that's why many employers still have this stupid mentality, but taking in account the law is on my side, I would repeat the F- Off, and if fired, I would sue until I would get my job back and some nice pocket money to go on holiday with my family :)
Look, if you have a job that forces you to work 80 hours a week or 130 hours a week and it's not your choice, you have a shitty job. Period. Go find another one. The only time I've ever had to work even close to that much was when I was doing data entry at piece work rates and even then it was not that much.
I can imagine many women pressuring their husbands to take that deal though
Mostly the ones who don't want him around. If I worked anything near those hours on a consistent basis, my wife would divorce me. And I wouldn't blame her!
>If I appear to be moronic, self-centered, or sexist… it’s only because I am (I’m a guy). Still I believe my heart is in the right place, and unlike my head, hopefully it’s not in my pants.
What the hell? I feel like I'm watching a US TV commercial.
"Whoops honey, if I didn't have my sports cap on I'd probably lose my head."
"Oh dear, you lovable oaf." Mother and daughter shake heads at retarded male
I agree. And frankly I find it the most grating thing about my generation: no spine. Stand up and speak. Don't try to soften the message with tired jokes and deflection. Just make your point. If people are angry, they're angry. Listen to their reactions and if you think you were in the wrong, apologize. If you think you were right, defend yourself. But you never, ever, open with an apology.
He sure holds a low opinion of men, 'tis true. I suppose it's so easier to get through life when everyone assumes you are too stupid to be expected not to pee on the rug.
More or less. I also think that the issue isn't investing or the like. It's trying to discover what sorts of solutions are available to large organizational problems that make it hard for women to participate comfortably in tech startups. If Marissa Mayer had been pregnant shortly after her job started at Google, what would have been necessary to make it so she could have balanced work and family life better?
Right now we have this myth that companies are machines and parts are largely interchangeable, and that gender doesn't matter in the functionality of the part. I call this a myth because it is a model we use to think about business and make sense of it, even if it isn't literally true. Gender does matter. Parts are not interchangeable. And it might be better to think of companies as ecosystems rather than machines.
The question I have for women in tech is: If you could start a business that would different about the way it would be run? Forget all models of how things are done. What would you change?
Right, this is just a call for something akin to affirmative action, which has had questionable results at best.
The onus here isn't on women. And the right solution is not to preferentially favor women in the tech field. What you'll end up with is a situation where asshole misogynists consider themselves even more justified in treating women in tech as second class citizens. This time because "they only got there through charity".
The solution is simple. People in tech need to treat other people in tech like human fucking beings, regardless of gender, race, or age. And more importantly, when we see people treating others based not on the quality of their work but on superficial qualities like gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or what-have-you we need to call them out on it. Loudly. Publicly. Repeatedly.
I'm a little confused as to what the problem is. Is it that there aren't enough women in tech, or is it that women who are in tech aren't being treated fairly?
If it's the latter, then I'm all for fixing that problem. But if it's the former, then it may just be the case that women don't' want to be in tech. I try encouraging my sister to learn about programming and computers all the time, but she'll have nothing to do with it. It has a certain, ah, stereotype when you're good at that stuff that she'd rather avoid (although she's smarter than I am and could probably learn it very quickly).
Then that stereotype is the problem that people want to fix. And then it becomes a chicke-and-egg problem: how do you fix the stereotype without having more women in tech? So you try improving things on both sides.
This is one of those "fish don't have a word for water" problems to some degree, beyond the misogyny that so often exists in tech. Part of the problem is that there is this stereotype of the tech "nerd" who is socially awkward, doesn't shower, works 70+ hours a week. That serves as a roadblock for guys to get into tech as well, but it's far easier for guys to overcome it than women. The fact that women are much less likely to find that stereotype desirable is used as a reinforcement of the notion that "girls just aren't well suited to the tech lifestyle". But the "tech lifestyle" is not an absolute, it's just a semi-arbitrary tradition. And it forms the core of just as much of an "old boy's club" as, say, traditions of cigars, scotch, and golf do in other activities. Or, more so, traditions of strip clubs and casual acceptance of pornographic representations of women, which is also a thing in many corners of tech.
Self-reinforcing stereotypes are part of the problem. The way that women are treated as outsiders and 2nd class citizens is part of the problem. The fact that women who are interested in tech and talented are turned off by the stereotypes and the culture is part of the problem.
Anyone here who would discount other's because of perceived charity is shortsighted at best and ignorant asshole at worst.
All we are supposed to care about is can you code and/or help our business.
Being red/white/magenta or whatever gender or permutation there of shouldn't enter into the conversation if Tech is really the "meritocracy" it claims itself to be.
Obviously money won't necessarily hurt but anyone who has ever paid attention on HN or even to the Tech industry as a whole should know about "dumb money."
who cares how much you can raise if you can't figure out what to do with it
You can't have a proper meritocracy if the prospective field don't have access to the same level of opportunities. Women get ostracised from I.T. fairly early on (i.e before education has finished).
> What evidence have you found that suggests that women are systematically ostracized from I.T.?
It's pervasive in everything, even in the names of stuff. E.g. there's a recent programming language that calls its interpolated strings "G-Strings". That's the class name in the code. A method for finding out the length of the "G-String" was added, called "size", in addition to the existing one called "length". So...
assert "----V----".size() == 9
The language designers who invented those names had a good old laugh at the pun in the mailing lists. But female programmers are often offended, and have a case for having that language (and related web framework) banned from their workplace, in favor of another.
We often say in the Perl world that objects that are ported to Moose "grow antlers." Arguably this is at least as female-hostile statement since only male moose grow antlers and therefore it establishes a male-normal perspective.
>You can't have a proper meritocracy if the prospective field don't have access to the same level of opportunities.
Agreed but how do you define the same level of opportunities?
Suppose the opportunity is "work hard, every day, 12 hours every day from when you are 20 until you are 40 and then retire as a billionaire." There is nothing stopping women from taking that opportunity. But women who do lose something that men who take that opportunity do not lose, namely the ability to really have a family with kids of one's own.
> There is nothing stopping women from taking that opportunity.
There's societal misogyny. The number of women I've met who refuse to try to do something technical because they're female or blonde has long boggled my mind. That's probably not the tech industry's fault.
But it does mean there aren't the same level of opportunities. If someone whacks your shin with a crowbar before you do your figure skating, that just ain't a meritocracy, no matter how fair the judges are.
That's true. And anyone who doesn't believe that needs to read "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd. What she covers will boggle the mind and challenge what folks think about gender issues generally.
>But it does mean there aren't the same level of opportunities. If someone whacks your shin with a crowbar before you do your figure skating, that just ain't a meritocracy, no matter how fair the judges are.
That's true too, but what I am getting at is that when we talk about women in technology startups (which is really the subject of the article and many discussions here on HN) I don't think that's what's really going on.
Rather I think that what is going on is that in the area of startups, the entry fee is much higher for women, and the lifestyle demands sacrifices of a sort that men don't have to make. The bigger question in my mind is how we solve that structural problem.
> The bigger question in my mind is how we solve that structural problem.
Agreed. But I don't think that's a battle worth fighting just in the tech industry. There are rights for women that can be fought for in general: better protections against sexual harassment, better requirements for maternity (and paternity) leaves, etc. (Google found me this: http://www.now.org/issues/wfw/empledge.html )
Tech could strive to be a leader here: an industry that's more friendly to women than any other. But it would be setting an example for the rest of the nation, rather than making it a purely tech-industry-specific issue.
This doesn't solve the essential issue of Sexist Men Exist, but really... the only way to solve that is, ironically, conversation.
What about a basic shift from a company-as-machine model to a company-as-ecosystem model? It seems to me that a standard company is a bit like a standard vegetable garden, highly ordered to the detriment of long- and even short-term productivity. A better approach might be to create companies where family life and work life don't have to be separate, where you can still put in that 130 hour work week from home, taking your 15 min coffee breaks to play with the kids? Maybe ensure that new parents back from maternity or paternity leave can bring their kids to work for the first year or two?
Those things you mention strike me as band-aids. Sure they'd help but wouldn't it be better to rethink the way we emphasize the separation of work and family and the separation of work and home?
> What about a basic shift from a company-as-machine model to a company-as-ecosystem model?
Replace "company" with "society" and you have a deal. If you want to start at the company level, that makes sense to me; I'd argue that most startups are, by necessity, run according to an ecosystem model.
> Those things you mention strike me as band-aids.
I am not, unfortunately, a political genius and my suggestions are not the best possible. If something better and actionable comes along, I am more than happy to back it.
But asking 300 million people, let alone 7 billion, to "rethink the way we" do anything is a fairly gargantuan task. Some of us have already changed our minds. Others will need convincing. Still others will not be convinced.
I agree. You would also see resentment towards women founders from the guys who are pitching if startups are being picked based on the gender of the founders rather than quality.
It's nothing like affirmative action. He's not saying "investors should invest more in women-founded startups". He's saying "more women should invest in startups". It's self-help, not affirmative action.
He's told me that he's gotten some shit from people because of his profession. From other guys who aren't nurses. Weird, huh? But I've seen more hostility or unintentionally discouraging behavior towards female programmers from male ones than he's mentioned ever encountering from female nurses, so in that regard it's less of a problem.
Yet he's also mentioned that the number of males in the field is increasing, and that there are, in fact, efforts being made to get more men into the field.
Why would a limited labor pool for any profession be a good thing? And why should I believe that the current distribution in a very young field represents a natural equilibrium?
We address this is every gender thread on hacker's news. Yes, it is a problem. Yes, people are trying to fix it. Yes, including creating male-only nursing scholarships and spaces and community groups.
None of which has anything to do with programming. I don't know if you think you are being clever or if you are just repeating a talking point, but either way it's a derailment that has been addressed a hundred times before if you cared to do a little bit of homework.
It's interesting how the original article throws something at least kinda new into the mix, but this whole thread just heads right back to the same old grounds.
That's because it's not new. Read the comments on the original article. If a magic solution was enough, it would have been fixed already and no one would bother talking about the non-issue.
The problem is that people believe nursing is supposed to be a woman's job, and that a male nurse is thus unmanly for freely choosing to become one.
These beliefs are wrong. They are sexist. Full stop.
An indicator of the prevalence of these beliefs is the dominance of women in the nursing profession. This is hard, factual, statistical data that we can point to; it's easier to parse than qualitative data, such as stories of males laughing at male nurses for their profession.
It is a chicken-and-egg problem. Are blacks more likely to be criminals, or does the expectation that blacks become criminals increase the number of blacks being investigated for crime, leading to a higher rate of discovery? Is it because blacks are systematically discouraged from getting an education, which tends towards lower incomes and higher likelihoods of becoming criminal?
These are statistical truths. Absolute? Hardly; they're still mere statistics, which always lie. But statistics are closer to the truth than the dubious anecdotes we had before. They can demonstrate the existence of bias, even if that bias cannot be causatively tied to sexism. And in the end, that demonstration is more proof than the inverse position, the position that the nursing profession should be biased towards women, which really only has the above-mentioned sexist beliefs to fall back on.
Those are value judgements, they cannot be "wrong". You can judge them as wrong, but that's just one value judgement on top of another. There is no way to even hold a discussion between them on that ground.
> An indicator of the prevalence of these beliefs is the dominance of women in the nursing profession. This is hard, factual, statistical data that we can point to
This is hard, factual, statistical data that doesn't support your conclusion. Maybe women really do have a stronger preference for nursing jobs, or they are socialized that way, or those jobs fit their schedule better, or they like working with other women so they congregate in jobs already dominated by other women, or..., or some combination of the above.
Why take one piece of data and jump to the least charitable explanation? Sexism is just one of very many possible causes.
> Are blacks more likely to be criminals, or does the expectation that blacks become criminals increase the number of blacks being investigated for crime, leading to a higher rate of discovery?
Again, or both, or neither. Or both but maybe some other factor completely dwarfs those two you mention, rates of single motherhood come to mind.
But I would comment, that increased diversity (whether it is gender/race/age/etc) always yields benefits as you have a more diverse range of viewpoints to draw from. So it is always a problem when one group is over(or under) represented in a given area.
People are quite good at selecting people like them - in my experience, it's quite possible to have a nice diverse group of people, all of whom have exactly the same viewpoints.
I'm not objecting to this proposal in any way - nothing wrong with more investors - but there's no doubt in my mind that the female tech entrepreneurs who'll benefit from this will have worldviews very similar to their male counterparts.
If you really want diversity of viewpoints, you'll need to discriminate on harder-to-nail-down concepts like socioeconomic class or culture.
The benefits of diversity come with costs. Shared viewpoint and culture makes things much simpler. Things people consider universal ("well that's just common sense!", "It's about respect!") reasonably often turn out not to be universal. The very notion of the benefit of diversity is itself not held by all cultures.
Not to mention the physical issues. My wife was nursing and according to her the inability to carry most of the patients is one of the bigger problems in that field. The way it works now you need a group of male employees basically just for carrying people - not a very popular job. They try to solve it with robots in Japan, but it's at least another 10 years until those solutions are really viable. 50% male nurses would certainly help there.
"Looking across the performance distribution, we find that for undergraduates, three women teams are
outperformed throughout... For MBA students, at the
top, the best performing group is two men and one woman."
"The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better."
"The optimal percentage for the gender balance of men and women on teams is 50:50.
Neither men nor women flourish when in a minority on teams. When in a minority, women tend to network outside whereas men tend to become less motivated.
Having a slight majority of women on teams (about 60%) improves the self-confidence of the team."
I think the evidence is pretty clear. Anecdotally, I've seen the best performance out of mixed teams. All men teams and all women teams generally don't work out so well.
Moreover, companies which have more female execs report higher earnings. They literally make more money as the number of women in senior management increases.[1][2]
However "if many stock speculators believed Kay and Shipman, firm stock prices would jump upon hiring more female execs, making most CEOS quite eager to hire more women execs. There would be a boom in female execs and Kay and Shipman would not have bothered to write their oped. Since that didn’t happen, I’ve gotta believe most speculators don’t believe those studies, and so I shouldn’t believe them either. If you think otherwise, go speculate."[3]
Here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is and rake in the returns, laughing at the sexists all the way to the bank.
By extension, do you support "empowering" the employment of men in a female dominated profession by decree with the same zeal you show here toward women in tech?
What about women in coal mines and crab fishing boats? It's true that a man has greater mobility towards the top of the career ladder but this "privilege" also exposes him to the much more likely risk of ending up on the bottom of the ladder.
It's not equal to have proportional gender representation in only desirable jobs.
It's not something you can completely measure economically. A coal miner makes decent money but how do you put a price tag on black lung or being crushed to death?
>When I did the research for a book called The Myth of Male Power I discovered a Glass Cellar that holds far more men than the Glass Ceiling. The Glass Cellar consists of the hazardous jobs and the worst jobs (minimum security, low pay, bad conditions). The hazardous jobs-or Death Professions-result in 93% of the people who are killed at work being men. Of the 25 professions that the Jobs Rated Almanac rates as the worse professions, 24 have in common the fact that they constitute 85% or more males (welders, roofers, etc.).
Also need to consider the other costs externalized on marginalized men. Men are ~5 times more likely to die from suicide. Men are more likely to be homeless. They are more likely to be pariah of society. They live 7 years less than a women when a century ago the difference was 2 years. These are all costs externalized on men based on the traditional idea that men are strong/privileged and need to "man up".
I agree, the ratio is so skewed that the possibility of legitimate discrimination should be considered.
But consider this. We're experiencing the first generation of men that will be less educated than their fathers. Women are outpacing men in college education and literacy rates and this divide continues to grow. If we continue to systematically approach "gender equality" from such a lopsided perspective we're all going to hurt as a society. We're on the path to resembling Eastern Europe. Where the social cost of being a man is so high they are disproportionately dying and creating a gap in eligible bachelors.
I just finished reading "The Blank Slate", a very interesting book by Harvard (and former MIT) psychologist Steven Pinker. In the book, he argues against the politically correct (but factually incorrect) notion that our minds are infinitely malleable at birth, and that our nature is primarily shaped by culture and the environment. On the contrary, genetics and neurobiology play a comparatively tremendous role in determining who we are. And, like it or not, these physical characteristics may differ across individuals, races, gender, etc.
Pinker devotes an entire chapter of the book to gender, and the first half of that chapter to workplace equality. His thesis here is that a lack of 50-50 gender equality in a given profession isn't necessarily indicative of discrimination or unfairness, unless you believe in the blank slate. That is, unless you discount the possibility that women, on average, are interested in different things than are men. He goes on to present a vast amount of evidence that such differences in preference do exist, regardless of cultural conditioning.
This isn't to say that discrimination is non-existent. Many of us have seen (or heard) enough to know that it's alive and well. The point is that we shouldn't arbitrarily strive for perfect 50-50 equality. There will always be fields in which men and women outnumber each other by large margins, and that's okay. The best we can do is to try and stamp out discrimination wherever possible.
An indication that it is cultural is from looking at other cultures:
If you look globally, there are countries where that isn’t the image, and in fact, their numbers are dramatically better. I was recently speaking with some of our Oracle engineers from China and they pretty much have a fifty-fifty split of men and women. And they think it’s sort of odd that we don’t.
That's interesting, although I'm not inclined to take hearsay of hearsay at face value. It'd be great to see a report with some hard numbers proving that this is the case, and examining the cultural differences that could explain why their numbers are so drastically better than numbers elsewhere in the world.
Also, from a scientific perspective, this is a disastrously imperfect experiment. You cannot rule out the effect of the genes unless you control for that. Looking at a group of people who are physically different AND culturally different , then arbitrarily concluding that any differences are the result of cultures is about as unscientific as it gets.
I actually agree with your first statement - I saw that a few days ago, and I'm keeping it in mind provisionally.
As to the second point, humans are not very genetically diverse. Of course there are enough differences that we can sometimes conclude that a particular person's genes come from an ethnic group, but it's not as nearly as varied as even other primates. Basically, we hit a genetic bottleneck sometime in the past 100,000 years. So it's far more likely to be a result of culture than genes.
You're right about the lack of genetic diversity, but even that limited amount of diversity can result in drastically different personalities, tendencies, etc. For some truly shocking material on just how much of a role genes can play, look into the studies done on identical twins raised apart vs adoptive siblings raised together.
1) The Blank Slate was published 10 years ago by a psycholinguist (albeit Pinker an AWESOME psycholinguist but that's besides the point). There's been a lot of research since then to muddy the nature/nurture debate.
2) who's even suggesting that we need a 50/50 gender balance? Where are you getting this straw man from? All McClure has asserted is that there should be more women in tech, and given our 9:1 M:F ratio... there's a lot of room to move before we even start to discuss whether 50/50 is an appropriate ratio.
It's not surprising that new and enlightening nature-vs-nurture research has come out in the last 10 years. But I haven't personally come across anything significant with regard to asymmetry in gender-based interests.
Also, I'm not attempting to refute Dave McClure or anyone specific. I never claimed that he claimed we should strive for 50-50 equality, so it's unfair for you to accuse me of a straw man. I'm just making reference to an argument that happened to affect my personal view on the matter. This topic has come up again and again on HN and in tech-related blogs, and I think it's a very common viewpoint that any deviation from a 50-50 distribution is attributable to discrimination.
Regardless, I agree with you that that current ratio is overly-extreme, and that we can do better.
Pinker's book has been ridiculed by pretty much everyone who understands statistics or actually studies neurobiology. Even his views on linguistics are proving excessively simplistic as further evidence is gathered.
I recommend against holding up pop-science cults of personality if you would like people to take you seriously.
Pinker's book has been supported by pretty much everyone who understands statistics or studies neurobiology. His views on linguistics are proving increasingly accurate as further evidence is gathered.
As a guy in tech, I agree wholeheartedly with everything Dave has said, and was surprised he said it in an actually non-offensive way, given his typical writing style..
However, something I took away from this that really surprised me was how little money Dave started with and how little he still has. Don't get me wrong, I would kill to have $300k in the bank, much less $600k+, but I've always assumed that angel investing (despite the small investments) was a game for the incredibly wealthy and I wouldn't be able to invest until I was in my 30's and had exited with more than a few million in the bank. When he points out that anyone with more than $10k lying around can be the next big angel investor, it really jumped out at me. I've never considered investing $5k or so into something I really believe in when $5k-$10k is all I have saved up... However, as he said, it would be hard not to get my money's worth by investing in startups. I'm glad he conveyed how easy it is to become an angel because otherwise I would have never considered it until I had plenty of "fuck you" money.
The problem is, you do need to be a millionaire to be an angel investor. IF not you open your investments up to liability unless you really are "friends and family".
This industry is regulated and McClure sorta completely glossed over it.
I would be an angel investor if I was allowed. I would have been doing it for the past 4 years, and I would have much enjoyed doing that. I had 6 figures and 20 years of startup experience and was ready to write checks.
I just never found a way around the need to get accreditation. (Note when you have a successful exit you have cash in the bank, but that doesn't mean you necessarily have a $250k a year job, or $1M in the bank!)
Maybe in the bay area there are lawyers who can set you up to do this even despite the regulations... I dunno.
But this seems to be a glaring omission on his part. Or maybe the law has changed recently and that's why his program could now work.
Women don't need to be "empowered". It's not some socieo-ecominic reason that's causing girls to steer clear of tech. It's been discussed here before many, many times and women have weighed in. According to them its the culture and insensitivity towards women thats causing skewed gender ratios.
There are far fewer women in tech majors than men and that happens before women ever hit the workplace. The skewed gender ratio starts much earlier in life.
Okay. I left Google because I was fed up with how things were going over there (read my posts - link in profile - if you want to know more). I started my own little business.
So, okay, let's go. Throw money at me. I'll make more cool stuff with it. I'm mostly a "plumbing" sort of person, but I've been known to make actual top-level user interfaces on occasion too.
I'll bite here on a tangent: are you really interested in taking a $5k check from an individual angel? Do startups (real ones, not just "I started a company!" startups) bother with that stuff? It seems that if you're a three-person YC gang that the effort involved in coming up with an extra week's (if that) worth of runway isn't even close to worthwhile.
No, I'm interested in building something useful for a reasonable amount of money. That's what I do: a simple exchange of currency for services rendered.
Is this about women in tech, or is this some nebulous thing about startups? Because I'm all for the former, and don't really worry so much about the latter.
Is this about women in tech, or is this some nebulous thing about startups? Because I'm all for the former, and don't really worry so much about the latter.
> I’d like to CHALLENGE every woman in tech who’s a) got a nice car, b) owns a nice house, or c) is making over $125K a year
In the US you need to have an income of greater than $200k/year or assets not including your home of over $1 million in order to be an accredited investor. [1]
You don't have to be an accredited investor to invest in startups, but it does open up the company to additional annoying reporting requirements such that almost all advisors suggest staying away from such. From info on his own assets that he's posted in the past, it seems Dave's chosen to skirt said law himself, but it seems quite brash to (without disclaimer) push others to do the same.
This is technically true at the moment but not for long. Once the crowd funding portion of the JOBS act is accepted by the SEC, anyone can invest up to 10% of their annual income in startups.
What's to keep me from investing all my money in my own startup? I note attempting facetiousness, I'm truly curious how they differentiate me starting my own business and investing all my own money (at a substantial percentage of my reported income) or starting a business with a buddy and putting in a serious amount of cash.
There's a provision for raising up to $1 million from "friends and family" (specifically pre-existing contacts only, no solicitation). I presume, though am not certain, however, that personal funds of the executives are exempt from that.
Nothing. There's also nothing to stop you from having a $30k income, and taking out a $130k unsecured loan, with a consequential $0 net worth (EG: $130k now n the bank and a $130k loan balance).... and going to Las Vegas and putting all $130k on a single spin of the roulette wheel-- or a weekends worth if they won't' let you bet that much.
You can blow all that money gambling if you want, but you can't invest it in startups. (At least not as an accredited investor... and places like angel list will only deal with accredited investors.)
I would suggest that instead of affirmative action in funding women in startups, instead we should encourage successful women in tech to become evangelists. I don't think the issue is as much in the "nobody gives money to women who want to start startups" but rather in the fact that fewer women are in technology because of the cultural bias against it (and as a consequence, less women get funded startups).
Just think, if you are a teenager or college age girl, what women programmers do you currently look up to? They exist, but they need to be more visible to break the perception that "women don't become programmers"
Women in this field who try to be more visible are prone to being labeled as superficial, attention-seeking, untalented (and much, much worse) terms [1]. Culture change is what is required.
It's wrong to offer up the idea that women somehow are biologically averse to tech. You need only look outside the US to verify this: Malaysia's tech sector is almost evenly split between men and women.
It's a cultural thing, which we're loth to admit. We look around and say, "We treat women the same around here", not thinking for a second that maybe that's the problem.
I run the Hackbright Academy, a hacker school for women, and I ask all applicants what compels them to apply to our program. Invariably, part of every story is the idea that they were intimidated out of the field in college or high school by their male peers. Whether or not that's the grand reason for the disparity, it's still something that shouldn't be a reason at all.
Malaysia may not constitute good evidence for it being a cultural thing. Reason: a young male social outcast in Malaysia can't teach himself computer programming the way a young male social outcast in the United States can. So all programmers are college taught, which results in an even gender split. Whereas in the US, male geeks get a head start as kids and intimidate women in college with their accumulated skills.
Finally. It is hard to believe in this day and age that 99.99999% of women have no chance at receiving VC/Angel investments, whereas men only have a 99.9999% chance at not having access to VC/Angel money.
If women founders are being underserved by existing investors that would represent a market opportunity. Someone should exploit it out of pure self interest.
This doesn't seem to be about women in technology at all, just yet more fluff about startups, founders, exits and angel investors. Maybe Hacker News is the wrong site for me.
Old people (older than 40, say) are way under-represented in tech. Can anyone argue with this point? We need culture change, and maybe even affirmative action to force the industry to open up to oldsters. (yes, I'm in the 40+ demographic) In fact, we probably need a whole army of old journalists and bloggers to celebrate the achievements of their beloved demographic, and to get indignant about the injustices when they occur.
And come to think of it, I haven't seen many black or hispanic coders lately. They probably need to impose their demands on the industry as well.
Just kidding. I'm against quotas for oldsters like me, or any other supposedly marginalized demographic. I look for people who simply excel at writing code and building products, which anyone can do if they devote themselves to the craft.
