Judging by the comments on this article, it would appear that once you've been labeled a sexist it is downright impossible to dispel.
I'm not sure what people expect, exactly. Is pg supposed to give up all his worldly goals and possessions and live as some sort of equality monk? Should he know of and contribute to every one of the many groups and organizations involved in gender equality?
And what exactly is wrong with the "I have black friends" defense? Are you trying to say that pg is friends with someone in spite of his supposed hateful nature? That he's somehow looked past the person's "shortcomings"?
It seems to me more people are interested in being internet bullies than achieving true social justice.
This is the shallowness of that kind of P.C. bullying--Paul Graham has done much more for women in technology than any Internet bully, but he will continue to be attacked because it is possible to assign uncharitable interpretations to a few things he said once. When one realizes that this whole kerfuffle is not about being pro-woman, it's about posturing such that one appears to be pro-woman, then the attackers' views make more sense.
If you look at the comments below, the anti-PG crowd seems either to a) not care about YC's contributions to women in tech, or b) adopt a "so what" attitude. So what that YC has a disproportionate amount of women in high places and funds a disproportionate amount of female founders? I don't care, instead I'm gonna pick out some logical flaws in his arguments. (As an aside, there's few things more tedious than a nerd on the Internet concerned with "logical flaws" in peoples' "arguments".)
I'm reminded of Ted Kaczynski's take on P.C. activism:
"Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principle, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred."
I think the aim of making the tech industry friendlier to women is better served by continued outreach efforts, rather than making an example out of individuals arbitrarily.
I was referring to a specific subset of leftist behavior which I called "P.C. bullying."
But good job applying it to all leftist activism. By quoting the Unibomber. Because the Unibomber has done so much more for the cause of women and blacks than have left-wing activists.
That is to say, I'm not interested in going all anti-leftist and turning things into politics. You have me mistaken.
I'm not saying you're anti-leftist, simply quoting someone's take on the psychology behind P.C. bullying. Not everything has to involve left/right-wing tribalism.
You say as you post a paragraph from a (whoops: not dead) terrorist's tirade against liberals. I don't think you could have possibly picked a worse example to hold up as not involving tribalism...
You are mistaken. The Unabomber is and was a horrible person. Yet I found mcantelon's quote from him to be very insightful, even if I don't agree with it in its entirety.
Judge the quote on its content, not the messenger. The only instance in which shooting the messenger is valid is when we rely on the messenger's credibility in evaluating the opinion, which is not the case here, at least for me.
I don't see how the example is tribalist. Ted Kaczynski, in my understanding, was a loner that was neither left or right wing. And I'm not sure why the fact he's a terrorist is relevant to his analysis.
You don't have to be in the opposite of a group to spew hate against that group. And I see very little "reasoning" in that quote, just lots of eloquently-worded polemic which weakly attempts to cast negative aspersions on an entire political view. Some of it is outright false.
In other words, it's content that wouldn't look at all out of place on a right-leaning website's "This is why liberals are bad" section.
That's true, but that's just one quote of his (he's still alive btw). Here's another:
> The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
Dr. Kaczynski is an anarchist who opposes virtually all political establishments.
Mm. But notice the difference in delivery of those two quotes. This one concerns itself with a straight true statement (progress is at odds with tradition). The worst you can say here is that he says conservatives "whine".
Much unlike the other one which implies that leftists are all about power as opposed to what they say they are.
If he's an example of tribalism, as you claimed earlier, then he should be aligned with a tribe. "The conservatives are fools" is a fairly unambiguous denunciation of that tribe. Regardless of whether you feel he favors one over the other, he clearly rejects both.
Well, the difference is that the first one is usually fact based and best delivered neutrally. The second one is usually emotion based and delivered with harsh invective, and additionally usually doesn't concern itself with facts.
>"Dr. Sally C. Johnson's psychological report describes Theodore Kaczynski, the confessed Unabomber, as a man whose early brilliance was ruined by paranoid schizophrenia.
>"Johnson made her evaluation after interviewing Kaczynski, his family and people who knew him, analyzing psychological tests, and studing of the Unabomber's journals which document over 40 years of his life."
>"She cites "an almost total absence of interpersonal relationships," and "delusional thinking involving being controlled by modern technology" as examples of his illness."
That's why we can't have nice things. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Such bullying incidents may look like PR victories for the PC crowd in terms of shaping public opinion. What they miss though is that even when they don't backfire loudly (see "donglegate"), they turn off moderate people who are otherwise neutral or sympathetic to reasonable calls for equal opportunities. By trying to guilt trip the whole white/male segment of society as "privileged" and "misogynistic", some will bite but many won't, much more so when they feel they are unfairly put on the defensive. And while some will bend over backwards and become more Catholic than the Pope promoting their social justice causes, many will grow more and more resentful. They won't tweet and blog about it but they will be taking notes and making sure they stay the hell away from PC zealots and their ilk, be it in hiring decisions, investment funding or anything else. Congratulations, you have turned a sizable part of the silent majority into an opponent.
Actually MLK acted perfectly (if a little too quiet at times, though he was portrayed much more obedient that how dynamic he was).
The problem is with priviliged upper middle class white PC police, that are nothing like MLK -- and their "rage" is all show off and conforming to the social norms of their peer group.
In it, he writes: "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word 'tension.' I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth."
And of course part of what helped MLK's public standing was that there were much more radical people than him. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam shifted the Overton Window enough that MLK could look reasonable.
My point here is that social change is never comfortable, never easy, and certainly never welcomed by the bulk of the privileged group. Asking activists to be quieter and nicer is pointless; they already know what that gets them, which is being ignored. Which they've already had a bellyful of, or they wouldn't be activists.
People forced Paul Graham to confront the issue. And as he's a visible leader of the startup community, they're forcing everybody to confront it. Will that alienate some number of people? Sure. Would they have been advocates for change anyhow? Nope.
Ask yourself: what did those "more and more resentful" people look like in the civil rights era? Now ask yourself: is that the group you'd like to be remembered as being a part of?
Ah, ok. Sorry for jumping to conclusions. I took it as more of the tone policing rampant in this discussion. I'm glad to hear that wasn't the intention.
Q: How many times was Dr. King arrested?
A: He was arrested 30 times.
Malcom X, by comparison, was arrested only 7 times.
The number of arrests have much more to do with the type/style of protest that they engaged in than it has to do with some nebulous concept of "social behaviour". The reason why MLK and his followers were confident that their tactics would lead to success is because they could force arrests for plainly absurd and not anti-social actions. Force arrests while "behaving well". Instead of getting arrested for smashing police cars, or firebombing businesses owned by racists, they got themselves arrested for things like sitting in a restaurant.
The weird secret of Social Justice, including the "all white men are evil, because the group on average is successful" faction, is that it's mostly white men bullying other white men.
You're one of the few people here that understands this. Thank you. It's mostly white men trying to be someone elses savoir to free themselves from racial tension induced white guilt.
Heck look at the last part of the post and you can see how certain subjects are a complete mindfield with one badly phrased term being pushed thru the descrimination door when not intended. Fact that so many people were asked by PG to check out the draft before posting is testiment to how much overhead is now placed upon those who will at best descriminate individuals to to that individuals actions and then after that individual proving the point many times over and given fair appeal. In short the types of people who only judge the guilty on a person by person basis based upon the actual 100% facts now spend more of there time treading other peoples minefeild that it becomes a overhead and distraction to the tasks at hand. Hell 19 people checked thru that draft (many women as well and no I have not counted how many women compared to men checked the draft as it is irrelevant too me, though some will I bet now). 19 people, that is a lot of people to have for a internet post, I bet even top News Papers have never had that many editors checking a post before (lawyers maybe) and that is all due to people being offended for things that were not intended. It is a mindfeild, it is a overhead and it is a measurable expense many people now have added to the time sinks in there lifes. Innocent non-sexist descriminating people are the ones that suffer, but hey the good `person` always suffers, is that not true :(.
"Thanks to Sam Altman, Alexandra Cavoulacos, Adora Cheung, Tracy Chou, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Danielle Fong, Kevin Hale, Aaron Harris, Elizabeth Iorns, Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston, Claire McDonnell, Kat Manalac, Kathryn Minshew, Kirsty Nathoo, Geoff Ralston, Garry Tan, and Olga Vidisheva for reading drafts of this." Would be nice if he added "And no lawyers were harmed in the process of this checking" Just for some sainity of this whole area and would highlight the whole overhead aspect in many other area's of life we see today. Patent Trolls, PC bullying and the like, its a time TAX nobody needs and yet we live it, least the honest good people do.
I think the kind of critique here is subconsciously and pedantically picking up on general tone and perceived lack of authenticity.
PG went on the defensive -- and attempted to dispel critiques with a negative attitude and a logical argument.
This isn't a problem you can logic away. What he needed to do was write from the perspective of social conscience, even if it's not logical, even if it's not strictly absolutely statistically true. He needed to prove that he is coming from a genuinely positive point of view, so that we can see that his great influence is not aimed simply toward the neutral or equal, but in fact good.
He failed to do this, and therefore he receives criticism. The arguments against him are focused on the wrong things, because they're not very self-aware, but they're fundamentally correct in the big picture.
There's a difference between simple absence of evil, tactless neutrality, and genuine good. We like to hope our idols and influences are as far toward the good as possible.
PG is high profile. His companies and their founders are high profile. For as long as I can remember there's been a thick thread of schadenfreude woven throughout this community's reactions to various stories that have come out about YC, from Dropbox to Airbnb to PG's supposed racism and now sexism.
Trying to defend yourself or setting the record straight is almost useless when everyone's already made up their mind before entering the debate, especially here where there is this odd presumption that PG et al are money-grubbing fools willing to sacrifice their morals. No benefit of doubt is given. I've met PG briefly, have been to Startup Schools and can say that all the YC folk I've met seem like genuinely great people. Unfortunately, I don't have a citation handy.
This place as usual reads like a den of rabid pussycats.
pg is neither a racist nor a sexist, but because he does not jump to support every pet cause of every self-described "social justice jihadi", he is lambasted as such.
Well, guess what? pg is his own person. He's just a guy who invests in startups, not some sort of idol upon whom you can project all your transformational, social-justice dreams for the tech industry.
Is there racism and sexism in tech? Sure. Is that pg's fault? No. Has he done things to mitigate this? Sure. Are the "social justice jihadis" appreciative of this? No.
Just a question, why is pg in person supposed to care about equality and what happens if he loses the fight? Do you have prison sentences or civil excommunication about that?
It's nice if he supports fairness - i.e. equality of opportunity, as opposed to guaranteed outcomes. That's the best that should be expected of YC or any other selector.
Everybody is a little racist and sexist. It's quite normal for you to react differently depending on the visible characteristics of a person you are talking to, it's ingrained through millions of years of evolution. What's important is that you're not a dick about it, and you give people a fair shot in situations where those characteristics shouldn't matter.
The cashier at the local taco shop speaks to people in Spanish or English depending on whether or not they look Mexican. Is that a problem? I don't think so.
Sure, but for most people "racist" or "sexist" aren't the first words that come to mind when they think of pg - that would be "investor" or "writer", for example. Bssed on his writing he seems like a reasonable, fair, and unbiased person. Misquoted out of context, you can make someone say whatever you want to further your agenda, of course.
I agree with you. I just think "not racist and sexist" is a ridiculously high standard. I don't know when we adopted the idea that X-ism is the worst thing in the world, but it's a completely impossible to stamp out. And is it really so bad to greet a guy in Spanish in an area with a significant Mexican population based on his appearance?
Let's say you give a Hindi greeting to an Indian guy who's second-generation American and doesn't speak Hindi. What's the worst that can happen? Well, if he's a SJW he'll spread your name on the internet as a "racist asshole". But if he's a normal person, you get past the misunderstanding quickly, and plus he knows that you know enough about his culture to have learned its language, and he might even appreciate that.
Our primate relatives are racist and sexist. What makes us think that we can not be?
Pretending to ignore race/sex differences out of some misguided attempt to be polite or "color blind" or "culturally neutral" does no one any good.
By "racist", I mean "actually despises others because of their ethnic background", not "has the odd awkward or confusing moment of ethnic / cultural misunderstanding".
Similarly, by "sexist", I mean "actually dislikes or has contempt for the opposite sex".
Of course the bar for these words has been raised to the point where the political Left can call someone a racist because they do not support a specific affirmative action policy, or a sexist because they disbelieve certain cooked-up statistics about the alleged "pay gap" between men and women.
I don't think we can assume that is the case if we are using the "power + prejudice" definition of racist or sexist. As far as I can tell, this is the prefered definition of racist and sexist among social justice warriors. If to be racist you must be prejudiced and have power over those that you are prejudiced against, then there are some people who literally cannot be racist.
Typically this definition seems to only be used to shield SJWs from 'friendly fire'.
>Judging by the comments on this article, it would appear that once you've been labeled a sexist it is downright impossible to dispel.
That's because it's easy. The "sexism-accusers" don't have to do anything themselves to fight sexism. Anything concrete I mean.
It's enough that they voice their anger and point their finger to this or that scapegoat (and ocassional real offender), and they can feel good, nay, champions of equality.
Plus, they have all their similar minded peers to high five, usually all people of upper middle class upbringing, that are oh so sensitive and oh so beautiful souls that even overhearing a guy telling a "dongle" joke in private to his friend can make them feel enraged -- until is time for their fair trade coffee break that is.
Or maybe they had something happen to them or someone they know? Maybe they had someone's head on their shoulder crying their heart out? Maybe they tried standing up for them and were fired? Maybe for whatever reason they really understand what it feels like in a world where most people don't.
I'm one of those rage-queens you so happily deride here. I know it myself. I became one after I complained about a manager openly discriminating against gay employees and having everyone involved in the complaint, except for the manager in question, mysteriously being let go in the three months that followed.
Plenty of those "sexism-accusers" probably have similar stories so, pardon my language, but go fuck yourself for pretending we're all just some spoiled middle class rage warriors.
>Or maybe they had something happen to them or someone they know? Maybe they had someone's head on their shoulder crying their heart out? Maybe they tried standing up for them and were fired? Maybe for whatever reason they really understand what it feels like in a world where most people don't.
>Plenty of those "sexism-accusers" probably have similar stories so, pardon my language, but go fuck yourself for pretending we're all just some spoiled middle class rage warriors.
No, those are different people you describe -- actual humans.
The pg-incident style outrage is not done by this kind of people, but by finger-pointers and "champions for the cause" with ideological blinders.
In my experience, it's mostly the overpriviled that champion such things -- the actual victims and women who try to empower themselves and move things forward pick fights that actually matter.
>I'm one of those rage-queens you so happily deride here. I know it myself. I became one after I complained about a manager openly discriminating against gay employees and having everyone involved in the complaint, except for the manager in question, mysteriously being let go in the three months that followed.*
Which sounds valid, but is quite different, I think you'll agree, to the kind of pg-gate/dongle-gate/upper-middle-class-drama incidents people make a fuss about.
>Plenty of those "sexism-accusers" probably have similar stories so, pardon my language, but go fuck yourself for pretending we're all just some spoiled middle class rage warriors.
I think you just proved my point. So sexual discrimination is bad, but telling people to "fuck themselves" because you disagree with their viewpoint is OK?
How about a manager telling that to a female employee he disagrees with?
Or do you have double standards for the workplace compared to online discussion? Would swearing/harassing at women/gays/etc online be OK to you then?
I've been openly gay for many years and I've become intimately acquainted with the varying degrees of discrimination vs, acceptance.
When you're in a situation like that your world divides into a) people who really treat you just like anyone else, b) people for whom what you are is a positive/item of interest, c) people who have some aversion for you but would like not to and d) people who just displaying like what you are.
The easiest way to recognize type c) is actually that the first thing they say when you say you're gay is something like "I'm totally OK with gay people. My friend/brother/xxx is gay."
I don't dislike these people at all; they're usually sweet and I can tell they're working on their issues which I respect very much.
From what I had read so far Paul was a type c) when it came to sexism, so when this issue surfaced I really hoped his essay would convince me that he was a type b) or maybe even an a) but, given all the experience I've had paying detailed attention to dynamics like these because they have such a disproportionate influence on my life, I came away fairly confident that Paul is still firmly a c) with one foot cautiously on type b)
That's why given that this is the topic of this discussion I don't think I'd be doing anyone a favor of I pretended I felt Paul came off scot-free in all of this.
So yes; that makes me one of those "sexism accusers" you just called finger-pointing, ideologically blinded, upper middle class, oh so sensitive, fair trade coffee sipping, feel good armchair activists.
In that case I do the same as when a male colleague makes a smart-ass joke to a female colleague about making them go get them a coffee, which is calling them an asshole for what they just did.
(And no, you're not getting a pass by saying you were only talking about the real armchair activist any more than saying you only hate the real faggots would.)
>That's why given that this is the topic of this discussion I don't think I'd be doing anyone a favor of I pretended I felt Paul came off scot-free in all of this.
That's where you are wrong.
Paul might be the worst sexist pig for all I know -- but nothing of what he (actually) said in the interview, his response post, and his general conduct with YC and women founders, has given any reason at all for him to NOT get scot-free for "all of this".
It's inventing reasons to accuse PG in "all of this", when none exists, that makes you a finger-pointer.
And by how fast you turned from champion of tolerance to your "go fuck yourself" to someone in conversation, you only cemented this.
Ah OK. So the real problem is that my opinion is just plain wrong!
The founder of an accelerator which has a reputation (earned or not) for being fratty and exclusionary and who runs a forum that's widely criticised for quickly silencing discussions on gender issues and being a bit of a hotbed for sexism spends several weeks coming up with an essay.
The end result of all that hard work is something that's decidedly defensive, demonstrates that neither he, nor anyone in his inner circle, has taken the trouble of properly reading up on the literature surrounding gender issues, doesn't go much beyond the "it's good for business angle" and replies to comments [1] in a way that demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of internalized oppression, one of the most basic concepts when it comes to discussing systemic discrimination.
So because given all that I don't agree that PG now comes out looking like a saint I deserve to be described in the most derogatory terms you could think of; but me using a swear word invalidates my argument?
You know what, that's a classic 'tone argument' [2] from derailment bingo [3]. I doubt you've ever heard of it and judging from what I've read so far PG probably hasn't either, which is sort of my point.
And to reiterate once again; I very much appreciate what PG is doing and that he's taking positive steps in the right direction. That doesn't mean that I can't simultaneously believe that he has a long road ahead of him still.
This is how things actually roll in the real world. You can stick to your principles, but it may cost you. I do think that the PG situation is a bit of damage control. While not having enough female founders (or founders with a foreign accent) is a symptom of what's wrong, the root problems go a little deeper.
The quality of the idea, execution, and team is what should matter. Not the color of skin, not gender, sexual orientation, accents, or anything else. But here we are...
We can't pretend that SWM are the only ones who can create a good product, and if our tech heroes happen to fuck up or say something that isn't right, I don't think it helps to ignore it.
The goal of a lot of the bumper sticker justice crowd is anything but justice: it's the promotion of a cause they're leeching off of, for the benefit of their own ugly vanity. It's identical to people putting a save Tibet bumper sticker on their car, while not actually doing anything meaningful. It's about the least amount of effort to pose as an activist.
I find that most good intentioned movements have more than their fair-share of the equivalent of fair weather fans. They don't understand the core of what the movement is about, they don't take the time to understand the best way to accomplish positive outcomes, and they use an as-seen-on-tv / mimicry approach in their activism without the fundamentals to support it. It's like putting up a simple search engine page layout, copying Google, without the engine behind the scenes to power it.
>And what exactly is wrong with the "I have black friends" defense? Are you trying to say that pg is friends with someone in spite of his supposed hateful nature? That he's somehow looked past the person's "shortcomings"?
The critics I've read aren't saying pg has a hateful nature. They're saying that he hasn't fully accounted for his unconscious biases.
Given that everyone's friends have actual shortcomings, it doesn't seem a stretch to say that people are friends with people they imagine to have shortcomings because of an unconscious bias.
"Nobody can ever account for all bugs. It's the original sin doctrine of the programming community."
I'm not saying Graham should drop everything until every last bias is gone. I'm saying he shouldn't act as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator just because the percentage of female founders is up and it has women as partners.
How is he supposed to "fix" sexism at YC when no one is capable of identifying instances of it? Gender distributions isn't proof of sexism _at YC_. As PG has stated, YC is too far removed from the problem to be useful in combating sexism as shown by imbalanced gender distributions. So what do you expect YC to do in this case?
> "If there was just the pro-activity line of attack, if it was like, "OK, yes, women aren't set up to be startup founders at the level we want." What would be lost if Y Combinator was more proactive about it? About lowering standards or something like that? Or recruiting women or something, like any of those options?"
The reasons I wrote "he's acting as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator" are because none of his suggested solutions are about sexism at YC and this line: "More thoughtful people were willing to concede YC wasn't biased against women."
Edit: He is willing to do more about the problem generally, and I give him credit for that.
The thing that sticks out most is this: Of the very angry people who were repeatedly tweeting attacks at him after the Valleywag article, I haven't seen even one apologize. It's just sad.
Edit: @antics, I just reread the stream of angry @paulg tweets from Dec. 28th and have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe I missed tptacek's tweet both times. Please don't attack me over it.
Then you truly weren't paying attention. At the top of comments section re: one of the articles explaining that the interview with pg left out an entire question, tptacek's apology was the top-voted comment.
Insinuating yourself into a discussion you have not been following carefully to accuse another party of hubris is pretty much the apex of bad discussion behavior. It is not in good faith, please don't do it.
What's embarrassing is that this self-righteous, guilt-tripped social justice douchebag is a BDFL of Django. I wouldn't be surprised if some current or potential Django users or contributors get sick of his jihad and turn to to a different developer community.
Could you please educate the rest of us what is so upsetting about these tweets (other than the fact that he received death threats)?
Jacob is doing a fantastic job at making people of all types feel welcome, which I believe is more likely to make the Django developer community thrive (as it already is).
Also, the footnote mentioned where pg writes that he enjoys that startups can freely discriminate is worrying. It does not mean that pg is a sexist, but he is a role model and we would expect him to be more sensitive.
As a minority, I would not be comfortable around a sjw. I've been told way too many times by sjws what it's really like to be [minority category X], when I am very clearly minority category X and they are not.
I don't know anything about this Django contributor aside from the tweets I've just read, but the phrasing and verbiage are very similar to the sjws I've had experiences with similar to what I wrote above. It makes me wary. SJWs do not have my best interests in mind--99% of it's a show to demonstrate how pious and dedicated they are to being a morally superior person, and it seems that a lot of times that demands you ignore and steamroll over the very disadvantaged people you somehow have self-appointed yourself the designated speaker for. SJWs complain about marginalizing, othering, and silencing voices of minorities, but they're quickly becoming some of the biggest offenders.
and thinking that the second one (in response to some people telling him he was factually wrong about pg, and should maybe cool down) in particular marks him as a toxic passive-aggressive douchebag. Do you think these are fine, too?
I didn't know he was head of Django, which I don't use, but wouldn't go as far as assuming his personality leaks out to the project. It may well be that he's doing great things in Django, people often compartmentalize.
except for (preferably white) men, apparently: "ah right, yes, I forgot about the poor oppressed men. I keep doing that, why can’t I ever remember?"
Death threats from random anonymous people on the internet don't mean much more than that you have really pissed someone off. They're not to be taken literally.
Re pg's footnote: The discrimination example he brings up is based on real-world constraints, not some arbitrary prejudice. There is a place for enforced equality quotas, no child/woman/minority left behind and other social safety nets. Startups is not such a place.
The major hurdle for fighting for men's rights are people like yourself that keep lowering the debate by not being able to conduct themselves in a decent way. Frankly, the attitudes behind why women doesn't have a place in technology or used to be barred from many sports, are the same as why men can be forced into military service or has a higher risk of injury at work.
I would never work with him or one of the other SJWs in tech (Alex Gaynor, Bryan Cantrill, Adria Richards). You know they would be more than happy to ruin you if you slip up and say something remotely non-progressive, or that can be twisted to sound non-progressive.
UPDATE: Read up on the thread. Very sad to see how people, and Joyent in particular, came down on Ben. WTF. For what it's worth, here's Ben's response.[0] Reading that, it's pretty obvious he's the only adult involved in that whole fiasco. Seriously, W.T.F.
So true, in the end, it's not pg's fault if there is sexism and racism in the tech industry. They are doing their bit to improve the situation. Others should also try and do the same.
How much sexism and racism is there really in the tech industry? Most tech companies are quite the rainbow - 5 or 6 different native languages in a small company is not uncommon.
Only woked in 3 companies in 7 years but on the field, women in IT benefit a lot from positive discrimination. In fact they're promoted to managing jobs much sooner after they ask than men as far as I saw examples. Sexism is much more of a problem in the food industry and so on, so I would recommend IT jobs to girls if they want a great career with few hassles.
In fact I recommend IT jobs to everyone. The social inabilities that goes with programming is a repellent for everyone, but c'mon, we get to travel everywhere in the world, sit all day and watch gmail all the time. There couldn't be a more luxury job.
So a problem is, articles about sexism don't match the observations I've made on the field.
Edit: Added the last sentence and figures about my experience.
"I would recommend IT jobs to girls if they want a great career with few hassles."
I wouldn't, at least not compared to many other high ranking fields where women are respected to a larger extent. I would even say that if you, as a women, want a career in technology you have a better chance with a degree and experience in another field.
Indeed you can word something that could become misinterpreted and taken out of context and hung for it for all effect and thats even when you zoom out the context for the offended party. In part and I'm going to be blunt, women have historicaly been a bit repressed in some areas by some mindsets/people and those who have not read about others in such situations. There offended and rightly so, they can then sometimes see the worst and become overly deffencive and I can understand that as it is human nature to compensate and intellegent to learn from others mistakes. Sadly though the written word and conversations out of context can easily be seen as bad when the intention was never even there.
We all make mistakes, sadly though the mistake is often badly phrasing or being snap-shot sampled in a way that allows a different, wrong perspective upon what was said and intended. It is a form of PC over compensation which you get and had/have with the race card. Heck even talking about such subjects without being 100% behind the offended party can be deemed by some mindsets as being as guilty as the deemed offender and easily mis-labeled.
Another way to view this and see how it happens is take TSA for example or traffic wardens. The mindset people have is that from a efw bad examples all TSA and traffic wardens (meter maids they are called in some parts - lets say meter people now or as I prefer traffic wardens and avoid misconception of sexual biased even if not intended and I'm typing this extra overhead just to avoid a non intended issue right there :|). So TSA and traffic wardens, they are often looked down upon and pre-judged or any action deemed persecution, even when they are just doing there job and are not like the few examples that get passed on. You can get equaly good and bad news about say a traffic warden and people will remember the bad and apply that to all people with that job title after reading a few examples. It is how news works sadly and the mindset of the populus that take this news in, biasing the bad against all and the good only to a individual. I won't even try to understand that but that is how it is for most people. People sadly just love to label and bias bad news - heck even saying that is a bias/labeling mindset train of thought and is that wrong or am I just being honest about I see many situations happen which need not of happen.
That all said whilst it is good that the bias some people have towards women is being tackled, I do worry as somebody who treats people as people that a unfairness is arrising for women with regards to IT at the stage that a bias in favour of women arises in many areas now from training access, special progroms only available to women with no man equivelant and the like. These are to compensate the deemedbias in the past. But to new people into this World growing up in such situations who are unaware of a bias being needed, will grow up seeing a bias against them if they are male and with that create the bias all a new for a whole new generation and all due to them being descriminated against due to them not being a women.
DISCLAIMER: Just so we are clear I'm being totaly pragmatic and honest and and bias against or for any gender is not my intention nor will it ever be so if you read into it otherwise then it is your unopen closed mindset that is reading words in a different voice than intended. Though please do point them out if grammer or badly worded, though not intended I'd like to learn how to avoid the whole issue so replies like that greatly welcome and apprecieated.
Accusing others of being witches shows off your own moral purity. It also gives a feeling of power, a critical mass of the American tech crowd comes from the PC left that is large enough to set off a mob. The ultimate feeling of importance comes when a witch is burned (fired from his job). PG is a poorly chosen target in some sense, since he will be extremely hard to fire - although public humiliation is also satisfying to SJWs[1].
It is not all bad. One of the classic phenomena of witch hunts is when the hunt comes back to bag an original instigator. This is rich in irony and entertainment value.
My main takeaway from reading this article and the comments here is: The awareness of this problem is still very nascent and more & more solutions are emerging, as are criticisms of people who are beginning to acknowledge this problem.
To hopefully steer this in another direction, and because I have a little girl, what are some resources you all have seen that can help girls become interested and go into technical disciplines?
Here are a few of which I am aware. I highlight some companies started by women because they both teach technical skills and can serve as role models.
Aside: I've looked at that BlackGirlsCode link a bit more and I'm quite shocked that such segregation is encouraged, lauded even. Now there's some argument to support educating the sexes separately but if you're an asian girl living in Brooklyn (say) you can't go? Just because you're Asian ... ??? Really? What if you're half-Asian+half-African, how about your skins black but you're South American. Damn.
Do people really think you get rid of negative discrimination by doing more of it; how can such racism be positive?
From their website:
"*Sadly, San Francisco’s digital divide falls along the same racial and social fault lines that characterize so many of society’s issues. White households are twice as likely to have home Internet access as African American houses. Bayview Hunters Point, Crocker Amazon, Chinatown, Visitacion Valley, and the Tenderloin have significantly lower rates of home technology use than the rest of the city. Sixty-six percent of Latinos report having a home computer, as opposed to 88 percent of Caucasians.*
*Through community outreach programs such as workshops and after school programs, we introduce underprivileged girls to basic programming skills in languages like Scratch and Ruby on Rails.*"
If the racial divide is so disheartening why add your own. If you want to help the disadvantaged then help the disadvantaged not "all the disadvantaged with the right skin colour". Damn.
Hey I'm a white dude and I've worked with Black Girls Code on a few workshops. Just FYI girls of any race are allowed, it's just that this particular group caters primarily to black girls.
I'd say from the outside looking in it is a thorny subject, but in my observance BGC are good people who care about their community and are giving back to it through the knowledge and resources they've accrued.
Thanks for your comment and your work - beta is one of the tools being used at BGC isn't it¹. More power to your arm! [or firings to your synapses or whatever].
>my observance BGC are good people who care about their community
It's such a shame then that they promote themselves as only caring for the part of their community that has a particular colour of skin.
It's such a shame then that they promote themselves as only caring for the part of their community that has a particular colour of skin.
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling here.
In case you aren't: that is not what they are doing, and it also isn't a shame. Helping out people who are historically disadvantaged and face current discrimination is nothing to be ashamed about. The goal is to level the playing field.
I'm not a SWM and I think this stupid article has done a lot to damage the cause of equality. It is tactically, morally, and ethically stupid. I wish people would stop linking it, but sjws gonna sjw, I guess. Getting an angry response from disadvantaged people is more entertaining than doing the dull dreary or the high risk scary work of actually helping underprivileged succeed.
All the liberal white guys growing up to middle class parents in California read that and say "I guess I should feel really guilty for all I've been given in life".
All the white guys that grew up in the poor rural South and fought to learn about tech read that and say "fuck off, Scalzi". And then they spend the rest of their lives hearing from the other white guys about how their accomplishments are hollow for the rest of their lives.
Asians sit on the sidelines, largely ignored, quietly falsifying the "oppressor/oppressed" narrative[1] and driving social justice warriors crazy.
Asians throw the "white privilege" theory for a loop, because they face the same challenges as other people of color, and yet still manage to succeed admirably. Victim-lovers don't like them for that very reason, because they don't play very good racial victims - they are too busy succeeding.
Not at all. That one group has privilege doesn't mean no other group can. Here, for example, is a programmer talking about how he was privileged for looking like an Asian guy: http://pgbovine.net/tech-privilege.htm
This collectivism grouping of people with 'privilege' is so bogus it's astounding that people follow it so blindly.
Have you ever considered the possibility that people can judge other people based on their individual merits, not by the actions/inactions of people with the same colour of their skin or gender?
Furthermore, you quote one white paper to prove that white privilege is fact - how does that paper prove anything is factual?
If a lot of people see something you don't, they could all be deluded. Or you could just be missing something. Also, people aren't going to take you very seriously if you run around accusing them of being blind. Even when you're right.
Actually, there's a lot of research that shows that the default condition of humankind is not to judge other people based on their individual merits. And that probably includes you. Try some of these on for size: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
That paper proves that just having a name that people perceive as white gives you a substantial advantage in job searches. That is one small aspect of white privilege. There are a raft of studies like this. That's just one that stuck in my head.
I have no doubt that systemic racism still exists, particularly in the United States.
Certainly, that paper provides evidence that those with African American sounding names are at a disadvantage to people with white sounding names when applying for jobs.
Calling this disparity a 'privilege' and not a 'disadvantage' that needs to be corrected only stands as a reason to vilify one group, rather than lift the other, disadvantaged group up.
It's practically become a social faux pas to comment on anything in regards to social equity if you're a 'cigender white male' because of all the 'privilege' that group of people have. Case in point, this entire controversy with PG.
The word privilege has become so loaded that it's almost a catch all to dismiss or denigrate people's character irregardless of the quality of the content.
It's not that I think anyone is deluded, or blind. The language used has just become so muddled as to be almost worthless.
Maybe the term is muddled for you, but for me it's a pretty specific technical term, and most usages of it I see are pretty accurate.
I think the "disadvantage" term can have some utility, but for me it misses important nuances. One is that disadvantage sounds pretty abstract, pretty diffuse. E.g., disadvantaged youth are ones that happen to be born into poverty. But differential hiring based on names is active and specific.
Another is that thing many of the actions that make up privilege are positive ones. People helped me out in ways that other people just weren't helped. For example, when you look at the makeup of company boards or executive rosters, it's not like anybody said, "Hey, let's keep the women out." It's just that they happened to promote a lot more guys.
But the biggest thing for me is it puts the focus for action in the right place: on the people who are privileged. With power comes responsibility. White privilege is mainly white people helping other white people. That will only change if enough individual white people notice their privilege and act.
No, that is not what I said. I said calling it privilege only stands as a reason to vilify a group. Whether or not you choose to do that is up to you. You and many others seem to have taken the tact of creating a sense of responsibility to those who you deem to be privileged based on something they have had zero control over - their name, gender or ethnic backgrounds.
The focus of anyone interested in social equality should be to raise those with disadvantages up, not to impart a sense of blame and responsibility on those who fall into Peggy McIntosh's definition of privileged.
Recognising and providing support for those who are disadvantaged achieves that. Blaming those who do not have these disadvantages as if there's a concerted effort to screw the disadvantaged is great if you want to encourage victimhood and a lack of self determination for those you're attempting to help.
You seem to have a lot of opinions on the right way to do this. What experience do you have that would encourage others to give weight to your opinions? Perhaps you can share a couple of your notable successes and a couple of instructive failures.
Having talked with a lot of people you consider "disadvantaged" about this, they mostly disagree with you. As do plenty of other people.
I personally find the framing of privilege useful in evaluating and improving my own actions, as well as evaluating the actions of others. Having never heard of Peggy McIntosh before this moment, I can confidently say that I'm not really interested in her definitions of who's privileged and who's not.
Having been born white, I do of course recognize that I didn't pick that. I don't think people are responsible for things they have zero control over. But when those things give them power, I do think they are responsible for how they use it.
My experience is that of a white male. Does that make my opinions or viewpoint any less valid in your eyes?
I've expressed one opinion on 'the right way to do this'. Help the disadvantaged - and don't vilify those with perceived advantages that they have no control over.
I could ask the exact same thing of your background and why you feel that your opinion is more valid than mine, but instead I'd prefer to address the content of what you're saying, rather than what your background is.
I have also talked with a lot of people that I consider "disadvantaged", and they do agree with me. As do plenty of other people.
The Geekfeminism wiki page that you linked lists Peggy McIntosh's article "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", which was the first 'Privilege checklist'.
I'm surprised you haven't even bothered to read the original writing that frames the world view you've accepted as fact.
Your opinions are less valid when they make assumptions about the lived experience of other people. This is what the concept of 'privilege' is useful for - removing the unconscious bias that is loaded into your view of how other people experience the world.
When you make statements about how other people should act in a certain situation, it is useful to consider your cultural biases. This is what privilege checklists are useful for.
If you receive a strong 'check your privilege!' response to something you say, it just means that what you are saying doesn't seem to take into consideration what it is like to be the other person.
If you feel that you have taken this into consideration, then you can say so! Or you can ask for help in unfolding your biases. Just be aware that there might be a conversation going on that you are interrupting and that those involved might not have time to help you.
Privilege isn't about vilification, it is about trying to understand the experiences of other people.
It's a diagnosable variant of narcissism in which a person, like a young celebrity, becomes convinced that it's all about them because they spend long enough in a context where everybody acts like it's all about them.
I had known about ASN for a few years when I ran across the concept of privilege. Then I took some of the Implicit Association Tests, which made it clear to me that I was, like the rest of humanity, not the perfectly balanced intellect I wanted to think of myself as.
I basically had to admit that I'd spent decades fooling myself. It wasn't, as I thought, that I, e.g., "didn't see color". Instead, it was that I didn't see my seeing of color. What else about my mind and my social interactions did I not see?
Well good news: the reason I talk about privilege is to help the disadvantaged without vilifying anybody. If somebody is doing some vilifying somewhere, maybe you should go talk to them.
I don't think my opinion is more valuable than yours. I do think that the opinions of a non-disadvantaged person (which I'm just going to call advantaged, because that's less clumsy) on how to achieve social justice aren't very persuasive to me unless they've actually tried those opinions out in the field and had some success with them. Similarly, the views of managers on how to code are unpersuasive to me unless they have spent a lot of time coding. Experience matters.
Now that you mention it, I did read "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" years ago. But I'm uninterested in the academic side of this except so far as it has practical utility to me. I use the framework of privilege because it has been very useful to me both in sorting out my own bullshit and in working on these issues. Note that I don't accept the frame as fact; frames can't be factual. What I'm asserting is factual is the substantial advantages that particular groups have, the data of which you apparently don't dispute.
So I think where we've gotten to is that you, a white guy with no apparent experience of either experiencing or fighting disadvantage, has some strong opinions on how social justice should happen. And I say: that's great. Go do that and let me know how that works. But having once held your view and moved on to a different one after years of thought and experience, I'm going to stick with mine for now.
People aren't doing any vilifying? Have you not been witness to the absolute carnage that has ensued for Paul Graham since being misquoted? Are we actually communicating on the same website right now?
My opinions are tantamount to a manager saying 'You want to learn to code? I may not know how to code, but I will provide you a helping hand and resources to help you learn.' I see nothing even remotely contentious about this.
You claim that you are uninterested in the academic side of this topic and yet you debate a random person on the semantics of a word on HN and post links to academic research on the topic. Could you be any more disingenuous?
Speaking of being disingenuous, you completely misconstrued what I said in regards to your world view - here's exactly what I wrote:
"I'm surprised you haven't even bothered to read the original writing that frames the world view you've accepted as fact."
I never made a claim that 'frames can be factual', or anything of the sort. A few comments ago you made the assertion that:
"White privilege by the way, isn't a theory. It's a fact."
I think where we've gotten to is actually you, a white guy with no apparent intelligence have nothing better to do with your life than try (and fail, miserably) at imparting your world view on someone. Congratulations, keep at that.
I did not closely follow the Graham thing. I did not say that nobody was doing any vilifying. I said that if somebody was, you should be talking to them, not me.
I guess we disagree on how I should take your opinions, but that is not a surprise.
You did claim that I had accepted a "world view" as fact. I consider a frame and a world view effectively the same, so that's what I meant. You should also decide whether you think I misconstrued what you said, or whether I'm being disingenuous. Accusing me of both at once isn't really coherent.
I'm sure that last paragraph is meant to be devastating, but you're going to have to try harder than that. Like Scalzi, my opinion is that a lot of young white males are going to have little tantrums when I talk about privilege, because that's easier for them than the discomfort of actually accepting their unearned advantages. That's fine. Eventually you'll get over it. Or you'll grow up into a bitter old white male, increasingly resentful about your diminishing privilege. I'd rather it were the former, but it's up to you.
The Asian article was interesting. It is, however, downplayed
I still don't buy the whole white privilege concept as something distinct from being a simple numerical majority. One paper on some exaggerated African sounding names compared to some typical English names does not prove a whole lot. Among other things, There would need to be a control group with some names that sound both (1) white and (2) strange to English speaking ears.
Obviously, there are advantages to being white in this society as Louis CK points out, just as there are advantages to being black, and advantages to being Asian. Yet almost no one talks about black privilege, or Asian privilege. Except possibly Gavin McInnes, and then only ironically, as a comment on white privilege: http://takimag.com/article/tackling_asian_privilege_gavin_mc...
How about Sunni / Shia muslims in Iraq under Saddam? The Shia population is by far the majority, but Saddam was Sunni. The Ba'ath party violently persecuted the Shia popluation. I think it is safe to say that you would be privileged to be Sunni in this population, even though they by no means constituted the majority.
There are advantages to being members of all sorts of groups, but the advantage of being a member of SWM is particularly strong and has been quantified widely [1].
edit: Perhaps you were limiting your first statement to within particular groups, e.g. tech, where there is a majority of SWM. The thing is, a majority of the privileged group is what you'd expect, right?
What those names actually sound to target audience is white and black. If you read the section on how they picked the names, those were the most obviously white and black names they could come up with, using both census data and actual reactions to resumes.
That a typical black name sounds exaggerated and African to you is a pretty good sign you aren't black. Jamal, for example, is an Arabic name. If you look at name frequencies from 1979, some names of equivalent frequency to Lakisha are Janice, Christa, Gloria, Lynn, Shelley, and Alexis. For Jamal, names of similar frequency are Rudy, Josh, Allan, and Gordon. (Source: US Social Security department.) If you think this study would be materially different with Janice and Gordon than Emily and Greg, you're welcome to run it. But I think you'd be wasting your time.
I used to live in Chicago, where they did this study, and definitely knew both of those names, so they didn't sound "strange" to me, not in the sense of "I've never heard of this name," anyhow. They did sound strange in the sense of, "not part of my tribe," though. As a white guy who grew up in a white area of a neighboring state, I didn't personally know anybody with those names until later in life. But I knew they were black names.
And that's the kind of "sounds strange" that can influence hiring decisions. Not one person need say, "I hate black people, so I'm throwing this resume out." All they have to do is start callbacks with the one that "looks best" to them, one they have a good feeling about. One that seems the least strange.
The reason that the people who talk about privilege don't talk much about black privilege or female privilege is that they are pursuing social justice. Their effort is part of a long historical arc going back to when black people were property and women might as well have been. Once we've finished tiding that mess up, I imagine the conversation will shift quite a bit.
What I had in mind was that for a white English speaker, the 'black' names would probably sound foreign and unfamiliar, but non-English names from white countries (e.g. Norway, Iceland, Sweden) would also sound foreign and unfamiliar.
The question I was curious to answer was, are the people who are assessing resumes responding to an impulse (conscious or unconscious) of:
- "hmm, that name sounds black" or
- "hmm, that name sounds unfamiliar and foreign"?
With the former, it sounds like racism, with the latter, it sounds like generic suspicion of foreigners, concern about English communication ability, etc.
Maybe it's an academic point because in a US context, there are probably more people with "American Black" names that sound unfamiliar to white, English-speaking Americans, than there are Norwegians or Icelanders with similarly unfamiliar names.
Ah, I see what you're saying. Sorry for the confusion.
In some sense, I suspect the two aren't totally distinguishable, because I expect the underlying mechanism is at least partly an in-group vs out-group mechanism. Indeed, the social justice technical term "othering" is about how people take actual present people and dehumanize them by activating negative intergroup biases.
In this case, the researchers used in-person surveys to judge that the names specifically were perceived as black, rather than merely unknown.
4.I’m a straight white male and my life isn’t easy! My life sucks! Your “lowest difficulty setting” doesn’t account for that!
That’s actually fully accounted for in the entry. Go back and read it again.
This one’s a stand-in for all the complaints about the entry that come primarily either from not reading the entry, or not reading what was actually written in the entry in preference to a version of the entry that exists solely in that one person’s head, and which is not the entry I wrote. Please, gentlemen, read what is there, not what you think is there, or what you believe must be there because you know you already disagree with what I have to say, no matter what it is I am saying.
I'm certainly not saying that anybody's accomplishments are hollow, and I'm not saying anybody should feel guilty. Neither I nor Scalzi feels guilty about having privilege. The question for us is what we do with it.
How do you know he's a straight white male? Can you tell race, genitalia, and sexual orientation by typing style? Are you going to tell me to check my male privilege next?
If somebody other than a straight white male has freaked out about the Scalzi piece, I haven't seen it yet. If Jim Zvz is not among that group, he is welcome to correct me, and to be clearer about his concerns about the piece.
Until you've been a victim of the kind of systemic racism they are trying to reverse, maybe consider that you know nothing about how such efforts should market themselves?
Thanks, I guess? I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic it's hard to tell online. Just so you know I am not trying to argue with you, just sharing my experience with BGC.
You are correct that Beta is a tool being used at BGC, and we collaborate with other organizations listed by mikeleeorg.
I understand what you are saying however it's my opinion that any community (racial, ethnic, religious etc) that is attempting to impart knowledge is doing a good thing. Particularly when that knowledge is important and beneficial to the future, as I believe programming is.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885123 - Homeless coder starts app
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6365495 - Africans genetically more corrupt?
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448409 - Rick Ross's history
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6857739 - Nelson Mandela dies
5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6035263 - (Most obvious)Resume with black vs white name
6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6902563 - Cover up of racist+sexist mindset in Harvard
7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6907915 - Homeless coder finishes app
8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975732 - BlackGirlsCode event
I'm going to just keep on collecting these links and post the list on every instance I see.
This will be added as the 9th.
That's the amazing thing about threading. One can comment on a specific issue without derailing a main thread. I noted it was an aside (OT if you prefer) - I don't see how allowing the promotion of racism helps the thread any more than my your injunction to others to ignore it. If you don't want to comment, don't. It's an affront to the community here IMO for you to tell us what we may or may not discuss.
Edit: I think you edit-bombed me? The person running blackgirlscode and the other volunteers seem to be doing a fantastic job. The girls attending seem to be enjoying, getting encourage, learning. I don't know the community it's based in. Racial segregation is not the way.
Yes I did edit. My original comment was congratulating & encouraging HN for ignoring & downvoting your comment but then the replies started coming in and your comment was no longer greyed-out, so instead I just changed my comment into my standard copy&paste list and you are now the 9th on the list when the next time I need to post it arises.
The comment isn't stupid: such gender/race discrimination _may_ backfire(for example, if your message is read not as "black girls have the same abilities but may need extra help" but as "black girls need extra help because they are black & girls -- inherently less smart and talented". Now, I'm not saying that it _will_ backfire(I guess it probably won't) but it _may_.
Also, the author makes a really good point that you probably want to help all disadvantaged(unless you're racist/sexist for some reason): why exclude asian girls if they get less help?
I get that, in fact, race/gender discrimination may be the best way to fight race/gender discrimination of the past, but this point of view requires much more explanation than simply hitting downvote button.
> Also, the author makes a really good point that you probably want to help all disadvantaged(unless you're racist/sexist for some reason): why exclude asian girls if they get less help?
That one group is focussed on dealing with the problems experienced by one disadvantaged group does not imply intent to exclude others, it can just mean that they feel that the particular reason that one group is underrepresented are specific and that that is what they are focussed on addressing.
Particularly if the problem they are addressing isn't outright racism/sexism, but disadvantage due to mainstream educational systems being culturally maladapted to the target group, other groups -- even if similarly disadvantaged by the mainstream system -- may naturally not be well served by their particular programs either, and making clear where the focus is helps people to find the right fit for their needs.
Obviously, the ideal state would be to not need such targetted groups, but the existence of disadvantage doesn't mean that there is a good short-term one-size fits all solution.
It is not like profit from white males running Federal Reserves automatically goes to underadvantaged white males.
My point is that if you believe in equal abilities regardless of race/gender then you probably want to completely get rid of race and gender fields in your application form. And if you actually support discriminating against these fields, then you have to explain your decision rather than simply hit downvote button.
I can see how BlackGirlsCode may help people, but I also can see how it may harm. My guess: it probably helps(although I'm not an american). Downvote irrelevant comments not comments you disagree with.
> My point is that if you believe in equal abilities regardless of race/gender then you probably want to completely get rid of race and gender fields in your application form.
You probably want to avoid them being used in selection decisions, but you may -- particularly if you are a group whose mission is dealing with the specific barriers to a specific disadvantaged race/sex subgroup -- want to have them on your admission form so that you can assess (a) whether you are effectively serving your mission, and (b) whether your program has broader utility than you expected and perhaps should be described differently.
Having grown up in a poor rural area without access to the internet until the age of 18, I get pretty pissed off when leftists judge me based on my genitals and skin color. Where do they get off assuming that I've had everything in life handed to me because I'm a white male? When did it become acceptable behavior to say that to a person's face?
For example, if BlackGirlsCode produces a generation of black women who are perfectly capable programmers but believe that they're only capable "for black girls" and not by the tougher standards of asian men, that's backfiring. Such graduates will not go on to found startups or even apply for jobs at the best companies. They will probably have less overall life success than if they hadn't entered the program.
Or if the graduates are fine, but it's a resume stain, because everyone who hears about it thinks "These are people who need special help. I don't want to work with people like that. I want to work with self-sufficient people." So the graduates can't find jobs or investors. That's a backfire.
Or if it works well for the small number of people directly touched, but the much larger number of people peripherally touched become more likely to think that programmers are divided into "black" and "nonblack" and subconsciously act on that. It's a smaller effect, but a larger group of people and could easily be a net loss. That's a backfire too.
everyone who hears about it thinks "These are people who need special help. I don't want to work with people like that. I want to work with self-sufficient people."
Funny, fraternity/sorority membership is not interpreted so negatively as to mean the person needs special help acquiring social connections.
Your comment is insinuating that Asian, Indian, etc women and men have corrupted it for their own beefit, and that this corruption somehow benefits a mutual-aid society of white males. Is that what you intend to claim?
It's provocative, distracting and subverting - Introducing a politically sensitive, racially charged, artificial problem.
This will incite anger through political correctness. The cause is bogus.
Snubbing it is politically incorrect to criticize women and ethnic minorities in the west.
Non sequitur, PC trolls like this can do as much distracting as they please.
Why not bring up english? There are many people who are engineers who would benefit from localized API and developer documentation and understanding english better.
If you want discrimination in engineering - I'm surprised no one brings up english.
Edit to below: Sorry for editing this after your reply. I didn't notice.
You make a great point aboit the use of English for documentation, and the need for translation to other languages to promote computing in different nations.
See how I didn't mention race or sex or sexuality? That's because you don't need to mention that other stuff when you have a tight focus.
"Help girls code" does not mean "stop translating documentation to Portuguese".
"Help translate all these documentations and apis to many languages" doesn't mean "don't bother spending time teaching girls to code".
Dan, even using english as a first language - I have a difficult time articulating this subject.
1. English
English is the more topic subject dividing engineers and programmer's from reaching their potential. These are people who are already on their path and passionate about growing themselves into programmers.
Can you imagine how we can help them? Their potential if they have localized documentation?
A story of disadvantage - imagine having an issue and being powerless to articulate yourself to a predominately english-speaking world of engineers. What about their hearts, their passions?
And this is effective, safe. Helps people. Constructive. This is great news man.
Now you see where I'm going?
2. The PC troll issue
I feel tempted to blurt out every emotion. But when a particular group is mentioned - we have to make everyone happy? Why is pycon code of conduct pulled off geekfeminism.org (http://jessenoller.com/blog/2012/12/7/the-code-of-conduct). This is sensitivity not to woman, but I feel it's creating a culture of hysteria.
Truly, I do not believe woman in the first world (I'm sorry if this offends people) are at risk of rape or sexual harassment at conferences. Most conferences do not have codes of conduct that state this because it makes you ask, "Why?". Do these people ever go outside, to starbucks, etc? Do they live in a Chapel away from vulgar language and stringent political correctness? I'm deeply sorry to offend anyone here.
But how do you even get to Pycon if you're in this feminist Cabal? Do you go around in a bubble when you're outside? Especially in SF where radical free expression is so prevalent, it's amazing how the when it gets to the workplace and conferences, women (a select few), pull what we may see as a 180. Now they're ultra-chaste, "triggered"* by humor they probably laughed out at dinners before, especially in front of more confident and boastful company.
I feel I can't talk about anything. I feel it's a sand pit meant to distract and divide. I feel like I can't express myself in the most basic ways.
* Triggered means PTSD for traumatic events in their past. So now it's not a matter of political niche. Ever study cognitive-behavioral psychology? People can link a bad memory to anything!
The problem is that you don't understand what racism is. Racism isn't just treating someone differently because she belongs to a different race. Racism has more to do with power dynamics than with color of a person's skin.
For example, just because a college has different standards of admission for different races to promote diversity is not racism but to give preferential treatment to the group of people who have more social and economic power. That's racism.
BlackGirlsCode is not a racist organization. Actually to the contrary, its trying to improve the opportunities to the most under-represented group of people in tech industry. This is a good thing for the tech sector. To focus on blank girls, this organization can be much more effective in its goal (to make tech sector more inclusive) than if it was a "PeopleCode" or even a "GirlsCode" group.
While that's an interesting view, it's also wrong. It might make for a good way of justifying things in your mind, you should really take a look at the more common definitions of racism to understand why this point of view you have in one held by a minority of people.
Hey, you know what? If every black person sees you and thinks "honkey," you will likely experience hurt feelings, and a slight discomfort when in certain neighborhoods. You probably will stop going to those places. It would be very hard to blame lack of progress in your professional or academic career on this perception. You could go almost your whole life without that perception having any tangible manifestation in your life.
If every white person thinks the N-word when he sees a black person, that fact creates an inescapable environment of hostility where anyone would feel completely helpless to create any sort of positive future for themselves. Of course we don't live in a world where everyone is this blatantly racist. The point of this is to explain to you in a different way why racism is more powerful than just "you exclude people based on race." Some people need environments where they can feel comfortable learning, before they can get up to speed and have the confidence to defend themselves against criticism and hostility.
...you should really take a look at the more common definitions of racism to understand why this point of view you have in one held by a minority of people.
Right. Because letting the majority population define which terms an aggrieved minority can use to describe its own situation is completely sensible. What a surprise, the discriminated minority has a different view of the majority's behaviors than do those in the majority!
> "Right. Because letting the majority population define which terms an aggrieved minority can use to describe its own situation is completely sensible. What a surprise, the discriminated minority has a different view of the majority's behaviors than do those in the majority!"
---
Perfectly stated. Seems like the people at BCG are trying to help girls learn to code, with an emphasis on those who are black--because of a range of obstacles that might otherwise prevent these girls from learning.
And let's be honest here: if BCG didn't do this work to encourage black women and girls to code, who would? I see nothing wrong with their desire to encourage black girls to learn more about coding.
>Right. Because letting the majority population define which terms an aggrieved minority can use to describe its own situation is completely sensible. What a surprise, the discriminated minority has a different view of the majority's behaviors than do those in the majority!
Ha! I've had to respond to this "point" more times than I can count and I really like how you put this. I think I'm going to steal this for next time :)
(Sorry, accidental downvote while attempting to select text)
> Not that it changes your overall point, but note that California no longer has a majority population along racial lines.
California still has a very substantial White racial majority (74.0% as of the 2010 census), it just doesn't appear to when people of Hispanic ethnicity are counted as a separate group from their race (non-Hispanic Whites were only 39.7% in the same census), as is frequently done in the US.
It makes sense to divide Hispanic and non-Hispanic White if we are performing this categorization for the purpose of analysing discrimination. This is because traditionally Hispanics have been discriminated against by non-Hispanic Whites. The same could be said for the Irish, or Catholics... but Protestant/Catholic discrimination seems to have simmered down in the US.
Or to put it simply: Does a Hispanic in California currently experience White privilege? If no, then they should be counted separately.
An opportunity only offered to one person out of a group who would similarly benefit from that opportunity simply based on their racial heritage is racism. Yes. It's entirely unnecessary discrimination.
"All the blue-eyed children may leave early for recess." [not a direct quote AFAIK] - the brown/green/whatever eyed children would equally benefit from early recess.
There are plenty of other isms besides racism. Eye-colorism is a different kind of discrimination than racism, unless eye color is just a proxy for race (which is quite possible). Discriminating based on gender is called sexism, discriminating baed on nationality is called nationalism, etc...
> The problem is that you don't understand what racism is. Racism isn't just treating someone differently because she belongs to a different race. Racism has more to do with power dynamics than with color of a person's skin.
erm, it is a potentially racist organization, here's why: BlackGirlsCode is specifically geared for one power dynamic, black girls vs white girls. While they may be attempting to level the playing field between white and black which is politically and socially acceptable, they are furthering the gap between black and (pick an underrepresented minority). This exclusivity is exactly how every power came into power and subjugated the rest. From the very beginning the set of principles that guide this rationale of pragmatism while understandable, is hypocritical.
It's attempting to do successful intervention & marketing, essentially, by focusing on a specific demographic. As we all should know, focusing on a specific demographic is a fine way to produce a product targeted to that demographic's needs. Young black women have different pain points in tech than Zuckalikes or male first-born children of Chinese immigrants. It is obvious that other organizations with mainly white or male constituents are not effectively serving the market and it's no surprise that something better for this target group has come along.
The rest of your comment is pure silliness. Every power that came into power, to repeat your phrasing, did so by claiming they were the best and then grabbing the money. When I see the black girls of code claiming they are racially and morally superior to everyone else, and making tons of cash, I'll consider believing you.
You're right, but I'd say my comparison is at least a subset of what you're covering.
Yeah, targeting is one thing, exclusion is entirely another. If you're excluding other races from your product that's well...racist.
>The rest of your comment is pure silliness. Every power that came into power, to repeat your phrasing, did so by claiming they were the best and then grabbing the money. When I see the black girls of code claiming they are racially and morally superior to everyone else, and making tons of cash, I'll consider believing you.
Well, I said potentially and you said 'claiming' implying an active process of obtaining power. We are in agreement that black girls are not a powerful force in the development community, but neither were (pick small exclusionary group/minority that came to power). Rwanda anyone?
They aren't now, but could be, especially with the principles they are using that are in place.
Ah, please regale us with your tales of successfully combatting racism and evening a tilted playing field. I know many people who need the benefit of your undoubtedly extensive experience in the trenches. I'm sure that your comment is not merely an uninformed effort made from your armchair.
I'm half black half white, born of a polish father who managed to make it from Poland in 1975, and an army brat african american mother. I grew up in a predominantly white irish and white jewish community on the North Shore of Chicago, racism was subtle but it was there. My older sister has significant experience in this particular field as a woman who was pushed into various programs like this. I happened to end up in CEED at UCLA, a minority focused engineering program and went through the fun stuff of National Achievement related stuff.
This in no way diminishes the ridiculousness of the statements you have made. In fact, it makes it all the more perplexing why and how you think that BGC is on the same spectrum as the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda, as given your background, perhaps it should be expected of you to know just a little better than that.
The analogy is one of how principle matters. There are plenty historical examples of minority groups defending and supporting themselves, rightly so, some would say, and eventually gaining power and subjugating others. The one thing that rarely changes in those organizations is the principles behind them. Those with little power in the beginning can only defend themselves, with great power they can do that by subjugation of others.
So I will reiterate, it is the principle of exclusion that puts it on the same spectrum. No they haven't and I will assume most likely will not cause a genocide. However, principle...matters. It is unwise to perpetuate the same beliefs and systems of an oppressor and expect a different outcome! 'Only certain people of a certain group because of race and gender can be here'.
Since you insinuated I could know nothing of the subject because of my background, and then upon revelation suggest I should know better because of it, I'd suggest to you that instead of making assumptions about me and my background what I should be like, and chaffing at the fact that I don't fit the mold of someone you'd expect with this background, maybe heed what I have to say as it is from a unique position that is not common.
No. Your position is ridiculous, as in it deserves ridicule. A stupid but equally valid conclusion falling out of your absurd insistence that the principles at play -- as you identify and interpret them -- must not have any overlap with those of historically oppressive regimes would be for me to stop segregating my flour and sugar in my cupboard. These same principles of segregation -- as you define it so broadly as to be without meaning almost -- are at play in my kitchen and I can extend your silly argument to conclude that I also have been sowing the seeds of oppression in the place where I keep my food!
As far as I can tell, your argument is,
1) BGC starts out by identifying a target population based on race.
2) All genocidal massacres have begun with this step.
> This was in context to the previous comment about power dynamics
There is no reasonable sense in which it is accurate to say that Black Girls Code is geared for "black girls vs. white girls".
There might be some vague sense (though its still a very bad and misleading way of putting things by inventing a conflict which is not essential to the focus) to saying it is geared for black girls vs. white boys.
can a white girl join black girls who code? a conflict nonetheless exists whether or not it is intended by the organization. remember the segregation concept of 'separate but equal' ? it wasn't intended and it was not the focus of segregation to deliver unequal qualities of life, but by the implementation that is exactly what happened and I'd say, conflicts created by organizations like this shouldn't be ignored. you call it misleading, I say it should be addressed. I wouldn't sacrifice the principal for the pragmatism.
>For example, just because a college has different standards of admission for different races to promote diversity is not racism but to give preferential treatment to the group of people who have more social and economic power. That's racism.
So, building women founders, is, as is building male founders, a way to create a few more people with "social and economic power" to rule over the rest of us.
Well, your language does not read as being genuine. To be frank, it reads like someone faking caring for rhetorical effect in order to to cause an argument. I currently do not believe that you are arguing in good faith.
Your language does not read as being genuine. To be frank, it reads like someone trying to derail the discussion by critiquing someone else's tone. I currently do not believe that you are arguing in good faith.
Oh yes, he's shocked, he's genuinely shocked, he finds it all such a shame.
I mean, really.
People claiming outrage and shock at having just discovered the existence of affirmative action in a country that practiced aparthied in some parts within living memory are either outstandingly ignorant, stupid, or lying through their teeth.
I haven't just discovered the concept of affirmative action. I don't live in the country in question either FWIW.
I have just discovered the concept of widespread support for racial and sexual segregation in a tech education [charity?] group in the USA. I have just discovered that not only was this link mentioned in the highest voted comment on a HN thread but also my objection to such racism - passed off as you so nicely word it as "affirmative action" - was immediately downplayed.
I do find it a shame - have you seen what they're doing with this group. They're getting kids involved in programming in a way that's exciting to me - indeed one commenter mentioned they've worked with them and wrote (IIRC) betathegame which I'd just been looking at to use with my own kids. They're well resource and completely up-front about what they are "black girls code".
So you believe I'm outstandingly ignorant? About what? I was ignorant of creeping support in the tech community for racism, for segragation in learning, for exclusion based on skin colour.
Division by age; no problem with me. Division by sex; can be argued for (and BGC do). Division by skin colour, in learning to code, how is it in the least bit relevant.
I do sometimes proffer opinions that I do not hold in order to develop better understanding or to develop my rhetoric but this is by no means one of those times.
Rather than questioning my sincerity perhaps you can convince me that skin colour is pertinent when offering access to education in computing? If you don't want to do that then perhaps you can say hat it is that's convinced you that it is acceptable?
Ok, the reason I was questioning your sincerity was not because of the argument presented, as much as that the subject combined with some of the language cues and the context set off some sort of baysian based bullshit detector in my head that was ringing like a big fucking gong. It isn't always perfect, but it is usually good and it was ringing pretty loudly, which is why I stopped beating around the bush. I am not the only person here, looking at the other comments, that strongly suspected you of trolling here. If you are not, then you have my complete apologies.
Now as to why I think that this club is ok, is not because I think that skin colour has any relevance in learning to code. Also, if I thought they were being exclusively for black girls, rather than just targetting them, then I would not give this any time, but that seems to be evidently not the case.
The sad fact is that skin colour has deep relevance in the US because it is still such a deeply divided and institutionally racist country in many ways, especially if you do not have enough money to sugar the pill.
If you are a teenage black girl in poverty in the US you are bombarded with media telling you what defines a teenage black girl in poverty in the US. You are marketed to as a teenage black girl in poverty, you are educated as a teenage black girl in poverty.
And unless you are unusually idiosyncratic, you will already have bought the story you are being sold by the time you are a teenager.
Most people buy the story they are sold by the society around them.
As far as I am concerned, given the society and history of the US, the club BlackGirlsCode is not spreading the message, "coding is a black thing", it is spreading the message "black girls are able and allowed to code", which is a positive thing. It isn't forcing people to think of themselves in a certain way, it is trying to start with how the people they are trying to help are already viewing themselves, it is accepting that the society is really screwed right now and so sod trying to destroy tribalism in one fell swoop, as that is a big job and may take a few more generations, lets try and get people to widen their horizons and do something about the massive technological literacy gap. Clubs called BlackGirlsCode in the US are needed for exactly the same reason that organisations dedicated to literacy for Dalit women in India are neccessary.
Personally I would rather that society drop the whole black/white thing altogether as a description of skin colour, as not only is the binary designation one of the most heinous divide and conquer traps that is going, but I think that the terms are also woefully inaccurate and unfit for purpose as descriptive adjectives. However I rarely get a good response to that, so convincing society in general of that one is really more of a long game.
To be fair, your main addition in this so far has been to parrot me then to say I sound stupid, which I may well do and I completely entertain it as a possibility, however I am not sure it puts you down for insightful contribution of the year here either.
To add my own experiential insight as a female who started coding at 11 (without the aid or encouragment of a parent like you!)...
Reflecting on my thought processes at that age, I remember it being entirely about 2 things:
1. Expression. Nothing could have sounded more dull than building aimlessly-- I wanted to DESIGN. (My definition of this being "carrying out a specific communicative purpose through look and function.") I wanted to make a website that demonstrated my tastes and values to my friends. (Which is likely why I went straight to websites and not desktop software.)
2. Social dynamics. Similar but different to the aforementioned point, I wanted to actually affect other people with what I was making. As a young girl, that typically meant impressing potential friends and boyfriends. I had a poetry site at one point. I made sites for a fake band my girl friends and I talked about forming. I had tons of blogs. I really should have segued into games at that time, as that would have fallen in the same category, but sadly I did not.
While I know every human being is different, I was what you'd consider a "girly girl." So I believe the difference between myself and a young boy was quite pronounced in a stereotypically feminine direction-- which is where one should be investigating a subject like this, in my opinion.
Based on my daughter and her friends, involvement in Lego Mindstorms robotics and First Lego League competitions is another great way to get girls interested in programming and technology.
I wanted a Lego Mindstorm kit so badly as a kid, but my parents never got me one. I think my life would have been a lot different if my home situation had at least afforded me that one thing.
My former advisor, Leah Buechley, and other friends created this introduction to programming and electronics via e-textiles and the LilyPad Arduino: http://sewelectric.org/
Technovation Challenge (http://iridescentlearning.org/programs/technovation-challeng...) is a worldwide program for high school girls to develop engineering and entrepreneurship skills. I was a mentor for this locally and it was great fun. Super smart girls.
Edit: Also, if you're searching for this topic, "girls in STEM" (or SET, SETI, SEAT, etc) is another great source of resources aimed at encouraging girls in science.
I'm not a parent or teacher, so I'm not in touch with what high schoolers find interesting these days. But imagine if there were a program backed by top VCs getting startup engineers, especially ensuring visible minorities among the bunch, into high schools to break down how their popular apps or games du jour work. Rather than "I want to learn to program, ok, let's print out 'Hello World'", outline the systems thinking behind the apps and services that the audience uses every day. Maybe it could even be effective as an online video series. Maybe it already exists.
Still: There are things we all can do if we actually care about helping change mindsets early on. Even many smart teenage boys (so I am told, see disclaimer above) don't want to go into engineering because it's nerdy and unpopular. We need diversity on the inside, not just on the outside.
Hey great list. I'm working on a game that teaches programming and game design. It's now available for download at www.betathegame.com. One of our co-founders is a female!
Why would he? And why are you asking this question? There's nothing in what he wrote that indicates that he would do that. Please don't bring negativity into this surprisingly positive and constructive sub thread.
Sorry you're being downvoted. It's a fair question. I plan on exposing her to as many topics as I can. I'll support whatever path she takes. My job, as I see it, is partly to give her a taste of as many topics as possible, then to help guide her as her interests begin to emerge.
Thanks. I find it odd that supposedly pro-female movements denigrate all the things that women have participated in over the years. Women have always been with us, and they haven't been sitting around all day doing nothing! But we tell young girls nowadays that to be valuable, they have to do things that boys are doing.
A true pro-female movement would first of all recognize the value of all the work of women over the millennia. And secondly, they would fight against discrimination. But the desire for equal representation in every field comes out perversely anti-female, since it values down everything females are doing and values up everything males are doing.
If I have a daughter, it will be okay to me if she wants to be a scientist or a stay-at-home mom. My mom played a big role in my life for which I am forever grateful. That too is valuable.
It's not that being a stay-at-home mom isn't valuable it's that you're giving up your independence. For most of history women of course didn't have much of a choice, even if they were educated.
I find the outrage over this so disingenuous. It looks to me like it's more about punishing someone for being a high-profile member of a hated, perceived-oppressor group than actually caring about women being programmers.
To think that pg actually believes that there are no female programmers was the least charitable possible interpretation, and the only reason to have picked that one in particular was to confirm your own bias.
Note that there is no similar hand-wringing about the lack of women in the fields of sanitation, construction, plumbing or cartooning. Likewise, not much hubbub about the gender imbalance in the fashion industry.
Could it possibly be that men and women think differently, and those minor differences are reflected in their career preferences? Could it be that these preferences play a bigger role in gender imbalances in career fields than sexism in a modern society?
> Note that there is no similar hand-wringing about the lack of women in the fields of sanitation, construction,
Yes there is, and examples of programmes to get men into. Ursing or women into construction have been posted to HN before.
Someone always always makes the same point as you and for some reason it always manages to infuriate me. I've had to re-write this 4 times because it was so vicious at first. But it does feel tbat a person must be deliberately trollin when they trot out the same tired bullshit that other idiots spout, especially when that bullshit has been debunked on the same forum that they're posting to and when it is so easy to debunk with a simple websearch. It feels as if some people like living their lives with the blinkers on.
The fact that you know of programs "to get men into nursing or women into construction" that have been "posted to HN before" or have seen some claim "debunked" in the past doesn't mean the person you're writing to has.
FWIW, I read HN pretty regularly and had never noticed any programs to get more women into construction. Not to say that they don't exist, but I'd agree with your interlocutor that the level of hand-wringing on that subject doesn't seem at all similar to the level seen in tech.
As for whether that sort of claim is "easy to debunk with a simple websearch", it's probably much easier for you. Keep in mind that google tailors its results to return the sort of sites you've looked for before, so what you see in response to a given search is different from what others would see. (Not to mention that not knowing that something exists makes it hard to know what phrase one might google to find it.) So instead of saying "it's easy to debunk this with a web search", it's far more productive if you do that search yourself and provide an actual link to the references that YOU think debunk it.
I haven't seen much talk about construction at all here on HN. It's a tech site, full of techies, talking about tech. Of course tech will be an overwhelmingly popular topic here.
Do you spend time on construction forums every day, hearing about the latest trends in construction? I would guess not, which is why you don't hear much about what is going on there.
> FWIW, I read HN pretty regularly and had never noticed any programs to get more women into construction.
Here there actually is a government program to get women into trades, simply because there's a shortage of skilled tradespeople in general, and nearly every other demographic is 'tapped out' if you will.
Construction, while it can be lucrative, is simply not 'aspirational', so anyone looking to improve their social status steers clear of the profession.
The women into construction line seems to be specific to a certain type of poster. It's a trope that gets trotted out by people who have seen it somewhere else.
'But it does feel tbat a person must be deliberately trollin when they trot out the same tired bullshit that other idiots spout, especially when that bullshit has been debunked on the same forum that they're posting to and when it is so easy to debunk with a simple websearch. It feels as if some people like living their lives with the blinkers on.'
Well then, since I'm spouting "bullshit" (your words):
Educate me. Let me play the "Citation Needed" card.
Just search HN for [women construction] and you'll see a bunch of MRAs making the point that there are no programmes to get women into construction, and people giving examples of such programmes across a range of countries.
Your inability, or unwillingness, to perform a simple websearch even when given suitable search terms tells me all I need to know about your desire to find facts and make corrections to your weong statements.
"Your inability, or unwillingness, to perform a simple websearch even when given suitable search terms tells me all I need to know about your desire to find facts and make corrections to your weong statements."
And your hair-trigger temper and vitriol tell me all I need to know about you.
Someone always always makes the same point as you and for some reason it always manages to infuriate me
It has been so thoroughly brought up and smacked down that at this point, I'm going to be charitable (?) and assume that this guy is just trolling and/or meta-trolling at this point. Take a deep breath and let it go.
1. It is possible that men and women do think differently and therefore have different career preferences, so the optimal gender ratio is not 1:1.
2. Just because the optimal gender ratio may not be 1:1 does not mean that the current expression is the optimal one.
I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women. I don't think we'll ever see 50% participation, but I don't want to see any person (man, woman, or anyone identifying otherwise) turn away from this field because they found it hostile. I do believe that this happens, and that sucks.
'I think we absolutely need to make this field more friendly to women.'
And I completely agree. I guess my point is: how much of this outrage is manufactured? Is the gender imbalance truly a "crisis" or is it an artifact of something else entirely?
Certain parties like to fuel the outrage flame because they make money on clickbait. There are also just people with an axe to grind that get off on starting fights. Then you have people that will swear up and down that there is no gender problem in tech, nothing wrong with 'brogrammer' culture, etc. The reasonable people in the middle all think they are arguing against the extreme views, but just end up fighting each other because they misunderstand each others' view points. You have people that have directly experienced sexism in tech thinking they are arguing with the deniers when in actuality they are arguing with people who think their interlocutors are just the angry people looking for a fight.
Messy. And no women are persuaded to learn programming, and no one wins but those websites making money on advertising. Everyone comes away angry.
Oppressed minorities have historically been excluded from highly desirable fields. As a consequence even today you see few black people in, say, Princeton or investment banking. This is most certainly not because black people (or women) think differently. The status quo just takes a long time to improve, especially when people pigheadedly deny there's a societal problem.
Looking at the hard data from 2012-13, we have 10.7% international students. So of the US students, 7.4/.897 = 8.2% identified as African American.
It's true that this is under-represented compared to the 12.2% of the US population for that demographic cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat... and in fact the ratio of the two percentages is about 0.67, so you could argue that about 33% of African American students who ought to be at Princeton if the student body were strictly proportional to population are missing.
If we look at the corresponding numbers of non-Hispanic whites, we see 72.4% of the population, and 56.7% (100 - 10.7 - 38.4)/.897 of Princeton's student body. The ratio is .78, which is definitely higher than 0.67, but not nearly as much higher as I was expecting when I saw the Princeton numbers. For one thing, I recalled the US as being 15-16% African American, but it looks like in the last 20-some years the demographics have shifted markedly... The upshot is that you see fewer black people in Princeton than you might expect based on general population but way more than you used to even in the recent past.
It would be interesting to see what US demographics for college-age folks look like, though; they may be significantly different from overall demographics.
For comparison with the above numbers, American Indian students are underrepresented at Princeton by a factor of 4 or so, and Pacific Islanders by a factor of 1.8. Hispanics are presumably underrepresented by a factor of 2 or so, but it's hard to tell with the complexities of the classifications there. Asian Americans are overrepresented by a factor of 4.
I'm not actually sure I have a point here, other than attempting to quantify "few"...
Ah, OK, it sounded like you'd picked Princeton in particular.
And yes, there are substantial differences between the Ivies, and between other "otherwise prominent" institutions. And even within a single school it can fluctuate widely, whether due to trends or chance. For example, http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/students/diversity.html shows a pretty wide range in African American enrollment numbers at MIT over the last 4 years (ranging from 5.3% to 7.7%) and similar fluctuations for Latinos (but at a much higher base level).
Another confounding factor here is that even though the applicant pools and matriculating classes for these schools have gotten much more national than they used to be, the matriculation demographics still tend to skew somewhat local. MIT, for example, has a disproportionate number of undergrads from Massachusetts: according to http://web.mit.edu/registrar/stats/geo/ there are 340 of them out of 4080 US students total (8%) this year, while the population of MA, at 6.6 million, is only 2% of the US population. Similarly, http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admi... says Princeton has 204 students from NJ this year, but only 38 from MA, while the population of NJ is only 1.5 times that of MA at most.
Since different parts of the country have different racial breakdowns (MA is 7% African American, not 12%, for example) this complicates any analysis of the goings-on at such schools. :(
That's an interesting factor that I never thought about in admissions of universities. Location and ethnic makeup of a state might have impact on the enrollment of minorities, though I don't think it's substantive it might have an impact.
But please tell me honestly how you feel about the fact that RIGHT NOW, anyone can look up "investment banking" in the library and start learning about it? They can open trading accounts and start doing it right away without permission from anyone. Would you disagree that the playing field is not level because of this?
I feel people who want to be coders should not wait to get acceptance from incumbent coders, but instead, go to the library and learn to code from books and websites.
Bosses want people with abilities, so if people get abilities, they'll be employable.
YC is probably a great way to start a company, but it is far from a requirement. If females want to found a company, why not start it right now, right away? Why waste time focusing on anything outside their goals?
Why fight to persuade someone that you can make customers happy and then give them back a portion of your work? Why not simply begin to make customers happy right now? This is the best time in the world for doing this, yet so many people are wasting it away by focusing on convincing other people that a minority of people are wrong.
Even if they get everyone to agree with them, they'll still need to do all kinds of hard work to learn to code/be a vet/dancer/founder, etc. So, why not start NOW to do that hard work for one's self?
Although I'm sure you mean well this comment comes across as out of touch with reality.
- Most investment bankers aren't self-taught kids from impoverished neighborhoods who got where they are today through a combination of pluck and determination.
- Good libraries are in good neighborhoods. Poor neighborhoods often don't have a library at all.
- Bosses want people who have abilities, but depending on your circumstances at birth it may take a lot more effort to acquire those abilities.
Some people succeed even though the deck is completely stacked against them. This has always been the case. And yes, the individual should do what they can to make the best of an unfair situation. However, I'm arguing that the deck shouldn't be stacked against people based on gender and race in the first place. And before there can be meaningful change people have to acknowledge that this unfairness has to be addressed.
I think a major argument against this, in the field of programming in particular, is that most of those other field-related imbalances are culture-neutral. You'll find more male sanitation workers, construction workers, plumbers, etc. everywhere from the US, to Brazil, to China, to Russia, to Pakistan. (Controlling, of course, for the more general inequities in employment-by-gender that those cultures face.)
But the "no female programmers" thing is specific to western culture. There are plenty of female programmers in India, and in Russia. So this is likely something about western culture, that has caused this difference.
>But the "no female programmers" thing is specific to western culture. There are plenty of female programmers in India, and in Russia. So this is likely something about western culture, that has caused this difference.
i'd be very curious to hear from a female programmer from Russia. I just find it hard to believe in overturning of the sexist culture there, and my impression that we have more females in hi-tech here in SV.
Do you have any statistics for your claim about female programmers in India? I have yet to meet a single Indian programmer who was female in the decade and a half I have been programming. In fact, the only females in tech of Indian heritage that I know have been US-born.
I don't have statistics, but Apple sent me to India/Infosys in 2009 to train their programmers, and it seemed about 50/50 to me (I worked with a few hundred people). I have no idea if that's representative, but I have no reason to think it isn't.
For a girl in India, studying computer science is one of the best options. Jobs are abound, pay relatively well and work environment is thousand times better and safer when compared to other industries. This I guess, explains what you observed on your trip.
I think it's more about first world culture and career opportunities.
Programming (or anything with a keyboard) is not really seen a manly profession in developing countries. Or, to be frank, in the first world countries either.
The difference is that in the first world, the pay increase and quality of life is much greater between say carpenter or fireman vs computer programmer.
I've been in conversations in with high level execs where the disdain for the 'tappy tappy' crew is clear.
The Scandinavian countries rank high, probably the highest, when it comes to gender equality. They also rank high when it comes to having a gender segregated labour market. You might find more women in STEM in a third world country that has less gender equality than in a Scandinavian country. One possible explanation is that these countries are affluent while countries with more gender inequality tend to be less affluent. If you don't have a social safety net, and maybe even have to rely on finding a husband to provide for you and all the uncertainty that goes with that, if you don't find a job for yourself that is lucrative enough, STEM might be a good choice. But if you live in a country with both a lot of gender equality and income equality? Then money doesn't factor into it that much anymore...
I tried to Google for the articles I've read about this but I didn't manage to find them.
There are also many apprenticeships for women in construction/plumbing, because they are 1) good-paying jobs (at least in housing booms) and 2) ones where historically women have been denied apprenticeships/union membership.
Oddly enough, there is also gender imbalance in the fashion industry, but not the way you're thinking of it. Sure, women models make WAY more money than male models, but more top designers are men: (http://www.universityobserver.ie/2012/02/06/gender-imbalance...)
Maybe you should do a little googling before you sound off about the lack of hand-wringing? Maybe it's just you who don't care.
An assertion that female behaviour or aptitude differs from male behaviour or aptitude in a way that casts women in a positive light is valid.[1]
An assertion that female behaviour or aptitude differs from male behaviour or aptitude in a way that casts women in a negative or possibly negative light is evidence of sexism and something that must be fixed.[2]
Usually when people are making the argument that "men and women think differently", it is an excuse for why the status quo should remain so. Yes, we all know that men and women have different brains and may not be interested in programming in the same percentages.
That doesn't mean that programmer culture can't often be hostile to women, and doesn't deserve scrutiny. But that also doesn't mean that pg and YC need to be crucified for not immediately ridding the world of all "Cowboy Developer" wanted ads.
I think Paul nails it. And I think there are a lot of really misguided social engineers in these comments.
Treat people well and fairly, all along and throughout life, and let nature take it's course. Are things imbalanced right now? Absolutely. Is it because of unfairness in the past? Absolutely.
Can we speed things to being better by being unfair the other way now? Absolutely not. We create a Frankenstein of a 'better culture'.
I believe it is analogous (pun) to running pure sound through one equalizer that distorts it and then through another that tries to bring the sound back to true by using your ear. It sounds plausible, but it can never work.
> Can we speed things to being better by being unfair the other way now? Absolutely not.
Do you have any evidence for this? Because prima facie, reaching out to women does get some of them into tech fields, and we know that young women who grow up around women in tech are more likely to become such themselves. Are you claiming that we can't actually influence the number of women in tech by discriminating in their favor? Or are you just asserting that we shouldn't?
> I believe it is analogous (pun) to running pure sound through one equalizer that distorts it and then through another that tries to bring the sound back to true by using your ear. It sounds plausible, but it can never work.
OK, interesting metaphor, but you could say with equal gravity that it's like veering to the right and then correcting by turning left. The metaphors are a way to describe the truth we know, not derive it out of nothing.
I think the argument is that a society which is constantly discriminating against people one way or the other for "arbitrary reason X of historical importance to group Y" isn't the right way for society to work.
You might be able to get the ratio of men-to-women for a particular career field more even, or get more blacks through college, or whatever goal you feel is important accomplished. That's absolutely true and I won't argue with that.
But do the ends justify the means? Some people might argue no while I believe you would argue yes. The person you replied to was arguing no, at least as I read it.
More that I don't think you can achieve the harmony you seek. The reason I prefer my metaphor to the left/right driving one is that I intended to allude to the complex nuance involved. Like the sound metaphor: the more you meddle, the more you screw things up.
If I really believed the 'ends' that are sought after could be achieved -- hey sure, whatever means you want, knock yourself out. I guess it's a question of a broader view of 'ends'. I assume the goal is 'harmony and fairness', but if the goal is "X/Y ratio of men to women in A,B,C fields", then sure, I guess you can achieve that.
Are you prepared to argue that because my mother was discriminated against in the past based on her sex it's now moral to discriminate against me (male) because of my sex?
Either I quash your argument by showing you how my grandfather was sexual discriminated against (which would by the logic that made such an argument above make discriminating against my mother justified) or we have to say that it's OK to discriminate against my daughter because of her sex.
That may be a false dichotomy (please add alternatives) but I'm nonetheless not prepared to follow the route that leads to continued discrimination based on irrelevant characteristics.
The justification for affirmative action is not past discrimination itself, but its continued effects. Many groups have been discriminated against but recovered; there is no affirmative action for the Irish. For those that haven't, we use affirmative action. Thus, we wouldn't discriminate against your daughter entering tech unless men had in the meantime become ostracized as unmanly for pursuing tech, which is unlikely.
I recently published a statistical analysis of the proportion of female founders who receive funding from VC firms and accelerators such as Y Combinator to male founders: https://medium.com/p/2613f58e5082
I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad.
He comes closest to saying anything of substance with the paragraph: So how would you cause there to be more female programmers? The meta-answer is: not just one thing. People's abilities and interests by the time they're old enough to start a startup are the product of their whole lives—indeed, of their ancestors' lives as well...you probably have to go back to the point where it starts to become significant.
The fact this post mentions no group currently working towards what pg says should be done really bothers me. It appears he has done no research. Groups exist which work towards that very goal of getting girls interested in programming so they become women involved in tech.
How would you get more girls interested in programming? I don't know much about girls specifically, but I have some ideas about how to get kids interested in programming.
This came off similar to how Stephen Colbert jokes that he "doesn't see color". If you cannot be bothered to understand the very group you hope to address why even bother? How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)?
I don't think he should have written this post. He put lots of effort into writing, but seems to have put very little thought or research into the actual subject. I guess he felt defensive about his character being sullied but I think he sufficiently addressed that issue already.
The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"
Actually by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black." And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.
And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch. The reason I didn't go into detail about it is that I'm not an expert on the topic. I wasn't going to write about something other people understand so much better than me just to send the message that I care.
> And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.
That... is not an argument? There's ample evidence to show that members of underrepresented groups within individual companies/industries experience unconscious biases in hiring/ranking/etc, even towards groups of which they're a member.
I'm not judging particular people (I have no opinion on the individuals mentioned), and I honestly haven't kept up with this whole narrative so there are certainly no statistics I can cite. I'm saying that stating that someone belongs to a class is entirely insufficient to demonstrate the assertion that they are not biased against that class, particularly in a context where that class is systemically biased against.
The personal opinions of individuals are pretty irrelevant when discussing systemic issues, so I don't see that as very productive to focus on. In either direction, actually; personally well-meaning people can nonetheless be complicit in systemic racism/sexism/etc., and personally bigoted people might not be.
I do think YC is probably more open to women as founders than the VC norm, but it's the overall statistics that convince me of that more than some attempt to discern what its principals personally think about things. That was the most interesting part of this post as well, talking about what YC is actually doing.
Systems are made of (or by) people. Systematic biases are not curses handed down by gods, they originate from somewhere within organizations.
It is therefore relevant to consider the individuals involved when we are talking about systematic biases of the system which is composed of them. You cannot talk about the biases of YC without talking about the biases of the people who comprise YC. It would be like talking about the structural integrity of a building while trying to never consider the physical properties of the building materials.
(Of course, even if we strike off this entire thread of conversation as irrelevant, that does not make the comment I was responding to any less problematic.)
Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.
None of this is relevant to the discussion at hand.
The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]. None of the men overlap in expertise with the positions held by the women. None of the women overlap in expertise with the positions held by the men. The "model" person the firm likes to do business with is a caricature of only <one> of the sub-sets of staff. Because there is no gender overlap in these two sets, this is "strucurally" sexist...at least arguably...regardless of which sub-set does the selection [2,3].
[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant.
[1] The rest of the staff are all Hackers or Designers.
[2] The allocation actually doesn't matter. Only the stratification.
[3] Note, however that the "model" personality type is de-facto gendered [male]. This is not a logical necessity. It could be the case that the roles are reversed--either all of the hackers were/are women, etc...or the target Founders could be Hr/ops-legal-accounting...etc.
The "appeal to statistics" is just re-proposed racist talking points. You would not accept it in a discussion involving race, and you should not accept it in a discussion involving sex or gender.
> Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.
1) See above.
2) I am not baiting anybody into disparaging these women, and do not see how my comments could honestly be misconstrued as such. I don't want @zorpner to insult these women, I want zorpner to realize that unless they have specific information about these specific women, then there is no justification for assuming such disparaging things about these women.
3) I have made absolutely no threats, veiled or otherwise. Where the hell are you getting this from?
> "The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]...""[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant..."
This has been addressed in this discussion by one of the women in question, I am genuinely stunned that you are repeating it.
I also still can't reconcile how a month and a half ago pg apparently believed that Silicon Valley is a near perfect meritocracy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795606) and now he's been working hard(er than average) to address systemic inequalities.
For the record though; I thoroughly applaud his efforts on improving gender equality and I very much appreciate the first baby steps he's taking here on behalf of the industry. I really hope though that one day he'll be able to look back on this essay and realise this was really only just the start of it.
> Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely.
He's saying that a useful definition of meritocracy does not mean that everyone is only judged by his abilities. He's saying explicitly that such a thing does not exist. Further:
> And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good.
I don't know how you jump from "pretty good" to "near perfect meritocracy".
This was on an article about one of Silicon Valley's particular problems with diversity being that it thought it was more meritocratic than it actually was.
Given that context pg then goes on to use math as a rhetoric device to illustrate an inherently perfect meritocracy and then states SV is nearly as good; hence 'near perfect'.
In general, meritocracy's tend to have market inefficiencies. It's one of their traits that allows those who should rise based on merit but may be held back by other factors to thrive: by exploiting those inefficiencies. Female founders may currently be the market inefficiency that will be corrected next, the same way young founders were when YC was founded. It's not a perfect analogy, but the Rays and A's have been able to be some of the most successful franchises in baseball simply by targeting those inefficiencies. Hopefully something similar happens in the founder world soon.
Also, a bit unrelated but since Billy Beane became GM, the A's have never won less that 74 games. It seems like exploiting market inefficiencies is extraordinarily effective at minimizing downside risk.
Everyone is sexist to some degree, even women, even me. We all have unconscious biases because that's the way the human brain works. We do pattern matching. And we currently live in an environment where women are _usually_ not amazing programmers and startup CEOS. Admitting that would add a lot more strength to PG's piece.
For more info and facts on unconscious bias and women in tech:
He's not talking about evidence as much as a lack of acknowledgement of internalized oppression: the fact that there are plenty women who believe their rightful place is indeed in the kitchen, plenty of gay men who think gay love is indeed disgusting, etc. etc.
If any evidence would be relevant here it would be something like results of implicit association tests on the topic. I for one would be very interested in the (effects of the) results.
As long as the ratio isn't much worse than 3:1 (men or women are at least 25% of the workforce) either way I'd argue that it's a pretty balanced work environment all things considered. Shooting for 50/50 equality would potentially make more inequality problems than it solves, just for a different subset of the population.
In other words in nursing if you paid men 2x what women make you'd sort that shit out it quite a hurry and get a bunch of dudes helping take care of people. I'm not sure you could find anyone who would agree that it's an equitable or desirable way to achieve the "right" outcome, though.
Equality is definitely a goal, I think we should have more male nurses, but that's not really a priority when men are over represented in most of the higher paid fields (doctors, lawyers, CEOs .etc). Let's work on helping the more disadvantaged party first, yeah?
I'm an engineer. I was in grad school at the same time as some of my friends were in law school. I know lawyers who make $40k per year or even less if they're public defenders. Prosecutors don't make a lot more than public defenders.
Then I moved to Houston for work. There are plenty of jobs out here that pay substantially more than what your average doctor or lawyer makes. I know of welders who are making $80/hr, quadruple what some lawyers I know earn. I know of machinists who own their house and cars and boats and whatever.
I think you're confusing prestige with pay which is totally understandable. But with the education bubble having happened and the resultant unbalance in the workforce prestige != paid well, nor does "uneducated" mean bad pay.
The really great part of all this is that welding or machining or some of these skilled trades are actually much easier than startup founding. It's nearly impossible to get filthy rich that way (not that a startup is any guarantee but there are more billionaire startup founders than billionaire welders) but it's much, much harder to go broke. In other words the income distribution has a shorter right tail but also a shorter left one.
Trying to get more women as startup founders as a way to reduce income inequality seems like a fools errand due to the speculative nature of startups. I'm not saying that there should be fewer women founders, not at all. But to suggest that we can have more equality in the world by balancing out startups totally misses the bigger picture.
It's like pushing for more women princes in Saudi Arabia. Yeah men dominate that right now, but even if you made it 100% equal you're still talking about a trivial percentage of the world's population.
I don't know if we drove some men into nursing from high paying engineering jobs then there would be more space for women in engineering. Salaries would raise for everyone still in engineering so it would become more attractive to women.
First, it's not only a question of paychecks but about how it affects society as a whole. That you want more women leaders because you want the decision makers to have less biases and blindsights, on average. Perhaps you also want more men elementary school teachers because you want more male role models for children, and perhaps less chances of biased behaviour towards schoolchildren based on gender. Not just because you want the men who are already wanting to be elementary teachers to have an easier time. These two seem more important on the societal level than bringing more women in to tech and more men into nursing.
Secondly, this looks similar to the argument that 'men are over represented in positions of power, so men are better off as a whole'. This assumes that men are a collective soup that automatically benefits from being collectively better off. Perhaps by assuming that more men in positions of wealth and power means that all men have an easier time getting into it, ignoring that men come from different backgrounds and social classes and may not ever get a shot at something like that, anyway. I doubt that many have the conundrum of becoming a big-shot CEO, or taking on a high-risk fisherman job because he needs the risk premium (yes, you've probably already read about men being over-represented in some jobs that aren't really featured items on 'career day'. They come up often enough in these threads). Another assumption behind this is that men necessarily benefit from other men being in power. That's a problematic assumption. Why would all men necessarily benefit from that? In fact, assume that a man in power things of women as inferior, and only think that men are a threat to his position of power; then he has a motivation to keep men down, or at least the swaths of men that aren't immediately useful to him.
Sure - my wording was poor. I mean to say that the women wield enough collective and individual power to ensure that they are not an ignored minority. It's not yet close enough to 50/50, the female voices are clearly central to the group.
Let's remember that this is a journey, that YC seems to be at the forefront of it and we should encourage the progress to date while maintaining high expectations for the future.
Meanwhile there are genuine benefits to being at the forefront of diversity, as it widens the pool of awesome founders.
Moreover other players tend to take note of what YC does, and as the evidence builds this will help change the industry.
This reminds me of the industry groups going after Apple for their manufacturing practises, which turn out to be amongst the best in the game. While I felt that Apple was unjustly accused, they did open their books about their sustainable practices, and that's helped improve industry expectations.
I've been considering what interested my 11-year-old {female} self about programming. The question keeps popping up, and the only answers I've seen are so vague that I feel something of a moral obligation to offer my own specific insight.
To put my experience in context, I didn't know a single soul interested in programming IRL. So the only way I could have come to it is from a deeply genuine place.
In my adult life, I've heard many men talk about their excitement for coding/programming at a young age, and it is almost always about the love of simply building things. Because building is fun.
Unfortunately, my experience could not have been more different. Reflecting on my thought processes at that age, I remember it being entirely about 2 things:
1. Expression. Nothing could have sounded more dull than building aimlessly-- I wanted to DESIGN. (My definition of this being "carrying out a specific communicative purpose through look and function.") I wanted to make a website that demonstrated my tastes and values to my friends. (Which is likely why I went straight to websites and not desktop software.)
2. Social dynamics. Similar but different to the aforementioned point, I wanted to actually affect other people with what I was making. As a young girl, that typically meant impressing potential friends and boyfriends. I had a poetry site at one point. I made sites for a fake band my girl friends and I talked about forming. I had tons of blogs. I really should have segued into games at that time, as that would have fallen in the same category, but sadly I did not.
That said-- while I know every human being is different, I was what you'd consider a "girly girl." So I believe the difference between myself and a young boy was quite pronounced in a stereotypically feminine direction-- which is where one should be investigating a subject like this, in my opinion.
As written, the first paragraph lays out the situation of you being personally accused of sexism and the second paragraph starts with defending yourself against those accusations. I do not think you set the proper context to use the fact YC has a woman cofounder to defend yourself against accusations of sexism.
The 'Some of my best friends are black...' cliche is only actually a problem if it is used to justify a racist statement. Otherwise it's a perfectly valid indicator of having non-racist character.
While it's great that you took the time to write that essay, from what I have learned over the years about human nature (not from what I've read but from a large amount of real life experience) you can't use logic and intelligence to change the opinion of those who feel particularly strong about something that is emotional to them (think middle east conflicts). [1] Because emotion and rationality are two different things.
[1] The most important thing about any relationship is that the other party will at least listen and consider what you have to say. People online (and spouses or girlfriends) who cut off without even considering are persona non grata to me. I wouldn't marry or date them and I wouldn't invest in them.
> And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch.
Can you share more about what Hacker School is doing to get girls and women interested in programming? "Hacker School is currently only for people who already know how to code," according to their FAQ, which seems counterintuitive to getting people (women or otherwise) interested in programming.
You're correct that Hacker School is not for people who have never programmed before. We are not directly working on helping people write their first line of code.
But we do help people, including many women, take the next step (e.g., we've had women come to HS as little as eight weeks after they wrote their first lines of code). Learning to code is a continuum (and something that takes place over many years), not a binary thing, and we help at just about every point except the first month or two.
We've also put a lot of work into fixing the leaky-pipeline problem. For instance, a female Stanford CS grad told us that Hacker School is why she decided to take a job as a programmer (she was planning not to go into programming after her experience at Stanford).
A few ways we've worked to support female programmers:
- We've built an environment that we think is more human-friendly (and therefore also more female-friendly) by having explicit social rules and norms that work to fight impostor syndrome and other fears and insecurities that get in the way of people's education (see: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment).
- We've awarded over $500,000 in grants for female programmers, which were generously funded by numerous companies including GitHub, Etsy, Dropbox, Palantir, Jane Street, Tapad, Tumblr, and others (note that Hacker School is 100% free for all students, so these grants are purely used for living expenses).
- As a result, Hacker School has been 30-45% women for our past five batches.
- We've helped numerous women (and men) move from being very beginner programmers working in other fields to being employed as programmers at excellent companies.
- We've helped experienced female programmers become even more awesome and progress personally and professionally.
Towards this last point, we're working on visibility and gender equality on the higher end. Here's a testimonial from a recent alumna who was already a pretty accomplished programmer when she came to Hacker School:
"Hacker School gave me a lot more confidence in my programming abilities. I wouldn't have even considered proposing a conference talk before Hacker School, but now I've spoken at LambdaJam, Strange Loop, and Strata this year! I had previously believed that contributing to open source was just too hard for me to do (big unfamiliar code base with no help!), but now I don't hesitate to make pull requests when I find minor bugs in software I use. The most important thing to me about attending is that you become part of this network of supportive, technical people. They connect you to interesting opportunities, help you when you ask, and support you when you're stretching to do something new."
I think increasing the number of female role models for women who don't yet code indirectly helps bring more women into the field. And additionally, many of our alumnae volunteer and mentor new female programmers outside of Hacker School, and many of them would not have been in a position to do so without the confidence, experience, and skills they acquired at Hacker School.
(Sorry if my response is all over the place; I'm supposed to be in a meeting now so this is a little rushed.)
After reading this from pg today and your comment here, I'll again suggest considering a change to your logo to a young female hacker or a male/female hacker pair and changing your name to NY Hacker Apprenticeship. Role model, balance, etc, etc. Possibly we can then have many Apprenticeship programs across the US, a useful but long gone part of our economy as people. The needs of role models are fulfilled, and the equality debate can be put in its place by making the political stance clear at the front door.
In my opinion this is antithetical to Hacker School. One of the things I most appreciated about Hacker School is that while it manages to get 30-45% women in recent batches which is quite refreshing, it does so without distracting students from their actual goals which are not to work on social problems of sexism and racism, but to focus on becoming a dramatically better programmer while making friends and connections with other students who are doing the same.
In fact, one of the rules in Hacker School is that you are not even allowed to discuss sexist, rascist, etc things at all. From the manual [1]:
"Why don't we want public discussions of sexism, racism, etc. at Hacker School? For many people, especially those who may have spent time in unpleasant environments, these conversations can be very distracting. At Hacker School, we want to remove as many distractions as possible so everyone can focus on programming. There are many places in the world to discuss and debate these issues, but there are precious few where people can avoid them. We want Hacker School to be one of those places."
I'd say it's more like "I'm not racist! I adopted a black kid."
The second paragraph was mostly fine but it did come off a little... unhumble. And humility is usually the tone you want when talking about how your company is doing good for X cause, but it could be doing more.
Odds are good if you're married to someone of a different race, your in-laws are of a different race, and you know your kids are going to be mixed, that you're probably not racist.
That does not work due to fundamental differences in how racism and sexism typically manifest.
Up until about the 70s or so, racists campaigned heavily against interracial marriage. Most racists likely still hold these views, though after 1967 they are no longer relevant so you don't hear about it very often.
I do not recall any sexist groups ever campaigning against heterosexual marriage. Now, sexists have campaigned against laws that would equalize the rights that people in marriages have.
Therefore "I am not sexist because I believe that my wife and I are equals and should be treated as equals by the law" would be an analogous statement.
I may be the public face of the company, but it's impossible to imagine YC doing something that Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn were against.
So effectively they have veto powers. This sounds a bit like "my wife runs the house, I'm only allowed to do what she lets me do." I know that's not what you mean, but you come off sounding too defensive in most of the essay. Stop playing defense with words, let your actions (or YC results speak for themselves). More importantly, take a step back to truly understand the problem and perhaps study some solutions that have worked in other industries.
Why do I think you should do some more studying?
Because you still make comments like this: "You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like. There’s a bunch of ways you can do it. You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon." You made a similar comment two years ago [1].
Because of statements in your essay like the ones highlighted by parfe in the parent post and by me in this post. These statements don't mean anything, they carry no weight, and I'm surprised you would think they do. All your best friends could be Martians and you could be actively trying to destroy every Martian on Mars, except your friends of course. One does not preclude the other.
> And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.
While I don't agree (really, I know virtually nothing about those women and haven't met them), I think you would find that many of your critics from the original controversy do think they are sexist and would say it to their faces.
It's not pg's job to equalize the gender ratio in programming, nor is it his job to get girls interested in it. Saying he thinks you need to reach girls young does not obligate him to go research what organizations are out there doing just that.
He meant the post to be a statement of his position, not a rallying cry to fix a societal problem. You seem to have wanted the latter, not the former. That's fine, but it's not a failing on his part that he didn't write the post you wanted him to write.
I tend to agree. It certainly appears people are assuming just because pg wrote his thoughts on women in programming that he must somehow be held responsible until all problems - real or perceived - are alleviated in this domain. Don't blame the messenger.
I think you're reaching. Paul isn't talking about whether or not he is sexist, he's talking about whether YC is sexist. He's not saying HE has women FRIENDS he's saying YC is actually RUN in a large degree by women, one woman in particular - the co-founder of Y-Combinator Jessica Livingston. Not to minimize the other women involved, but it's just particularly relevant that the founder of YC could as much be said to be Jessica as Paul.
It's a clunky transition, but the transition goes from "I (PG) have a female co-founder" to "here is the makeup of YC as it applies to women" in the second sentence of the second paragraph.
He was accused both of being a sexist himself and of YC being sexist. I would say the "he is sexist" (for the sake of argument, let's assume that "sexist" means "particularly sexist" because it's hard to argue ANYONE is entirely innocent of being sexist) were pretty tenuous, but his attitude toward whether or not YC was biased toward men were pretty off.
This does a great job of explaining the latter, which I feel were a legitimate problem.
I'll give you this: "It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself" is a weak sentence. Yes, you having a female co-founder is strong evidence, but if you do sexist things then it doesn't make it any harder for me to argue you're sexist. The "it's hard to argue" part doesn't belong there, it belongs after he's not only explained who he chose to start YC with, but how YC and he have acted in relation to others in the industry, which stacks up extremely favorably.
PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true."
John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."
I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.
I think you misinterpreted that. PG said funding decisions aren't made based on similarity to the people making the funding decision.
John Doerr is saying that sometimes one of factors in making a funding decision is similarity to other massively successful founders, not the people making the funding decisions. PG has been pretty open about the fact that pattern matching to other successful founders is very common.
The other massively successful founders are also incredibly similar to the people making the funding decisions, though - in fact, quite often they are the people making those decisions.
Do you really think that interpretation would improve PG's position? That pattern matching based on gender and race is "very common"? Are you implying that is ok so long as it's the race/gender of other founders?
Thankfully PG does not actually take as extreme a position as Doerr. He merely downplays the existence of it in the VC community.
How about addressing the fact that sexism related stories get flagged off his very own website with surprising speed (either manually, or by his own automated algorithms)?
Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? The reason sexism-related stories fall down is not because of lack of interest or due to prejudice, but quite the contrary: too much interest, causing an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, and a subsequent sinking.
> Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice?
Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.
I guess you could. Although I'm not sure how exactly an algorithm can be inherently prejudiced, that sounds rather postmodern. You can make one that is inefficient or apply one that isn't suitable to a given data set, and end up with skewed results. But an algorithm promoting prejudice by itself? I don't know. I always thought mathematics was neutral.
Either way, it absolutely does not apply here. HN's algorithms sinking sexism-related stories is a side effect. The fact of the matter is it will sink any story that has an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, whether it's about sexism, Haskell or the Church of the SubGenius.
This is the same logic as saying that encryption is evil because it can be used by terrorists to hide information. Encryption always does the same thing, it's fundamentally neutral, regardless of what's being encrypted. The same way HN's algorithms are fundamentally neutral, regardless of what happens to trigger their procedures.
I think you're overcomplicating it by insisting on isolating the algorithm from its owner and environment. No-one else was doing that.
If you don't want to apply a label to the algorithm, how about "Foo Bar's decision to run Algorithm X against Dataset Y resulted in consequences that predictably increased prejudice, so it would have been better if he hadn't done it"?
If that's okay, note that this is pretty close to what parfe said -- he's clearly upset at the fact that pg chooses to run an algorithm on Hacker News, rather than at the algorithm itself.
I won't comment on the efficiency of the algorithm (although it is questionable).
Let's assume that it's a bad design decision. Your logic behind it being prejudiced is still faulty, as it ascribes a fallacious cause.
The algorithm merely shuffles page rankings based on two criteria: upvotes and comments, both of which are user-supplied. The algorithm does not support prejudice, it simply behaves in the fashion it is programmed to. You're completely ignoring all of the mundane stories that go down due to the same factors, and cherry picking the ones about sexism.
Along a slightly different track than you were originally running on, there are a number of ways in which an algorithm could promote prejudice. Consider a nice little machine-learning algorithm that analyzes characteristics of successful employees at a given company in order to select new hires that share those characteristics. If, for instance, the company had a couple rabid barbecue-lovers who made sure that all lunches primarily featured delicious pork ribs, and they made fun of the vegetarians, Jews, Muslims, and people with braces who couldn't chew the meat off the ribs, and so being a rabid lover of pork was strongly correlated with success in the company and being a non-pork-lover or hampered by braces was strongly correlated with simply leaving the company at an early stage to get a job with the rival across the street that had vegetarian and shrimp satay lunch options... well, it's just the algorithm at work, my friend! Math is truth! As a mathematician, I guarantee it.
Once again, this isn't the algorithm being inherently prejudiced. It does what it's meant to do, but it's being applied to a prejudiced and unreliable data set.
Don't blame the algorithm for the fallacies of the people using it. The only fault in your scenario is the PEBCAK.
Aren't upvotes a measure of interest? I would argue that the lack of upvotes on sexism-related posts indicates a lack of interest in discussing these issues on the part of the general population of HN.
What you get is a small group of vocal people eager to discuss the topic while everyone else simply avoids the post. This is similar behavior to what is seen in a flamewar, but could we agree that there might possibly be a better way to rank posts that is able to differentiate between an important discussion that not many people want to have, versus a petty internet argument?
I don't have a strong opinion on (the lack of) women in tech. I don't feel strongly either way, so I'd be more moved to change the status quo if I could be presented with a good case that women are being held back.
Sorry for being insensitive, but complaints about presentation slides mentioning porn stars (unnecessarily edgy IMO, but not misogynistic unless you stretch the definitions of freedom/dignity/exploitation to mean that all porn is exploitative), late night invitations to drink coffee and dongle/forking jokes haven't made me more sympathetic to having a debate about sexism in tech; if anything, they've made me avoid reading or commenting on anything related to sexism. I don't want to keep women who feel wronged by some event from retelling the experience, but most of the stories about sexism in tech I've read have made me form a pattern of avoiding sexism stories altogether.
I fear I might be missing insightful essays from women about their experiences (good, bad, and anything in between) in tech.
I don't mean any of the following as flame-war type criticism, so I hope you are able to find a way not to take it that way.
Stories by women* about their perceptions of the hostile sexualization of many work and conference environments are themselves part of the case being made that women are being held back.
(You would perhaps be shocked how many men share many of the same concerns, and not just out of solidarity with women.)
Ambivalence of the sort you claim and the concomitant disinclination to engage and try to understand things like the late night coffee invitation incident is part of what is holding women back.
I'm not* saying that you're actively choosing to make the world a worse place. Further, as beings of finite attention and lifespan it's quite true that we can't possibly pay attention to everything.
In your writing I do hear a bit of something that makes me thing you might want to understand what the big deal is, but it just hasn't "clicked" for you. Perhaps this is because you find the existing discussions off-putting, or perhaps because the things you read about are about situations that wouldn't be a big deal for you personally.
If you're interested in understanding more, I'm wiling to continue the conversation here or elsewhere.
Even if not, I'd encourage you to keep dipping your toes in the conversation from time to time.
> Aren't upvotes a measure of interest? I would argue that the lack of upvotes on sexism-related posts indicates a lack of interest in discussing these issues on the part of the general population of HN.
The sexism-related posts have a large number of upvotes, yet they are penalized anyway by the controversial algorithm under discussion.
That was my understanding as well. Every single "sexism in tech" thread on HN devolves into some combination of the following:
* The Tumblr SJW PC brigade flinging poo
* The people who wish the first group would FOAD, flinging poo
* The people who have something interesting to say lamenting the existence of
the first two groups, who wish they'd both FOAD.
* The people who make meta posts about the whole thing.
I.e. boring, predictable, bile-filled, and more suited to certain Reddit and Tumblr communities who shall remain nameless. Every time this comes up, especially this high up on the page, my reaction is "Oh god, not this shit again..."
I would have flagged it myself, but somehow I don't think flagging a PG article is conducive to my further ability to use the feature...
The algorithm was written with an intent and it can be changed.
Its been very clear for a long time that almost all discussion about women in tech is as good as censored on hackers, which is a shame because its giving a lot of well intentions but naive people the impression that there is no problem.
Whereas the latest NSA disclosure, facebook privacy setting etc etc leads to a rational though provoking discussion that stays on topic and within its own thread?
If they get more comments than upvotes in a window of time (IANpg but last I heard, it was the first 30-45 minutes after submission), they'll suffer the same fate as submissions about sexism in tech.
Unfortunately it seems that no one can actually agree on the exact nature of what the problem is, so most discussions end up being just pointless shouting matches.
'The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"'
Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends?
Or is it up to the mob to define what "friendship" is?
> Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends?
No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X. Finding specific people of group X meet your bar from friendship, no matter how high that bar is, does not mean that you don't have a bias -- even potentially a very strong bias -- against people of group X, it just means that if you do some people have other characteristics that have weighed sufficiently in your favor to outweigh any general bias you have.
> Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then.
I think the problem has nothing to do with the word "friend" but the word "prejudice".
> I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.
So what? The fact that people in group X can earn any given position with you doesn't mean that they don't, just by the fact of being members of group X, start out in a worse position in your view. So, that people in group X may have earned the designation "friend" from you does not in any way prove that you don't have a prejudice, even potentially a very strong one, against group X.
Basically, the difference is between, on one hand, having friends who are black and that being an orthogonal characteristic unconsidered in the friendship; and, on the other hand, having friends despite their being black.
Surely however that sort of defense against specific manifestations of bigotry can be evidence (assuming proof is practically unobtainable). For instance, if I were accused of hiring practices that are biased against black people, pointing out that I have only hired black people would be evidence (if not proof, in this hypothetical and silly black and white example...) that the accusations are false.
> For instance, if I were accused of hiring practices that are biased against black people, pointing out that I have only hired black people would be evidence [...] that the accusations are false.
Without information about the external constraints on your hiring, I'm not sure it would really constitute meaningful evidence (e.g., if the entire available employment pool was black, hiring only blacks wouldn't be evidence that the process you had implemented wasn't biased, just that the bias has no opportunity to manifest.)
(This is the kind of thing that would work mostly to burden shift, but then the burden would already, IMO, be on the person making the accusation from the start.)
OTOH, it would be very challenging (though not impossible) for anyone to have evidence that your system was biased against blacks with a hired-all-blacks outcome.
I suppose my hangup here is what I perceive to be the difference between evidence and proof.
It is entirely possible to find evidence of things that turn out to be false. For example, you could take the seemingly chaotic retrograde motion of the planets in the night sky as evidence of the existence of gods with self-determination. We know know that isn't true, we have better explanations for that phenomenon (notably the notion of heliocentricity).
The planets moving differently from the stars was never proof that there were gods up there, but evidence? Sure, it was evidence. Evidence can be of various qualities, evidence of thins has to be judged critically, and weighed against the alternatives.
Evidence for or against bias on a particular axis is something that tends to indicate the presence or absence of differential treatment basis on that axis.
Facts which do not provide a basis for comparisons of how different values on that axis are treated are not much evidence for or against bias, this include facts about outcome (e.g., all the people I hired are black, etc.) without additional information from which the expected outcome in the absence of bias can be inferred.
> How then, might one prove that one is not bigoted?
Generally, in practice, one can't prove the presence or absence of prejudice on a particular axis. I mean, to prove its absence, you'd have to prove that your subjective assessment of people is not affected by their status on the axis in question.
EDIT: If one is accused of bias based on a particular example of supposedly unequal treatment based on the status in question, of course, one can always provide the actual basis for the specific treatment at issue, or simply rebut the factual characterization of the treatment.
Men learn at a certain point that we are not, in fact, women. We have different values, priorities, and hormones than women, and given the same scenarios we're likely to come to a different conclusion than a woman.
So why would Paul try and talk from his zero years of experience as a woman and explain how to get more women in coding? Why not simply state "Please stop calling me a sexist, I don't like it, here's some facts about sexism at YC and in the industry in general."
I dunno. Allow me to share some thoughts as a young woman.
I had no problem getting into computer programming when I was young.
I had no problem getting accepted to a high-ranking university and graduating mathematics.
I had no problem completing a master's in computer science.
I had no problem finding resources for programming because they're already there, written by men and women. They just don't have "women's" or "for girls" written on the cover in large, brightly-coloured, friendly script.
So I don't really see what the fuss is about. Couldn't the low number of female computer scientists be due to the fact that not many girls are actually interested in such things? Maybe women can think and perceive what is around them for themselves, and don't need charities to show them the "hidden option" of programming?
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Addendum: before somebody jumps to the conclusion that I'm from a wealthy background, I'm working class, a humble chain-smoking serf. I'm from a bloody poor family and my CV has more bartending credentials than tech. I've never even dreamed of owning a current-gen Macbook, in stark contrast to every student I see these days, all seeming to have thousands of pounds worth of hardware without working a day in their lives. I've been using the same Linux machine for half a decade.
Libraries are free. If you're interested in doing something and you have the aptitude, you don't need to be spoon-fed by liberals.
Finally, thank you! I totally agree with you. I find that the current crusade against "prejudice" (against different social groups) in programming is largely caused by the fact that programmers have gone from "uncool nerds" to "cool rich kids" during the financial crisis. As a consequence of that, many people wish they were programmers, and they encourage kids to be programmers "because it will earn them a good wage" and not "because it's what you're interested about". That is the same reason many people become lawyers and doctors - not because they genuinely want that, but because of the prestige and money one gets by being a doctor or a lawyer. However, personally I would rather be represented/operated by a lawyer/doctor who is in it because of genuine interest, not because of the money. The "real" hackers who have been programming since young age, since before it was cool, have demonstrated that they are really interested in technology, and not just because it's hip or it will make them rich.
> We have different values, priorities, and hormones than women, and given the same scenarios we're likely to come to a different conclusion than a woman.
We have different hormones, definitely. But different values and priorities? Different conclusions? I (a man) have very different values and priorities from quite a lot of men. Men often come to different conclusions than other men.
This is not a fundamental men vs women difference. People are different. Men and women are both people.
I can imagine that one reason "sexism related stories get flagged" is because they are rarely interesting, innovative or well though out.
Such articles mostly repeat feminist/misandric boiler-plate amounting to little more than defending female privilege (e.g. no draft, longer life, many more opportunities to avoid having to work, better medical care, earlier retirement, more lenient sentencing for equal crimes etc, more social services, etc). I think a common term for this is "privilege blindness". Why would a thinking person want to read this again and again?
> I find myself disappointed by this blog post. The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!" Then he follows up with statistics comparing YC to the general VC market. Fine, you do better than most. However, not the worst does not mean not bad.
Suppose that you walk up to someone who earns $100,000 a year and donates 60% to charity, and you see that although he rarely goes on vacations abroad and lives in a 500 square foot apartment he does have a relatively new car. You then say "how could you? If you had gotten a slightly crappier car you could have saved $3000 and sent that off to fight malaria in Africa and saved someone's life! Do you really value that tiny dose of comfort above a human life?"
It may be a valid moral point depending on your personal morality, but acting that way is absolutely useless if not counterproductive toward the general goal of getting more money donated to charity to fight malaria in Africa.
I can see you are trying to help the subject and advance the discussion forward. I wonder if it would be more productive to instead just criticize point by point pg's post (which I think was decent), instead write what you would suggest would be an alternative.
You pointed to What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/) and another one and mentioned how he has done no research. Alright, what about CWC? What is your research? Instead of just shutting down point after point in the original post, maybe explain why you think GWC or BGC is a better alternative.
> I don't think he should have written this post.
Then we would have seen comments complaining about "PG has has this incident in a while and hasn't followed up, that is so typical of such and such ...".
When someone crushes the industry average in hiring an under-represented group, you really have to ask yourself what more can they do?
Being specific - are you suggesting more outreach? Overpaying to take funding opportunities away from others? Lowering the bar? Offering more coaching to promising candidates?
Glad PG wrote this and equally glad this is the top comment so far. It appears PG hasn't yet learned that it will never be enough for some people. In anything he writes on this topic he'll leave out some group or state a point in a way that someone disagrees with. And then, all they'll do is attack attack attack.
> The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"
It bothers me unduly much that it has become a common meme that saying this amounts to saying "I am a racist!" That may be convenient pattern-matching, but if someone has friends that are black, that is definitely some evidence that they aren't racists.
I think this really comes down to pattern-matching and goalpost shifting. There are many definitions of racism, and conflating them serves the purposes of people on both sides of the argument, which makes it an anti-useful rather than merely useless term. When someone says "I'm not a racist, I have black friends" they are referring to the casual/common definition of racism, which is that they judge individuals as individuals and not based on their membership of a racial group. Under this definition, calling someone a racist is essentially saying that they have views that are sympathetic to the views of extremist groups like the KKK. Under this definition, saying, "I'm not racist, I have black friends" makes perfect sense, because it implies that, even if they have tiny biases against people based on race, they are at least not so strong as to preclude having close personal relationships with them.
Another definition of racism, used by people arguing against them, amounts to "everyone is racist in some ways, so it's basically always wrong to say you aren't a racist." (Obviously this is a caricature of another end of the spectrum, there are intermediate definitions) Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what. If this is the definition of racism you are using, there is literally no evidence you can provide other than to be black yourself to avoid claims of racism against black people. People who subscribe to this definition have had arguments with people who they believe to be self-evidently racist, yet who used "I have black friends," so many times, that it pattern-matches in their brain to "this person is a racist." This is an uncharitable view.
Having black friends or black family members is Bayesian evidence that someone isn't racist as it is defined in casual discourse, and I think it's time that people stop pretending it's the opposite. Similarly, having a female co-founder is valid evidence that you view females as having the capability of equal business acumen to men, no matter how much people dislike the way the argument pattern-matches.
Unfortunately, there is literally no way to be so careful with your language use to avoid this argument, because the issue has long, long since diverged from the norms of reasonable discourse. There will always be people on the side of "everyone is racist" who will just say, "He's just hiding his racist views by trying to use alternate terminology."
> Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what.
In some limited cases, even being a member of the group that you are accused of being biased against is not enough to save you from the accusations.
" "Within the logic of the concept, those who accuse others of being self-hating Jews may themselves be self-hating Jews."[14] Gilman says "the ubiquitousness of self-hatred cannot be denied. And it has shaped the self-awareness of those treated as different perhaps more than they themselves have been aware."[5]"
This comment makes me so angry that it is difficult to remain calm, but I will try. You have this wrong. All three of us are in charge of so much more than you suggest here. We all participate in investment decisions and advise the companies on many different matters-- including business strategy. Since we started YC, there has not been one important decision we've made that I have not been a part of.
I contemplated a response to the question from pshin45's friend, but decided it might be a fool's errand because the question itself suggested a deep misunderstanding of YC. I am hard pressed to imagine a more incorrect characterization of the role Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica play in YC than "one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations". I certainly understand why Jessica's initial reaction to the question would be anger.
I would estimate that, collectively, I have worked with Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica for upwards of 500 hours over the past 2 1/2 years. And I would estimate that 80-90% of that time has been on product development, business development, sales, customer acquisition, fundraising assistance ... I could go on.
Outside of our company, there is nobody who has been more involved with our "business strategy" than Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica. There is not one part of our business that they have not been critically and deeply involved with.
"That's good to know - I wasn't aware of that. I'm happy to hear this isn't the case, but I've heard this from YC founders many times which is why it was my perception."
Jessica is the reason Steve + I got into Y Combinator. It was her decision to give us a second chance after we were rejected (reddit would end up being one of the first breakout hits from YC).
I wouldn't have just told Charlie Rose "All Hail Jessica Livingston" if her role were just "founder relations" -- without going into the roles all the partners (male and female alike) play in YC, that simplification is way off.
... and lest anyone think this is limited just to (the extremely helpful and insightful) JL, we (a recent-batch YC company) have been repeatedly and substantially helped on important strategy matters by KN and CL. Reducing their roles to "taxes" and "legal" misses the point completely; they are more like "finance strategy" and "legal strategy". Both have advised us on important structural decisions we made early in our company's life.
Although I'm merely a messenger in "my" two comments above, there seem to be 2 important takeaways here:
(1) First off, it's great that several YC founders are so quick to come to the female YC partners' defense, which lends a lot of credence to PG and JL's claims about the large role of female partners at YC.
(2) We all know that even the greatest product can be held back by poor marketing. I don't personally know the YC founders my friend above referenced (via my username), but the fact that some~many YC founders would think that at all, shows that there's a lack of good marketing/branding around how active and influential women (i.e. JL/KN/CL) are at YC.
The (positive) reality clearly does not match the (negative) perceptions.
I don't know what the solution would be, and you could certainly argue that PG/JL/et al. shouldn't have to "market" or "brand" this aspect of YC at all, but clearly this a problem, especially in light of PG's latest essay, the Information/Valleywag incident, etc.
Just because your friend wasn't aware of their roles doesn't mean that his/her lack of awareness is someone else's fault and responsibility. Maybe s/he should research a little more next time before singling out and belittling female tech workers. Isn't the rallying cry of social justice something like "it's not our job to educate you?"
Sounds like you, your friend, and their YC founder friends were actually hurting women by spreading untrue rumors that underplayed the true importance of these women in YC.
And yet there is no sense of remorse or apology for that.
Where is the indignation now towards yourself and them? Or is that only reserved for people who are actually doing something in the world?
It's not my place to ask, but if I were Jessica I would probably appreciate an apology. She said you made her so angry that it was difficult to remain calm. If you make someone that angry in real life based on your own mistake, wouldn't you normally apologize for it?
But my greater point was that there is generally too much criticism and indignation that are substituting for listening and understanding. Put yourself in the place of PG and YC in having unjustified criticism like you posted directed at them. And maybe take that to heart before you throw stones.
"Yes, I absolutely am sorry and saddened to have made JL upset. Again, it's been my understanding that while the female partners are great and I'm sure sit in on important decisions, they are primarily YC's accountant and lawyer. If that's not their main role at YC, I and others are mistaken. For the record, I think JL is /great/ and YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like her."
I can confirm that you and others with this understanding are indeed mistaken.
Based on my extensive experience with all of them, I would shuffle your words around a bit and suggest a more accurate characterization is:
YC's female partners are great and make and participate in important decisions. Though it is not their main role at YC, two of them have chief responsibility for YC's own finance/accounting/legal needs.
In hiring Kirsty and Carolynn, YC did hire other women like Jessica, at least on the "great-ness" scale.
And I wholeheartedly agree that YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like all three of them. Just as it would do itself a lot of good to hire other men like pg, pb, Robert, Trevor, Kevin, Aaron, Geoff and Garry.
If you are genuinely taking requests, I'd personally ask you to ask your friend to query their YC contacts on these subjects:
1) whether they can actually describe in some detail what JL / KN / CL do at YC (hint: they're easily seen to be quite active, so one might wonder what's keeeping them so busy)
2) whether they ever bothered to arrange office hours with any of them to see whether they could be helpful (YC partners' schedules are oversubscribed so you can't expect them to come to you to offer help)
3) whether they ever drafted a contract or financing document during their early stages without consulting KN or CL (and if so, why they chose to make important decisions without the advice of experts who are strongly incentivized to help them free of charge)
4) whether their company survived long enough to need advice on financing, contracts, or founder issues such as a departing founder or bringing on a late-stage founder
I think that would help to clarify how justified the initial claims were.
"there has not been one important decision we've made that I have not been a part of."
Careful, you're not fitting the narrative these people want believe. But seriously, disappointed pg even wrote this. Just engaging with these people is losing.
The sad thing is that it's very likely that sjws will embark on some sort of crusade against her for not fitting into their worldview. Anyone who exists in a way counter to their ideology is marked an enemy to be destroyed in the most high school styled manner possible. Ironic, considering that they claim that their goal is to further the cause of women in tech, etc.
Y'know, for a company that deals with funding founders to do their work, founder relations sounds like a pretty important job to me. Someone has to keep an eye on where that money's going. Maybe that's just naïve on my part but it sounds like it should matter a whole lot to keeping the enterprise going.
"If negative stereotypes are present regarding a specific group, group members are likely to become anxious about their performance, which may hinder their ability to perform at their maximum level. For example, stereotype threat can lower the intellectual performance of African-Americans taking the SAT reasoning test used for college entrance in the United States, due to the stereotype that African-Americans are less intelligent than other groups. Importantly, the individual does not need to subscribe to the stereotype for it to be activated. Moreover, the specific mechanism through which anxiety (induced by the activation of the stereotype) decreases performance is by depleting working memory (especially the phonological aspects of the working memory system).
But do note that the same wikipedia page points out that several recent attempts to replicate the studies that claimed to measure stereotype threat have failed, putting the whole idea into question.
I'm not saying that out of some attempt to sweep away the general problem of improving diversity; it's just important to work on solutions that will actually make a difference.
There are also recent studies that confirm different manifestations of it, for example [1]. I tend to agree with Wikipedia on the publication bias aspect, but I don't think you can sweep away the impact of stereotypes at all. I also think working to change tech stereotyping (in general) as one of the things that will actually make a difference, so I guess I'm biased too.
It's interesting that neither this article or Paul's related December article ever address the most basic and seminal question about this in the first place: why is this a problem? Why is it a big deal if there are less female founders than male?
It seems like this whole discussion has been nothing but a bunch of posturing and vague half-solutions about an issue that I'm not sure even exists.
As far as I can tell, it's a big deal because a lot of people hold as a normative axiom that the proportional representation of people groups (genders, nationalities, ethnicities, etc.) in organizations (businesses, governments, YC classes, etc.) ought to match their proportions in the general population. I suspect this is either an axiom, or a close conclusion from a broader axiom like egalitarianism.
As an axiom, there's not really a way to argue that it is illogical. You can only attempt to persuade the person to change their axioms.
I think this axiom only applies to inclusion in desirable groups or roles. It's hard to imagine even the most egalitarian thinker working to improve the male:female ratio among death row inmates, for example.
I don't know. I suspect many would think that. The disproportionately large number of African Americans in prison and on death row is certainly widely considered (by myself included) to be a bad thing. Of course, for me personally, I don't want it to be resolved by adding more people of other ethnicities to the group.
The issue is fuzzed when you consider less extreme cases than "death row inmates". That is something of a special case since there are many people who think that nobody should be a death row inmate.
A more normal case might be "gender imbalance among garbage collectors" Nobody is going to argue that this imbalance should be corrected by reducing the number of garbage collectors, since they like their trash to be collected. Would they instead argue that the imbalance should be corrected by adding more female garbage collectors? Doubtful. In practice, they will just ignore that imbalance completely. It won't be discussed.
Vivek Wadhwa is doing a bunch of research into the data. I don't have his report at my fingertips but fundamentally, not investing in women is not a rational move. Here's the media headline version:
"Women-led private technology companies are more capital-efficient, achieve 35 percent higher return on investment, and, when venture-backed, bring in 12 percent higher revenue than male-owned tech companies."
Conclusion: Women earn over 50% of degrees but start fewer than 3% of companies. If we accept that women-led companies do well, as per the data -- and yes, there are certainly caveats -- then this gap clearly shows there is a problem, in terms of inefficient use of investment if nothing else.
Hypothetically, that could be completely accounted for by women being more realistic of their chances of success at starting a company. So those who wouldn't have succeeded never bothered in the first place, skewing those statistics.
In this instance, the outcome is still desirable. If isolating fairly across all variables (and there are several at play!) means that higher company performance is tightly correlated to having a diverse leadership team, it's a competitive benefit to take advantage of that correlation. I doubt we could ever truly prove causation in this instance.
Startups that succeed do so by creating something that people need. It's a net win for society. Therefore, if there are women who have what it takes to start startups, but they don't, then that's a net loss to society. It's a net loss no matter why the women don't start the startup - real discrimination, lack of positive examples, perceived lack of opportunity, or whatever.
I remember when I first started programming. I had been drafted into this tutoring program in high school to help kids pass the big standardized test in Texas. During a lull one of the teachers there, Mr. Vega, started chatting with me. He saw that I was messing around with programming on my TI-83. He said something like, "Oh yeah, there's lots of money in computers. You should learn more about that." And I mentioned that I had thought about taking a computer science class, and I had even thought about borrowing a textbook from the CS teacher to read over the summer. He said, "Oh yeah, you should definitely do that." And so I did. Looking back on it, it's funny. I somehow felt like I needed permission to learn programming. But I kind of did. And he gave it to me. Just a tiny bit of encouragement was enough to get me on the path.
I guess the problem is ladies never get that tiny bit of encouragement. Which suggests the problem might be shockingly easy to fix. Just say, "Hey, you. Try programming. Seriously."
First, it is a shame Mr. Graham got the business end of a "reporter"[1] trying to get click-bait in a story, and sadly, it is almost impossible to correct the story on the second or third or etc. day. The initial "truth" is what people remember. I've been down that road, and it is a politician's game[2].
I am extremely happy though about this paragraph "First of all, kids need to be able to program, in both senses of the word: they have to know how to write a program, and they need access to a computer they can write programs on, which nowadays probably includes Internet connectivity."
I was lucky and grew up in the 8-bit era where cheap, programmable computers with magazines teaching programming were the norm. Now, the cost of programming is much higher and has excluded many. I am happy Mr. Graham is doing something about this.
1) I have a particular problem with the "edit actual words for clarity" school of thought among some "reporters"
2) check the inevitable worsening of any number released by the government (job), initial ok - correction worse
Less than 10% of nurses in the United States are male. Why isn't there a hue and cry about this gender imbalance? Is it even a real problem?
There is, but you're probably not that exposed to it often by dint of (presumably) not being part of that industry. But if you look into it, there's concern about the lack of male nurses and a concerted effort to improve diversity (the same for other professions with traditionally female-skewed demographics, like teaching).
Diversity, when it comes to sexes, is such a nebulous idea. Here is a comment I left above.
What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different.
Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways.
For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes.
For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.
And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
Quick Google search turned up http://menteach.org/ for example, founded in 1979 to get more men into teaching.
Frankly, organizations working to get more men into teaching or nursing is so easy to find by Google, I think people claiming otherwise should be assumed to have agenda. I am starting to suspect these are intentional trolling.
>And guys, what could the nursing industry do to make it more welcoming to you? Anything? Or are you simply not interested in it?
Nursing would be among the worst professions for me. It requires a lot of simultaneous attention to wide variety of details - the cost of missing something is somebody's pain, injury, life... I can focus really deep on one thing at a time - suited me well in Math before and in programming now - while any situation requiring attention to a several different details in parallel or quick sequence just exhausts me.
Related to it is the perfection level required. Take the simplest thing - inserting needle into a vein. Doing it a 1000 times, you need to do it perfectly a 1000 times. In my mentality - it is much more efficient/faster to do something not perfectly, thus getting it right, say, 9 times out of 10 and apply additional effort to correct the 1 out of 10 mistake. The same about following a multi-item checklist (or multi-step procedures) - i immediately filter out "unnecessary/unimportant" items. Obviously, such mentality have no place in nursing :)
I don't know why this isn't a well-established point, taken as an axiom of these discussions. It has been proven that testosterone increases risk-taking. Men, on average, are more willing to take risks--and even more willing, the more testosterone-triggering a situation becomes (e.g. a competition with the possibility of impressing a potential mate will induce higher risk-taking.) It's not so much a fact about "men" in the strict biological sense, either; it's just a fact about testosterone itself. Trans-men take more risks, too, when they're on hormone therapy.
If you're only looking at cash in the bank afterwards from the exit maybe.
What doing a startup does is worst case, that it accelerates your carreer a lot. If you do startups for 2 years, you can get the jobs (if you want) that people working at a corporation will get within 10 years, so it accelerates your career by the factor of around 5.
Examples? Myself and all my startup-friends who have to work for someone every now and then when the bank balance nears 0 again are offered very high-paying/high responsibility jobs.
The reason for that is that the education about business, building a product and personal growth that you get out of a startup is simply unmatched.
For that reason, it's smarter to do a startup in all cases. However, only if you want to accelerate your career of course. If you don't want to make career in your life, then doing a startup is not smarter, because it does take a toll.
In all seriousness, why would that be the case? I assume you mean that you should start a startup if you believe that you can outperform the median, although presumably all (or most) founders believe that of themselves. I guess gambling based on your confidence in your ability is preferable to gambling on something else with poor performance at the median, like the lottery.
No, he would say you should start a startup because you want to start one. Your reading of it as "I should only start a startup if I think I am above median" is probably even more risk averse than he would advise, since he thinks many more people can start companies than do.
I should have been more explicit, and said "I should only start a startup if I think I am above median if my goal is to build a company that makes a net gain."
The expected monetary return on a startup is positive, because the giant win at the end of the tail more than pays for the losses.
However, the expected happiness is probably negative (unless people like failing). The guy at the end of the tail is not 10,000X happier than the average person.
People do more than win and fail at startups. They mostly spend their time trying, and there are great personal rewards for that. For entrepreneurs, failing is just another step towards success.
1. Being an above 25y founder was viewed as advantageous and below 25y founder was viewed a disadvantageous before YC/2005. YC made being <25y old founders viewed as advantageous and >25y founders as disadvantegous.
2. YC making young founders succeed inspires the older founders, plus other young founders.
3. They tried the same for female founders. However, acquiring the skills to do a startup requires decade-long exposure to tech and business of a decade, sometimes even it requires exposure for a whole generation. For that reason, it is not as easy to what YC did with women as with young founders
4. Prgrammers here, stereotypes there, it ALL goes back to getting young girls to do their own projects in their teens to acquire the business acumen, hard programming skills and understanding of how to build a product that people will want. That is the solution and nothing else will help more than this.
>>YC made changed that into being a >25y founder disadvantegous.
Disagree with this point, unless you mean relative to pre-2005. I'd argue that it brought the age range of founders closer to the optimal spread, rather than bias against founders above 25. It just made investors admit that there's not an age at which you suddenly become "founder" material.
In a footnote, PG says the poor need hardware to program. I work with poor kids (and volunteer to teach technology to them). Hardware is relatively easy to come by (there are cheap options and donations), but access to the Internet is not.
They just have to go to central places (cafes, libraries). It's not easy. Also, not everything we do needs internet -- we tear apart and rebuild desktops -- that's actually a fairly easy thing to teach even a young kid.
Can you source a router and teach them to build their own internet over private LAN? There is a huge range of basic to one-day advanced things they could do with socket programming and building basic client/servers to have fun with. Then source some donations and build a neighbourhood mesh network.
Note: I'm a woman and started this way teaching myself C when young. Client/server tutorials were one of the most fun, I recall.
I'm not part of an organization -- it's mostly 1:1 with people I find through other volunteering (Big Brothers, talking at middle schools, etc). We wing it based on their interest.
I posted because PG said a YC non-profit was looking at this and wanted to say that if you want a kid to program at home, the issue is that they need access to the Internet (to get to a client/server tutorial, for example). His statement seemed to say that access to hardware was the problem, which in my experience, is not the case.
In my 1:1 cases, I can manage.
EDIT to add the footnote text from the article
Many kids now have computers with Internet access, but kids from poor families often don't. So to get them interested in programming you also have to solve the problem of hardware somehow. That is among the problems being attacked by one of the nonprofits in the current YC batch.
The problem of not having a "computer with Internet access" is not a "problem of hardware", it's the Internet part.
This is an excellent initiative. However, their focus is on in-school internet, which may be a problem in some places, but not near me. The in-school internet is fine, and they even have some technical classes.
But, to a kid, that wants to follow their own interests, they need the internet at home. Not having it at home is a huge disadvantage to the poor.
That's one positive side effect of 3G: more people can get Internet access. Data caps for pre-paid plans are low here (200MB-300MB), but at roughly $5/month, they're the only affordable option for poor families and people who live away from metro areas.
It's a cup half-empty/half-full thing. I'm happy that more people can access the Internet, but I wish they could have uncapped broadband. Until we get there, hacker spaces for the poor will remain a necessity.
The comments here are ridiculous. Should PG fund women/minorities just because they're part of X group?
Affirmative action isn't good for anyone, because it encourages lower standards and hurts deserving people.
Equality isn't about having an equal proportion of men/women in every occupation, it's about treating everyone fairly as an individual, regardless of sex/race/age/etc...
No one complains that women are under-represented in the garbage collection field... Or that labourers on construction sites are overwhelmingly men. Or that most of the dangerous and undesirable occupations in our society are done by men...
I don't know about female founders, but I always thought that given the readership, pseudocode problems placed as job adverts in some of the puzzle magazines would get a lot of interesting candidates, many of them middle aged women who have been solving a variety of logic puzzles daily for decades, entirely for their own amusement. I bet some of them could code like demons, if given the impetus.
That doesn't address the major obstacle I see when trying to introduce programming to beginners.
Finding smart people who can think abstractly isn't actually that hard -- lots of people can do it. But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.
The layers of abstraction go very deep, and every layer leaks a bit.
But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.
Depends what you define as productive programming. Not every problem requires intimate knowledge of the whole stack. Besides, I found that the most important skills for me are not in trying to memorise all the details, but to get good at using reference materials and to look for the structures rather than the nouns.
My wife is a founder and a programmer. I help her all I can, as a hacker. Watching it from up close I am more pessimistic about quick leveling of the playing field near term.
Yet here is what we can do that pg did not mention. I shall tech my daughters. Thank you code.org.
Unlike me most of the crowd here don't have kids yet, I guess. But day will come and you will. Half will be girls. They'll see you from up close. They will hear your battle stories. There will be no better role model than you.
Yes one generation is a lot in internet years. But status quo never changes quickly. At least we can personally can see to it that it does change
I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous continuation of a ridiculous drama that came out of a ridiculous out of context treatment.
We've become overly sensitive and prone to offense over trivial matters. Accusation of sexism or racism or what else is almost on par with being a terrorist now and all it takes is an unfortunately put word or two. The accused party is commonly terrified, as if he committed the worst possible crime, and tries hard to defend what's left of his honor and reputation.
This is nuts. This is the article that shouldn't have been.
This article shouldn't have been? I think the one previous to this one was going to far. ("What I didn't say") It's not PG's fault people lie and have reading comprehension problems. By writing even more on this he's just giving more to feed SJW trolls.
"It's hard to argue I'm biased against female founders when I have a female cofounder myself."
No matter how the rest of the essay is, this honestly doesn't mean jack and insults the intelligence of his critics, no matter how off-the-mark they were. He goes on to note other, more meaningful statistics, which is great, but this sentence alone is kind of laughable.
edit: the downvote was predictable, although still disappointing. I was simply pointing out that picking your wife as a cofounder should not be used as proof that you are not biased against women. Honestly, PG's argument would be stronger as a whole if he removed that line from the essay.
She was an investment banker, I believe (or some equivalent) at the time YC was formed. I seriously doubt PG would take on a cofounder that couldn't pull her weight, even if he were in love with her.
A racist is less likely to have black friends than a non-racist. I'd suggest that a racist is even less likely to have black co-founders than a non-racist.
edited to add: The reason the "look at my black friends" argument is mocked is that in many cases the friends referred to are not friends in the true sense of the word. There's no such distinction possible when talking about a co-founder. One either is or is not a co-founder.
This is a dangerous oversimplification of what "racist" (or any negative bias) means. There are many people who have no problem associating with individuals of [insert class here], but would be less likely to hire them, etc. Racism, like everything else, is a spectrum, and it's critical not to characterize it by its most extreme elements.
How can I simplify the meaning of something I haven't attempted to define? How can I mischaracterise the nature of something I haven't attempted characterize?
One can overlook one's own prejudice with regards to a few friends from categories which their disregard, having gotten to know them as /people/, and still regard strangers in those categories with disdain.
This is taking the whole paragraph out of context. Paul mentions the 3 partners out of 12 in YC and compares it to the rest of the VC industry. I would say its a fair statement. This is a bit of nitpicking here.
I don't know Paul but I do know that based on this article he's laying out the problem based on what he knows which is start ups. I appreciate him doing this as I get a better insight to the problem from someone that has firsthand, "in the field" knowledge. I also got some great takeaway action items that I can apply for my own kids. So, thanks for that.
In the same vein the argument later that investors aren't going to be biased against women because they're interested in money is a dud. Most businessmen are motivated by money, but there's more than one instance of businesses who discriminated in the past.
The fact that investors make or lose money based on their beliefs does provide one source of pressure to be rational, but it's not a guarantee.
If you accuse someone of a specific business misbehavior, and that person's actual behavior in the conduct of his business bucks that, it's a relevant statement. It's not Archie Bunker saying "I don't have a problem with those people".
In my professional life, of the the managers working for me was formally accused of racist conduct by an employee he supervised. The core argument was that he was unpleasant and unfair to him based on his race. A major part of his defense was his family (his wife happened to be of the same race), his children, and the extensive work that he did in that community mentoring people.
Bias is a state of mind. Facts/statistics alone do not tell the story.
Also, I must say I apologize for my Gatekeeper comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6986872). I didn't have YC's female founder numbers at the time, but being 2x the average VC's portfolio in terms of female founders is pretty darn good evidence that you aren't biased. You weren't attempting to make the point eloquently in your "The Information" piece and you didn't, but you do here.
I'm still glad I brought it up - the discussion (not from PG but from others) was revealing, but your head is screwed on straight about how to think about whether or not YC is allowing the institutional biases of others cloud its own judgement, and that's great news.
Side note: if anyone knows who said "instead of being a gatekeeper, we should be a gateway" I'd love to see it. It's similar to what I said except way, way better and I'd love to see the context.
YC's MO is to spot value where other VCs don't. When YC started, it invested in young founders. PG is saying that YC now sees female founders in the same light: as marginalized (aka, undervalued), therefore presenting a great investment opportunity.
If the valley's smartest VCs are becoming "Bullish on Women", to use Warren Buffett's phrase [1]), PG's essay is big news for women.
I wish I could contribute to conversations on sexism in tech, but I'm always too afraid of being burned at the stake for saying something the Internet doesn't like.
I wish more people did not write out knee-jerk responses every time this topic shows up on HN. When people are typing out a dissertation in a matter of minutes, quality takes the full force of the blow.
There are currently more comments than there are upvotes, it's ridiculous. Yes, I see the irony of myself posting ;)
I've been conducting an informal survey amongst coder friends testing the hypothesis:
Childhood experience playing with LEGO blocks is a predictor
of a person's affinity towards programming as an adult.
I think "building things with code" is very similar to "building things with LEGOs" so I wonder to what extent other people see programming the same way and whether "LEGO experience" could be a factor in the developer gender gap.
Perhaps some of the female coders on HN could comment. Did you grow up playing LEGO?
I actually hate Lego. The only Lego thing I ever wanted was Mindstorm.
I did have a crazy amount of K'nex, though, and built all sorts of race cars, roller coasters, bridges I could put between two chairs and make an adult sit on, etc. I still like K'nex a lot more than Lego--you can do many more things, and with far fewer pieces.
After reading this article, and many of these comments, it is pretty clear that someone needs to figure out a better way of managing discourse on the internet.
Comments are broken, especially for political debates.
"So if we want to get more girls to become programmers, we should give them more examples. Ideally in person..."
I am volunteering with a local "Code Club" to teach programming to 8-14 year olds. We have just tried to be open and gender neutral, ending up with between 10-25% female depending on the week. Purely subjective opinion, but Jessica Yuen from the Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/other-featu...) tutorials has been a huge example for these children (boys and girls).
I'd love to profile more examples in our code club sessions. Does anyone know of a central source for people willing to volunteer as "examples" for young computer scientists? If not, maybe we can start a google doc or something?
The SWE K-12 outreach (http://aspire.swe.org/) is probably close to what you're thinking of, though if you meant more of a peer-to-peer "dial a mentor" service I don't think I've seen one. Not that it couldn't exist.
Some other great organizations helping set examples and mentor high schoolers:
There are also several great organizations for women working in computing, who you could reach out to for mentors. PyLadies, DevChix, Systers, Anita Borg, etc... And local tech companies, at Google there were several folks working with local high schools who would put out internal calls for people to go and speak about the cool stuff they worked on.
Wow these are all great resources! Thank you. My club is in the Phoenix AZ suburbs, but thank goodness for webcam. I've patched in colleagues from my company (in MA) before. Of course the kids all wanted to know what video games they have made, and how much money programmers get paid :)
At Thinkful we recently dug into our enrollment and performance numbers to see what we could learn about people towards the beginning of their careers as developers [1].
Turns out that women enroll in our courses at about the same proportion they're currently represented in engineering, which is disappointing, but that there's no difference between their performance once they enroll.
Of particular relevance is the rate at which incoming students report their motivation for taking the course is to "found a startup". 16% of men, but only 5% of women, gave that reason.
The whole affair reminds of how Larry Summers was taken down. Basically, there is a type of gender activist that takes pleasure from dragging down males, especially White males, in positions of power because they have been indoctrinated to believe that White male privilege is the source of all evil.
Thus, if one considers the whole Game, the White male is the Evil Boss : if you take him down, you get, like, a bajillion points. There is immense psychological satisfaction in witch hunts for this type of neurotic persona.
If this were not the case, any normal person would be red-faced with embarrassment and profusely apologetic when they discover that they previous rant was due to the misinterpretation of a quote out of context. Anyone interested in being truthful, that is.
We just went through the entire 2013 performance for female and male students here at Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/).
The results are very revealing for this debate: Once enrolled in our courses, women perform exactly as well as men in every dimension. However, enrollment among women is significantly behind their male peers, but sadly on par with what other coding schools are seeing.
The post was just put here 42 minutes ago, I think it's hard to have any serious rebuttal without some thought. PG took a long time to think this through and write it, it deserves the consideration it was given in its response.
PG isn't a worm. He's done good things, not bad things, and he knows it and won't say otherwise. He tries to clarify (implying his accusers are mistaken), rather than apologize. Some people don't like anything great; they weren't tearing him down due to misunderstanding but malice. They don't like his attitude and accomplishments, and clarifying that his views are reasonable won't satisfy them. This is an explanatory passage from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand:
"My sister. My dear sister. Oh, she'll think she's great, won't she?"
"You dislike your sister, Mr. Taggart?" He made the same sound; its meaning was so eloquent that she needed no other answer. "Why?" she asked.
"Because she thinks she's so good. What right has she to think it? What right has anybody to think he's good? Nobody's any good."
"You don't mean it, Mr. Taggart."
"I mean, we're only human beings—and what's a human being? A weak, ugly, sinful creature, born that way, rotten in his bones—so humility is the one virtue he ought to practice. He ought to spend his life on his knees, begging to be forgiven for his dirty existence. When a man thinks he's good—that's when he's rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he's done."
I can't even understand american sexism. Why do you divide coders, founders etc by gender? Why do you count gender statistics and want to change it? It's like Soviet Union in late 1920s but even more strange.
I haven't really been keeping up, so I don't know if the criticism is valid or not. However, I think the topic of sexism, and discrimination in general, is something that needs to be talked about more openly.
Hopefully something good will come from all of this, so if Paul, or anyone else, has to take a hit at least it will assist in initiating some these conversations.
Lesser men would have gone into a shell and "put this behind them" by letting people forget. I commend what PG is doing here. Taking this head on and not worrying about people picking apart sentences in isolation and ultimately still talking to folks who matter - female founders.
The tone of this article is pretty defensive and borders on hostile. Understandably? Yeah, it sucks when people misinterpret a sentiment or take something out of context, but if you really want an open discussion about why there aren't more female founders, acknowledge your part. There's a dearth of female founders because YC and angels and VCs are just not as willing to fund females. Until 1974 -- when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed -- they weren't even willing to give women a credit card in her own name.
The issue here isn't about Legos vs Barbies. It isn't entirely about lack of CS majors or women in STEM; nor is because women don't know code. Successful founders make wise choices with capital, investing in people / ideas / things that have likelihood to build long-term value. This should be the only criteria for deciding who to fund, but VCs don't see it that way.
We were not angry that the application I (early 30's F) and my cofounder (early 20's F) submitted was rejected from the last YC application process. But we were pretty confused. It's an emerging green-tech niche in an industry beyond primed for some technical disruption. Maybe I don't have CS degree, but I did earn a master's in a male dominated field. Over these last 10 years or so have learned enough to write all the code for our prototype. My cofounder went to Cornell. With just a tiny bit of help, we could have built something great. But instead she's interning at a newspaper, making $10 an hour, and I'm getting "it's just not a great fit" rejection emails.
We decided that we were about 95 percent certain that if it had been 2 guys applying with this idea, YC would have at least given us an interview. The fact of the matter is that Silicon Valley treats us very badly. If we can't put our talent and ideas to work "for the man", why is it so hard for us to put our ideas to work for ourselves?
Wha? Y Combinator and random Silicon Valley angels are somehow responsible for something big banks did over forty years ago? Before many of them were even born?
"Sometimes the kafkatrap is presented in less direct forms. A common variant, which I’ll call the Model C, is to assert something like this: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have benefited from the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} behavior of others in the system.” The aim of the Model C is to induce the subject to self-condemnation not on the basis of anything the individual subject has actually done, but on the basis of choices by others which the subject typically had no power to affect. The subject must at all costs be prevented from noticing that it is not ultimately possible to be responsible for the behavior of other free human beings." - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122
I'm sorry to hear you got rejected from YC, but:
- there's a good bit of randomness in the process; no one could possibly have a 95% chance of getting an interview, even if they were young Elon Musk;
- as pg and co. will be the first to tell you, they make mistakes and don't fund promising groups all the time;
- simply getting a degree from any school (even Harvard) isn't a strong predictor of whether someone has all the skills to succeed at a startup (http://paulgraham.com/colleges.html), because colleges and YC are looking for somewhat different types of skillsets
> We decided that we were about 95 percent certain that if it had been 2 guys applying with this idea, YC would have at least given us an interview
What gives you that certainty? There are a lot of teams with similar credentials to yours that apply to YC and don't get interviews. Perhaps you didn't convey yourself well in the application or they simply preferred other applications.
It's crazy that people take their rejections from YC so personally (even posting Facebook updates like "we'll prove them wrong" etc). If there was something astonishingly impressive in your app that's different .. but just in my batch there were published PhDs, people who've written novels, sold companies, personally knew celebrities, some with millions of users already .. etc. For most "regular" competitive applications, there's a decent chance you'll be missed just due to randomness.
> It's an emerging green-tech niche in an industry beyond primed for some technical disruption.
That's what you think .. You can't just assume everyone (and the YC partners) are going to think the same way (and perhaps they didn't buy your line of thought).
Positive discrimination is still discrimination. Why should the split be 50/50? Is the same proportion of brown eyed people present in a YC batch as is in the rest of the population? Perhaps too the intake should include the 'right' proportion of those who do not possess the skills to succeed in a start up? Otherwise thats competencyist right? What a ridiculous fuss over nothing.
A low number of women does not automatically mean prejudice. Men and Women are different. I know, I've seen pictures. Brains differ between the sexes also. Perhaps the relative number of men and women is more indicative of those inherent sex based predispositions than anything else. In fact it would be more surprising if the balance was 50/50 would it not?
Simplest example I'm sure many males have encountered is hold a door open for a women. You intention is mearly being polite and the fact they are a women is not relavant as to why you are holding the door open for somebody just behind you - your just being friendly and polite and civil. Yet I can bet many have done this and a women has labasted you as a sexist or even worse said nothing and now things your a sexist thinking them uncapable of opening a simple door. I've experienced this and as I have said I'm sure many other men have as well, it wears you do and leads to you becomeing a selish person and bitter over time though this and other such situations when you are labeled against intention.
There are then also times when you can laugh and joke about such things, though again to external parties they can be seen badly. I was on the phone many years ago with a girlfriend and a friend was in the background joking and my girlfriend said - that mike (my friend) sounds likea right sexist pig (he ain't) and I replied - well I've never met a wrong one ( was was joking) and we all laughed. Reason we could all laugh is that we all knew non of us were sexist and more still we were joking about it. Now for external parties reading this they can see the worst and fixate upon that, indeed why had my girlffriend felt the need to say and ask if my friend was sexist, well it was how it was said and the prior conversations and that she knew mike well enough to know he was not and therefore was joking herself when saying it.
On the plus side, people who prejudge and do not listern or allow a defence and are easy to prejudge without appeal are the types of people I do not wish to have any dealings with in life, be they man or women as I'm sure many others feel that a closed mindset is bad and wrong. I do wonder though and I'm probably starting kicking a hornets nest by even thinking this but I do wonder how much of this biasing and labeling is historicaly due to religion and does religion as a whole predispose people to a mindset of labeling without appeal or by even asking that question am I myself labeling when it is just a question and that is the only label being applied!
The people who were quickest to criticize pg after the Valleywag article have been extremely quiet about this post, which is odd because it's about something they are generally extremely passionate about.
What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different.
Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways.
For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes.
For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.
And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
I really want to ask pg why he even thinks there is a need to defend himself on these sensitive topics ? Is he really worried about his reputation that much ? I mean everyone knows what pg is known for: startups and innovations. Who cares about a misinterpretation of what he said or meant ? Honestly, every time he has to write a blog on what he meant, it kinda fuels the trolls and haters to counter argue. Why not just focus on what you do best i.e. help create startups.
I'd say it's not so much about defending his reputation as it is about trying to make sure that female founders don't avoid applying to YC because of this drama.
"People's abilities and interests by the time they're old enough to start a startup are the product of their whole lives..." regardless of their gender.
The one thing that caught my attention in this essay as I read over it a couple times, was PG's emphasis on the being a computer programmer, as opposed to computer hacker. My sense (and someone feel free to correct me), is that YCombinator does have a pretty significant (and, I believe, appropriate) bias towards hackers.
Someone can become a computer programmer in a fairly straightforward fashion - just take a dozen or so computing science classes - and, voila - if you pass them you are a computer programmer.
But becoming a hacker doesn't just require that skill, it also requires a desire, passion, and focus that goes beyond just understanding the mechanics and syntax of computer programming.
It's likely that having more female computer programmers will result in more hackers, but I thought it was strange that in an Essay of Female Founders in the context of YCombinator, that PG didn't mention the nuance between "Computer Programmer" and "Computer Hacker" even once. The closest he comes is, "avid programmers" - and I'm wondering if he was writing this essay for a broader audience, and explicitly avoiding the word, "hacker."
The point I was trying to make is that he never once mentioned the word "hacker" in his essay. Didn't try and dive into it's connotations, and implications. Didn't want to even take a paragraph to capture the essence of being a computer hacker.
I'm guessing that it might have been in an earlier draft, when he decided that it was distracting from the actual point he was trying to make, which was relatively straightforward.
One thing that happens in American public schools is that because they're so worried about catching the average student up, exceptional students feel bored. Male here; question for females: is something similar happening now? That is, is it the case that so many programs are catered to stereotypically feminine girls that girls who just want to, independent of their gender, learn how to code, are feeling unaccounted for?
Despite how politically charged this topic is, as a female founder myself, I'm glad PG wrote this.
"[...]YC has slightly over 3x the venture industry average." Yes, 3 out of 12 female partners may be great compared to the industry average, but I'm disappointed that this is the first argument he makes for why he's not sexist. I'm not saying that PG is sexist, but all this argument proves is that gender discrepancies are still a problem (even if YC is above industry averages). 28% of US businesses are women-owned.
Everyone has biases (including myself)...it's a fact of human nature. It's no wonder VCs are somewhat biased considering in the past, the "successful" founders were almost always white males. I think PG so defensively saying that he and YC are NOT biased is problematic in itself. I wish he would have accepted that he (like every other human) is likely biased. It would have been nice to come away from reading this feeling that PG, personally, has a growth mindset.
It's great that PG and YC are trying to do more for female founders, but I'm a bit disappointed in the way his arguments were conveyed.
The biggest problem is from the age of 2-13. The world's culture is still "coding isn't cool for girls". Look at the difference between the ways boys play in a room vs girls. Girls are encouraged to play princess and house...yes...still!! Boys on the other hand are more likely to invent games, or build things. My sister is 13 and laughs at the idea of learning programming as a girl. She's a super smart girl, but the social pressures are too much to overcome. By this age most of you successful programmers already had some sort of "builders" mindset.
I say we need to address the problem at it's roots. Mentorship, and shining the spotlight of success on women like Adora could potentially be the most important part of our battle here. GO ADORA!!
Too Long; But Read (i.e. TL;BR which is exactly opposite of standard TL;DR). I gotta admit this is an excellent read. If this was not from "Paul Graham" I would not have read even the half of it.
One thing is for sure that, I don't care what media and others (haters) think. Paul has done so much for the tech start-up world. Just see the "Thanks" section at the bottom of the page and you will see the names of women entrepreneurs names and do a Google search on them and you will see their start-up venture. Some of them have been aqua-hired by notch firms. That's matters. Period.
I think it addresses the issues better as being of education, certification, professionalism, skills, talents, and abilities that one needs to get started in STEM roles regardless of gender, et al. I really think GG hits the nail on the head with that post. Don't let a few jerks or douchebags who are not 99.9999% of the industry make you think that all of the industry are just like them.
Only 42% of those who reviewed drafts of this article are men - a pretty clear case of bias. We're going to need an article about how to fix an industry that's dominated by women (and don't get me started about those manicure shops!)
I think those of us who have watched PG over time already knew this, but isn't it easy to target someone successful when you have a cause? And how dare they not change?
P.S. It would be interesting to see whether YC is picking winners among the female founders they select ... their formula (as I understand it) seems pretty gender neutral.
Napoleon Bonaparte believed there was a star in the sky that was dedicated to him.
Men seem to have a higher opinion of themselves and are more willing to invest in their sometimes farfetched ideas. Some of those farfetched ideas have turned out to be valuable and have harvested a bounty.
Awareness of bounty results in more people taking more risks and chasing after their hairbrained ideas, a few of which are share a wide appeal.
The California gold rush is a good example, a time when many San Francisco merchants became rich.
Only a madman would pursue a dream that reaped no harvest and many do.
I don't get why pg felt the need to write this post and don't think he should have. The last post clarifying his out of context comments was enough, but continually emphasizing "I am not a sexist" (when the majority of people don't believe it anyway) makes him seem self conscious and actually dignifies the argument that genus a sexist.
I think he should have written that last post, then released a post about how he expects 2014 to be for VCs or something and changed the conversation from this ycomb sexism foolishness.
I'm glad it that he doesn't go into depth about the core and controversial statement re: why 13 year old girls don't flock to programming in the way that nerdy 13 year old boys do.
I'm also glad YC is being proactive here. It's always clear that certain biases exist, and the only way to overcome them is by addressing them specifically. Deep cognitive biases (against young people for example) can only be overcome by amazing success stories.
He never made that statement. He just said that the best founder-hackers start hacking around age 13, and that admitting female founders who did not do that wouldn't address what he sees as the biggest bottleneck to female founder-hackers.
I understand you have an image to protect, but I really wish you would stop dignifying this politicization and "tech journalism" garbage with responses. You're doing a disservice to yourself and the tech community, which should be lauded as one of the most meritocratic sectors of the world economy.
The real message should be: if you're a downtrodden member of group XYZ, quit whining and do something about it.
To the girls of Hacker News: I am a female founder who codes. Here's a blog post I wrote reflecting on PG's essay (guess I had too much to say for the comments section):
Most YC companies have at least two founders. Many have three.
PG's language here:
In the current YC batch, 16 out of 68 companies, or 24%, have female founders.
is ambiguous.
If we assume for the moment that the average YC company has 2.5 founders, this statement could vary between the 24% number quoted (when all of the cofounders are women) and 9% (where only one of the cofounders is a woman).
It sounds to me like the latter(9%) but does that matter much? The point seems to be that it is roughly twice their calculated industry average, which presumably uses the same metrics.
Like mediocre people in any field, they're fighting
the last war, and the last war was won by Mark Zuckerberg.
My curiosity has been piqued. Does the author have point of view previously stated on Zuckerberg?
Where does Zuckerberg stand merit wise? I see him in the news headlines often with his smiling picture. What makes him more clever than the rest of you.
To cut to the point, how many leg ups did Zuckerberg get between luck and connections? What part of his success was environment, what part was his own will and power?
Where does he stand as an engineer, at founding and then? Is he just a face, a legend, or does is he a real decision maker?
He controls 57% of the Facebook voting stock (may be less after his secondary offering). He's one of the most powerful founder CEO's in the world. Zuck definitely got some advantage in connections and upbringing, but there have been countless other founders with the same advantage who didn't win the war PG is talking about.
I'm a bit disappointed by the fact that this blog post gives perhaps the most obvious and common "politically correct" answers to the question of female representation in the software industry, without actually tackling any controversial subjects like reduced training costs for women.
It's unpalatable. PG says nothing more in this post than he did in last one where he really didn't need to explain himself anyways. The more he writes about this, the more he'll have to write about this to defend himself.
If anyone is interested in a creative response to the issues raised in this article (including the notion of cognitive bias), feel free to visit here: http://wishforyouand.me/2014/01/11/day-8/.
Another interesting fact is that the more successful female founders are, they will later have the money to fund other startups as it happened whit the young founders, now a huge portion of successful founders invest money in other's young founders ideas so it will happen whit the females.
You know what I'd love to see the next time one of these inflammatory gender-related posts comes up?
One thread that only women are allowed to post to. No men to challenge them, play devil's advocate or otherwise defend their privilege. Just one place for us to say our piece without being downvoted into oblivion, where our voice can be heard (in all its glorious heterogeneity).
Because that's what's missing in this conversation about women in tech. Women.
Carry on mansplaining your way through it boys... I'll be over here building things.
Using language like this is no more constructive than male chauvinists telling you to stop bitching and get back in the kitchen. It might rally those who already share your beliefs, but it sure won't help you connect with the people you most want to reach.
Try to imagine reading this as a female developer/founder. It's not that it's all crazy/insulting/aaargh, but enough is. And it's happening without our input.
There are women in YC, as seen in comments above. Nice of you to declare their input absolutely worthless.
You'll be more successful if you don't hallucinate sexism where there isn't any. Plenty of women in the tech field manage to do this. There's no reason you can't, too. I hope you come to feel more comfortable with your place in tech in the future, because the "all men are out to get us" mindset espoused by modern mainstream feminism has a very severe and debilitating effect on women's careers.
>You know what I'd love to see the next time one of these inflammatory gender-related posts comes up?
>One thread that only men are allowed to post to. No women to challenge them, play devil's advocate or otherwise defend their privilege. Just one place for us to say our piece without being downvoted into oblivion, where our voice can be heard (in all its glorious heterogeneity).
>Because that's what's missing in this conversation about men in tech. Men.
>Carry on femsplaining your way through it girls... I'll be over here building things.
Do you think you'd react well to a comment written like this? Expect hostility--it's deserved. Sexism isn't pretty, and that goes for both misogyny AND misandry.
8:15 a.m. Wake up to hugs & kisses
8:30 a.m. Weight in five pounds lighter than yesterday
8:45 a.m. Breakfast in bed, fresh squeezed orange juice and croissants. Open presents: expensive jewelry chosen by thoughtful partner
9:15 a.m. Soothing hot bath with grangipani bath oil.
10:00 a.m. Light workout at club with handsome, funny personal trainer.
10:30 a.m. Facial, manicure, shampoo, and comb out.
12:00 a.m. Lunch with best friend at an outdoor cafe.
12:45 p.m. Notice ex-boyfriend's wife, she has gained 30 lbs..
1:00 p.m. Shopping with friends.
3:00 p.m. Nap.
4:00 p.m. A dozen roses delivered by florist. Card is from a secret admirer.
4:15 p.m. Light workout at club followed by a gentle massage
5:30 p.m. Pick outfit for dinner. Primp before mirror.
7:30 p.m. Candlelight dinner for two followed by dancing.
10:00 p.m. Hot shower. Alone.
10:30 p.m. Make love.
11:00 p.m. Pillow talk, light touching and cuddling.
11:15 p.m. Fall asleep in his big, strong arms.
The Perfect Day for HIM!
6:00 a.m. Alarm.
6:15 a.m. Blow-job.
6:30 a.m. Massive dump while reading the sports section.
7:00 a.m. Breakfast. Filet Mignon, eggs, toast and coffee.
7:30 a.m. Limo arrives.
7:45 a.m. Bloody Mary en route to airport.
8:15 a.m. Private jet to Augusta, Georgia.
9:30 a.m. Limo to Augusta National Golf Club.
9:45 a.m. Play front nine at Augusta, finish 2 under par.
11:45 a.m. Lunch. 2 dozen oysters on the half shell. 3 Heinekens.
12:15 p.m. Blow-job.
12:30 p.m. Play back nine holes of golf course, four under
2:15 p.m. Limo back to airport. Drink 2 Bombay martinis.
2:30 p.m. Private jet to Nassau, Bahamas. Nap.
3:15 p.m. Late afternoon fishing excursion with topless female crew, all nude, who frequently bend over a lot displaying growlers.
4:30 p.m. Catch world record light tackle marlin-1249 lbs.
5:00 p.m. Jet back home. En route, get massage from naked supermodel (bending over naturally)
7:00 p.m. Watch CNN Newsflash. Bush resigns. Porn Legalized.
7:30 p.m. Dinner. Lobster appetizers, 1963 Dom Perignon, 20 Oz. New York strip. For dessert: ice cream served on a big pair of tits.
9:00 p.m. Relax after dinner with 1789 Augler Cognac and Cohiba Cuban cigar.
10:00 p.m. Massage and Jacuzzi with tasty pizza snacks cleansing ale.
11:00 p.m. Sex with 3 women, all with lesbian tendencies ... some bending over.
11:30 p.m. Nightcap Blow-job.
11:45 p.m. Go to bed alone.
11:50 p.m. A twenty two second fart that changes notes four times & forces dog to leave the room.
Why is pg engaging with these trolls? Does anyone think they truly care about women succeeding in business or software? No, this is about making a stink and attention whoring. The appropriate response is to flip these weenies the bird.
It's not the trolls I care about so much as more moderate people who may have seen the fight from a distance and come away with the idea that YC is somehow sexist. Particularly women, because I want them to apply.
In other words, this is a posture piece: it's about your reputation, and only about the issue at hand insomuch as it is important to give that issue its due.
I mean that ('posture piece') as neutrally, perhaps, as it is possible to mean it.
>come away with the idea that YC is somehow sexist.
And you can say, with a straight face, that YC is not sexist? That it's just the tech environment, and you're on the 'right side'?
Again, this is about your reputation--controlling the narrative.
Not hate, cynicism. Talk's cheap and tends to benefit the speaker.
The rhetorical arc of the piece is public self-exoneration. I don't think you can reasonably argue otherwise.
PG isn't required to give a deposition of his thoughts on the matter. He could remain silent and continue working on what's important to him.
Or more interestingly, he could launch YC initiatives to get girls coding, shift resources towards some meaningful contribution, something more tangible. Possibly he's done that, and combined with aforementioned silence he might be cruising quite comfortably.
Instead he writes a piece designed to keep the 'more moderate people' from thinking YC sexist, a piece that changes nothing (the flame war abounds) except public perception.
See above, "working on what's important to him," with a certain wry taste.
I find that a very strange definition for cynicism. Usually cynics tend to assume that people are, more often than not, consequentialists: pursuing means for their ends.
PG's ends, in this case, are his business; he wants to make more money. This piece, seen as a consequentialist act, would be a gambit played to calm a possible negative tide in feminist circles toward YC, that might have resulted in YC getting fewer (qualified!) female applicants... which would be bad for business.
I think your problem might be in assuming PG cares about his personal reputation, rather than about YC's reputation. Only one of those two things will make him money.
In other words: this is part of "working on what's important to him." Playing the politics of business brand-image is just as much a part of "business" as building your product, as far as profitability goes.
I didn't intend to particularly provide a definition for cynicism so much as deflect the idea I was writing out of hatred.
>This piece, seen as a consequentialist act, would be a gambit played to calm a possible negative tide in feminist circles toward YC, that might have resulted in YC getting fewer (qualified!) female applicants... which would be bad for business.
Precisely, with a possible qualifier on 'feminist circles'--moderate, maybe even conservative feminist circles.
By which I mean to say, he's pointedly ignoring the feminist concerns outside of the most mainstream: even those that have a point.
Which is why this isn't a conversation! There is no interchange of ideas happening here, only the inevitable flame war spawned by a HN gender topic.
The nature of this kind of discussion is always going to be hyperbolic and emotionally charged, which is why gender discussions here get nuked.
That's what I find so amusing about PG's foray today: PG could write the most innocuous treatise imaginable, and he'd still be getting into trouble, and deservedly so.
Ask yourself: what happens after this? Is YC going to be the shining light that brings sexual equality to the Valley?
Or does YC culture get to pat itself on the back for being less sexist than the other parts of tech culture and continue its general status quo?
This essay doesn't heal any divide; it just stirs the pot a bit more. It's about reputation, not solutions--which is somewhat a shame, because the second half of the essay (which essentially is a restatement of PG's initial comment) is pretty thoughtful and reasonable.
Because by engaging the toxic, he's cementing his role in the toxic.
Dude actually wrote: 'by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black."'
Comedy gold. You just don't say stuff like that.
I mean, maybe he's got some semblance of a good point in there somewhere, but you can't hear it over the kneejerk outrage.
And maybe that's where I have a problem with this. PG ignores the flamewar unless by touching it he can get something he wants--the appropriate reputation amongst moderates. And he can't (and won't) get away scott free.
i.e. Not only is pg a witch but also a liar for not admitting it!
Look we get it. You enjoy being some moral arbiter that has impossible standards so you can act like your better than everyone while accomplishing nothing.
Apparently Helianthus think's PG should have both said nothing at all (eg, Because by engaging the toxic, he's cementing his role in the toxic.) and said something radical (the section of moderate feminists that are inherently sympathetic to YC; the concerns of those outside that layer, even the valid ones, are simply not important to PG)
Not entirely sure what the author thinks they are achieving.
Not both; either of those would have been more interesting and less prone to hypocrisy.
Perhaps I am less critical of Paul as much as I am the crude politics of it all--thus critical of Paul by extension.
(Before you think I am directly calling Paul a hypocrite, what I mean is that the toxic flame wars are, by their nature, hypocritical, and it takes care to interact with them without appearing hypocritical yourself--care that I do not think Paul managed.)
I dunno, I thought I was being direct. The tech sector has sexism problems, and YC, as part of that sector, is not going to be immune to them.
This piece does nothing but puff up YC in an effort to distance YC from the tech sector's sexism, which will only work to a point.
The target audience is the section of moderate feminists that are inherently sympathetic to YC; the concerns of those outside that layer, even the valid ones, are simply not important to PG.
To reiterate: this is a posturing move, in the most neutral sense possible.
One thing I have noticed is female journalists, who chose not to do CS themselves, but feel very strongly that other women should go into CS. Not even that they wish they themselves could go back in time and get into BBC Micros. It's a curious phenomenon and I wonder if it's really driven by anything other bandwagoneering.
Do you not root for your country's athletes at the Olympics, and wish that more people would enroll in X so that your country would have a shot at a gold medal?
I don't think that's a scalable analogy. Programmers aren't an elite, really, among professionals. Anyone smart enough to be an accountant or a doctor or a civil engineer is smart enough for 99% of programming jobs, and many of them, for any programming job. Even someone who ended up as a journalist could probably handle the helpdesk or doing QA or websites.
So if it's not so difficult, and there are already a lot of women as doctors and lawyers, it's normal for women to say that they wish that the social barriers that prevent women from getting in the field from an early age would should be broken. It's not a question of bandwagon, it's a question of equity.
But what are these barriers? No-one seems to know, and in these articles, they always say it's because "geeks" have no social skills and poor personal hygiene and that drives women away. Which is nuts, to imagine a conspiracy of men to keep women out by the cunning strategy of not being "cool" enough (!) Not to mention sexist as hell.
And once again, they aren't wishing things were different so they could have done it...
> Do you not root for your country's athletes at the Olympics, and wish that more people would enroll in X so that your country would have a shot at a gold medal?
This might be the wrong audience to ask a question like that. :-)
(My own answer: no, of course I don't root for my country's athletes at the Olympics or care whether "we" have a shot at a gold medal.)
I suspect a relatively small number are real trolls; the majority are probably just used to the standard media / Internet battle lines and narratives and attempting to reproduce them, without thinking deeply about the issue. Many of those people can be reached with a more nuanced and interesting discussion, but not in the course of, say, an interview, or a short e-mail exchange.
Having been in a surprisingly large number of situations in which people misinterpret what I say because it doesn't fit into the standard box or boxes common to a subject, I empathize with the problem. And I'm not a famous person or someone who gets interviewed about hot-button topics by time-pressed reporters!
When they're wielding ridicule like this and you defend yourself, you look weak. You're playing into the frame. The sane people who are only superficially concerned with the issues at hand are first and foremost repulsed by weakness. The appropriate response to ridicule of this sort is to laugh at the accusers and give them a wedgie. Like it or not, that's how you win the crowd.
I really despise the way HN is moderated-- there are childish vendettas, there's filtering of inconvenient truths to the VCs and the startup world-- but I never thought PG was sexist or racist. In fact, I hate the fact that, despite being more progressive than most VCs (and willing to discuss these issues rather than equivocating) he's become a lightning rod. What The Information did to PG was almost criminal.
The people who caricature us as being only interested in funding young hotshots forget that when we started, in 2005, young founders were not a privileged group but a marginalized one. VCs didn't want to fund them, and when they did they often as not tried to replace them with "adult supervision." The fact that young founders seem a privileged group now is partly due to our efforts.
That's half-true, but I'd debate that point. From 1995 to 2005, VCs still liked to fund young founders-- but specifically because they were so clueless. They took advantage, worked them to the extreme, diluted their equity severely, and then often handed their companies off to their (usually middle-aged) friends. After 2005, the chickenhawking dynamic (see: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-th...) has evolved and the new one is much kinder to young founders. I don't know if it's related to YC. But YC definitely gave young founders an edge that they didn't have before; now they have a backer who knows, through having seen so many companies evolve, how to avoid being scammed in the ways that young founders in the '90s were.
It seems like YC's actual effect has been to replace a chickenhawking culture that was attracted to, but screwed, young founders with a chickenhawking culture that gives young founders a better chance of coming out on top. That's an improvement, objectively, but it also makes YC appear to own the transformed chickenhawking culture. It's like picking up some litter on the road and being held responsible for the nearby pieces that weren't cleaned up.
It's never been about equality of opportunity. It's always been about equality of outcome which in itself is a very un-capitalist view.
I understand:
Maybe we can give women a shot at this and see if they can do really well. It might work, or it might not. It's a market that's un-tapped and we might end up with great results. Let's try this out.
I don't understand:
More women need to do this because.
I'm not sure what people expect, exactly. Is pg supposed to give up all his worldly goals and possessions and live as some sort of equality monk? Should he know of and contribute to every one of the many groups and organizations involved in gender equality?
And what exactly is wrong with the "I have black friends" defense? Are you trying to say that pg is friends with someone in spite of his supposed hateful nature? That he's somehow looked past the person's "shortcomings"?
It seems to me more people are interested in being internet bullies than achieving true social justice.