I'm assuming some HNers are soon to arrive saying things like "why does it matter that a founder is a female?", "why make an excluding event? isn't it sexism all the same", "imagine if someone make a 'male founders conference'?"
I would like to ask you to think for a moment, before raising this concerns (I am not bothering here to debate with haters, only with those who are genuinely concerned that this might sexism all the same).
If a group is underrepresented in some professional, economical, academical field, it is worthy to understand the causes. Sometimes is a historical gap in fields that have a self-perpetuating cycle of dominance (such as blacks in politics). It is tough to adress such underrepresentation, and it take generations to make any change (as it took generations and generations to create the initial gap).
This is no such case for female founders. Here we have a much simples issue: stigmatization. At least, this is how most people in this field, including the organizers of this event, seems to classify it. It is easier to address because a cultural perception is easier to change than institutionalized cycles of power (as in politics).
And, as I see it, this is the only goal of this event. No one is claiming that women are better than men in founding startups. Or the opposite, that women are worse than men in founding startups that they need special treatment. This event is only trying inspire women that founding startups does need to be stigmatized as a male club. Women can have a good life in founding one if they give this thought a chance.
So there the only assumptions I see in this event are that: (i) founding a startup is a good thing that they should inspire people to do (something largely supported by HN audience I would guess) and (ii) that women aren't currently being correctly or ideally presented, attracted and inspired to these opportunities of founding a startup.
These two assumptions may be contested. If you disagree with assumption (i) you a have a much bigger fight to pick, basically the whole illusion that Sillicon Valley sells to the world, this event isn't particular relevant in this broader debate.
And if you disagree with assumption (ii), that this event is not necessary, it means that is no harm done by such an event ocurring. It would by useless at most, but not particularly harmful.
This is my perception of this, and I am writing it hoping to avoid a thread full of heated debate based on false assumptions. Maybe I am being pretentious, but I swear I am just trying to help and expose my thoughts on the subject.
> This is no such case for female founders. Here we have a much simples issue: stigmatization.
I disagree. I might be in the minority but in the places I've worked in tech no one cares - at least as far as I can tell - what your gender is, it's how well you do the job.
What I do see a lot of is women who are capable but not interested in STEM. Not because of some kind of social stigma, they just don't care about it. My mother studied mathematics and eventually switched to sociology because she was more interested in how people interact - math was easy for her, which was the primary reason she went to school for it. My wife is very intelligent and analytical but could not care less about computing.
There are legitimate physical differences between men and women (men on average have more upper body strength, for example) that are not caused by social stigmas. Isn't it reasonable to think there might be some mental differences as well? Perhaps the average man is less risk-averse than the average woman and therefore is more likely to enter a risky business venture. It's not some kind of discrimination or societal pressure or a learned behavior, it's just human nature.
That said - I live in a bit of a bubble. Of course there are places out there where women are discriminated against for this kind of thing, and I totally understand why conferences like this exist (I have no problem with them). But it's worth considering that sometimes it's not just a discrimination issue and must be corrected
> Perhaps the average man is less risk-averse than the average woman and therefore is more likely to enter a risky business venture.
I think the general assumption for women promoting these types of events is that while this statement may be true, it's not because of an inherent difference in women and men. The difference is due to social and cultural conditioning, not because of any biological difference.
> I think the general assumption for women promoting these types of events is that while this statement may be true, it's not because of an inherent difference in women and men
I am not sure I agree with this either, but like in my parent post I don't have any real evidence - this is an exercise in handwaving :)
Kaitai's comments elsewhere on this page are how I think about it - what she says makes a lot of sense to me and is a great case for why these types of events should exist. Suppose I am in some sort of bucket that is underrepresented/discriminated against/etc. My thought process would be
* The problem I am facing is too big to be fixed in a reasonable amount of time/effort (e.g. years, maybe decades of social change)
* There are no experts who have solved the problem so I cannot get advice from them
* However, there are others like me who face the same problem and with whom I share common ground - maybe I can learn strategies from them and they can learn from me as well
Would you be willing to do me a favor and take the implicit association test on gender at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit and post back the results?
I really think that it's the best answer I can give to someone like you who would want a bit of deeper understanding into what this is all about ...
That's a very interesting link! For me, I ended up in the "strong association between men and science". My best guess as to why that is is that there are very few women that I've personally worked with in a technical capacity.
I cannot imagine mustering any offense toward a group of people for spending their own money to organize a conference about a topic that interests them. None.
Good for them for doing something they're passionate about.
There is of course a genuine (world-wide) problem they're trying to solve. As Paul Graham himself has written:
> I also think girls are less likely to become nerds than boys of equal intelligence, possibly because they’re more sensitive to social pressures. In my school, at least, girls made more of an effort to conform than boys.
If this conference could encourage girls to take risks (socially and financially) rather than go with the flow, that would be huge and extremely positive.
In a society that is far more sensitive to girls' needs than boys' needs, however, I do fear that conferences like this further marginalize disadvantaged boys (of all races). The overwhelming majority of boys do not go on to start startups, nor do the overwhelming majority of boys think they have a realistic shot. We all do a great job of completely ignoring those boys' needs, assuring ourselves that "nearly every senator and billionaire tech founder is a man, so boys will end up doing just fine".
It might be time for people to start catering conferences toward this growing, ignored group of young people.
Of course, that is NOT YC's responsibility. Just because they want to work on one issue doesn't mean they're morally obligated to work on another.
I hope this conference goes well for everyone involved.
Agree, whether it's startups or politics, those born into a lower social class don't really have advocates (obviously politicians pay lip service to the poor). That said, if a group of upper-class women want to have a founder conference where the attendees are primarily upper-class women no one should begrudge them.
Thanks for the comment. Sorry your hope at the bottom of your post is a pipe dream :)
I am a woman. I am thinking of being a founder. I guess I'm a founder of something since I'm working on selling products (ebooks) online. (Huh. A realization.) I am totally interested in this Female Founders conference because I might see people "like me" who have succeeded. How exciting to learn from them what worked!
Some guy will read that paragraph and tell me I should just learn from guys. I already do -- I read HN, pg's stuff, books on iOS, tutorials on python, lifehacker stuff, coding stuff, math stuff. I learn from guys all the time about many important things.
But not one of these guys is going to show me by example how a short woman can come across as authoritative but not (too) bitchy or how a woman can negotiate for VC funding effectively without bringing a guy along or how a woman can manage a public or pseudonymous online identity through the shoals of denigrating emails or sexually explicit snarking.
I want to see how women do it, because that's what I'm going to have to do.
"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."
Mini-story: I went to Caltech for undergrad. A "Men's Trip" started in my hovse in response to a women's dessert night or something. They had one men's-only weekend trip and realized they were bored without girls. The next "Men's Trip" was women-welcome. It was a lot of fun to go along, shoot guns, whip shitties in the desert, make Molotov cocktails out of a disputed load of boys underwear (the guys could not remember whose they were and neither wanted them). Great stuff. But I still found the women's dessert night valuable.
>But not one of these guys is going to show me by example how a short woman can come across as authoritative but not (too) bitchy or how a woman can negotiate for VC funding effectively without bringing a guy along
How about doing it the same thing a man does? Why should you have to do it differently? Do you think women have to bat their eyelashes or wear skimpy outfits? I am not following why you need to learn this from women? To me this is like saying your public speaking professor has to be a women or you won't be able to learn from them.
>or how a woman can manage a public or pseudonymous online identity through the shoals of denigrating emails or sexually explicit snarking.
This isn't likely to happen in the first place, but just be professional and use your head. There is no particular trick to it. Just think about what you are doing (make wise choices). Don't post pictures of yourself in a bikini on your open permission Facebook page or Post your phone number online ETC. It isn't rocket science. Again, why do you need a women only convention to learn this?
Great comment. If anyone would like to learn more about feminism, I can't recommend highly enough the book "Feminism is for Everybody" by bell hooks. I find a lot of commenters here and on other sites form (strong!) opinions about feminism and sexism despite not understanding basic concepts like privilege, oppression, and intersectionality. That book is an accessible primer on those topics.
The problem with ‘feminism’ is that it is essentially worthless as a label to denote a political ideology – sure, there are some people who call themselves ‘feminist’ who have perfectly respectable views, but there are also a bunch of people calling themselves ‘feminists’ who are worse sexists than anybody else.
Sure, equal rights and all such things are good and proper aims, but ‘cutting off penises’ is not. Certainly there is a lack of women in some fields and one should attempt to help balance gender distributions. Surely nobody should feel ashamed for reporting an (even attempted) rape regardless of the way they dress. Of course, if strong independent women want to sell sex for money, they should be allowed to – oh, wait, one of the leading feminists (Alice Schwarzer) is strongly opposing any legalisation of prostitution and you will find people who call themselves feminists opposing any of the previously-mentioned targets as well.
I like to think that ‘communism’ as a label has much the same problems – surely ‘people should have equal incomes’ is a somewhat acceptable (not necessarily agreeable) opinion, and calling yourself a communist possibly justified. But what is the relation between the ‘communist’ label here and the ‘communist’ label of the people who built a wall around their country (GDR) or killed all intellectuals (Burma)?
Is there no word that one can use to describe the ‘sensible’ (equal rights, balancing of gender distributions etc.) feminism? Put another way, if I happen to come across someone who calls them-self a ‘feminist’ online, does that actually tell me anything about them?
Is there any label that people apply to themselves or others that successfully filters out the lunatic fringe from reasonable people?
I'm not afraid to call myself a feminist (even though that puts me in the same camp as some crazy people) in the same way that I'm not afraid to call myself a hacker or a man or a parent or an urban farmer.
> Is there any label that people apply to themselves or others that successfully filters out the lunatic fringe from reasonable people?
I don’t know, it probably has to do with the visibility of these fringe groups and your position in the spectrum described by the label. I am sure there are lunatic social democrats somewhere, I have just not yet met them, and I am also positive that there are lunatic liberal democrats somewhere, but again I have not yet met them.
OTOH, there certainly are lunatic ‘scientists’, but they take a sufficiently small stage in public that I can self-identify as a scientist without having to worry about being confused with them.
> I'm not afraid to call myself a feminist (even though that puts me in the same camp as some crazy people) in the same way that I'm not afraid to call myself a hacker or a man or a parent or an urban farmer.
Even if I was a hacker (I really am not, just an interested guy), I would hesitate to call myself a hacker in front of an audience that associates the word mostly with their CC details being stolen.
The only reason "lunatic" feminists seem more visible is because people feel compelled to point out the most extreme views of "lunatic" feminists every single time there is a discussion of feminism.
It would be like if every time a science article was posted on HN you had multiple people pointing out that all science is crazy because some lunatics used to think eugenics was a good idea.
Seriously, pick any thread on HN vaguely related to feminism and you will find multiple people claiming that feminism is a worthless lunatic ideology not based on reality. And 99% of them use outdated theory (just as eugenics is outdated) and complete misrepresentations to back up their claims. For example saying things like:
"oh, wait, one of the leading feminists (Alice Schwarzer) is strongly opposing any legalisation of prostitution"
When in fact her position is nowhere close to that:
"She views prostitution as violence against women and favors laws like those in Sweden, where the sale of sexual services is legal but their purchase is not. (See also: Prostitution in Germany.)"
It's pretty ridiculous to claim that feminism seems crazy because fringe feminists are simply more public, when you are directly and purposefully contributing to making them more public in a pretty transparent attempt to discredit feminism.
>The only reason "lunatic" feminists seem more visible is because people feel compelled to point out the most extreme views of "lunatic" feminists every single time there is a discussion of feminism.
No, that is not the only reason. The fact that their beliefs are mainstream, and not a fringe at all is a major reason they seem more visible. These are the bulk of the women's studies departments at universities. These are the most mainstream organizations like NOW. They are the ones actively fighting against equality, and screaming hate at men for daring to want to talk about men's issues.
>When in fact her position is nowhere close to that
Her position is exactly that, and she has repeatedly campaigned to prevent legalized prostitution. She literally views consensual sex between adults as a violent act, with the woman always the victim and the man always the aggressor. You even quoted as much, yet you act like it is a lie? That does not seem like the actions of someone engaging in an honest, good faith attempt at discussion.
I guess that's true if you consider being for legalized sex work the exact same as being against legalized sex work. She's pretty explicitly pro legalized sex work.
Let me quote the relevant part again:
"She views prostitution as violence against women and favors laws like those in Sweden, where the sale of sexual services is legal"
If you interpret viewing prostitution as violence the same as viewing sex between consensual adults as violence you're totally right on that one too.
In what ways do organizations like NOW actively fight against equality, and scream hate at men for daring to want to talk about men's issues?
>I guess that's true if you consider being for legalized sex work the exact same as being against legalized sex work
Why are you being so blatantly dishonest? She is not for legalized sex work, she is for making purchasing sex a crime. That is not legalizing sex work, it is simply not making the prostitutes side criminal.
>"She views prostitution as violence against women and favors laws like those in Sweden, where the sale of sexual services is legal"
And being a customer is a crime. That is not legal. Again, why such incredibly dishonesty?
>If you interpret viewing prostitution as violence the same as viewing sex between consensual adults as violence
Prostitution is sex between consenting adults.
>In what ways do organizations like NOW actively fight against equality
Actively campaigning against laws that would make joint custody the default?
>scream hate at men for daring to want to talk about men's issues?
You really want to present this law as a matter of women wanting an "out"? You have no idea why anyone is advocating for this.
I have no problem talking "men's issues." I have a problem, though, talking about men's issues with a person who hasn't even investigated the very foundation of what is happening in a situation before jumping to "me, me, me."
Women are regularly-- constantly-- kidnapped and sexually/emotionally/physically abused into sex work. In the US-- not just in third world countries. They make no profit. They win the prize of being beaten, but not to death. Then, when what they're doing is discovered, they go to jail. Instead of the kidnapper. Which they can't fight because the person who has actually profited from what they've done would literally kill them and their entire family if they did.
That is why anyone is advocating that buying-- not selling-- sex be illegal. Because there are far more men benefiting from female prostitution than females benefiting from it. And the organizations that try to rescue women are made helpless by current legislation.
The solution presented is imperfect, of course, because 100% of women do not fall into this category. It's just that the women in this situation have no way of identifying as such without someone going after the people they love.
On the other hand, you have men who are down in the dumps, who seek a prostitute to feel better. There may be legitimate mental health issues there, which is deeply unfortunate.
We could make their side "legal" as well. But would that make the situation better or worse? It seems to me that jailing a man who purchases sex is the least of two "evils." Which is the best any legislation can do, really.
If you want someone to be mad at, please, be mad at the pimps. Not women-- as a big, faceless entity, no less.
Also try to familiarize yourself with an issue before jumping to conclusions like this. If something sounds completely absurd, chances are you haven't heard both sides.
If someone misunderstands what I mean about self-identifying as a hacker, it creates an opportunity to explain that the word can mean "person who is driven to build, tinker, explore, and experiment" the same way that the word feminist can mean "person who feels that civilized societies shouldn't treat women as second-class citizens".
Language is difficult, but it's important enough to care about doing well.
Where I really crossed the threshold into understanding Feminism was in a class I took in college (as trite as it sounds). We were discussing gender-specific organizations, not unlike the one in this post, when someone asked why it's OK for women to have a conference, but if men did, people would flip. The teacher gave a long-winded answer, but what really stuck with me most was a single statement: "Because every other organization is already a men's organization." YMMV.
Sorry, are you saying that statement made you understand as in the statement is an explanation of some essential point of feminism? Or are you saying that statement made you understand that feminism often (not always!) has a tenuous grasp on reality, tends to make baseless or meaningless statements, and is purely ideological much of the time?
Because that statement -- which btw is the standard "I don't want to have to argue with you" brush-off used by campus feminists everywhere -- means nothing.
Every other organization is already a men's organization? Really? In what sense could they possibly mean that? What assumptions must they be making for that to hold true? By virtue of the fact that they're on a university campus, they're part of an organization consisting of well over 1/2 women [1]. Men are a minority on most campuses in the states. So does the university as a whole qualify as a "men's organization"? If not, why is a "women's organization" necessary on campus? If there's no need to be 'shielded' from a broader, all-encompassing men's organization constituted by the university, it seems that a men's organization is just as justified as a women's organization in that environment.
It seems you need a bit more than dclowd9901. Perhaps "White Privilege and Male Privilege" by Peggy McIntosh and "Oppression" by Marilyn Frye are good places to start:
I highly doubt you engaged these issues critically if you seriously don't believe that most institutional structures are dominated by men.
Great, student bodies have slightly more women than men. However the vast majority of professors, researchers, and administrators are men. It's the positions of power being dominated by men that makes the institution for men. Much like the positions of power in politics and business are undeniably dominated by men.
I didn't say that most institutional structures aren't dominated by men. I don't know whether "most" are or aren't -- neither do you. If you figure out a way to quantify that, let me know. Seems like a research grant in the making.
I do know, however, that "every other organization is a men's organization" is a ridiculous statement. Every other organization? Seriously? In order for that to be true, "men's organization" has to be defined in some absolutely meaningless manner where organizations which include women and have women as administrators and are run by women are somehow oppressive "men's organizations". Otherwise the statement is provably false and anyone caught saying it should be instantly discredited.
>It's the positions of power being dominated by men that makes the institution for men
First off, very few men have access to those positions of power. Men who don't have access to powerful offices still have issues and need protection. If you weren't born rich and to parents with connections, you likely aren't becoming a surgeon general or president or even university president. So in what universe can the entire university be termed a "men's club"? Where do the men without access to institutional power turn for relief? They are not only excluded from what feminists term the "men's club", feminists fight to disallow them from forming groups to fight for their own interests. Double whammy. Lower-class men get universally screwed over in the blind drive to bring "equality" to positions of power.
Second, much of feminism ignores the question of why one-to-one gender representation is desirable in the first place for each and every position of power. Why is it a goal in and of itself? In hiring someone to lead an organization, I want the person with the qualifications that best match the job description to be hired. If that turns out to be a man, great. A woman, great. I don't care. There is a job that needs to be done and it should be done well, free from political or ideological influence.
There is the argument that even if hiring is completely gender-neutral, if the most qualified people turn out disproportionally men then it is inevitable that male interests will be baked into the system. Well, the man is still the most objectively skilled person for the job maybe you should figure out how to build control mechanisms that prevent male ideologies from perpetuating insidious effects throughout the system, rather than just scream about how men should be barred from the position. Just saying "let's hire more women because they're women" seems like the laziest possible pseudo-solution and doesn't seem to lead to desirable long-term effects. Do we want people running our society who are qualified to do so, or do we want people running society because of gender quotas?
Third, there is the question of whether or not these inequalities are systemic because of male oppression or female behavior. It is likely a mix of the two, but feminists completely discount the latter. For example having children is a pretty strong biological drive in human beings. I'm not saying all women want to have children, but a lot do. So maybe some females aren't taking high-powered high-strung positions because they'd rather have kids. The vast majority of high-responsibility positions can't cope with the candidate taking 5 months off for mat leave.
There's the issue of "oh the females only want kids because they're socially programmed to slave away as subservient housewives". I don't know, the nuclear family is a pretty strong element of culture and socialization for sure. But it seems unlikely that given our million-plus-year history of a biological drive to have kids that it's all a social construct. Further, that females only have kids because they're brainwashed seems unprovable.
There are innumerable other issues I could list but what's common to all of them, in my view, is that they focus so intently on the end goal of elevating women's power status that they bulldoze over all other considerations indiscriminately.
We need nuance in order to achieve an actual egalitarian society, which much of feminism -- especially statements like "all other organizations are men's organizations" -- beats into the ground with a thousand-pound shovel.
"much of feminism ignores the question of why one-to-one gender representation is desirable in the first place" - I agree, the mainstream meme of "equality" betrays a liberalism about much of "mainstream feminism," when radicalism [0] seems much more internally consistent.
> Otherwise the statement is provably false and anyone caught saying it should be instantly discredited.
It's only provably false because you're making a semantic argument against it, sticking on the strict definition of "every" rather than interpreting it as heard by others.
> First off, very few men have access to those positions of power.
Right. That's a problem, too. It's just not a feminist problem.
> Second, much of feminism ignores the question of why one-to-one gender representation is desirable in the first place for each and every position of power.
> Well, the man is still the most objectively skilled person for the job maybe you should figure out how to build control mechanisms that prevent male ideologies from perpetuating insidious effects throughout the system, rather than just scream about how men should be barred from the position.
And step one to figuring out how to build said control mechanisms is explaining to people that they should help out. To which there is always the response that there isn't anything wrong in the first place and look, women are underrepresented because they aren't supposed to be in positions of power anyways so why change anything?
These conversations are necessarily circular because you can't talk with everyone about everything all the time. You're always going to rehash conversations periodically, and one-to-one representation is a fairly concrete fact-based grounding point for such conversations. You're going to have to explain the benefits of functional programming to every fresh-faced only-learned-Java college graduate over and over again until you change the underlying system to explain functional programming to them before you have to.
> Third, there is the question of whether or not these inequalities are systemic because of male oppression or female behavior. It is likely a mix of the two, but feminists completely discount the latter.
Surely not EVERY feminist! That statement is provably false and anyone caught saying it should be instantly discredited.
> There are innumerable other issues I could list but what's common to all of them, in my view, is that they focus so intently on the end goal of elevating women's power status that they bulldoze over all other considerations indiscriminately.
Yes, that's true. This is why I, for instance, have stopped arguing with atheists or privacy advocates. They're so focused on the end goal that they bulldoze over all other considerations indiscriminately. That's one of those costs you pay for people being human and actually caring about the issues they fight for.
Another cost is that, here in reality, if you don't take a polarizing stance, it's incredibly hard to provide compromises when it comes down to actually deciding policy. And if you take a polarizing stance long enough, you start fully committing to it rather than holding it for the sake of making change. If you take a realistic stance, then when you compromise, you start losing the things that are necessary, too. Both strategies are bad. You have to get insanely lucky for everything to work out well and crystallize over the course of generations.
There is no right answer. Thinking you have the right answer virtually guarantees that you're bulldozing over someone else's considerations. Failing to think you have the right answer pretty much means no one will listen to you. Fucked either way, so you fuck it up until it's less bad.
>It's only provably false because you're making a semantic argument against it, sticking on the strict definition of "every" rather than interpreting it as heard by others.
Yes, forgive me for making a 'semantic' argument. That is, an argument that is concerned with the meanings of words people use. How petty of me.
Unfortunately many people who say things like "every other group is a men's group" believe and mean exactly that. That is how they justify seriously arguing that men forming men's interests groups is inherently oppressive.
>Right. That's a problem, too. It's just not a feminist problem.
Right. Which is exactly what I'm saying. It's not a feminist problem, so why don't certain strands of feminists want men's groups to worry about those problems? What are these men supposed to do? Tough it out and hope for the best? Why don't they deserve advocacy just as underprivileged females do?
>Surely not EVERY feminist! That statement is provably false and anyone caught saying it should be instantly discredited.
Nice catch :)
>if you don't take a polarizing stance, it's incredibly hard to provide compromises when it comes down to actually deciding policy
I don't disagree with much that you've said. I don't have a problem with feminists or any other interest group taking a polarizing stance. I have a problem with those who do so but then completely deny the other pole on the dialectic legitimacy. If you're going to polarize the issue, admit that there are two sides, and allow both to exist. Fight it out on the merit of the arguments.
"Every other group is a men's group" so men's groups should be prohibited from existing?
Nah. If you want to take the binary stance, fight for your issues and let The Other Side fight for theirs. Otherwise admit that you just want totalitarian control, and tell The Other Side sorry, you're screwed, enjoy fighting us every step of the way.
The MPAA pretends it is fighting for consumer's rights, and we all get pissed off because that's obviously a lie and the MPAA's only interest is furthering industry goals. Yet when this strand of male-exclusionary feminists that I'm speaking of pretends to fight for men's rights as well as women's, while obviously not doing so, we're all like "yeah, that's cool". It's bizarre.
(Preface: I ended up scrapping my reply and approaching it differently due to "the sense" I'll talk about down below. The coherence of the comment will probably suffer as a result.)
I'm getting the sense that you were introduced to specific schools of thought in college and mistook them to be a lot more pervasive than they actually are. Maybe I can ask you a question in different terms: of your professors, how many of them would you say were male-exclusionary feminists? I'm looking for a ballpark percentage and expecting it to be high.
Because here's the thing: I've never heard of these male-exclusionary feminists. I don't claim to be a feminist (though other people would probably apply the label to me fairly; I don't care), nor am I particularly well-studied in the area (because at the end of the day, I don't actually care about women's rights). So maybe it's just my scholarship that's lacking.
But you're talking about this group as if they were a major and extremely significant subset of feminists. I would like to believe that I'm not so completely ignorant as to have missed these people over the last few years of absorbing feminism, but it's entirely possible. I wouldn't be surprised if they existed, and I would be even less surprised to discover they've found a home in a "feminist-oriented humanities department" because that's exactly the kind of thing that universities do: provide homes for extreme views that don't cross the line into actual crazy.
So basically, can you show me, at all, that the argument you're arguing against isn't made of straw?
I'd be willing to more directly respond to your post, too, but this seems more important.
I'm not the person you asked the question of, but I'll dip my oar in anyway. Of the self-identified feminists I've come across, both online and in real-life, the vast majority of them subscribe to patriarchy theory. A standard response to the common debating technique of switching the gender in a hypothetical scenario and presenting it as as challenge to their world view is to say, "Well that may be so, but the difference is that prejudice against women is systematic, because patriarchy." So in this world-view men, as a class, cannot be victims, only victimisers; they cannot be oppressed, only opressors; and so on. And patriarcy theory permeates feminism. So in this sense, all of feminism, and most if not all feminists, to one degree or another, are male-exclusionary. I don't personally believe that this element can be exorcised. I believe it is axiomatic, that it and that it trickles down through the ranks even to those who consider themselves merely sympathetic to feminism.
>of your professors, how many of them would you say were male-exclusionary feminists?
Not one. Most were totally reasonable people, interested in furthering a gender-egalitarian version of feminism that seemed eminently fair. When I say I critically engaged with the issues, I don't mean I was out to destroy feminist arguments and advocate for the abolition of feminism. I agree with much of what (many) feminisms fight for. But there is always room to introduce nuance, and I found that most faculty really appreciated that kind of critical engagement.
However.
The student politics at my school -- and at many other campuses in my country -- were shockingly totalitarian. To give you an idea, the majority of student associations across the country are unionized, and are all locals of a national student federation. Every single student in each university pays mandatory fees (read: union dues) to these locals as part of tuition.
The national union was infamous for stifling even discussion of men's issues on campuses. See [1] for an example:
"This spring, the Canadian Federation of Students passed a motion encouraging all student unions to reject men’s rights groups, because they promote “hateful views toward women” and justify physical and sexual assault."
One student's union under the CFS umbrella became relatively well-known for cancelling a charity fundraising campaign for cystic fibrosis, Shinerama, because cystic fibrosis "disproportionally affects white males" [1.5].
We've got freedom of speech enshrined in our Charter up here, yet our campuses constantly rate abysmally in free speech indexes largely because of the student unions I'm talking about [2]. Groups that all students, including men, are forced to pay money to under the theory that these groups represent all students.
Feminist groups repeatedly [3][4] tried to block public lectures on men's issues from happening. In one case, even pulling a fire alarm in an attempt to force an end to the discussion. There is an extremely famous video of an anti-men's-rights protestor screaming at her 'debate partners' to "shut the fuck up" while she explains that feminism fights for men's rights, too, so men don't need men's rights groups [5]. This happened at a few other universities other than UoT, too.
So that is the environment in which I came up, and certainly it colored my views. Hence when I hear people saying that extremist lines like "every other group is a men's group" are emblematic of feminism in general, I find it disconcerting, and feel a need to argue against.
Interesting, and legitimate sources. I don't disagree that there's a problem here, but there are far too many nuances to pick apart, so I'll go about this more obliquely.
First: the way you approached this engagement started with a claim that most feminism has a "tenuous grasp on reality". Claiming that the reasonable feminists are a tiny minority is a good way to suggest that every claim the person you're responding to is probably wrong, in your view. In other words, saying "often (not always!)" isn't enough; that doesn't introduce nuance. That introduces antagonism. The best suggestion I can give is to demonstrate a knowledge of feminism that you support while explaining why this particular school of thought is wrong.
Second: there is a systemic marginalization of women. Moreover, this is demonstrable by a lack of one-to-one gender representation. You start to address the issue reasonably in your complaint, but you revert back to dismissal rather than recognizing that people are working on control mechanisms. Yes, affirmative action style programs are a blunt instrument, but that's something to "fight on the merits of the argument". I can make arguments both for and against it, and I rather expect you to be able to as well.
If random chance is determining the results of something, a 50/50 gender split is a reasonable expectation across a large enough sample. If that 50/50 split isn't present, then that suggests there's a significant effect besides random chance. We can claim that's a biological thing, or we can claim it's a cultural thing, but it's systemic either way, and this wouldn't be the first thing we decided culture ought to trump biology on anyways. (lol typing on keyboards at midnight)
I'm pretty sure you knew this, but it's unclear based on what you've said so far.
Third: It's worth pointing out that a lot of the people you're going to come across online are going to be American, which means our views are colored by the fact that feminism is losing as much as it's winning in this country. We have prominent public officials making unquestionably misogynistic statements, and the best we have to show for it is that a few of them were voted out of office.
Maybe feminism has achieved an unassailable victory in Canada. I don't know; I don't live there. But it hasn't achieved it everywhere else, and certainly not in America. I notice that I rarely see such an announcement for a program or conference in Canada. I see them for the US, for the UK, for India. These places are not bastions of feminism.
Fourth: There are some notable bits in your links demonstrating a problem. It's this: some men's rights activists are making the same mistake as the worst of feminists: they're tearing down all women in the name of being supportive. Claims like saying rapes are over-reported or slut-shaming with a public poster are petty and damaging. Creating a safe space for men who are abused or oppressed is fine, but leveraging that in order to push women down? That's not okay. It wasn't okay when women did it, and it's not okay when men do it.
The inevitable consequence? Exactly what you're complaining about: feminists who recognize a threat and respond to it. Which causes another round of men who are angry about being oppressed. Which results in an escalation of feminists yelling them down. And the worst of it is that they are both right. If you want to fight against this kind of feminism, then you need to temper that with the acknowledgement that what some men's rights groups are doing is in fact wrong.
Fifth: You know why people respond with "yeah, that's cool"? Because they're sexist. Because they unconsciously believe that men are stronger and should be able to tough it out. Because they believe women need to be protected. Because, you know, we still look down on women. Empowered women are still considered an exceptional case, rather than a natural fact. And that's probably not going to change in our lifetime. It's the kind of thing that needs to bleed out over generations.
Sixth: I believe I've met an example of what you're talking about, online, and if she's representative at all, this becomes a component in a larger theory. I am of the belief that people who bully, who oppress, are people who have taken it from others and are effectively passing it on, knowingly or not. This woman yelled at me about how rare decent men were, for instance. It put me into a months-long fugue, but I'm not the kind of person who has the luxury of support groups.
What it sounds to me is that you're seeing the tail-end of a cycle: you noticed a chicken hatch from an egg, so of course chickens come from eggs; you're just not viscerally seeing eggs coming from chickens.
Seventh, and finally last: This, "I find it disconcerting, and feel a need to argue against" is exactly what people feel when they read what you write. As previously noted, I don't really care about feminism. (...and checking back, that was part of the comment I scrapped. Bah.) But I do feel I have a strong enough grasp on the fundamentals that I can explain it usefully in argument.
When you make this kind of "men need advocates too" claim, that sets off warning bells. After I wrote all the above, I hope it's clear why. You caught me on a day I was feeling good. Other times, I'm more interested in handing out a beat-down and would not have stopped to ask for clarification.
1. I'm kind of unclear on why you quoted me the way you did. I didn't actually say that most feminism has a tenuous grasp on reality, I said exactly what you later quoted me as saying ("often (not always!)"). Yeah, it introduces antagonism, but it isn't, in my view, unwarranted. It's hard to have an argument without some antagonism.
2. If you really want to take that path, then yes, there's systemic something at play by virtue of the fact that the male-female distribution isn't always uniform across human activities. Is it marginalization? That isn't a given. You take it as a given.
e.g. 99.9% of women can have babies, 100% of men cannot. Is that marginalization? Or just systemic? 76% of US public school teachers are female. Is that marginalization, or just systemic? About 20% of congress/senate are female, 80% are male. Marginalization? Or just systemic? 92.2% of Federal inmates in the US are male, 7.8% are female. Put another way: one out of every eighteen men in America is locked up in a Federal pen. Is that marginalization? Or just systemic? [1][2][3]
Once again, my gripe is mainly with the type of feminism I originally, way back responded to. The kind that says we can't have men's groups because "every other group is a men's group".
And again again again, I don't have a problem with fighting female marginalization where it occurs. I have a problem with groups who say we should fight female marginalization and ignore men entirely because men aren't marginalized. That's bullshit, and needs to be fought vocally and persistently wherever it is encountered. Men need advocacy too, and groups who say otherwise are, frankly, an enemy to justice as far as I'm concerned.
3. Point taken.
4. Great, but I'm not advocating anyone to take some predefined MRA position and set it in opposition to feminism. I absolutely agree that often (not always!) MRA groups are victims of the exact same ideology-induced blindness that I'm complaining about in some feminisms.
Why I linked those articles is because they lay out events that objectively did occur where feminist groups or institutions actively tried blocking men from discussing men's issues. The men's groups that applied for funding at UoT and Ryerson had nothing to do with these controversial positions you're talking about. The instigators of the men's group at Ryerson included two women.
About the posters. If you're referring to the "just because you regret a one-night stand doesn't mean it wasn't consensual" one, I don't see how that's slut-shaming. It's turning a City of Calgary/Battered Women's Support Services campaign's own logic around. Their posters said stuff like "just because she's drinking doesn't mean she wants sex". If the men's rights poster implies that women are sluts, then the City's poster implies that men are rapists. That's the point. The drinking poster implies that all men are potential rapists; the one-night stand poster implies that all women are potential liars. Heads, meet tails.
Nobody wants to think about that one logically, though. People just want to react.
5. Yeah, and really I'm just pointing that out.
6. Point taken.
7. Well, if people want to react to what I'm saying that's fine. I'm equipped to handle that. I'm obviously not making these posts to have people not engage me in argument. It's having the argument that is important, imo.
I don't really understand what kind of warning bells "men need advocates too" claims would set off, and forgive me if after reading your posts I don't see what in your posts should have illuminated that for me. I still fervently believe that men do need advocates
> Is it marginalization? That isn't a given. You take it as a given.
Fair enough. That's legitimate.
Of course, then you proceed to list exactly one statistic that isn't marginalization and then throw down three that are.
There is a weak bias that teachers should be women. I expected the breakdown to be more pronounced by state, but I couldn't find numbers within a minute. I did find this: http://www.edweek.org/media/pot2011final-blog.pdf : which has an unsubtle chart on page 12 showing that the female percentage of teachers has been going up over the last 30 years. You're going to tell me that that means it's men who are marginalized, but guess what? Teachers are a marginalized group to begin with. (Also, I see 83% on that page, not 76%.)
20% sounds like the effects of marginalization to me, especially when SCOTUS does much better. Fun fact: you basically never hear about misogyny from a SCOTUS decision. Ratio there? About one-to-one.
Crime is multi-faceted, and I'll try to cover it succinctly. There are two major aspects. One: criminals are the ones who actually did something charge-worthy. Why does this tend to be men? Two: profiling happens, and people expect men to be a criminal and women to be victims. Thus arrests predominantly happen to men. So yes, there's a marginalization of women going on here. Of course, this is overshadowed by the fact that far too many people are being arrested in the first place, and far too many people arrested are conveniently of minority races. Part 1 isn't addressed by the police; it's addressed by fixing sexism in society itself, which would result in a more balanced ratio of inmates without touching the justice system at all.
Also, I do hope that science figures out how to get men pregnant. That's a thing being worked on. It's not really the more important thing ever, though.
> Once again, my gripe is mainly with the type of feminism I originally, way back responded to. The kind that says we can't have men's groups because "every other group is a men's group".
Then why are we even discussing anything? I could dig out an explanation of why your semantics are wrong, but I think we've established that the exclusionary policy you're objecting to isn't what was actually being called out. Are you just arguing for the sake of argument?
> If the men's rights poster implies that women are sluts, then the City's poster implies that men are rapists.
No, it doesn't. I've seen lots of women drink who I haven't subsequently fucked. This is because drinking is not a sexual act. Why do I have to explain this?
Yes, there is a problematic fuzziness in the line of women who decide to report a rape because they regretted a one-night stand after the fact. The appropriate response isn't to say, "Just because you call it rape doesn't make it rape." The appropriate response is to get women the emotional education they need to stop doing that, whether it means fewer one-night stands or more recognition of why they're regretting the previous night's decision.
And even if you were right, that women are taking advantage of a compliant legal system in order to abuse men. Does that actually make it okay to advocate rape in return? Sure, it's understandable. I can sympathize with the desire to lash out and be self-defeating. But "she did it first" is not exactly the kind of moral foundation I hope people above the age of 10 are using.
> Nobody wants to think about that one logically, though. People just want to react.
And that's exactly how I feel about the way you treat it. You don't "think about that one logically". You just "react", because men have a plight and you have to advocate for it.
> I don't really understand what kind of warning bells "men need advocates too" claims would set off, and forgive me if after reading your posts I don't see what in your posts should have illuminated that for me. I still fervently believe that men do need advocates
Of course they do. It's just that most of the people who claim this, in my experience, have been people who don't need advocates and are just relishing another opportunity to slam the door in the face of women. Women need advocates too, and groups who say otherwise are, frankly, an enemy to justice as far as I'm concerned.
>One: criminals are the ones who actually did something charge-worthy. Why does this tend to be men?
Are all charge-worthy laws just? No. Are they going to let all the prisoners free en masse who committed MJ-related drug crimes now that it's basically legal? Is the drug war really working, or just creating more casualties than necessary?
Say a kid is born into a gang family. The gang's existence is only possible because drugs are illegal in the US. The kid grows up around violence and drugs, no 'mainstream-style' support from the parents so there's no school or work involved, then ends up in the gang himself. Eventually he goes down on charges. Was his demise systemic? Or is he "just a bad guy" who did something charge-worthy?
>No, it doesn't. I've seen lots of women drink who I haven't subsequently fucked. This is because drinking is not a sexual act. Why do I have to explain this?
That's the point.
The fact that posters exist telling you not to get rapey on a woman just because they're drinking is why we have to explain this. Drinking is not a sexual act, why are the posters making it one? Not all men are rapists, why are these posters presuming all men are?
>The appropriate response isn't to say, "Just because you call it rape doesn't make it rape."
I don't know whether or not it's appropriate, but it logically holds. As does "just because you regret a one-night stand doesn't mean it's not consensual". It's implying a default suspicion of women just as the other posters imply a default suspicion of men. If people don't like the tactic, maybe they shouldn't use it. Using it in the service of feminism rather than some other ideology doesn't magically make it okay.
>And even if you were right, that women are taking advantage of a compliant legal system in order to abuse men. Does that actually make it okay to advocate rape in return?
Huh? Who's advocating rape? Not me, and certainly not those posters...
>And that's exactly how I feel about the way you treat it
Fair enough, I can't tell you how to feel. But I've made my share of logical arguments in this thread, and they'll stand on their own.
>It's just that most of the people who claim this, in my experience, have been people who don't need advocates and are just relishing another opportunity to slam the door in the face of women
There's a contingent of women-haters out there for sure, just as there's a contingent of man-haters too. [1] But it's a mistake to assume that just because one advocates for a group, that person auto-hates The Other Group. In fact, that's kinda the same mistake you accuse me of making, isn't it? Thinking that because my experience with feminism has been way more confrontational and politically-charged than the majority of other people's, that my judgment of feminism as a whole is skewed?
[1] - Robin Morgan, influential writer, editor, general cultural producer. "I feel that "man-hating" is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." -- http://books.google.ca/books?id=PatzOnRJCf4C&pg=PA202#v=onep...
It is unbelievably tempting to just lash out at you because you are such an unpleasant person. Instead of following me around on HN responding to my (lengthy, in-good-faith) posts with irrelevant one-liners, why don't you try actually contributing?
Do you have something to say?
Are you afraid you might be wrong? Is that why you cling to the relative safety of slinging content-free one-liners? Can you not think clearly enough to formulate an argument against?
Why don't you engage in the discussion rather than troll with useless, inane posts that fit better on /b/ than HN?
I'm not even close to an 'MRA', as you're using the term (which, btw, is in an implicitly derogatory fashion, which says a lot about you). I think that MRAs as defined by Internet Feminists like you suffer the exact same flaws I'm outlining in feminism.
I do, however, believe that men have issues and need advocacy. Groups that try to deny men the right to advocate for themselves -- which all of the above linked groups do, objectively -- are wrong, for the reasons I've extensively elaborated on in this thread.
You really think it is legit to physically prevent men from discussing men's issues by pulling a fire alarm (illegal, btw) and forcing them out of a building?
So your issue with feminism is essentially that it's wrong for a women's movement to pursue women's issues?
Nothing about feminism is orthogonal to addressing the needs of men. In fact there is a lot of feminist theory exploring pretty much every single issue you listed, and if you did actually engage the issue critically you'd probably know that.
Sometimes I think HN has a 2-post memory or something.
To remind you, I originally responded to a poster who claimed to "finally understand" feminism when a teacher said, in response to "why can't there be men's organizations", that "every other organization is a men's organization".
I'm reacting to that specific kind of feminism, which prohibits addressing men's issues on the assumption that all men are already taken care of by some mythical "men's club". This obviously isn't representative of all feminisms, but it's a pretty common viewpoint here on HN, and it's often accepted uncritically. Note I qualified my talk of feminisms in the previous post with "much of feminism says X", deliberately avoiding saying "feminism says X".
It is not wrong for a women's movement to pursue women's issues. It is wrong for a women's movement to pursue women's issues exclusively while lying that it also addresses men's issues, subsequently advocating the prohibition of groups that address men's issues.
There are streams of feminism that are orthogonal to addressing the needs of men. And I'm addressing those streams specifically. People who say things like "you can't have men's organizations because every other organization is a men's organization" are contributing to these streams.
I'm sorry but it's patently obvious that "every other organization is a men's organization" is hyperbole. You're making a very forced semantic argument that applies to pretty much everyone.
99.999% of feminists would agree that there are institutions dominated by women, they just happen to be the hyper-minority. You're doing exactly what's done every time a feminist discussion comes up, deliberately misrepresenting feminism in an attempt to discredit it.
Please show me these feminists that want to prohibit men from addressing men's issues. Or provide a shred of evidence for any of your claims. You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but don't post tired unsubstantiated bullshit and pretend you've critically engaged the subject.
I'm sorry, you're wrong. Semantics are important because the meanings of the words people use are important. If there's one thing feminism should have taught you it's pay attention to the discourse, because the discourse shapes everything around you. Yet here you are telling me to ignore it.
Also, you have a messed up vision of what "critical engagement" means. Addressing arguments on a logical basis -- which is what I'm doing -- is a perfectly legitimate form of argumentation.
When I tell you that a->b and b->c thus a->c, do you really need me to cite a source?
Saying that "every other group is a men's group" directly in response to the question "why don't we need men's groups?" is very explicitly wanting to prohibit men from addressing men's issues. I do not need to cite sources to show that.
To placate you, here are just a few examples of certain strands of feminism actively blocking efforts by men to organize for men:
"CAFE has attempted to open chapters at several campuses across Canada in the past year, only to be met with heated protests. In June, the Canadian Federation of Students put forth a motion to oppose “men’s rights awareness groups” like CAFE, alleging they “provide environments of sexism, patriarchy and misogyny to manifest and be perpetuated on campus.”" [1]
"The Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU) takes issue with a men’s issues club. If it were not so serious, it would be laughable. An organization that collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in mandatory levies from Ryerson students is afraid of three students—two of them women—starting a men’s issues group." [2]
University of Toronto feminist group pulls a fire alarm to prevent a men's group lecture from happening, since they couldn't stop the lecture by protest alone. [3]
I'm certain that if you warm up your fingers and do some googling, queries like "X university bans mens group" would provide more such articles from around the world.
Just wanted to tell you that your comments of "if you did actually engage the issue critically..." are obnoxious. Two honest people can read the same literature, learn from the same folks, etc, and come to different conclusions. You're insinuating that if obstacle1 disagrees with you then they are either ignorant or lying about their experience. Not cool.
No sorry, had the poster actually engaged the issue critically they'd probably at least cite specific sources and literature for the issues they are raising, instead of reciting the same tired criticisms of feminism that are brought up in literally every discussion of feminism ever.
What I'm saying is explicitly written down in the posts I've made. If you're willing to engage the points I'm actually making, I'll have a discussion with you. If you're just going to throw broad-reaching polemical feminism 101 articles at very specific points, I'm not going to take you seriously. You didn't even state why you think those articles apply to the (again, very specific) point I made.
I thought it would be obvious by just reading the articles. Even in environments where there are a bit more women than men, men still have male privilege (as McIntosh describes it), women are still under oppression (as Frye describes it). Women still fear rape and all other male violence on college campuses, for example. "Majority" makes no difference when it comes to power structures; look at "the 1%" in the US..
Just looked at the former, and it starts with an example of zero-sum thinking -- namely, that someone's disadvantage is necessarily a source of an advantage for others. Other social justice concepts are apparently also derived from this logical fallacy.
I love feminism btw; it has been, and still is, a truly progressive movement, despite it being currently infested with SJW's. The fundamental difference, which results from exactly this zero-sum thinking, is in the approach: are we pulling women up (the conference in question being a great example of that), or are we dragging everyone else down? Are we trying to reduce the gender gap by helping women to increase their value in our society, or do we try to make the society less efficient and reduce everyone's value, just so that the disadvantaged parties feel better?
"are we pulling women up (the conference in question being a great example of that), or are we dragging everyone else down"
"everyone else" happens to be men, and plenty of self-identified feminists believe that men need to have power and privilege taken from them, because no one should have the kind of power we do, by nature of the gender caste system. I recommend the first essay, first. "feminism" isn't a monolithic "movement," it's kind of like saying "I love conservatism!"
That's a good point; the way I see it, the general social justice movement is largely a movement against hierarchy, and for valuing all people equally. It is naturally allied with feminism in the sense that both see the elimination of the gender gap as desirable.
I personally consider the SJ concepts destructive and anti-progressive: hierarchy can often be efficient, there is nothing fundamentally immoral about it, and since people's contributions to society are not equal, treating them equally is neither efficient nor just -- similarly to how treating them unequally based on superficial criteria such as gender is inefficient and unfair as well. But, we probably have a philosophical disagreement on this, which is really fine -- I wish the anti-efficiency and anti-growth people would stop calling themselves "progressives" though, but that's quite another topic...
I would have absolutely no problem with the feminism/SJ alliance, except for the empirical observation that when you hear someone proclaiming themselves as a feminist, most of the time it's a SJW in disguise, and then we have an unfortunate situation when a valid position is supported by entirely unacceptable arguments... Which is pretty much the reason I felt I had to comment on this, as I don't want people to consider the two concepts as identical.
In the end it boils down to the problem that it's very hard to explain the mechanics of culture to people who have little to gain from changing it.
When you've pulled the short straw in your culture, whether it's due to race, sex, orientation or something else, you have a lot of incentive to attempt to change culture and you logically end up spending a lot of energy on learning the intricacies of culture and cultural change.
If you're in the priviliged group however there's very little incentive to pay attention to these issues at all, since effecting cultural change would have little personal benefit.
A byproduct of those systemic forces is that it makes discussions between those two sides very difficult; quite like how discussing technical topics in politics is very hard.
I'd really like to ask your teacher which organizations, exactly, did (s)he mean. My experience is limited, obviously, and I'm not from the US, but I've only rarely seen an organization with only male members, and even most of these have welcomed women who wanted to join.
I have a very high opinion about feminism (and absolutely agree with the top comment on all points; events like this are great and necessary), but this high opinion is not at all shared with concepts like privilege, oppression, and intersectionality.
And I particularly don't like how people who treat feminism as some kind of a subset of a broader "social justice" movement (and whose keywords you just mentioned) are imposing a very particular interpretation of feminism.
HN readers in these gender discussions are so outright condescending, hateful, and knowingly, deliberately unreasonable-- not to mention "othering"-- it makes me consider never coming to this website ever again.
Thank you for being a voice of reason, even though doing so can be incredibly frustrating in its fruitlessness sometimes.
Please stay. Don't let the vocal minority dissuade you. There are a good number of people here that do care. Gender is being increasingly discussed here now, which inevitably draws out this discussion.
I really think that this site will become more inclusive, but it needs your voice (and your votes).
As someone else said, it's a hot-button issue that brings out a vocal minority of the insecure and/or deliberate trolls. I know it's ugly, but please consider sticking around to try to help.
Before resorting to name calling ("troll") or useless stereotyping ("the insecure") of people disagreeing with you please try to understand what some of these people are trying to say. I don't think the comments made by ravetkn and obstacle1, for example, do not quite fit the typical troll pattern.
This is a grown up forum, differing view points should be securely discussable, including race and gender issues. AFAIK, offensive comments were made by users on "both sides" (whatever that means in this case).
The problem is that people come from the angle of "we hold these truth to be self evident" and/or universal and become upset when people try o argue on the contrary. This is normal human nature, but on HN we should be able to do better.
Before resorting to name calling ("troll") or useless stereotyping ("the insecure") of people disagreeing with you please try to understand what some of these people are trying to say
I never said that absolutely everyone who disagrees with me is a troll, or insecure, or both, I'm saying that these threads tend to bring out some terrible behavior from a vocal minority. That's not a controversial position.
I want, more than anything, a meaningful discussion on these issues. I also know that "But what if I had a conference FOR JUST MEN? What about that, you SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR?!" isn't meaningful discussion at this point.
My only concern with events like this is that males could also learn from female founders advice and experiences. It just seems like a loss to forcefully segregate the audience.
I would love to attend an event that featured a female only stage. It would be a refreshing change from the current conference lineup.
Sexism is a reality in the tech industry. Something has to be done. I agree with the intention, 100% -- I am much less sure about the means. Self-segregation is only reinforcing a us-vs-them attitude. Sexism starts with a cultural attitude that ignore the issue of micro-iniquity: it starts as a mental construction based on conscious or unconscious value wrongly bestowed to the members of some broad cultural category: it's this fallacy that needs to be removed. Self-ghettoisation is, at best, a remedial plaster on a wound, at worst it makes things worse. Not to mention that us girls often partake in broad categorisations, prejudices and stereotypes, sometimes against our own 'kind' (see the women attitude described in http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.full...)
Today the problem is women, tomorrow (and, well, today too) black people, LGBT... is it really the shortest way towards the elimination of unfair handicaps and perceptions, to tackle one 'category' at a time?
The best place to start would be to diversify the lineups at Hacker School.
If the sentiment is that female founders are uncomfortable at conferences full of male founders, then cordoning them off isn't going to help. I don't think this conference is meant to address that particular issue, but I believe it may be a by-product of it and conferences like it.
It's more than just about female founders. I'm sure there are many male founders out there who'd like to ensure that the organisations they're building are places where female employees would be happy. It can be difficult to get that perspective but the info from events like this could be valuable.
In time (assuming this event is as successful as I expect it will be), then putting more female founders and early employees on stage at their other events will help further.
Edit: Apparently it's going to be streamed [1] so I assume that will be open to all. Looking forward to it.
I'm pretty sure most men seek advice from their peer group and/or founders they know. Because there are fewer female founders, there are probably fewer dispersed among the peer groups.
Then you can attend. The invitation request form explicitly has a box to denote your gender. That implies to me that men are welcome, if they want to attend. I assume the webpage says "Are you a woman who..." because that is their target audience.
I agree with you so much that I broke my mouse clicking the upvote arrow. I'm also glad that ycombinator is doing this because it shows YC's official stance, as an organization , supports these kinds of events regardless of all the commentators trying to detract from them.
The only problem is when the people who are throwing the sexist event go on to claim they are against sexism. The logical position is to say that it is indeed sexist but that it is necessary, but they lose their standing to complain about a Founder's Club - Men Only event.
The event is targeted to women, but they are not exclusionary. Look at the invitation form.
As to your main point, when there is a power asymmetry, I think it is unlikely for that asymmetry to remedy itself without explicit efforts targeted at it.
There is no mention of males involved or invited to come anywhere else, so I'm going to believe that drop down exists to send a "thanks for your support" or is simply an oversight.
I don't have a moral problem with gender exclusive events. It's sexist and exclusionary and that's ok, and I hope the ladies putting on the event feel the same.
I did not, thanks. However, can we agree that a drop down box and a comment buried on HN being the only indications men are welcome to apply amounts to hair splitting when we are deciding whether or not to classify this as a gender exclusive event?
The fact remains that this is an event that only allows people with certain kind of biological traits and therefore disallows certain people to the event.
That's inherently wrong in my opinion.
I don understand your points. But there are better ways todo this. Like creating an organization to support female founders. But a conference about founders, and then disallow Men? That's not right in my opinion.
Basically what this does is acknowledge the fact the feminst females in our industry feel undervalued. The harder you reach out, the more attention you get. Sometimes, just sometimes, this doesn't make things better.
I'm assuming some HNers are soon to arrive saying things like "why does it matter that a founder is a black person?", "why make an excluding event? isn't racism all the same", "imagine if someone made a 'white founders conference'?"
I would like to ask you to think for a moment, before raising these concerns (I am not bothering here to debate with haters, only with those who are genuinely concerned that this might be racism, all the same).
If a group is underrepresented in some professional, economical, academical field, it is worthy to understand the causes. Sometimes is a historical gap in fields that have a self-perpetuating cycle of dominance (such as women in politics). It is tough to address such underrepresentation, and it take generations to make any change (as it took generations and generations to create the initial gap).
This is not the case for black founders. Here we have a much simples issue: stigmatization. At least, this is how most people in this field, including the organizers of this event, seems to classify it. It is easier to address because a cultural perception is easier to change than institutionalized cycles of power (as in politics).
And, as I see it, this is the only goal of this event. No one is claiming that blacks are better than whites or asians in founding startups. Or the opposite, that blacks are worse than whites in founding startups and that they need special treatment. This event is only trying inspire blacks, and that founding startups shouldn't be stigmatized as a white and asian club. Blacks can have a good life in founding one if they give this thought a chance.
So there the only assumptions I see in this event are that: (i) founding a startup is a good thing that they should inspire people to do (something largely supported by HN audience I would guess) and (ii) that blacks aren't currently being correctly or ideally presented, attracted and inspired to these opportunities of founding a startup.
These two assumptions may be contested. If you disagree with assumption (i) you a have a much bigger fight to pick, basically the whole illusion that Sillicon Valley sells to the world, this event isn't particular relevant in this broader debate.
And if you disagree with assumption (ii), that this event is not necessary, it means that is no harm done by such an event occurring. It would by useless at most, but not particularly harmful.
This is my perception of this, and I am writing it hoping to avoid a thread full of heated debate based on false assumptions. Maybe I am being pretentious, but I swear I am just trying to help and expose my thoughts on the subject.
I really liked the fact that you substituded "females" with "blacks". It forces feminist too look into the mirror. Sometimes they are so blind with their feminist feelings.
Most woman are not feminist, but the ones who are, tend to shout a lot. They are the ones that make things worse for the bigger group.
Of course, i'll now be marked as a "hater". I hope people will actually comment on your post with arguments.
Care to share your research data that this has to do with stigmatisation?
And what exactly is "this field"? Field of those believing that the cause is stigmatisation?
How about this assumption, which, I believe is also false?
1. In this case, I'm translating the top-level post, not speaking for anyone.
2. Idiomatically, "tech" usually refers to the computing (specifically software, in most uses) industry. I guess I could have said "Silicon Valley", but man, those extra 10 letters, very difficult :P
Did anyone stop to think that woman generally just have differing interests and natural skills than men? Why is there so much emphasis on women being the same as men in everything? I don't see campaigns to get more women interested in auto repair or plumbing.
Here's a screen shot from the industrial apprentice website. http://cl.ly/image/3g093I0I3T3A. That's a rotating carousel of images; the majority of the images in it are men, but there are two women.
While we're on the topic of conferences that target a specific slice, does anyone know if there's something like an Immigrant Founders Conference? That sounds like another demographic that has huge potential and could use some pretty specific kinds of help.
Joking! As an immigrant founder, I can think of a couple of key issues may have been different for me than a resident founder: immigration laws and their impact on startups (obviously) and to some degree, context - understanding customers well, even when you did not grow up in the same context as them.
I imagine, if nothing else, non-naturalized immigrants have unique concerns and obstacles. Visa concerns, ITAR (admittedly probably rarely an obstacle for YC style startups), etc.
I can't say I have any personal experience with any of that though, that's all just a guess.
I don't know about immigrant founders conference, but the most prominent push between immigrants and tech sector would be FWD.us movement. (edit: it should be .us not .org)
It should be noted that you don't need to be a current startup founder to apply:
Are you a woman interested in starting a startup? Then we'd love to have you at Y Combinator's Female Founders Conference, where female founders we've funded, along with some distinguished guests, will share practical advice from their own experience.
Fantastic! Will this be streamed? For women not based in Bay Area (and therefore realistically women with even more limited access to female tech/entrepreneur role-models), this would be a great resource to be accessed remotely and real time, and could definitely be the catalyst for some quality Twitterverse discussion/encouragement for female tech entrepreneurs.
Great! In my experience, the most inspiring talks by female tech entrepreneurs were ones where you would have had no idea whether they were female or male based on the content of their speeches/talks (e.g. "This is how we got our first 1000 users" rather than "This is how I navigated being in an all male board room"). This conference is a great opportunity to hear the experiences and perspectives of female entrepreneurs-- I hope that its content focus is more on their achievements and strategies rather than their gender. Actionable insights like how these entrepreneurs navigated their Series A or hired their first employees give a less explicit, but (in my opinion) more resounding affirmation that women have just as much credibility to succeed and achieve in the tech space. Excited to tune in!
I'm against these, because I'm against gender discrimination. Gender discrimination means that one gender is treated differently from another.
It's also interesting to know whether transwomen will be allowed. Some radical feminists only accept 'born as women' to their conferences. And if transwomen are accepted, what's their definition of that.
Since you are against this conference in principle, I have a feeling you're only bringing up the trans issue to cause trouble.
But, you're right, it has been an issue at some conferences. So it's worth clarifying.
The Ada Initiative does not represent all women in tech, but they do help organizers with codes of conduct and other policies for female-friendly conferences. It might be good for jl and YC to consult with them. Their policies are inclusive: http://adainitiative.org/faq/#how-does-the-ada-initiative-de...
> Some radical feminists only accept 'born as women' to their conferences. And if transwomen are accepted, what's their definition of that.
Really. That's interesting. I know... a few feminists 'round these parts who might be characterized "radical." Can't think of anyone getting their hate on against trans women. And I don't know why you would raise such a specter of exclusion with no basis.
While this may be a thing, what I have observed is that those most concerned with feminism in tech offer pretty consistent solidarity with their trans brothers and sisters. I don't believe this was invoked in good faith. Next level concern troll.
Thanks for discussing this issue and offering links, too.
You can be a human, you can be someone with the flu, but you can't really "be" a feminist, or any other political "ist", being that there's no agreed-upon definition of the word. So it's more productive to talk in terms of people "identified as" X.
Just 'Feminist and transphobic' somehow seemed wrong language-wise. That might just be because English is not my native language though, so I've edited the comment.
Whether it is logically inconsistent depends on how you define several terms. Of course everyone is going to choose definitions that make their points of view self-consistent... so that obstacle needs to be cleared first. You very quickly fall down a relativist hole.
The best way out of that hole is to describe things literally, with as little interpretation as possible.
For example, if you interview a hypothetical person Alex, and Alex claims to be a feminist, then you could write: "Alex, a self-described feminist, ..." but should perhaps avoid writing "Alex, a feminist, ..."
The first only relies on you, the audience, and Alex agreeing on the very basics of the English language. The second implies some sort of agreement between you and Alex on what it is to be a feminist; basically you are injecting your assessment of Alex's beliefs. In the first, the audience may disagree with Alex, but they should have very little room to disagree with you. In the second, the audience disagreeing with Alex pulls you into the fray as well.
You will find irrational extremists on either side of every political issue. In the case of gender relations, you have the religious right and MRA wackos on one extreme and the mysandric, transphobic "RadFem" fruitcakes on the other.
Much of "radical feminism" holds that gender isn't about expression, and that you can't switch genders as much as you can switch races. This makes people extremely uncomfortable, of course
Do you agree with the following definitions commonly used when discussing gender issues?
Sex: Assigned biological category -- male or female: designated at birth by visual assessment of anatomy based upon presumption of reproductive role.
Sexual Orientation: Term for an individual's physical and/or emotional attraction relative to their own sex such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight.
Gender: The social meaning given to biological sex.
Gender Expression: External characteristics and behaviors associated with gender that are socially defined and associated with masculine or feminine. For transgender people, their gender expression doesn't match their biological sex.
Transgender: People who identify with a gender that is different from their biologically assigned gender.
Intersexed: Describes people who are born with external genitalia, chromosomes, or internal reproductive systems that are not traditionally associated with either a "standard" male or female.
Cis-gender: People who identify with the sex or gender they were assigned at birth.
Gender is generally assumed to be defined as that part of 'sexual identity' which is a social construct and hence changeable.
I think the phenomenon is brought up in discussions of sexism in the tech industry disproportionate to the degree to which it occurs. I don't think people who typically bring it up are actually concerned with the issue, but rather want to poke a stick at the notion of feminism itself.
I'm not sure whether your first sentence is meant as snide, but given the quality of your posts on gender issues in general I'll assume you're just taking the opportunity to elucidate the logic behind both viewpoints.
I do have to say that as a person somewhere on the trans* spectrum some of those posts do feel rather hateful towards 'my kind' though.
You specifically posted links equating radical feminist concerns with queer theory/transactivism with "transphobia," cheapening real transphobia, given that the links I posted (have you read them? I recommend them) illustrate that "radical feminist" desired exclusion of transwomen from conferences, etc, is not motivated by hatred, but a gender politics that doesn't have much to do with queer theory/transactivism specifically.
If you think I'm saying bigoted things (or trans*-spectrum-phobic), I'd appreciate knowing where I've done that so I can learn not to.
I simply shared two wikipedia articles on the topic to refer to a somewhat impartial source and added an article which illustrated the existence of a transphobic fringe within the feminist community.
I didn't intend to make any statement concerning exclusion or condemnation of transwomen from conferences; although it seems like you did jump to that conclusion. Neither did I explicitly mention 'radical feminism.'
As for feedback; the part that's hurtful here is that while the article I posted seems to take great care to attempt to perform a level-headed in-depth deconstruction of transphobia in the feminist community and painstakingly ensuring to criticise specific behaviour by specific people rather than the feminist community as a whole.
Many of the articles you linked invoke a variety of ad-hominems, strawmen and generally mostly seem aimed at eliciting a certain emotional response towards the trans community.
Actual transphobia (like the rampant homophobia, specifically against lesbians, before it) in "feminist" communities is tragic, just as it is anywhere. I don't mean to excuse bigots, only to provide context for the discussion of the political exclusion of (rather than emotional, bigoted marginalization and violence against) transwomen from women-only spaces, which is the overall topic at hand here and the concern of many radical feminists.
As I suspected we're mostly on the same page then with the main difference being (if I'm correct) that I interpreted radical feminists as the subset of feminists who hold radical beliefs rather than referring to a specific 'radical feminist' belief system and its views on trans* issues (whose existence I was not aware of until now.)
I have never heard of such a thing in a conference context, but I have seen it come up in others. And I don't think it's helpful to label such exclusion "hate", as it typically comes from women who feel that self-identifying as female is not sufficient to qualify one to be called a woman.
But it's a very complex and interesting issue, not worth bringing up here, as you note. It's brought up here to stir the pot, I seriously doubt GP actually cares about transpeople at all.
[Edited later: for what it's worth, I regret choosing the word "typically" above. "Sometimes" or "often" would have been more appropriate word choices]
OK, so if I follow what you're saying, since RadFem2012 excluded transwomen, the Female Founders Conference probably will too? Perhaps, nawitus. Perhaps.
I agree that it's largely to stir the pot in this case, but as a gender-dysphoric bisexual male I am curious where the line would be drawn.
I'm fairly sure Jessica will just apply common sense though and would put me somewhere below full (trans-)women but above cisgendered men as far as priority goes, which would make sense.
Not that I'd be able to attend either way though; even though I would very much love to.
> I'm fairly sure Jessica will just apply common sense though and would put me somewhere below full (trans-)women but above cisgendered men as far as priority goes, which would make sense.
Why? If anything, a heterosexual man would be more likely to benefit from a conference for female founders because his SO is a founder or wants to start a company.
(Not trying to start a flame war — I just can't see the difference between a bisexual man, a homosexual man and a heterosexual man in this context.)
You were born male and so have not experienced female socialization and experiences throughout your life. You have what is often called "male privilege." I'm not comfortable with my "gender" either (who is?) but I don't plan on taking up space at the conference.
Radical Feminism (one concept) is somewhat equivalent to separatist feminism, which takes it as axiomatic that women making decisions under the influence of men are not free to make decisions (they're the "all sex is rape" school). Given that, they historically[0] tended to see trans women as male invaders of a female space, which makes them de facto transphobic. Transphobia is not a typical property of feminists who happen to be radical in their views - if anything, it's the opposite (radical feminism is a second-wave school which had its peak in the 70s).
Not all people who call themselves radical feminists believe that "all PIV is rape" (notice how you equate sex with penis-in-vagina intercourse). You forgot to provide a link to that [0], I'll give you one: http://againstallevidence.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/cant-we-a...
I didn't mean to imply (and I don't believe) that all radical/separatist feminists believe that, but that the idea originated in that movement. I don't equate PIV with sex but didn't want to add jargon to what was meant to be a 101 post. Hence quotes.
Any time. I believe there's a high amount of nuance to the writings, activism, and ideas referred to by the phrase "radical feminist," and without noting it, it becomes very easy to get the wrong idea about the whole thing. "All sex is rape" and "all PIV is rape" are two vastly different statements in the context of this politics.
Words have multiple meanings. Yes "to discriminate" does mean to treat one thing differently than another, to discern among various alternatives. That's not the context discrimination is being used in here. In that sense, having separate bathrooms is also "gender discrimination". Are you against that as well?
In this context discrimination refers to a systemic tendency to undervalue a particular class of people for reasons unrelated to their ability to contribute. That is a situation worth reversing. Don't deliberately interpret words in the wrong context just to be a pedant.
>That's not the context discrimination is being used in here. In that sense, having separate bathrooms is also "gender discrimination". Are you against that as well?
Yes. And gender separated sports leagues. I believe people shouldn't be defined by their gender, which is a problematic term in the first place.
Again, there are two different meanings of the word discriminate. Having different bathrooms is discriminating between the genders. Treating them differently. Having bathrooms for one gender and not the other would be discriminating against that gender.
No, there are two word, discrimination and segregation. Men having a bathroom and women not (or vice versa) would be discrimination: one have bathroom, other don't. In having separate bathrooms men have a bathroom and women have a bathroom, no discrimination there.
> Our goal with this conference is to inspire women to start (or hang in there with!) a startup through the insights and experiences of those who have done it already. If you're a woman interested in learning more about startups, I encourage you to apply.
How is that discriminatory? You can't argue that women are widely represented in entrepreneurship (heck, it's an even smaller percentage than in development.) Startup School has always been 99% men. I'm personally super excited about a conference with women who've dealt with the issues I have as a female founder.
It's discrimination by definition. Some may claim that certain kind of discrimination is positive (e.g. positive discrimination itself). I'm personally objected to all kinds of discrimination, "positive" or not.
I think you should revisit your definition of discrimination. Discrimination is treating someone unfavorably or with prejudice due to their gender. This event is for female founders and promoting them. There is nothing against men, against male founders, or the sex in general.
Just because something is for one subject does not mean it's against the opposite.
Definitions of words are a) subjective b) tools for communication and c) political. I think my definition of discrimination is better, because there's no objective definition of 'good discrimination' versus 'bad discrimination'. Defining discrimination to only mean 'bad discrimination' is then futile, and doesn't really help with communication. In fact, those endless debates of what is and what is not discrimination would be replaced with slightly more constructive debates of where discrimination might be justified and where not.
Do you believe that no gender discrimination in favour of men occurs in the rest of the industry? Are you against any particular act of discrimination that you happen to witness, or are you stating a preference for a system in which no discrimination occurs?
(I, too, am against gender discrimination, which is why I am for these.)
"Discrimination" is a red herring. We practice discrimination all the time, it can be a good thing. Using it like it's a dirty word is insulting to the intelligence of the organizers here.
Imagine you're a woman. The legislature that governs your country is more than 80% male, and that's after a lot of very recent gains by women. You feel this status quo is the direct result of historical as well as current bias against women, and bias for men. Much worse, since this legislature makes the laws and performs checks on the other branches of government, the inclusion or lack thereof of women in the legislature has concrete and far reaching impacts, such as whether congress takes seriously and pursues reports of sexual harassment and discrimination in the military, or whether abortion rights are upheld. This status quo is not simply the result of age-old and deep bias, it is a player. It perpetuates the bias and slows our evolution out of it.
It is in your interests to have a government that is representative and understands your difficulties as a woman in this society, that understands these biases and is highly motivated to undo them. You would also like your daughter and the daughters of others to one day look at that poster on the classroom wall with a solid block of 44 male presidents in a row and finally see a woman among them, because you know it has an impact on their psychology and dreams and perceptions of gender, even if only one woman among 44, even if it takes decades for that poster to change enough to erase its impact. You directly experience on a day to day basis how much women are limited by society simply due to their gender. It is also obvious that despite the ever increasing number of men who are sensitive to women's issues, it is fare easier for other women to share your understanding simply because they've lived it and have been pained by it. It is not just a abstract principle of equality for them.
Is it not rational, in fact extremely smart, to have a preference toward electing women into office, when all other factors are more or less equal or less important? As a preference, a factor in your choice, not the sole decider, you would of course vote for a man sensitive to women's issues over a traditionalist women, or a man with unknown sensitivity to women's issues over a woman who was significantly less competent or more disagreeable with you on other important issues.
Is this gender discrimination? Is it gender discrimination if said preference only lasted as long as the stilted status quo existed? Would you not be a naive idealist to stick to the notion that despite the deeply ingrained sexism in society, one should not take any active action against it other than not be sexist yourself?
>Is it not rational, in fact extremely smart, to have a preference toward electing women into office, when all other factors are more or less equal or less important?
If one assumes falsehoods, many irrational decisions becomes rational. For example, like the assumption that a male politician doesn't care about women's issues. In fact, I live in a country with 40% of the parliament being women, even though 60% of the voters are women. Women decide the outcome of the election, which might be one reason that men are used in forced labour but women are not.
Anyways, if the choice is between a male and a female politician who are completely identical in every respect other than gender, then it's a roll of dice - but such a situation is not realistic.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you lack empathy for the challenges faced by women in Silicon Valley because you're a white male whose local culture is globally famous for being tolerant and inclusive?
You haven't experienced the problems personally, and you probably haven't even seen them locally. But they're real.
I'm against many things that should be legal and that I don't organize. Just because someone has the legal right to hold a discriminatory conference, that doesn't mean I don't have the right to criticize it.
1. The invitation form ask for gender, implying men are allowed to attend.
2. If we assume that an imbalance in a system is self-enforcing, then it is unlikely to remedy itself - even if we remove what initially caused the imbalance, because it is self-enforcing.
3. I don't think you brought up the transgender issue in good faith. The organizers of this event have given no indication that they align themselves such a fringe group.
I don't know about the person to whom you are replying, but in my opinion, in this case, two wrongs make a right, if you can call hosting a conference aimed at an under-represented group a "wrong". Sure, in a perfect world, we wouldn't want or need such conferences, but in this world, we should strive for the best equality we can manage and not limit ourselves by blind idealism.
If in the future, women and men are equally represented in STEM fields, then we can have a discussion about whether such conferences have outlived their purpose. But since that is not the case today, I think that trying to rectify the imbalances in a reasonable, non-confrontational way that doesn't harm anyone is laudable.
First most I was trying to get clarification as to what the person meant with their comment, as what my comment was is how I interpreted their comment.
I am not for or against such a conference, though ideally they're not needed - however if there's enough of a specific interest then business-minded people will try to create a conference to leverage that interest and try to make profits from that common interest - nothing wrong with that - just stating it for the point of that conferences for X,Y,Z group will always end up existing.
I think the solution is to shift the power structures that have been sustained, and are perpetuated, by most of our culture's current societal structures - and so everyone - poorer women and men, any minority, have the same chance of making their way into "power." Unfortunately I have to get back to work before I start writing a mini-essay going into more depth..
Nothing, and I'm not sure what the "correct" representation would be. However, I do not believe the representation we have now indicates a field with an equal barrier for entry for a man and a woman who have the same skill set, motivation, and intelligence.
I haven't read anything about the conference, other than from the title, it seems to be geared towards women. That's fine - just hoping men aren't ban from it, and wouldn't be ridiculed or outcast if they did attend.
Men always become very nervous when women try to have their own spaces, talk amongst themselves, organize into groups, etc. It's like reality can't pass the Bechdel Test.
Women (and some men) tend to be very suspicious of male-only spaces because they think that said men are plotting to reestablish the Patriarchy. Not really, though.
Sometimes it's nice to have a safe space where you don't have to police yourself for the opposite sex and risk being misunderstood by them. I don't begrudge women their own space, and I would hope that women, feminist and otherwise, would not begrudge men theirs.
More like "men as a political class." I'm male, and I knew I was inviting this comment. To me saying "some men" is like giving the "good men" a cookie, when really all men should be concerned about these kinds of things, by virtue of being human.
>To me saying "some men" is like giving the "good men" a cookie
To me, saying "some men" is being precise with language and not falling into generalization. "Men", in common usage, refers to individuals that are male, not a "political class".
English does not discriminate well between the universal quantification (∀; all men are) and existential quantification (∃; some men are) when quantification is indefinite (men are). It's often unambiguous; saying "men are well-represented in the boardrooms of US companies" would not be taken as implying that a number of men close to 165 million (or 3.5 billion) crammed into American boardrooms. Where it's not, it's far better to assume that the speaker is using the existential qualifier, as universal quantification is usually spelt out as a rhetorical feature ("ALL MEN benefit from the patriarchy" is far stronger than "MEN benefit from the patriarchy").
That's a very good breakdown of usage of the word and I'd forgotten about the indefinite usage. In this particular usage, it included the word "always" ("men always"). If someone states "men always love sports" then I'd interpret that to be equivalent in meaning to "all men love sports".
"some" people always seem to jump up to make this pedantic argument when men are generalized about, and yet somehow talking about women as a general group never seems to invoke the same.
Ah. Criticizing the intentional use of sloppy generalizations is "pedantic" and sloppy generalizations are sometimes used against women so this justifies the use of sloppy generalizations against men. Got it.
> I'm against these, because I'm against gender discrimination. Gender discrimination means that one gender is treated differently from another.
As a society, we accept discrimination in order to build a better and more equitable future.
SV prides itself on being a meritocracy, but it isn't a perfect one. People were born with money and connections have it much easier than the average schmo off the street. But certain minorities in our field* also have the added burden of having to battle pervasive stereotypes that sometimes borders on downright hostility on top of a near complete lack of a support network.
In order to become a more perfect meritocracy, we should strive to level the playground for everyone, but we can't easily tilt the playground such that average schmo's are on equal standing with people born into SV royalty, but we can make some minor shifts to help overcome the burden of being stereotyped because of what you look like.
So we accept some discrimination. And we benefit from it. The fact of the matter is that having diversity in startups is A Good Thing and increases the odds of success (unless your plan is to only sell your product to people who look/act/think just like you).
* Yes, women are the majority in the world, but for this and all discussions, it is important to limit ourselves to a field; in this case, tech startups. I would be just as supportive of a conference/support group/etc. for promoting and helping male child care workers (95% female) to overcome the stereotype of men being unfit for child care.
I would think that gender equality would trump gender discrimination. Or are you saying that inequality is acceptable in the face of attempts to take corrective action?
So, I understand your intent, I suppose, but a think a more pragmatic viewpoint could be beneficial. Sure, this conference is aimed at women, but many tech conferences are predominantly aimed at men, simply because that's the largest demographic who attend. This isn't hurting men in any appreciable way, and could encourage more equality later down the road.
> Some radical feminists only accept 'born as women' to their conferences.
This may be true in some rare, extreme cases, but is frankly hard to imagine. Can you cite any sources on this? My experience (though I am neither trans nor a woman) is that people involved in the feminist movement or gender-queer community try to treat a trans person as much as possible as any other person of that gender.
How are many tech conferences "predominantly" aimed at men?By not saying they're specifically for women? So now not mentioning gender is women discrimination? Nice. Go, Equalia!
I didn't say it was discrimination, in the same way that the conference under discussion is not discrimination. However, have you ever been to a tech conference where, say, a quarter of the attendees were women? I haven't. What I am saying is that creating at least one conference in which a woman is not unusual is not a "wrong" in the way that someone up the thread said.
I don't think it's too far-fetched to claim that conference organizers try to tailor their conference to the demographic who attends. While the vast majority of topics apply equally to men and women, there may be some topics that women will be more interested in, given their minority status in the tech world. I'm saying that it is laudable to create a conference where such topics can more easily be discussed.
> How are many tech conferences "predominantly" aimed at men? By not saying they're specifically for women?
One common argument is that conferences that are organized predominantly by men also tend to target men, even without conscious intent, because their planning, structure, and communication reflects the different ways that men are socialized in our society.
>So, I understand your intent, I suppose, but a think a more pragmatic viewpoint could be beneficial. Sure, this conference is aimed at women, but many tech conferences are predominantly aimed at men, simply because that's the largest demographic who attend.
I'm not necessarily against a conference aimed at women, I'm against a conference which is only for women (which this seems to be according to it's homepage). (The rules for this conference apparently are not available at this moment).
>This may be true in some rare, extreme cases, but is frankly hard to imagine. Can you cite any sources on this? My experience (though I am neither trans nor a woman) is that people involved in the feminist movement or gender-queer community try to treat a trans person as much as possible as any other person of that gender.
This is awesome, congrats to all the hosts! It is more common now to see female founders of non-tech companies but hopefully this conference will inspire more women to get into starting tech companies and furthermore, will inspire younger women to pursue more technical degrees, namely CS.
The reason for a Female Founders Conference is presumably that women are under-represented among founders. A quote from Paul Graham may explain why:
http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
"One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon."
The problem -- and the reason they are popular -- with identity events like these are that they give lots of people except the most talented women a cop out:
Sexist males - "See, women can't hack it as founders in the real world. They need extra help."
Non-sexist males - "Whew. I'll support this event and stop second guessing myself whenever I choose to fund a male-led organization."
Mediocre females - "Sweet. Now I can get recognition even though a don't deserve it"
Talented females - "Crap. Now everyone assumes I have this position just because I'm a woman"
Maybe I'm just a naive idealist. I still believe that on average people's individual greed causes then to hire the best people no matter their sex.
Well, I took it and it determined that I don't associate gender with science or liberal arts. It also felt extremely contrived, and felt as though it functions largely on cheap tricks, like building a clear pattern of a theme being presented on one side of the screen for a long while and then suddenly switching it to the other side. To be frank, it seemed like the purpose of it was to induce cognitive stress from trying to figure out where you're trying to click than to actually assess anything to do with gender. I'm aware that biases are doubtless a very hard phenomenon to study accurately, because they can't simply be compared to some arbitrary 'unbiased' standard, because no-one is unbiased, but this did nonetheless feel like it was more a test of motor skills than beliefs.
For what it's worth, I'd be interested in seeing something which accurately assesses personal biases, because it'd help one in determining where/if their reasoning might be being influenced by irrational factors.
The IAT is the bread-and-butter technique for determining implicit associations and are probably the best technique we have for assessing personal bias.
When you try it out for a topic where you do have a strong association you'll actually feel directly what it's measuring and why it's relevant.
P.S. Did you really try to answer as fast as possible? If you take your time it won't be able to measure much.
Yes I really did try to answer as soon as possible. Why would I not? Because it might give me a 'bad' evaluation? Why would I care when I don't even feel that it's valid?
In fact, attempting to answer quickly is what lead me to feel it was largely a trick, because it switched up locations of gender after consistent streaks of a given gender (or other metric) being presented solely in one place. Several times I'd be just about to click something and then think "Hey, what the heck? Why did it suddenly move the answer?". This represents a confounding variable in the experiment, because it no longer strictly measures beliefs, but instead measures a mixture of beliefs and motor ability (ability to react quickly to the changing locations of answers), so the test can't determine if an answer was due to belief or motor ability.
Wasn't implying anything ... just making sure you did the test correctly.
And I think you were reading too much into the random placement. The test just picks a number of words for each category at random and then determines whether it's easier for you to categorize certain things together.
You'll be able to respond faster to 'good & saint' and 'bad & killer' than 'good & killer' and 'bad & saint' because your brain categorizes them differently and that difference in performance is what this test measures.
The moment where I felt my brain slowing down to parse things was rough. I knew I wasn't going as quickly but I felt like I couldn't do anything to speed up again. Very fascinating how that stuff works subconsciously.
I ran into Donna Dubinsky at an event once and got to pick her brain for an hour. It was amazing. She's in SFBA, and I'd love to see her added to the list of speakers. (I'm really hoping someone does full notes for this conference the way that someone usually does for Startup School).
This is a great step towards getting more women involved in the startup scene. Thank you! Many people talk about the problem (myself included), but it's nice to see that some people are working towards resolving it.
The harm that a FOO only conference does in directly proportional to the representation of FOOs in that industry, in terms of lost opportunities for networking. And the benefits to FOOs in terms of being able to compare experiences with other people like them that they might not be able to do otherwise is inversely proportional to their representation. It might annoy you and that's understandable, but it's still a reasonable thing to be doing despite the exclusion it causes. If half of all founders were female maybe thing would be different, and I honestly think that male only conferences for nurses or educators might be a good idea.
Many HNers appear to be outraged that this event is 'female only.' I think creating a conference environment that is restricted to women is very important. For a group that is under-represented in this community, having a safe space where open discussions can take place without fear can help strengthen a growing community of female startup founders (just look at some of these comments; you can't reasonably expect anyone to feel open to discussing these issues when there might be concern for some of these types of responses).
Even as someone who believes in the importance of gender equality, as a male co-founder, I acknowledge that I do have subconscious biases that need to be checked periodically (or better, constantly). When there are more female founders, and more of a presence of female leadership, I believe those biases (and the biases of other men in our community) will decline over time. Having a safe space where supportive discussions may lead to success for more female founders is a great place to start.
When is there going to be a conference for male founders only?
- where we sit with legs spread and scratch our balls without females giving us dirty looks
- where we can wear sweatpants and football jerseys and watch sports
- where we can talk about cars and cheerleaders and drink beer all day
- where there's no threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit if some feminist witch overhears you and decides she doesn't like you talking about a "dongle"
There are some things that women just don't get about men, and in a mixed-sex group, we're forced to conceal our true natures. Where is the conference for men only?
(FYI: If you take this post at all seriously, relax. It's a joke, poking fun at both men and women.)
I get a feeling that Valleywag probably had less to do with this conference than you think. I would guess that this topic is something that Jessica et al have clearly been thinking about, and I wouldn't be surprised if I learned that something like this had been cooking for a while.
I don't know why people ascribe ideological significance to this kind of thing. Fact is, there are proportionally few female founders, probably even fewer than we would expect even if we expect more men than women to do startups, hence encouraging women in particular to do startups will increase the pool of founders overall (which benefits everyone) with the side benefit of improving YC's portfolio. There is still Startup School.
It would be very, very interesting to repurpose the Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes Racism Experiment[1] to one that highlighted the subtle (or not so subtle) differences faced with gender. Then applied to the audience here. I wonder if more empathy for such a conference would be seen.
This sounds awesome. I remember buying a ticket for a "female founders grub with us" thing run by jl as a present for a female founder friend.
I wonder if some companies could sponsor expenses for non sfba female founders to attend. I think it is a lot easier for female Bay Area founders than female Midwestern founders, so it would help them a lot.
Please define a 'reasonable' subset of hackers as opposed to an 'unreasonable' subset (such as the one I mentioned previously). Does not any individual or group deserve equal consideration? How can you judge what group 'makes more sense' in you opinion?
I can't comment about this because I'm a white male and therefore cannot relate to anyone who is oppressed, since I've experienced nothing but privilege my whole life. So the only thing I can do is be silent so that the silenced can be heard.
There is literally nothing bad that could come of this, and I'm totally serious. I'm sure the women that attend will benefit hugely. I may get the missus to watch the stream. Been trying to ignite her entrepreneurial spirit!
Any female-centric conference of the sort should be as praised as any "--insert-female-dominated-field-here-- Conference for Men". This should strip out most of the bigotry from both ends of the spectrum.
I've scanned this thread and the other [1] and my reaction is this. In the Western world we are free to assemble in groups of like minded interests - publicly and privately.
If private organisations wish to have conferences or meetings aimed specifically at certain groups then that is their right, as is the case with YC's FFC. It's YC's money, they can spend it how they like, and decide who gets to attend or not.
I see plenty of veiled and not so veiled accusations of positive discrimination, but you forget YC/pg already "discriminates" against sole founder startups. He also pretty much insists you move to SF if you accept a place on his/their startup treadmill. Annoying? Discrimination? Yes/No/Maybe, but it's his company, and I guess statistically for him sole/remote founders are much harder and costlier to work with than startups who are local and have 2+ founders. That's YC's choice as a private company operating in an interference free capitalist democracy such as the US.
I might, if I was bloody minded, take issue at government trying to fund and run these Special Interest Group meetings without demanding an equivalent "man only" conference. But to be honest I don't, for various common sense reasons, and the obvious fact that in industry the number of males sitting at the top tables of companies far outweigh the number of women. The recent thirty to forty years of equality enshrined in law does not eradicate hundreds of years of inequality, we still have years of work to do with regards to gender and race equality.
I think what the "outraged" HN crowd (which I liken to the UK Daily Mail "outraged of Little Upper Bottomly" types) forgets is that these special interest group conferences don't affect existing hiring practices. I'm heavily involved in hiring staff for our company, I do the technical screening calls and assess how well a candidate might or might not fit with our company, staff and goals. I don't really care if the person I'm hiring is in a "special interest group" and has been attending or promoting "Women Only" conferences or classes, all I care about is hiring staff based on the merits of skill, ability and commitment.
There is a huge amount of "Reductio ad absurdum" in both these threads (and please note I am not accusing anyone of sexism), but I really wish some members of our community would try to gain a bit of perspective. Privately run conferences, focusing on particular gender or social groups are not the same as active positive discrimination (which I am vehemently against) when it comes to hiring/promotion in the workplace.
I'm Canadian, I fully admit that I don't know how your legislation works in its entirety, but after giving it a quick read I have to ask: Illegal under which Title?
Looking forward to going once you organize it and pay for it. Make sure to post your amazing speaker lineup on HN, it's pretty hard to get people to go to conferences that are predominantly attended by men.
I would like to ask you to think for a moment, before raising this concerns (I am not bothering here to debate with haters, only with those who are genuinely concerned that this might sexism all the same).
If a group is underrepresented in some professional, economical, academical field, it is worthy to understand the causes. Sometimes is a historical gap in fields that have a self-perpetuating cycle of dominance (such as blacks in politics). It is tough to adress such underrepresentation, and it take generations to make any change (as it took generations and generations to create the initial gap).
This is no such case for female founders. Here we have a much simples issue: stigmatization. At least, this is how most people in this field, including the organizers of this event, seems to classify it. It is easier to address because a cultural perception is easier to change than institutionalized cycles of power (as in politics).
And, as I see it, this is the only goal of this event. No one is claiming that women are better than men in founding startups. Or the opposite, that women are worse than men in founding startups that they need special treatment. This event is only trying inspire women that founding startups does need to be stigmatized as a male club. Women can have a good life in founding one if they give this thought a chance.
So there the only assumptions I see in this event are that: (i) founding a startup is a good thing that they should inspire people to do (something largely supported by HN audience I would guess) and (ii) that women aren't currently being correctly or ideally presented, attracted and inspired to these opportunities of founding a startup.
These two assumptions may be contested. If you disagree with assumption (i) you a have a much bigger fight to pick, basically the whole illusion that Sillicon Valley sells to the world, this event isn't particular relevant in this broader debate.
And if you disagree with assumption (ii), that this event is not necessary, it means that is no harm done by such an event ocurring. It would by useless at most, but not particularly harmful.
This is my perception of this, and I am writing it hoping to avoid a thread full of heated debate based on false assumptions. Maybe I am being pretentious, but I swear I am just trying to help and expose my thoughts on the subject.