XX Combinator

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/xx-combinator.html

by jonpaul • 16 years ago

39 53 16 years ago

Its sort of ironic that Jessica Livingston is on the ycombinator team. Is she not a hacker? I really don't think she isn't...

presidentender• 16 years ago

Please stop stacking your negatives. I can't read that last sentence.

zitterbewegung2• 16 years ago

Sorry it should read "Isn't jessica livingston a hacker because she is part of ycombinator?"

bdr4• 16 years ago

How about a women-only hacker space? That might create more female founders (of any age) in the long-term.

Also, one thing Tereza mentioned, that "women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing", could be seen more as a problem to be addressed than a constraint to be worked around.

mctavjb9• 16 years ago

I'm all for women hackers/entrepreneurs self-organizing on an informal level and comparing notes, but I must confess that I have the same visceral reaction to women-only hacker spaces that I did to girls-only math classes when I was in 6th grade. Whatever floats your boat, but I've always believed that it shouldn't be about lacking a Y chromosome, it should be about doing the hacking/learning the math. I may be in the minority of the minority, but I would much prefer to build my business surrounded by people with a diversity of perspectives who could provide flashes of insight that would never occur to me as a typical INTJ scientist (although not a typical 30-something female, clearly). Narcissistic nutcases-- there are plenty of both genders-- are a fact of life.

I believe that the status quo is not going to evolve much through anything that can be construed by naysayers as affirmative action. Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done. Laura Finton, founder of oneforty and a Tech Stars grad is a great example. She started her company as a single mom with young kids as a solo founder with no programming skills. Even though I'm not a Twitter person at all, I take my hat off to her. She's taking the time to tell her story to the Boston entrepreneurial community and leading by example.

TimeForThis3• 16 years ago

> Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done.

I don't think it's that simple though. For a majority change, positive feedback is required along the lifecyle from knowing nothing to loving it and having entrepreneurial aspirations. I think the main problem is the mostly invisible peer pressure to do something else - not the peer pressure to not do something. This is why more female role models are needed and more tech-oriented schooling from a young age and more gender neutral literature, etc.

bdr4• 16 years ago

Sexism makes it harder for women to do certain things that they might want to do. Creating a reliable women-only space could address some of that difficulty. I'm very skeptical of your claim that naysayers would eliminate the utility of such a space; after all, the whole point of it would be to shut out social obstacles.

jergosh• 16 years ago

Waiting for XXX combinator...

jrnkntl2• 16 years ago

I had that idea some time ago but looking at the problems of regulation I let it go.

I guess there isn't really a real platform for this that isn't bloated with bots, spam and ads.

jrnkntl2• 16 years ago

If so, we need to rename Y Combinator to XY Combinator.

nehan2• 16 years ago

Is that even necessary? It already is XY Combinator -- only 14 women out of 450 people in ycombinator total -- 3.1%. That's pathetic.

sp332• 16 years ago

YC is not anti-women, or whatever. They're biased toward traits that correlate with gender. They're not biased against women specifically or intentionally. It's incidental.

The proportion of the general population that has applied to YC is vanishingly small. There is plenty of room for incubators with different priorities, and different intentional and incidental biases. Do you think YC is adversely affecting the startup landscape?

petercooper5• 16 years ago

How does that tie up with the application rates? If only 2-5% of applicants were women, the end result merely reflects reality.

What percentage of people in YCombinator are black, gay, Muslim, or otherwise? Would low percentages of people with these labels be "pathetic"?

hnal9432• 16 years ago

This sounds like critism, but you are you critising? Women? Y-Combinator? "Society?"

psyklic2• 16 years ago

So ... encourage 40yo women to enter the space by lowering the barrier of entry? Doesn't this seem sub-optimal for investors?

TimeForThis3• 16 years ago

Where does it say to lower the barrier of entry?

psyklic2• 16 years ago

The assumption is that these women are just as capable as Y Combinator applicants, but that the program is biased against them. Even if you believe this, any time you restrict the applicant pool arbitrarily (by gender/etc), you will lose some of the best applicants. For example, you will likely at least double the great applicants by allowing 40+ y/o males to enter as well. Hence, it just doesn't make sense as an investor to participate in "XX Combinator."

w00pla• 16 years ago

Really?

There are always complaints about women in technology. Yet when I spent my Saturday nights in an underground lab, there weren’t a lot of women in the lab. The bar and social spots on the humanities side were full of them though.

Is it okay to have double standards? If we make women only organizations to promote things, is it okay if we make men only organizations?

If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?

diN0bot2• 16 years ago

i think that's what the article is trying to say. 22-yr-old women are not going to spend their nights in an underground lab (jesus christ!). a 40-yr-old woman has a different perspective and capability.

X-only in terms of constituents is always dangerous, of course. groups should aim to create a specific culture where Y is not tolerated, but where individuals are free to join the community within the constraints of the culture. eg, hacker news.

tibbon2• 16 years ago

Why shouldn't the 22-yr old woman spend their nights hacking like we do? The article just dismisses women kicking ass in their 20's because they, "like to be experienced first" or something like that? Then totally dismisses their 30's due to children. Guess what, if you're serious about running a business then children are often hard to fit into that picture. You can't have everything.

I can't imagine waiting until my 40's to start hitting the ground running as fast as I can. Nor should women. The women I know who have done various accelerators, including y-combinator, were hackers and not interested in having children immediately. They were more interested in doing amazing things as goal #1

sprout2• 16 years ago

I think organizations to get men into teaching and nursing would be valuable. Teaching especially. When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink.

I think you're mostly making a strawman argument. I don't know what your opinion on the matter is, but I think that most self-described feminists would agree that a dearth of men in teaching is just as much a problem as a dearth of women in engineering.

hugh3• 16 years ago

Teaching needs more men, because children (particularly boys) need more adult male role models.

Nursing can stay 90% female for all I care, though. I think most men prefer having female nurses (either of the hot variety or the motherly variety) and I'm guessing most women do too.

petercooper5• 16 years ago

When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink.

Why? If you take a group of 100 random men from around the world, they're going to have as wide a range of opinions and ideas as a group of 100 women.

Groupthink comes more from cultures than genders. A group of 100 Americans is going to have more shared opinions and ideas relative to any other group than 100 men or 100 women or mixed culture. Cultural diversity would be more helpful to avoid groupthink than gender diversity.

Goladus• 16 years ago

I don't think the goal of XX Combinator is to make a women-only organization.

Y Combinator is designed to be an environment for young hackers to flourish, where they might otherwise be stifled by large institutions and various cultural expectations (read PG's essays, etc.)

It seems the idea behind XX combinator is to take a similar look at 40+ women and design an environment where they can flourish. Just like Y Combinator wouldn't turn away a promising woman candidate merely because she's over 40, putting up "girls only" signs is probably not going to help XX all that much either.

dieterrams4• 16 years ago

> If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?

There's no shortage of men in the humanities, nor in teaching once you get past the lower grade levels. In the US, at least.

The point of women in tech advocacy is that there are a variety of forces discouraging women into self-selecting themselves out of careers in technology. One is just the fact that there are so few women in tech to begin with. Another is that barely any can be considered high-profile. Then there are all the historical, cultural, and sociological factors.

This sort of advocacy is just an attempt to fight against those forces by establishing greater visibility and precedent for successful women in tech.

(As an aside, I think it'd be great if there were more female engineers in the dating pool.)

_delirium2• 16 years ago

> There's no shortage of men in the humanities, nor in teaching once you get past the lower grade levels. In the US, at least.

That's true currently, but only because of very long cycles, I think: there are still plenty of male professors in the humanities today who got their PhDs in the 1960s and 70s, when all of academia was male-dominated. But men make up around a 40%-and-declining proportion of new non-science/eng PhDs, which is actually not much better than the women in science/eng numbers (women make up about a 35%-and-rising proportion of new science/eng PhDs). In some fields it's closer to 25%, since that 40% of men getting humanities PhDs are strongly clustered in a handful of fields (like philosophy, which is still male-dominated). I think things are going to look quite interesting in 20-30 years once the current crop of older profs retires.

liedra4• 16 years ago

There is definitely this push (in Australia at least, with special scholarships, etc.) for more men in nursing and teaching.

bitwize2• 16 years ago

ESR wrote about this: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2118

diN0bot2• 16 years ago

i think there's likely a minimal activation number where if there aren't enough women in a particular hacker space then the women who do come by don't stick.

as a woman myself, being a 40-yr-old entrepreneur makes sense in a dozen ways. one less important but rather interesting way is that one is more likely to be interacting with 40-yr-old males. i must say that most young men are rather self-minded. male hackers traditionally develop group process and team-supporting after a prolonged technical and super-independence+confidence phase. women tend to develop differently. once everyone matures and self actualizes interaction becomes awesome :-)

starkfist• 16 years ago

This will sound supremely sexist, but... I currently work in an office with tons of women. Whenever you read something about gender in the workplace, there is a lot of talk about how women are team-oriented and cooperative. However, in my experience this is not true at all. The women in my office are shockingly mean to each other... not a day goes by without someone sobbing and fleeing to the women's restroom. At companywide events, the talk is always about who did what backstabbing maneuver to whomever else, why this woman doesn't deserve this promotion, i can't believe she wore that to the office, she's probably sleeping with the VP of Sales, etc etc.

bitwize2• 16 years ago

As a rule, women tend to be more socially engaged -- but there's two sides to every Schwartz: an upside and a downside, and the downside here is a certain degree of cattiness and backstabbing that even my female friends complain of. (I tend to hang with particularly forthright people.)

nmftt• 16 years ago

Too me it sound like a symptom of too many women at the same level and inability of management to handle the situation. I've worked with both male and female sports teams, and I would say that there's about the same amount of friction. I do think that men generally are raised with more "teamwork" in mind, i.e. more men do team sports. Just seem like a reason to get more female managers.

samd• 16 years ago

You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services. If we had an adequate social support system there wouldn't have to be such a trade off between work and family.

hnal9432• 16 years ago

You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services.

Who's the you in this sentence? The government? Investors?

This strikes me as a tautology. Just about anyone would start a company if the risk and sacrifices involved were mitigated by a benevolent 3rd party.

petercooper5• 16 years ago

You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services.

Less of the "women" and more of the "people," please. Many men are involved in child care and housework in a significant way, and similarly have to make trade offs between work and family.

petercooper5• 16 years ago

Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it.

What does this borderline-sexist generalization even mean?

First, there aren't enough women entrepreneurs. There aren't enough women VCs. There aren't enough women developers.

Is there a quota? The beauty of our (Western) society (at this moment in history) is that people have the freedom to shoot for whatever they want independent of their race/religion/age/gender. Using people's physical or demographic characteristics to fill out some sort of social prescription is as offensive as it is misguided.

dieterrams4• 16 years ago

There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can make it in technology. This is what we get to take for granted, and as a result, aren't really aware of. Girls trying to figure out what they want, out of the set of options that they think are viable/promising, don't have this benefit, and needlessly self-select themselves out.

Really? Downvoted? I'd love to know what for. Is what I'm saying making people angry?

anamax2• 16 years ago

> There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can make it in technology.

What, exactly, are these older men doing such that younger men can benefit and younger women can not?

If your response is "they're men", that's not something that they're doing. That's something that the younger women are doing, or rather, not doing, namely thinking that the gender of X matters in "X is doing Y, so I can do it too" when it doesn't.

bdr4• 16 years ago

What does this borderline-sexist generalization even mean?

Are you asking rhetorically? It means "the average woman would want more experience in a field before starting a business in that field than the average man would." I'm not saying I agree, but why not address it on whether it's true or not than with borderline-namecalling?

petercooper5• 16 years ago

Ah, but it didn't mention men. It was making an implicit point that's hard to attack. Either way, if it /were/ making the point you bring up, it's crude for the writer to imply that men prefer being naive and inexperienced when starting a business.

liedra4• 16 years ago

I'm a woman and these sorts of things bug me. OK, so there aren't enough women in tech. Perhaps that's because they just don't want to be in tech! Sure I've had my share of "oh, well, there's no way you'd be good/no way you know what you're talking about because you're a woman" or similar sexist attitudes, but I don't want to work for those sorts of people anyway.

IMO if you want to be in tech, you'll find a way to do what you want to do. People (all people! not just women!) who are motivated to do something will do what's necessary to achieve it. Sure it's nice to have another woman to chat to occasionally when you run into sexist jerks, but otherwise I get on just fine with people of any gender because I'm confident and know my stuff, work hard, and am pretty laid back. Probably helps that I grew up with the net a bit though (I'm almost 30) so am no longer horrified by gutter humour or swear words, or other "unladylike" things.

hazzen• 16 years ago

In my 3 years of TAing undergrad computer science intro classes, I am going to say you are wrong. The number of incredibly smart, gifted women who believed they were failing the course despite having some of the best scores was staggering. Many of them simply believed they were not good enough to compete with the loud-mouthed egotistical dicks in the class. They had no role models and no belief that they were good enough to compete with the guys who had been using computers since they were five.

I am not saying this is a problem for all women or that it only affects women, but it is still a problem that needs to be solved. Role models help, encouragement helps, and having someone around to convince these students they aren't stupid helps. I would rather more women get into TAing intro classes than this program, but take what you can get.

liedra4• 16 years ago

Wow, that's really sad. :( Maybe it was the lack of loud-mouthed dicks in my courses, but all the women I met in my compsci degree who were doing well actually really enjoyed it and, well, did well. (Or perhaps it's how our courses were set up; there wasn't much opportunity for people to be dicks).

I will admit, it can be quite intimidating as a woman to, say, start going to things like Linux Users Groups though; back when I first joined my local one (late 90s, early 2000s?) there were a lot of... intimidating people there. But there were also a number of women, and a few friends of mine also there, which was good for that moral support. But then again, these people are loud mouthed egotistical dicks to everyone that has an opposing view to them, usually, not just women (e.g. if they use emacs and you use vim, be prepared!).

In these very charged environments it only really came up a couple of times: one of these that happened to me was one of the main examples used in the "women in linux howto" (which I'm not a fan of actually, because I think it causes a bit of a negative feedback loop), and was dealt with very well by both male and female members of the group. Curiously, due to that howto, I still get email from concerned guys hoping that I haven't been turned off LUGs for the rest of my life!

I definitely think it's a great idea to have more women in tech, especially education, but I think that they need to feel like they have a passion for it. And all the incentives, etc. make for a bit of a bad taste in the mouth w.r.t. that :)

bdr4• 16 years ago

Saying "people who are motivated to do something will do what's necessary to achieve it" presents a false dichotomy. I learned the magnitude of this mistake from building websites. Adding just one more step to a sign-up process can greatly reduce the number of signupse. That means there are people who were "motivated" to sign up, but gave up. Maybe sexism or lack of role models are like those extra steps.

liedra4• 16 years ago

Yeah, you're right, I wasn't really expressing myself very well I think, which will teach me to start typing before my first coffee of the day :)

I actually think a lot of the problem is the culturally linked gender roles that society pushes on kids from an early age. The "girls play with dolls, boys play with cars" type stuff. I was always a tomboy and hated dolls, I was far more interested in cars and planes and Lego than more girly toys (though when peer pressure started to become a part of my life I felt left out without Barbies and things).

The point being, at my academically-selective girls high school, we had only a tiny computer room (and not much done in there), no metalwork or woodwork or anything like that classes, but lots of sewing and cooking as our "design and technology" part. Us girls weren't really encouraged to use computers much, the only thing that really got me into it was my dad, who was (and still is) an oldskool computer nerd. I'm sure if we'd had more opportunities to do more with computing there would have been more women going into computer-related degrees at university, for example. But these distinctions are things that need to be addressed well before the getting-to-uni part.

I just get the distinct impression that to get more women into these sorts of areas they need to be more exposed to them from an earlier age, so it's part of their normal expectations about what they can do with their life, much like becoming a doctor or a lawyer is these days, when in the past these were most definitely male dominated areas.

XX Combinator

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