Ambient Un-Belonging: Women and Tech Startups

http://www.audreywatters.com/2010/09/05/ambient-un-belonging-women-and-tech-startups

by deanerimerman • 16 years ago

20 37 16 years ago

Audrey's got a great summary of all the clarification / untangling of Arrington's mess...

kiba3• 16 years ago

We cannot and will not eliminate all gender inequality, and some inequality does not alway favors men. (A good example of this is that no matter how accomplished or rich a man is, he will probably be asked to laid down his life for children and women. That's not discrimination, but grim pragmatism.)

Some disparity will alway boil down to choices. If women take maternity needs, than she will expect to be behind her peers when she come back.

As much as I like awesome hacker females to live in my world, some women...for whatever reason choose other professions instead. I'll respect that choice, not try to convince them that they work on tech for the sake of getting 50% gender balance.

erikpukinskis• 16 years ago

One of the most heartbreaking things smart men do in response to accusations of sexism is to focus on the rare exceptions to women's oppression while failing to even acknowledge the rampant examples of it.

Men. Are. Victims. Too. But a conversation about women's oppression is not an appropriate context to explore it. It makes us feel like you don't believe women's oppression is a problem.

philwelch7• 16 years ago

And now I finally remember why I stopped arguing with feminists.

Unlike reasonable discussions, where you make a point and the other person points out the flaws in your reasoning, or presents evidence for a counterpoint, or something like that, arguing with feminists always ends up with the feminists expressing their emotions and trying to rule certain arguments "out of bounds", not because the arguments are flawed or invalid, but because they make feminists feel "heartbroken".

kiba3• 16 years ago

All I am pointing out is the inequality of gender cannot be entirely eliminated nor can it alway be blamed on women or men. Women are not men and men are not women.

Men's role as expendable defender is not a role hoisted by women, but rather through evolution. The oppressor, if any, is nature for making us that way. In that sense, men cannot blame women.

It also work in the opposite direction, there are things that women probably should not do when she is having a baby.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

>A good example of this is that no matter how accomplished or rich a man is, he will probably be asked to laid down his life for children and women. That's not discrimination, but grim pragmatism

Once upon a time that was true - but since everybody is supposed to be equal now, you can bet that I am not going to do that. And I don't think that many men are doing that either.

kiba3• 16 years ago

It still a biological fact that men are expendable. Men have enough sperms to probably make lot of women pregnant, but women can only bear children 9 months at a time and be pretty vulnerable at that.

When it come to ensuring the survival of human race, you know what the commander/leader/whoever in charge, male or female, is going to choose.

Does it sucks to be a male too? Yep, but it also rock to be a male sometime too.

patio113• 16 years ago

To the limited extent I agree with the critique, it seems exploiting it is a better resolution than writing about it. I tend to think the tech industry disproportionately ignores female customers, for example. That means writing for them is like shaking a money tree.

If one really believes there is a vast untapped well of ladies who want to code XML files for poor wages for 14 hours a day, identifying and hiring them yourself sounds like a sure fire path to millions.

petercooper3• 16 years ago

I tend to think the tech industry disproportionately ignores female customers, for example.

You won't believe the number of times I've heard Ben Affleck's "don't pitch the bitch" line from The Boiler Room presented as a serious maxim of doing business.

patio113• 16 years ago

That line, which I've never heard before, richly earns a bozo bit. [Edit: This idiom means "marks the speaker as an intellectually and/or morally unserious person who is not worth effort to speak to."]

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

It doesn't really seem to me like many of these rebuttals actually read Arrington's article; they're just angry in general about the state of women in tech. Arrington very specifically said that by the time it got to him and TC50 or whatever, it's too late. All this railing about "male privilege" and "ambient un-belonging" is pretty much tangential to what he said.

anthonyb8• 16 years ago

Arrington's article is a big old whitewash as far as I can tell. On the one hand he's saying "I don't know why women aren't in IT, stop blaming me" but then on the other hand his comments are full of vitriol. Everyone who's commented expressing a differing opinion has been "flagged for review", meanwhile shit like this: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/women-in-tech-stop-blaming-... goes unchecked.

Which is the point of this article: The tech world is a very unwelcoming place if you're an outsider (and sometimes even when you're an insider, which Michelle Greer apparently is).

anthonyb8• 16 years ago

Nice downvote - want to back it up with some argument?

danilocampos2• 16 years ago

I'm really uncomfortable with how other men deal with the subject of women in tech.

More than once, I've noticed developers who are women derided as less competent, less capable than their male peers. Their professional success is ascribed to their appearance, their male bed partners, or some other such male-invented loophole. One of these conversations happened just the other day where I work. The really disturbing bonus is how suddenly "bitch" becomes a synonym for "woman."

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I can't claim to understand a cause or a solution. My mom was a single mother who started her own business to keep me fed and clothed, so I maybe I'm immune to this business of discounting the capacities of half the population with no more information about them than their anatomy.

I only know it makes me sad.

edit: Initially terrified that this got voted into the negatives. Thanks for restoring my faith in you, HN.

earl2• 16 years ago

I haven't heard anything like that, and I work in a company with female developers. Further, I have no doubt that it wouldn't be tolerated by any of my friends at the company, and would be a firing offense.

No company name because some commenters here are jackasses and anything I say is representative of my employer :rolleyes: Nonetheless, we're a startup in SOMA you've probably heard of.

edit -- Perhaps you should sack up and tell people you're uncomfortable with them talking about your coworkers / women in such a manner? Much like racism, sexism is aided by ambient acceptance of such stuff. Like, for example, when people hear sexist comments and are quiet about it. It's not necessarily easy to do, but the right thing isn't always easy.

danilocampos2• 16 years ago

No female developers where I work, so that could be part of it. This conversation wasn't about anyone at the company.

And you're completely right, of course. I, honestly, was too shocked to react. I mean, flabbergasted. It's so... antiquated, like finding out someone resents the Union for that whole abolition thing.

In the days since, I feel bad not to have spoken up.

petercooper3• 16 years ago

Even though the topic of women in tech rarely gets mentioned on Hacker News, it's encouraging that when it does the discussion comes to a consensus that really pushes things forward.

philwelch7• 16 years ago

I'm unconvinced. This blog post just seems like a lot of emoting and handwaving and contradiction with a light glazing of feminist theory on top, with no real counterargument or refutation to be found. I'm reminded of two quotes:

"M: An argument isn't just contradiction.

A: It can be.

M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.

A: No it isn't.

...

M: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.

A: No it isn't" --from Monty Python's argument sketch

"DH3. Contradiction.

In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than how or by whom. The lowest form of response to an argument is simply to state the opposing case, with little or no supporting evidence.

This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in:

I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion. Intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory.

Contradiction can sometimes have some weight. Sometimes merely seeing the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to see that it's right. But usually evidence will help." (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html)

gukjoon• 16 years ago

Why is it un-PC to acknowledge that there are fundamental differences between men and women in terms of both innate talents and, more importantly, motivations? Differences that would lead to huge demographic disparities in incredibly niche fields like software engineering and starting technology companies?

Mike Arrington says flat out that the reason why there aren't enough women in tech is because "not enough women want to become entrepreneurs." It's a question of motivation. This statement is easily falsifiable and I don't think any of the responses make even a meager attempt to do that.

Is there a disproportionately higher number of women-lead start-ups applying for venture funding and then not getting it? Since this is a question of motivation, even showing that a significantly higher percentage of women-lead start-ups fail would suggest that Mike Arrington is wrong.

earl2• 16 years ago

Except I keep meeting female engineers (including several coworkers) who are all foreign -- chinese, indian, british, E European. So it's not unreasonable to infer that culture - specifically American domestic culture - is a big piece of the puzzle.

patio113• 16 years ago

I know more Japanese female engineers at one office in Nagoya than I have met in my life in the US. Some of that might be cultural: Japanese girls, to all appearances, don't dislike math. A lot of it is related to other options: tech is seen as a "progressive" industry to work in, where the Old Guard isn't going to squash your face in. (Relatedly, translation/interpretation is almost female only.)

Punting on the cultural issue for a minute, is tech really the best option available to an academically prepared American lady? Compared to, say, management consulting, or law, or medicine, or... ? We have good lives as programmers, don't get me wrong, but for startup hours you could work for McKinsey and make six figures from day one with no uncertainty about exits required.

ahoyhere• 16 years ago

There are LOTS of women entrepreneurs in the US. Arrington is full of you-know-what, as usual. However, there aren't a lot of women in the "slave for a couple years, hope to grow big and get bought" arena... which, imo, isn't unreasonable.

nitrogen• 16 years ago

I found this article lacking in concrete suggestions. What can be done to improve the situation? Should we paint the walls of CS classrooms pink? Hire female architects to design the engineering buildings on university campuses?

Maybe one of the reasons for the gender disparity in software engineering in particular is that it revolves around logical analysis and direct steps from problem to resolution, while women are (stereotypically) more adept at emotional reasoning than logical reasoning. If so, what, if anything should be done to correct this?

dgordon• 16 years ago

I knew this would be more complaining about "privilege" when I saw the two gratuitous uses of "fucking" in the first paragraph. I see the two together all the time.

blacksmythe• 16 years ago

I would like to see more women in tech, partly because I don't want to work all day in a mens-only club.

I hope all of us would agree that it is wrong to judge people on their gender. I think the reason a lot of women have a very negative response to the original post is that the women responding feel like they don't get equal treatment at work.

I think that articles that seem critical of women for not achieving more in the tech field are counterproductive to promoting a good working environment.

I would like to see more men come out and say that publishing blogs that make women feel unwelcome in the tech field is wrong.

Ambient Un-Belonging: Women and Tech Startups

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