For Stanford Class of '94, a Gender Gap More Powerful Than the Internet

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/100000003252545.app.html

by hemancuso • 12 years ago

71 48 12 years ago

kenjackson• 12 years ago

Very good article. I must admit, the more I read about Thiel, the less I like him.

It's unclear to me why they think that SV is more meritocratic than anything else. Sports still seems much more meritocratic than SV. Any industry that depends so much on getting funding hardly seems like it would be especially meritocratic -- at least at first blush.

thoman23• 12 years ago

The more I read about Thiel, the more I wonder how someone so smart can be so dumb.

eli_gottlieb4• 12 years ago

Most people don't question views that justify their wealth.

melipone• 12 years ago

Is that him who wants students to drop out of college? And he went to Stanford ... What a hypocrite!

lectrick• 12 years ago

The more I read words by people who have read about Thiel, the more I wonder how armchair critics without much achievement on their resume can expend so much hater energy. Since when was success only deserved by those who could do, or think, no wrong?

rayiner• 12 years ago

Whenever you call something "meritocratic" it's almost always a circular definition. How do you define "merit" in Silicon Valley and how do you know the "most meritorious" are the ones winning? If you don't have an independent objective measure of "merit" other than "success in Silicon Vallay" your assertion is merely tautological.

rodgerd2• 12 years ago

I'd agree, although refine your criticism further: it's not so much a tautology as that "success in SV" selects for "people who appeal to VCs" which may or may not have anything to do with any other forms of merit (like the intelligence or technical merit people love to claim as being the underpinnings of "meritocracy".

ulfw• 12 years ago

The ones who 'sell' the best and who have the most connections and resources get ahead in today's Silicon Valley. It's as simple as that. Nothing 'meritocratic' about that.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/12/the-meritocr...

escherize• 12 years ago

Unless you define merit as selling.

michaelochurch5• 12 years ago

It's the 5th Paper Belt hub: the financial center of technology. Silicon Valley itself is dying, but Stanford is going to remain a top university, so it'll generate the MDs and VPs of this new increasingly IB-like industry, and tradition is strong, so San Francisco has at least 50 years (in my estimation) at the lead of the finance-of-technology business. It'll also house a lot of management consultants specializing in outsourcing, an industry that's not going to go away until labor arbitrages disappear (at least 30 years).

As for where technology itself will "go" next, I have no earthly idea. But you're right that in 2014, the Valley is a salesman's world. If you can raise funding, the balance of power between tech talent and fundraising has never been better for you.

michaelochurch5• 12 years ago

I'm inclined to agree but, honestly, Peter Thiel is one of the better and more thoughtful ones within that set. Closed networks like "the Paypal Mafia" are really, really bad for the world and Thiel is at least showing some interest in looking outside of it. In general, I think he's less elitist than most of them are.

One thing to remember about Silicon Valley is that it's still suburban California. It's fucking provincial. It has orders of magnitude more money (and the house prices reflect it) but it's even more like that "Agrestic" suburb in Weeds than anything in contemporary Southern California.

I still remember, in the 1990s, Northern California thought of itself as "the Good California" because it wasn't the norm for 16-year-old boys to get Ferraris and 16-year-old girls to get boob jobs as birthday presents. In 2014, any perception that Northern California is culturally better in any way is false. Silicon Valley is a lot more brash than Hollywood is. I actually like most Southern Californians that I meet.

I'm finding, as I get older, that West Coast privilege is more irksome and obnoxious to me than the East Coast variety. Most Harvard and Yale grads are down to earth and, to be honest, most Stanford graduate (except MBA, which is sociologically Undergrad++) students that I meet, I like... but this Stanford Welfare that produces Snapchats and Clinkles has got to fucking stop before it brings humiliation to the very idea of technology and sets us back 25 years. As I get older I hate the hypocritical pseudo-liberal privilege of tech more than the stuffy, blue-blooded East Coast variety. People are surprised by this, but those supposedly stodgy and "conservative" investment banks are far better places to be a woman, or minority, or just over 40, than VC-funded tech in the Valley. Silicon Valley is just a depressingly dysfunctional society and, over time, I think people are catching on to the fact and are starting to say, "I don't want anything to do with that shit". That's a real problem, because there are a lot of people doing great work (inside and outside of Silicon Valley) in technology, and I'd hate for their efforts to be hindered or set back by these stupid distractions coming from a few bad Stanford apples.

monksy2• 12 years ago

Have you been on the east coast very much. For a lot of it. It's dog eat dog. The attitude in DC is "your car is worth less than my deductable." There is a reason for the term Massholes, it's not even contested. NYC is priced out because of the finance sector, geography, and the fact that there are too many people there.

I'm not trying to take away from your critcisms of the west coast. But claiming that the Ivy league universities are more humble on the east coast is just blatantly incorrect. It's a status token. Prestige is a big deal.

Personally, I found that Chicago tends to be more blue collar. They bring in a lot of the homeliness of the Midwest. It also connects transport, infrastructure, and manufacturing.

The more I read about Peter Thiel the more I see him as incredibly smart and incredibly anti-competitive. He is open to admitting to it, but it's not a healthy business strategy to do that. (As how we've seen Redhat and others succeeded with an open business)

eli_gottlieb4• 12 years ago

those supposedly stodgy and "conservative" investment banks are far better places to be a woman, or minority, or just over 40, than VC-funded tech in the Valley.

Numbers, please.

brighteyes2• 12 years ago

It's unclear to me why they think that SV is more meritocratic than anything else. Sports still seems much more meritocratic than SV. Any industry that depends so much on getting funding hardly seems like it would be especially meritocratic -- at least at first blush.

Fair point. Sports may indeed be fairer and more objective than other industries - results are easily measured, and are objective. And it's clear that the tech industry is far from perfect. However, tech does have several things that make it fairer than other industries:

* You don't need a degree to get into tech. Sure, it can help - the article here is about Stanford, one of the best places to study at - but the industry also has plenty of self-taught people. To at least some extent, talent can rise despite not having e.g. parents that can pay for college.

* The tools you need to self-teach are cheap, and getting cheaper. Personal computers are common these days. For comparison, some sports require almost no tools, but some do (e.g. skiing). Music is similar (some instruments are cheap, others not so much). But most careers don't work that way. You can't be a self-taught lawyer or doctor or soldier or social worker.

* Talent has the opportunity to present itself in an abstract way. You can create an anonymous github account and prove your skills, and no one would know any demographic information about you. Something similar has happened in classical music, with people performing behind curtains so as to remove any bias due to their gender or race, and it was very helpful there. For comparison, sports doesn't work that way - you have to see people when they compete, so racial prejudice etc. might still have an impact. In tech and classical music, while things aren't perfect, there is a fairly natural way to diminish such effects, simply let people only see the abstract result of their work.

* Some fields absolutely require a strong mentor, like in academia (perhaps also in sports? I don't know). This disadvantages people that have a hard time finding such mentors, either due to prejudice on the part of potential mentors, or just a lack of connections, or weak social skills. In tech, some people benefit from mentors, but there are also lots of examples of people that have never had a mentor and do very well.

* Telecommuting is much more common in tech than other fields, even if it isn't ubiquitous there. We have the technical capability to let people work from home in tech, in most roles, and it makes things fairer in many ways.

* You make a valid point that industries that depend on getting funding are less fair than others, all things being equal. However, tech has been driving down the amount of necessary funding, through open source software, things like AWS, etc.

Again, tech is far from perfect, and has many flaws. Still, it's worth mentioning the good aspects.

michaelochurch5• 12 years ago

There's some truth in what you're saying, and I don't entirely disagree, but here are where I see you being overly optimistic on the matter of SV's meritocracy.

You don't need a degree to get into tech.

As soon as the market draws back, the non-BA programmers are going to be shut out (and most will have to go to school). I wish it weren't that way, but that seems to be how these things work. The more pedigreed you are, the less you fall.

That said, a bit of blue-collar street smarts can also serve you well. The people who really take a dive are the middle-class earnest types who aren't high enough on the socioeconomic spectrum to be protected, but were never low enough to learn how brutal the world can be when resources are scarce and contracting.

Talent has the opportunity to present itself in an abstract way. You can create an anonymous github account and prove your skills, and no one would know any demographic information about you.

You can get an engineer position, but you won't become a founder that way. There are no blind auditions to raise VC.

In tech, some people benefit from mentors, but there are also lots of examples of people that have never had a mentor and do very well.

What would you call the guy who offers the first introduction to the first investor?

foobarqux2• 12 years ago

Unless you include genetic pre-disposition as meritous athletics is probably one of the most anti-meritocratic fields.

sheensleeves• 12 years ago

A claim from a blogger on these issues: performance enhancing drugs in athletics widen the gap between the genetically gifted and the less so. Seems reasonable, but not intuitive.

rgoberstein• 12 years ago

Of course physical genetics give many athletes an advantage, but any athlete will tell you that training - both mental and physical - are the only things that will make an athlete or team win and can frequently make up for predisposed characteristics that may be disadvantageous (shorter stature, smaller frame, etc). As far as meritocratic environments go, sports is certainly among the top.

botman• 12 years ago

Front page of NYT? Must be a slow news day... Interesting collection of stories, though.

ameister14• 12 years ago

That title is a bit misleading.

I read this yesterday; it's pretty jumbled. It's an article that jumps around a bit describing how a couple of the people from the Stanford Class of '94, specifically David Sacks and Jessica DiLullo Herrin, made a lot of money using the internet.

It doesn't really get into the reasons there are fewer female than male entrepreneurs from that class, at least not with any depth, and then it concludes by saying that people from that class are getting into internet startups now.

pjbrunet• 12 years ago

I agree, it wanders all over the place like they had to meet a quota of words. I don't think the article really communicates what it was like for the "computer nerds" off in a weird, unproven, tiny little corner of the world nobody cared about or believed in. I think if you explore that, you'll start to understand why women weren't as much a part of that weird subculture. It wasn't all bad, I worked closely with women at IBM in 1994 (working on OS/2) that was also the year WIRED started to go mainstream. TV ads started to show URLs. Java went mainstream in 1994. But before 1994, almost nobody knew what the Internet was. Once the Internet went mainstream, people already familiar with the technology had a huge advantage: nerds.

In 1994 when I was at the University of Florida, only one dorm on the entire campus had "Internet" access. But it wasn't web access, we only had telnet. The moldy dorm was 100+ years old and barely had air conditioning. They called it "Fletcher Island" because we were cut off from everyone else--there was maybe 6 of us guys on the whole campus that had Internet. And there was only one guy that knew how it worked--he never spoke, was very pale, and he lived like a hermit back in the dark corner of this ancient building. The air quality was so bad that I got sick and had to move out. Maybe 2-3 women lived under us but we never saw them because the hallways were locked to keep the sexes apart.

colmvp• 12 years ago

Why do articles like this always divide it by gender and never combine gender and race? There are more Asian women featured in this article and probably included in the class than black (and potentially hispanic) men, despite the fact that the population of black men is and was in 1994 larger than Asian women.

learc832• 12 years ago

I've always wondered why the tech industry is so obsessed with the gender gap and yet almost completely ignores the race gap.

Is the gender gap really a bigger problem, or is it because men in tech think they are more likely to socially benefit from championing gender equality?

rhino369• 12 years ago

The racial gap is present in almost all faucets of American life. That suggests a society wide issue.

The gender gap is fairly unique to the tech industry and it is pretty extreme. My graduating class at Illinois for EE was 95% male.

MilnerRoute• 12 years ago

How exactly are they measuring this "gender gap"? At one point it seemed their argument was that female graduates didn't found as many companies as male graduates. (Though it seems like there could be a lot of different explanations for that.) The quote about how women "played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses" comes from the founder of a web site for female writers, which made me wonder if it was more advocacy than analysis.

I am concerned about the role of women in Silicon Valley, so it was nice to see that the Times' reporter notes that few women "described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley." It would've been nice if this article had more statistics about what specifically happened to the class of '94

facepalm3• 12 years ago

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with more men than women being into computing? They cite examples of women who were in computing dropping out. But surely lots of men dropped out, too. But the women made more news. And since there were more men, more remained to go on and get rich on the internet. It's just bad, bad science. Please apply some proper statistics instead of stirring up emotions with anecdotes.

minikites• 12 years ago

So take that thought one level deeper: why are proportionally fewer women entering computing and proportionally more of them dropping out?

facepalm3• 12 years ago

I knew this would come up. You probably think because computers weren't marketed to women? What if electronics companies only marketed to men because it was mostly men who were into electronics? Then rinse, repeat, why were fewer women interested in electronics, and so on...

I don't have all the answers, but one answer is: because the women were doing other things. There seems to be this idea that women who don't go into engineering become "desperate housewives". In reality they become physicians or bankers or lawyers. The article actually mentions that.

The reality is that computing is a pretty anti-social activity. Yes, there are meetings and clients, but your main job is being glued to a computer screen, alone. Frankly, I don't think it is a recipe for happiness, and women are smart enough to recognize it. Also, women have more options - a major one becoming mothers. So less incentive to try hard, maybe? Even the article mentions that the famous female entrepreneur eventually dropped out to become a mother. Although of course in the next sentence they have to reframe it as "went to Austin for her husband's job" instead of "to become a mother". Can't have that.

I recently met a young woman who was torn between studying mathematics or becoming a social worker. I did not try to stir her towards maths, even though I myself have a maths degree. What argument could I have used, except the prospect of higher income? Frankly I think social workers are probably happier than mathematicians on average.

vpetrie• 12 years ago

Too much hype. What this article does not mention is that all of these people are now in the sunset of their careers. Even the ones that achieved a lot are already declining from their peaks. I'm much more interested in what the class of 2015 is going to do.

eli_gottlieb4• 12 years ago

Age 42 is the sunset of their careers? Really?

petegrif• 12 years ago

Heard her talking about this piece on NPR. Unimpressive.

parennoob• 12 years ago

I always find it quite indicative of American attitudes that this article took "number of companies founded" as a metric of success, and ham-fistedly conclude that the men are "ruling".

Why not take "happiness with current quality of life" as one? Incorporate that into your survey, and see how many men and women report back as being satisfied and happy with their lives.

dang• 12 years ago

Discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8784926.

For Stanford Class of '94, a Gender Gap More Powerful Than the Internet

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