What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/06/what-silicon-valley-thinks-women-302821.html

by Alex3917 • 11 years ago

114 225 11 years ago

newsweek.com

dang2• 11 years ago

This post was briefly flag-killed by users. (That's what "[flagkilled]" means on a post.) We've unkilled it, obviously.

jennita• 11 years ago

Thanks for fixing that.

owenwil• 11 years ago

Thanks!

Alex39173• 11 years ago

It's pretty obvious why it was flag-killed, and not entirely unfair. But the reason I submitted this is that if you can get beyond the sensationsalist clickbaity sections then there are actually some good insights, and I think there is value in knowing how people who consider themselves to be outsiders perceive the world in general.

SeoxyS• 11 years ago

Curious, why the resurrection?

Personally, I found the post distasteful, though not enough so to merit a flag. I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright. I think that does the women in our industry a disservice and exacerbates the problem.

smtddr• 11 years ago

>I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright.

This only happens because the problem is constantly ignored. Personally, it's clear to me that nearly every single time anyone tries to talk about *ism in tech it degrades into a meltdown of horrible and/or needlessly pedantic comments. So much so that the actual problem never gets addressed. No choice but to try again and again; focusing harder and harder on examples. I do notice though, over a wide enough range of time, the conversations do very slowly inch towards maturity. And just think, if not even HN can handle the topic... what hope is there for anywhere else? Seriously, if anyone knows of another online community of mature discussion comparable to HN I'd like to know. Right now, HN seems to be in a class of its own in regards to quality of comments.

laurenkay• 11 years ago

Thanks for unkilling, but it's pretty ironic that a piece about Silicon Valley being a boys' club was flag-killed. With HN's prominence in SV, I really wish this were a progressive enough community to at least acknowledge the existence of sexism, and realize why articles like these continue to get written. Getting past the clickbaity photo that was used (we can save journalistic ethics for another night), this was a relevant profile of one type of startup that isn't well understood by SV. I'm glad the moderators viewed it as worth saving, but I really wish this community didn't need babysitting when it comes to discussions on sexism.

_tlf73• 11 years ago

thanks so much lauren!! Appreciate you standing up for us - we were really upset this was taken off hacker news considering how deeply involved we are with this community.

jdp23• 11 years ago

Ironic but not particularly surprising. It's almost like there are a bunch of guys here who don't like discussions of sexism.

akamaka• 11 years ago

I wish you hadn't unkilled it, because I ended up clicking on it.

I stopped reading and flagged the article after getting to this part: There is, though, one thing these two founders are missing, and it is almost the sine qua non of the fabled Silicon Valley startup. They don’t have penises.

This is trashy writing and flamebait, and I don't want to see in on HN. There is a vast library of quality literature on gender issues out there, and I think it's fair for us to reject articles that cannot rise above vulgarity.

empressplay2• 11 years ago

Thank you for unkilling it. It might be mildly controversial but so are many stories that get posted on HN. It was unfair of people to use the spam-flagging mechanism to try to dispose of it. If they have an objection, they can make an argument in the comments. Thanks again.

_tlf73• 11 years ago

Hey this is [redacted] from the article. We are a part of this community - on hacker news every day - was sad to learn this has been flagged so much. This isn't an us vs them - we're all in this together. Hope by sharing our startup story more of you who were so offended by the article can see that we're just like you, hacking and hustling on a product we love.

JamesArgo• 11 years ago

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. In that sense, Silicon Valley culture echoes the Wolf of Wall Street culture in the ’80s and ’90s.

Signal the right politics and even this nonsense gets upvoted. Scott Alexander wrote about why differences in outcome in highly technical fields might not imply a vast economically-counterproductive misogynistic conspiracy here:http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...

Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals.

webehere3• 11 years ago

Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals.

I think we should make a T-Shirt of that!

logn3• 11 years ago

I like that article a lot. GRE Quantitative and SAT Math skew heavily toward men. And the SAT covers very basic reasoning skills that would be related to programming aptitude. GRE Quantitative covers topics essential to surviving a CS major.

We should figure out where the educational system is failing women here. And we should also consider a new curriculum focused on programming, because traditional Computer Science isn't necessary for success as a tech worker. I've seen some colleges offer both a BA and a BS in Comp Sci which I think is smart, because in the BA they strip out physics, chemistry, calculus, etc which in my experience cause most CS majors to drop out.

learc837• 11 years ago

What CS degree requires physics and chemistry ?

Also I don't think a degree without calculus can really be called CS. How are you going to understand analysis of algorithms without at least a basic grasp of the concepts of calculus. A person who failed out of calculus definitely wouldn't have survived the rest of my CS program.

I wouldn't advise anyone to do a CS degree with all the math stripped out. Sure you can build CRUD apps all day long without an understanding of math, but you don't need a degree to build CRUD apps.

I think people who are happy doing that kind of work should skip college all together (or get a degree in something other than CS) and learn on their own or maybe do some kind of bootcamp.

wyager3• 11 years ago

We should figure out where the educational system is failing women here.

How does "women do relatively poorly on quantitative tests" imply "the educational system is failing women"? This could be do to any number of factors, many of which having little/nothing to do with the education system.

And, of course, there are more female college students than male college students, so there are other areas where you could just as (in)accurately claim that the education system is failing men! In reality, it's probably (again) due to external factors.

vinceguidry6• 11 years ago

differences in outcome in highly technical fields might not imply a vast economically-counterproductive misogynistic conspiracy

Even if there isn't a misogynistic conspiracy, there's still plenty of bog-standard human herd-behavior sexism telling girls they shouldn't even try to be good at computers because they can't be. It would be a shame if we ignored the latter just because we figured out the former doesn't exist.

Apocryphon2• 11 years ago

On the flipside, our ideals have no obligation to be constrained by reality.

raldi12• 11 years ago

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley.

I agree that parts of the tech world are really horrible, and I think we need to be doing everything we can to make women feel more welcome in our industry (not just for them, but for us), but isn't it at least a little exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley is the main "trench of the global gender war"?

I'd think we'd be ranked after at least a couple of these:

* The construction industry

* The Bible Belt

* The restaurant industry

* West Africa

* The movie industry

* The Vatican

* The sportswriting industry

* The people who make Superbowl ads

* Japan

* The adult entertainment industry

* The Middle East

* Wall Street

* Nepal

* The upper echelons of American politics

Hytosys2• 11 years ago

You aren't wrong that the author probably exaggerated with that sentence, but I think I am not alone in being awfully tired of your conversation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

EDIT: I guess I am alone.

raldi12• 11 years ago

I'm not saying the article should be dismissed; just that I think the author is overplaying her hand a bit in this one particular sentence.

irishcoffee2• 11 years ago

Not alone, just on your own island here.

nl5• 11 years ago

Most of the things you listed are places where women's rights are well behind those of men.

I think those are all places that need to be fixed.

But at the same time it's possible to think of the front line as being the place where the battle to move forward is being fought now, instead of places where little progress has been made.

From that perspective talking of SV as a front line isn't wrong: if women can't be treated equally in the supposedly progressive environment of SV, then other places will be even further behind.

wozniacki2• 11 years ago

  But at the same time it's possible to think of the
  front line as being the place where the battle to move
  forward is being fought now, instead of places where
  little progress has been made.

How is that line of thinking, rational?

So you want people who are already putting up with plenty of progressive dogma to put up with more progressivism, when the rest of those areas that raldi [1] mentioned haven't seen a lick of the same progressivism, impacting their lives in decades?[2]

Dont you think that such unfair pressure solely on the tech world, will only serve to alienate them?

Won't it cause them to dig their heels in?

Is that kind of retrenchment desirable?

In what way does that make any sense?

This is isn't even the first time I've heard this line of fuzzy thought-leadership.

I find it grating when people offer such silly twisted logic to prop up their premises.

When any form of change is imposed on any section of society, at too fast a rate, there will be resistance.

When any form of change is unfairly imposed on ONLY one section of society or in ONLY one geographic region, within the same country, there is bound to be a even greater degree of resistance.

[1] The construction industry, The Bible Belt, The restaurant industry, West Africa, The movie industry, The Vatican, The sportswriting industry, The people who make Superbowl ads, Japan, The adult entertainment industry, The Middle East, Wall Street, Nepal, The upper echelons of American politics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8964102

[2] I'm by no means advocating less than progressive conditions to prevail in any industry or any geographic region. This could be just as well, said of the conservative end of the spectrum. In other words, there are conservative pockets, hell bent on turning their already conservative professions even more rigid and unyielding.

MrDom7• 11 years ago

Name one right men have that women don't have.

Alex39173• 11 years ago

The bible belt isn't exactly eating the world.

We live in a society where more people now aspire to be tech CEOs than pro athletes or rock stars, and tech is one of the main centers of power both politically and economically.

It's easy to dismiss the article because there are a few mischaracterizations and exaggerations. But you need to remember that most people get their information about the tech world from second hand sources, and SV is largely opaque and closed off to the general public.

If you actually read it for what it is rather than just judging the author based on her knowledge of obscure inside-baseball tech scandals then I think there are some valuable points.

parennoob• 11 years ago

We live in a society where more people now aspire to be tech CEOs than pro athletes or rock stars, and tech is one of the main centers of power both politically and economically.

Citation? I would say this is a huge assumption, presumably backed by your anecdotal experiences. To offer an anecdotal counterpoint - from what I have seen of the majority of the college-going American generation, they do aspire to leadership positions in general, but seldom through purely technical means.

raldi12• 11 years ago

Ah, you're saying SV is the front line not because it treats women worse than anyone else in the world, but rather (to use the military analogy) because it's an extremely strategic piece of territory.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

The Bible Belt has a pretty big impact just by its territory and the population within it alone.

I really, really don't think the broader population is anywhere near as enthusiastic about startup culture (which is probably what you mean by "aspire to be tech CEOs") as you think it is.

As for technology being a main center of power, that is correct. But probably not in the idealistic way you're thinking of, regarding entrepreneurship and "disruptions" or anything like that. The fruits of their labor may be used indirectly, but it's primarily closed-room contract work and military defense that is used to exert political power, not that trendy startup or open source project.

dropit_sphere• 11 years ago

Wars are only fought where at least one side thinks they can win. SV is the front line because it is more egalitarian than those arenas you mention.

s_baby2• 11 years ago

Also "winning" the right to working in a coal mine or laying roofing wouldn't really be a victory after all compared to SV. These people want the upside of being a male without the risk that it carries. Yea some of us get to play this game in SV. What about the vast majority of us that have to work a shit job to support our family? Giving one gender privileged access to industries like SV while simultaneously sheltering them from industries like the coal mining industry would also be a horrible form of marginalization.

vinceguidry6• 11 years ago

That's my thinking as well. I've read up a bit on feminism, the picture I get is of a movement that's trying really really hard to get people to take them seriously. They've chosen tech as the battleground for precisely that reason. Personally, I think it's great. I like seeing my compatriots forced to confront sexism.

If you think sexism is bad in technology, you should see it everywhere else. The gender gap has gotten a bit better in the last twenty years or so, but traditionally male occupations are still overwhelmingly male, and likewise for female occupations. And salary gaps where you do find men and women working together are just abominable.

Sexism is one of those things you just kind of ignore until you really start looking, then once you do you see it literally every fucking where. And it's utterly depressing. We like to think that because we gave the vote to black people and women that we're enlightened.

rajacombinator• 11 years ago

Out of curiosity why did Nepal make its way on to your list?

raldi12• 11 years ago

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Nepal#Women.E...

falcolas• 11 years ago

OK. Maybe I don't get this, but doesn't framing this as a "war" make the situation even worse? Isn't viewing the opposite gender as "enemy combatants" a really terrible thing to do?

I would think that women face enough challenges in their workplace without being viewed by their coworkers as being hostile and out for their livelihoods.

Maybe I have this all wrong, but this seems that "news" pieces like this do not help anybody but the media (though perhaps it makes those on either side of the gender divide who already view the others as enemy combatants feel validated).

saraid2165• 11 years ago

Isn't viewing the opposite gender as "enemy combatants" a really terrible thing to do?

Except that's not what's happening. The war is between the ideology that genders are equal and the ideology that genders are not equal.

Framing it the way you have is a standard tactic employed by people who are entirely aware they are at war and have set up feminists as enemy combatants already.

joshAg5• 11 years ago

You misunderstand the enemy. The enemy isn't the other sex. The enemy is the culture itself that reinforces and perpetuates traditionalist gender roles.

In short, the enemy is the patriarchy, and if you think for a minute that that only negatively affects girls and women, well, then you've never been a shy nerd asking out that cute girl from your math class who's also a cheerleader. Spoiler alert, P(that goes well) < 0.01.

michaelochurch2• 11 years ago

Wall Street is much less sexist than Silicon Valley. I've been there. I know. Yes, there are some young men on Wall Street who act boorish, drunkenly hit on women, and generally cause a great deal of discomfort for those around them. They don't get promoted. They aren't trusted. They'll eventually get fired if they keep that shit up. In the Valley, they do get promoted. Misbehavior actually makes a young man more attractive to the VCs, deep in the throes of midlife crisis. That makes the difference. In one place, it's discouraged and relatively uncommon. In the other, it's rampant.

The amount of impropriety that you see in the VC darlings is off-the-charts. I worked (briefly) at an ed-tech where the married executives openly flirted with female subordinates (and one was fired for refusing advances). You'd never see that shit in finance, these days. That era ended when the people raising VC now were in diapers.

I would guess that "the upper echelons of American politics" are also less sexist than Silicon Valley, given that there are women succeeding in US politics, but wouldn't know from direct experience.

raldi12• 11 years ago

I've spent a fair amount of time working for Wall Street and the broader NYC financial industry as well, and got a quite different impression. And I'm not the only one. Examples: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/07/03/goldman_sach... http://gawker.com/5979679/id-do-her-a-brief-history-of-micha...

BTW, who's the Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, or Marissa Mayer of Wall Street?

geofft14• 11 years ago

I don't see active fights over the gender war happening in those fronts. It's certainly true that those aren't territories that we control firmly, but it's also not territory that we're disputing very hard. Gender is what it is in the Bible Belt, and most of the pushback is from a younger generation who grew up on the Internet. Gender is what it is in film, but the Bechdel test entered popular consciousness on the Internet. Gender is what it is in the minds of the old advertising firms, but the new ones are often technology companies, their clients are often technology companies, and when you say "Super Bowl ads" and "what they think of women" I can't help but think "GoDaddy". Gender is what it is in the minds of the current elected officials, but Obama's election has been credited, in part, to his ability to use technology more effectively than his opponents (and, therefore, to effective technologists wanting to work for him). Silicon Valley is the trench and the fortification; if it falls, we can then march on the cities.

Now, of course, there's a question as to whether the gender biases of the makers of the Internet impact the gender biases of the things that happen on the Internet. But I think they do. At the least, for fora like Reddit and HN where the platform and editorial direction are linked, it seems obvious that they must. For platforms like Twitter or G+, policies such as harassment response and tradeoffs, whether real names are common or uncommon[0], what speech is considered appropriate or inappropriate, etc. can all impact what voices are heard and who is empowered by the platform.

[0] I don't mean by this to imply that there's a standard feminist answer on whether real-name policies are good or not. There are feminist arguments on both sides.

MrDom7• 11 years ago

but isn't it at least a little exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley is the main "trench of the global gender war"

It's an exaggeration to say there's a gender war at all. It's feminists against the patriarchy. Feminists are real people. What's the patriarchy?

windlep• 11 years ago

Many of the industries/groups you cited don't have nearly as much wealth wrapped up in them. That's what makes the tech one worse, more wealth concentrated with less gender equality than others.

Once you reduce that list to ones with as much wealth as tech, its a pretty dang short list and it'd be interesting at that point to compare gender % in each.

blueMist5• 11 years ago

I am a WIT. an actual, technical woman in tech, annoyed with myself for letting Newsweek basically troll me. I've noticed the MSM has "discovered" SV, and is doing the usual pieces (sexism! drugs! too much money!, etc.). While there are obviously so many problems in SV, they never seem to find any of the many, many, many (shudder! older) technical women at Google, FB, Intel, etc. to talk with. Everything is written through the more attractive, yet limited, prism of "young person asking for money, bad behavior ensues". I will not comment on the hypocrisy of bemoaning the limited access of women to the spotlight while turning to a self-styled male "expert" on WIT - it's easier to do that than track down actual women in SV to interview directly. I didn't feel represented by the article, I thought it was pretty opportunistic and to be honest, I don't think Newsweek cares for the "plight of women in SV", just about trying to become relevant again. And here I am, talking about it, so they were successful in their trolling.

raldi12• 11 years ago

If you don't mind me asking a personal question, I'm rather curious what your exposure to computers (or electronics that you could take apart, toys with gears, etc.) was like when you were a girl (say, ages 6-16).

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

Some day someone will convince me that sexism can be fixed with more sexism. That day has not arrived.

deciplex• 11 years ago

If you know that you will be eventually convinced of it, shouldn't you just short-circuit the process and start believing it now?

epistasis• 11 years ago

This is the same type of sloppy thinking that endorses "if you're so tolerant, why don't you accept my bigotry."

It barely deserves a response, but I would like to point out that it is far more revealing of your ignorance of other people's experience than of any cleverness or wit on your part.

refurb3• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure your response did nothing but attack the author and completely failed to counter the argument. Well done.

greggyb• 11 years ago

Does anyone have a good source for industry-wide ratios that relate to the ones given in the article?

A couple examples:

2.7% of firms funded have female CEOs. How many of firms seeking funding have female CEOs? How many have a female cofounder rather than just looking at the CEO position?

80% of female founders used personal savings as their primary source of funding (it sounds like this is for the seed phase, but unclear in the article?). What is the industry-wide percentage?

Female founded firms do 31% better on average (in an industry where average = a failed company what does this mean?). Is the sample size (which the article makes sure to tell us is far too small on a moral basis) large enough to make this statistically significant?

Note: I am not trying to undermine the article - I don't have enough knowledge of the industry to say much. I am honestly looking for context for these numbers and wondering if anyone can help.

Kalium14• 11 years ago

As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to contextualize them. For instance, you'll get a statistic about what percentage of funded startups have a woman co-founder but no information about what percentage of startups considered have a woman co-founder.

shard972• 11 years ago

As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to contextualize them.

So the rule is to gimp data in order to fool people into believing things that may not be true?

kordless• 11 years ago

If you want to think forward about solving the challenges women face here, companies would do well to start taking a hard look in the mirror about how much they pay operations staff.

Operations keeps the company humming along while it's simultaneously trying to fly off the rails of the rocket sled that is a startup. Unfortunately, a large quantity of dicks (literally) in SV think that operations positions are cookie cutter and can be filled by anyone hungry for a job. I can assure you from first hand experience that's not the case, and have seen many a company encounter additional struggles because they lacked (or lost) the operations support to keep the team together in hard times.

Operation's positions are primarily filled by women. Women who work their asses off to keep the rest of the company fed when they are in crunch time. Women who ensure the office is warm, friendly and receptive to creative work. Women who make sure the ADD CEO is where they need to be on time to make deals happen. Women who understand the business better than most of the executives, because that's what's required to be good at helping the executives to get their shit together and get stuff done.

And, sadly, these women doing operations are paid a fraction of what men are in other equally critical roles. Personally, I think it's time to fix this discrepancy.

(Literally downvoted 2 minutes into posting this. Nice.)

Kalium14• 11 years ago

Is it as hard to find a suitable operations person as it is a suitable engineer?

hkmurakami• 11 years ago

I'm genuinely curious -- does the women in tech movement advocate for improvements in the treatment of such operational staff (HR, admin, etc.) or is the narrative mostly limited to engineering (and maybe including product and marketing)?

Kalium14• 11 years ago

That will vary wildly depending on who you ask. A lot of attention and people are focused mainly on engineering, and we probably hear about those the most, but there is certainly a broader spread of attention too.

geofft14• 11 years ago

Yes. Model View Culture, which is as good a sample of tech feminism as any, published this good piece on exactly the subject:

https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-myth-of-the-non-tech...

webehere3• 11 years ago

The problem with all this talk is that the scale is weird.

Silicon Valley is what? LinkedIn, or a 2015 YC summer intake company? At the scale of LinkedIn, maybe this argument is inconsequential in many ways. At the scale of a 2015 YC summer intake company, it is irrelevant.

Where between those two is this argument relevant? Should a growing company desperate for talent spend seed money while unprofitable on "operations staff"? Or should they minimise that pay and try to get great devs? Great sales people?

That's the issue with these kind of sweeping statements - there are so many companies in a labour market, and very few arguments can ever apply to all of them, or even most of them.

jongraehl6• 11 years ago

Is this a joke? Jobs pay what they pay. You don't fix things for other people based on your personal version of fairness, although you're free to pay employees in your own company whatever you like and they'll accept.

You're also advancing a "behind every great tech dick is a great female fluffer" narrative, which isn't helpful.

nsxwolf• 11 years ago

The cover art just sucks all the air out of the room. I immediately know you SV folks aren't going to get a fair shake in this article.

redwood• 11 years ago

Wish they'd mentioned Theranos

ladytron• 11 years ago

Theranos imo is a special case. It was founded by a woman with tons of family money and friends in high places. She did not need to play the funding game to get started. I doubt she would have held onto her position today if she had to use regular funding channels in the beginning.

Most likely, she would have lost control of her company.

7Figures2Commas• 11 years ago

Many of the concerns raised in this article are legitimate, and obviously aren't exclusive to tech. But the narrative presented by this article is not as compelling as it could be because the author relies so heavily on the experience of two founders whose struggle raising seed capital mirrors that of countless male founders.

Is it possible that Glassbreakers simply isn't the $100 million/year investment opportunity the founders believe it is? The author devotes just a single paragraph to this possibility:

To be fair, there are many reasons Glassbreakers might not appeal to a Founders Fund or Andreessen Horowitz, or any of the dozens of other all-male VC partnerships on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, reasons that have nothing to do with sexist bias. It’s not likely to be a Facebook, or even a Houzz, the home-remodeling site launched by an Israeli husband and wife, financed by Sequoia and now valued at $2.3 billion. Glassbreakers is by definition “gender-gated,” thereby excluding 50 percent of potential users. It also presumes that many women do feel the need for female mentorship, when in fact there is quite possibly a significant cohort of working women who think they are getting along just fine without another woman’s advice.

The author then minimizes this argument by pointing out that Uber founder Travis Kalanick was able to buy a San Fransico mansion when he sold a "now-forgotten" file sharing service. This has nothing to do with Glassbreakers, and anybody who stays in this game long enough will inevitably see more inexplicable fundings and acquisitions than can be counted. Good people and ideas go without funding and exits all the time.

The Glassbreakers founders were able to raise $100,000 in seed money, which the article's author humorously refers to as "pre-seed." They were looking for half a million dollars in "pre-seed" funding, but a lot of companies have problems raising. It appears Glassbreakers has some traction (1,500 registered users) since launch, but without significantly more than this, raising $1.5 million might be difficult for the founders in today's ultra-competitive environment. Just because they want an 18 month runway doesn't mean that investors are obligated to provide it.

Meanwhile, there are companies like Chronus (http://chronus.com/) and MicroMentor (http://www.micromentor.org/) that offer mentoring software corporations can use to build their own mentoring programs for employees. There is also an ecosystem of firms like Insala (http://www.insala.com) that help corporations implement mentoring programs end to end. So if Glassbreakers is ultimately going to pursue revenue through corporate opportunities, which is allued to in the article, Glassbreakers has to prove that it can differentiate itself from and compete with what's already out there. Nothing in the article suggests that it has at this early stage.

ANTSANTS2• 11 years ago

It's particularly ironic that the author included this quote:

“When I coach women, I tell them how wonderful they are. Women won’t make the ridiculous projections about their companies that the guys will. They won’t say the really stupid thing the nerds do. They are a lot more realistic and practical and humble.”

Soon after this line:

They told investors their project was the next Pinterest—the way screenwriters tell movie moguls their scripts are the next Titanic.

And then they quoted Shanley Kane and I lost the ability to take the article seriously.

angersock• 11 years ago

I agree--there were several decent points being made in the article, but fluffing it up to look like their gender was the reason they didn't get their desired funding was kind of disingenuous.

I can think of a probably a dozen local startups off the top of my head here that didn't get funding either. Tough shit.

colmvp• 11 years ago

Zuckerberg, Gates, Thiel, Musk—these are our Carnegies and Morgans and Rockefellers, whose names will be on museum wings and university halls 100 years from now. And there’s not a female among them.

Wow, yeah, it's crazy that a shortlist of four people of 316 million that none of them are women. Despite Asians having large representation in tech, should I be offended that none of those these heavyweights are Asian?

bbarn• 11 years ago

I would love to see the numbers of bootstrapped companies run/founded by women vs. those recieving investments. Until there are more women VC's, you're not going to see more women getting VC money. Why? Because purely evaluating a potential fundee on metrics alone will fail. VC's that use too much math and not enough "gut" will finance the wrong companies.

The problem with that is, all the dudes got all the money, and human tendency is to think highly of things we most identify with. ergo, dude investors are more willing to go out on a limb on an idea if they can identify with the person giving it (currently, lots of white males). It's unfortunate, but it's not purely inequality, it's just a sad fact of human nature that we seek what's most alike us.

It takes a particularly well educated, and self-understanding individual to look past emotional bias. The problem then becomes that others around them don't necessarily have that skill, so there becomes a cascading effect of lack of belief in something. (be that other investors, potential clients, or even quality employees) In effect, our prejudices create the successes on a larger scale that seed the next generation (of VC's, not generations of people) that's making the same emotional decisions.

I don't have a solution. Maybe it's screaming about inequality, as some do, maybe it's succeeding in spite of it. I don't deny it's existence, but I just can't figure out how to change it.

I think it just has to come down to each person realizing it in themselves and changing it. For me it was in round 4343239534 of potential front end developers, when a dorky looking hipster girl came in, and I realized half-way through her interview I had already set her up for failure because I'd assumed she was a poser. It took her being beyond great at what she did to make me realize that in myself, and let me tell you, that's an awful, awful feeling to have. When you're sitting there thinking you're a good person, fair to people, and realize you've made such a sweeping - and wrong - assumption about some one else because of their sex, race, lifestyle, whatever, it's really damn hard to accept it. I can completely see how people let themselves continue to ignore that little nudge in the back of their mind. It's not easy to change the way you think.

TL;DR - Fucking sucks, and it's really hard to change, but it exists.

hagan_das5• 11 years ago

"Gang-Bang Interviews"? Really?

SV tech is getting the diversity shakedown hard these days. Plenty of other fields have sex ratios just as skewed. Why is tech getting the brunt?

learc837• 11 years ago

I've wondered that myself. There are plenty of other well paying jobs that are even more skewed than tech. Look at electricians, and plumbers to start.

I don't see a constant barrage of articles lamenting on the lack of women electricians.

saraid2165• 11 years ago

How many articles do you see about electricians to begin with?

refurb3• 11 years ago

Because it's filled with idealists who are trying to "change the world"?

Apocryphon2• 11 years ago

Because tech culture is often very juvenile and puerile, and so makes itself an easy target.

Thriptic• 11 years ago

I'm actually consistently surprised that gender bias is really a problem (although I'm out in Boston so perhaps I don't see it). I would have thought that economic incentives would have stamped this stupid behavior out ages ago. The idea that team-killing unprofessional behavior on this reported scale is being allowed to continue by investors / management, or that VCs and hiring professionals are purposely ignoring strong opportunities because of peoples' gender just strikes me as being so stupid and shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable. Is this really happening, or are these types of articles simply exaggerating the extent of the problem?

MrDom7• 11 years ago

being so stupid and shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable.

If something seems to good to be true, it usually is. When somebody writes an article alleging something too stupid to be believable, maybe you should be asking what the author has to gain by misrepresenting the truth?

geofft14• 11 years ago

This is the same Silicon Valley where having Mahbod Moghadam is an asset.

Revenue, especially in the form of VC, is so disconnected from productivity that massive inefficiencies can exist (provided you have the capital to power through them). You can build a sufficiently-successful company ignoring half your resumes. In some places it's way more than half, and there are biases to top-tier schools, biases to personal referrals, etc., and things work.

Also the nasty thing about those sorts of biases is that they're self-perpetuating. If someone else previously hired you for a job you were well-suited for, you now have nice experience on your resume, a good referral, and usually connections. So a company hiring experienced local developers, or a VC firm judging founders by what they've built in the past, gets the result of everyone else's biases. There's also explicitly some allowance for mistakes if you look like you should have been and could still be successful, ranging from the acceptance of pivots to giving people funding even if their last exit wasn't so great. While useful, this also tends to defang the savagery of the free market significantly.

This is not to say that anyone is guaranteed free money. There's certainly hard work required, and also certainly some blind luck. But the market won't shake out mistakes as quickly as you'd hope.

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 11 years ago

Venture Capitalists aren't some bleep blorp ration-bots, they're just regular people who happen to control a lot of money.

birken• 11 years ago

These are always tough pieces to respond to, because there are certainly a lot of gender inequalities in the startup world.

But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of the situation instead of just a description of its current state.

They mention this particular pair of founders was turned down by YC and their trouble raising funding, but not any of the stats YC shares about how they have funded more and more female founders, and all of the outreach efforts they do.

They mention Ellen Pao concerned a lawsuit, but then only say she is "at Reddit", instead of saying she is currently the CEO. The CEO!

Also, they mention Peter Thiel and David Sacks are the new generation? I honestly didn't know who David Sacks was until I just looked it up. What about all of the partners at YC? What about Mark Zuckerberg? What about all of the non-sexist people?

potatolicious3• 11 years ago

"But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of the situation instead of just a description of its current state."

I admire the leadership being shown at YC right now and the progress that has been made.

But I'd caution against mistaking these accomplishments for trajectory. Just read the most upvoted posts in this very thread, and the number of men here who perceive that "women in tech" or feminism is a vendetta or war against men.

While we certainly appear more willing to call out the most egregious and obvious sexism in the industry (see: the Tinder fiasco), there are an alarming of young, supposedly enlightened participants who are vocally and virulently against any kind of reform, and adamant in their belief that women are "shaking down" the industry with their rabid bands of "SJW" lapdogs.

Note the sheer number of posters here who have completely not addressed any substance of the article and instead are focusing on how the tone is overly abrasive or the wording ineloquent.

No, I'm not willing to optimistically call the trajectory upwards - I'm not sure if I'm willing to call the trajectory level.

Kalium14• 11 years ago

In all honesty, this article reads like a hackneyed retread of several dozen other articles I've read. It trots out the same statistics, quotes the same people, and so on. It's hard to take an article seriously when it feels like one giant repost.

jongraehl6• 11 years ago

John Carmack's "we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want. It doesn’t matter what they look like." is pretty much all you need to say, over and over, until they give up.

There are two problems w/ 'white male' dominated engineering fields (really, male, unless you insist on the slander that asian+indian are 'honorary white'). One is optical. It just looks bad to shallow thinkers who don't care to pause to find out what the pool of able+willing workers looks like.

The other is that techies are too insecure about their value and virtue; they're inclined to actually respond in good faith to slanders like this one. Big mistake. You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone.

Yes, everywhere I look around me are a bunch of guys. (maybe 10-20% women). Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.

sami36• 11 years ago

I disagree in part with the comment above, but why is this opinion being downvoted, wherever you stand on the issue ? Regardless of whether you take issue with the soundness of his argument, a dissenting voice should have a right to be heard. I'm sometimes amazed at the swiftness with which a different perspective is swept under the rug...in the same forums and TOPIC, nothing less, where inclusiveness, Capital I, is being discussed.

kevingadd• 11 years ago

When you say 'until they give up' do you mean women and minorities who want a safe and welcoming workplace? Or are you referring to a different 'they' than the one being addressed in the article you're replying to?

wyager3• 11 years ago

women and minorities who want a safe and welcoming workplace?

How are current software companies not "safe and welcoming"?

ANTSANTS2• 11 years ago

How about "amoral 'journalists' trolling for clickbait," "far left-wing nutjobs salivating at the chance to strike at the tender underbelly of a vulnerable target hesitant to defend itself," "people with low social status desperately trying to act 'progressive' for kudos," "people who politick because they can't cut it technically," and "yuppies with no interest in computers who joined 'the industry' purely for the money, who 'appropriate' the culture of the native geeks while shaming and condemning them for the slightest trespass?"

empressplay2• 11 years ago

How many of those women you see are in technical roles?

I'm sure that on the face of it, you _do_ welcome women professionally -- the problem is the bias against women is entrenched, both by the familiarity bias (given two people with the exact same competency you will typically choose the male) and by social bias (working with women is complicated, you will tend to shy away from them).

To paraphrase, you can't buy lunch with good intentions, and despite yours it's obvious they aren't translating into the practical world. To go, "oh well, all the guys I work with don't have a problem with women, so the problem must be no women want to work here, or in technical roles" is a really shallow analysis of a much deeper problem. For example, it's widely known that some managers won't insert women into male-exclusive teams because of "cohesion". But it's not like they'll advertise that motive.

Because of these issues, universities have been advising women against pursuing computer science careers. So less women actually apply, which makes the ratio even worse, which makes it even easier (or more 'logical') to keep women out of technical teams. I've personally heard a manager say that they hired a man over a woman because they didn't think it was fair that he should have to hire the woman in the name of diversity, that it would be setting a dangerous precedent, etc.

Women make excellent troubleshooters, they can see angles and possibilities that men often can't. They can design awesome algorithms, come up with innovative solutions and take projects into bold new directions. Men are better at technical syntax, middleware, configuration, builds. There is an obvious benefit to having women on technical teams, and yet in most cases they aren't there. It isn't because they don't want to be, or can't pull their own weight. But when managers put them in, they often "don't work out" so they don't try the experiment twice. Strategic bias is still bias.

wyager3• 11 years ago

(given two people with the exact same competency you will typically choose the male)

My experience directly contradicts this. Software companies currently prioritize female engineering hires because people are making such a big stink about the fact that there are fewer women than men in software engineering (and automatically assuming that this is due to sexism).

I recently received an email from my employer to the effect of "If you know any female engineers, please send in a referral!". Yes, they used the word "female".

tomsthumb• 11 years ago

So... I'm a little confused here. When you say something like:

Women make excellent troubleshooters, they can see angles and possibilities that men often can't. They can design awesome algorithms, come up with innovative solutions and take projects into bold new directions. Men are better at technical syntax, middleware, configuration, builds.

That just comes off as sexist against both men and women simultaneously.

saraid2165• 11 years ago

Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.

Do you have anything other than "I believe!" to substantiate this, or are we to accept it on the power of faith?

tsotha2• 11 years ago

That's every bit as much as people on the other side have.

jongraehl6• 11 years ago

The reason I'm so confident is that I, and everyone I know, personally welcome and would hire and help competent women and bright-but-just-starting-to-ascend-the-learning-curve ones too. I've coached a female colleague in preparation for a successful job talk at Google, for example (same as I'd help any colleague I thought had a shot and asked me).

I've admitted that I don't know the culture in every company and part of the U.S. and do think if we're serious about protecting women from unfair discrimination we need to screen out whoever, due to cultural differences, cannot be professional in hiring and working with women). Professionalism is a pretty low bar and I'd expect even H1Bs from more gender-traditional cultures to be able to pass it, no matter their private preferences+beliefs.

hagan_das5• 11 years ago

You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone.

I posted a question elsewhere in this thread asking why the tech industry has been getting the brunt of the diversity shakedown. I think this is part of the puzzle.

The type of mind that lends itself well to tech tends to have less political acumen and social intelligence. We're prone to taking things too literally and sometimes miss the bullshit below the surface.

Are we really expected to believe that people who write software are any more sexist than lawyers or the population in general?

Let's call the diversity hounding of tech exactly what it is: the playground bully picking on the kid who they know wont fight back.

MrDom7• 11 years ago

I posted a question elsewhere in this thread asking why the tech industry has been getting the brunt of the diversity shakedown.

That's easy: it's influential. They started with the schools, then moved on to the universities. Next was hollywood, then the media. Every avenue of public debate in this country has fallen in line with the diversity shakedown. The internet is next precisely because it's the last influential arena where you can say what you want without fear of reprisal (for the most part). It's part of why the feminists have launched such an aggressive campaign against gamergate and gamers in general. They won't be bullied.

geofft14• 11 years ago

Ah, but there's an alternative hypothesis. Tech is an industry that people enter because they see a new world being created and want to participate in the making of it with their own hands. Finance, corporate law, so forth, not so much.

So it seems believable that tech is a place where you will find people sympathetic to do difficult, tradition-destroying things to build a better world, much more than finance or corporate law. (The way that tech has publicly embraced things from LGBT rights to non-college-degreed people, more than finance or corporate law has, is evidence in favor of this belief.)

Given that, the pressure on tech to do better than the rest of the world, and thereby set an example for the rest of the world, makes a lot of sense. It's not that tech is the most sexist industry (it isn't), it's that it's the industry that's most likely to get significantly better in a short period of time.

geofft14• 11 years ago

Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.

How are you certain of this?

If you have an overly-touchy manager, and he never overly-touches you, would you know?

If you have someone in sales who makes not-that-funny sexist comments, but they're not actually bad enough that you should bother caring, would you know if it's rising to the level of being a problem for women?

If you don't offer generous parental leave, and that matters disproportionately to prospective employees who are women but not so much to men, would you know? (Do you know, off-hand, what your employer's parental leave policy is?)

If one of your usual interviewers says something like "You're pretty good for a woman" (and not "You're pretty good for a man"), and your technical interviews are one-on-one, and this is why there's a drop between job offers to women and new hires, would you know?

(The answer may well be "yes" for all these; there are systemic problems far away from all these that can easily get a company to 10-20% women. But I, personally, am hesitant to answer "Is your company a good place to work for women" with anything stronger than "I'm pretty sure it is, but I couldn't personally vouch for it.")

jongraehl6• 11 years ago

Extremely certain, except of course for workplaces outside my experience, which is most of them. One thing I hadn't considered when I first posted was the impact of H1B workers, which I guess would vary depending on the culture of origin.

Importing foreign workers obviously isn't to make the workplace representative of the local citizens or even residents.

I know that women in tech experience a different brand of socially awkward interactions than men suffer, but to suggest that there's bias against them making it more difficult to succeed (as opposed to the opposite - people rooting for them and ready to to help) is just a bridge too far for me.

PhoenixWright• 11 years ago

I really wish I could go to at least one site related to something I'm interested in be it sports, tech or gaming and not have to listen to this feminist propaganda.

normloman• 11 years ago

Yeah it would be nice to just enjoy distractions without my beliefs being challenged all the time. Why can't I ignore all the problems of society, and just read blogs all day?

michaelochurch2• 11 years ago

Silicon Valley is where the future is allegedly built by people living in the past.

For just one of a zillion examples: why's the place so expensive? Fucking NIMBYs who refuse to allow 21st-century housing density. Also, California isn't that liberal. It's what 1960s liberalism would be if drained of all its leftist color and its impressive work ethic, leaving just nostalgic remembrances of the hippie era. The '60s leftists stood for something (like, civil rights and economic equality) but their 2015-era California remnant just wants to live in some silly suburban watered-down hippy-dippy utopia (see: Agrestic in Weeds) that never existed and doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Unfortunately, the not-fit-for-life soft-skulls become the Prop 13 assholes and the hair-trigger NIMBYs who block new development (it might shadow the gluten-free tomato garden I would start if I actually had ambition!) and drive house prices through the roof.

I like some people in California, for sure, but the Prop 13 NIMBY people should be forcibly relocated to the Pacific Garbage Patch... until we have something like The Raft in Snow Crash to put them on.

In the same way, this supposedly innovative industry is run by people who still subscribe to the Mad Men playbook of gender relations, never mind the fact that the rest of the world (yes, even Wall Street!) has moved beyond that and the sort of disgusting behavior (such as the investors who come on to women during pitches, or otherwise attempt to use their positions of power for sexual access) described in this article would get a person fired, if not more.

throwaway6761• 11 years ago

Throwaway account given the topic.

As someone who has been in the valley along while, the disrespect from women seems to come from a couple of angles -- the bro culture (define as you wise, Uber excels in this), racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst), and many of those that grew up outside the bay area.

Some of us have been seeing each other as equals for years, judgement based on merit, but many a*holes still perpetuate issues.

My data set -- several startups, a few big companies, bay area native; my wife non native, white, a number of large prominent technical companies. One of us in engineering, the other in project/program management.

The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a difficult one.

SafariDevelop2• 11 years ago

racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst)
The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a difficult one.

I'm not going to call you a racist, but the least you could do is provide examples or, at best, statistics to backup your allegations. None, but one, of the feminist accusations of the tech industry in the American media involved a non-white male.

caste loving people

As if Americans are not caste-loving? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-di...

refurb3• 11 years ago

Nothing more ironic than someone trying to fight sexism by denegrating an entire race!

geofft14• 11 years ago

Anil Dash has a nice article talking about Indian-American culture that comes off as much less racist because he's reflecting on his own culture (which, incidentally, happens to be my own, and I can confirm anecdotally lots of what he says).

https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats-no...

(To be overly clear, I don't think the claim that all the H1-Bs are importing sexism is defensible, as phrased, and I certainly don't think Indian culture bears the majority of the responsibility here, compared to American culture. I'm just trying to offer a better and relevant claim.)

jongraehl6• 11 years ago

Surely you can admit that Americans are less caste-loving. We treat talented individuals of all races+genders+GLBTQBBQ pretty damn well compared to the majority of the world (the mentally ill, on the other hand ...). I give us an A-, globally speaking.

Torgo• 11 years ago

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/04/27/radiumone_fir...

http://recode.net/2014/05/26/rap-genius-co-founder-moghadam-...

jecjec• 11 years ago

The front line of the gender war is the American courtroom, where men are subject to grossly unjust and discriminatory divorce and custody law.

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 11 years ago

Turns out if you actually analyze the numbers, this turns out not to be the case.

lkbm2• 11 years ago

In contested custody cases, fathers win about half the time. Granted, there's probably selection bias there.

The custody issue is clearly a result of gender stereotypes. I'm a feminism in part because it's the one movement that's actively and effectively fighting against that root cause.

I don't think tech sexism in SV is _the_ frontline, or that the courts are _the_ frontline, but they're both important fights. (SV might be the frontline _in tech_, but not in gender or sex equality overall, or even in the US.)

png_hero• 11 years ago

Two founders got less funding then they wanted, sexism? The idea for the company seemed reasonable, after all.

Maybe sexism.

The more likely answer is: most founders get less money than they want, in fact most founders fail.

There is under appreciated carnage in the founding game; acknowledgement of this, is one of the things that made PG such a fresh voice when he came on the scene years ago. That realism.

reality is that the founder game is a suckers bet, and one that men take at a vastly, vastly greater degree than women.

Men fail hard, and men themselves internalize the failure(most often) or blame larger forces outside of their control. Either response is fine (they usually don't blame "sexism" but they are plenty happy to blame other conspiracies).

But, when it comes time to talley the toll on men, society is largely quiet, why? Males are disposable.

Women, on the other hand, largely expect to be valued on the mere fact of their personage. They deserve respect for them being them. A noble belief, but one that does not exist in the hyper-competitive modern economy.

yeah, if I was a professor I'd give your business plan an A-... Does that mean you "deserve" funding? No.

So, I could go on, but until women start throwing themselves into the grinder at the same rate men do, the ratio of men at the top will always be lopsided.

And I say this not as a man that is bitter (I actually won the game against all odds) but I say this as somebody who believes that women's strategies on a whole are better than men's.

That is: men are stupid to take so much risk! It shouldn't be venerated!

The true non-sexism is to realize that women's choices are valid (and probably smarter) and women are more than just "poorly performing men"

sheepmullet3• 11 years ago

Spot on. Startups are a high risk industry and most fail.

We sell young men a dream... And the same dream just doesn't appeal to young women.

rockmeamedee• 11 years ago

This is not a good article. It's badly written and shit for nuance.

It divides things into a "Global Gender War" purely for the sake of heightening the mood."Look at these terrible gang-bang interviewers!" is all it has to say. There is no mention of the massive amount of work women are doing in the space, and when there is, it as an example of how terrible they are being treated. Here is a women-led company that offers peer mentoring, but they too are struggling because of gender bias. It calls Model View Culture an "acid-penned, widely read website". MVC is actually doing the social justice work and newsweek calls them "acid-penned". It puts fucking Vivek Wadhwa up as a better example of feminism than the actual women fighting for their humanity. Vivek Wadhwa isn't a good person, in general he's just a terrible male ally. (what he says just in _this piece_ is disrespectful to women, see http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy-feminists)

There are no humans in the piece, only victims and demons. Two examples of struggling women-led startups, and a female VC who was forced to touch a penis. These are women in SV according to newsweek.

This is as badly thought out and less researched than that Rolling Stone article. One of the subheadings is "Asking for It" as a pun on women asking for money. That's an actual rape joke.

plikan13• 11 years ago

Attitudes towards women in IT environments would become a little more relaxed if a fair number of programmers would have the courage to stop denying and come out of the closet. There, I said it.

What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women

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