An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

http://www.jenniferaldoretta.com/2015/02/22/an-open-letter-to-jessica-livingston/

by jaldoretta • 11 years ago

239 172 11 years ago

xtrumanx• 11 years ago

Not quite what I was expecting with a post that begins with "An Open Letter to...". I've been trained to expect any such letters would be someone's way to make their grievances about some entity public.

Now I need to go reflect on why I feel disappointed it was so positive. Haha, only serious.

itsdrewmiller• 11 years ago

I had to reread it like 3 times to make sure I wasn't just missing the "call out" part of the letter. I think I am happy about it, though!

pconner• 11 years ago

I like it. It's a nice change of pace. Not that there's anything wrong with negative open letters, but as you said, that seems to make up a majority of them.

saraid2162• 11 years ago

Only a majority of the ones that (1) make the news and (2) are explicitly called "open letters". There are actually tons of public missives on the internet full of positivity.

dlu• 11 years ago

I had to reread the first part of it to make sure I was reading it with the right voice/tone

acjohnson55• 11 years ago

I agree! I'm all about airing of grievances, but it's also good to see validation that previous such airings of grievances have led to advancement.

chaostheory9• 11 years ago

"I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university."

Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high prestige areas like law, medicine, politics, or finance. Engineering in general is low prestige. It's akin to being a plumber or electrician plus extra educational requirements (high skill, high pay, low social status). Despite the maker movement, our culture at large still doesn't value science & engineering as much as other fields.

Popular mainstream shows like Big Bang Theory don't help. On a whole shows like this just serve to further old stereotypes of everyone in our fields as being socially inept, ugly, weirdos. Is it a surprise that most females don't want to join our ranks after seeing that?

Are there any quantitative measures on social status by occupation to validate (or invalidate) my guess?

Aaronontheweb2• 11 years ago

I heard an interesting theory on low female attendance in STEM this week: the fact that those fields are stereotyped as nerdy, "low prestidge" men. It keeps a lot of men, at least in the US, out of the field too. When I went through engineering school at least half of my classmates were from countries that have very different attitudes towards engineering.

I'm sure there's some data out there breaking out US STEM graduates by country and see how that compares to other fields like arts and sciences - that'd be a good place to start a conversation around whether or not some Western countries have a cultural / stereotypical problem.

chaostheory9• 11 years ago

I heard an interesting theory on low female attendance in STEM this week: the fact that those fields are stereotyped as nerdy, "low prestidge" men

Can you give me the source?

lisa_henderson• 11 years ago

Women tend to focus on those jobs where the need for the job seems solid.

If we focus, for a moment, on those jobs that are available to those who have college degrees, many women become teachers, but teaching is not high prestige.

There is little risk that the USA will outsource all the hospitals to China, so women go into medicine. There is little risk that the USA will outsource all the lawyers to China, so women become lawyers. There is little risk that the USA will outsource all the teachers to China, so women become teachers.

But there is a possibility that most of the engineering jobs will move to China. And I think women are wary of investing 10 years of their life learning a skill that might get sent overseas.

malandrew3• 11 years ago

Women tend to focus on those jobs where the need for the job seems solid.

I find the use of lawyers as an example odd unless people are just downright ignorant of what is happening in that industry. For quite a while now now, there has been a glut of law school grads that are unable to find jobs. Furthermore, more and more legal work is being outsourced to India (and this trend keeps rising) or automated (like discovery).

If your assertion is true, then several years ago, when both of these characteristics of the legal profession started to occur (few job prospects after graduation and outsourcing/automation), then we should be able to observe a significant decrease in the number of women choosing to pursue a law degree versus men choosing to pursue a law degree.

Has such a discrepancy between the genders been observed in the quantity of law school applicants?

What I've observed is that women tend to go into careers that are "high-touch" and that factors like prestige and job security are lesser considerations. Teaching and nursing are the two canonical examples. The only parallel I can draw to job security, is that high touch jobs are far harder to automate and outsource. Japan has been trying with some of its robot experiments, but the uncanny valley is a high barrier to cross to automate high-touch jobs.

Interestingly this is why we see engineering/automation making doctors less relevant, while we see nursing becoming more important. Technology to aid with the low-touch aspects of medicine (the tasks doctors typically perform, such as pattern detection and pattern matching) are getting good enough that those interested in the high-touch aspects (nursing), can do most of the work required without the need to share responsibilities with a doctor.

(FWIW while society considers doctors to be higher prestige than nurses, I feel they are both equally important. IMHO, being a doctor as a profession having higher prestige is a historical anomaly since there are statistically fewer people in society who are good at the analytical work that computers now excel at. For thousands of years, sexual selection favored neurotypical minds. It has only been in the past ~100 years or so since the industrial revolution where sexual selection has started to favor sexual selection in favor of those on the aspie/autistic side of the spectrum).

joshuapants• 11 years ago

many women become teachers, but teaching is not high prestige

If you give weight to the McKinsey study, almost half of US public school teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes. This suggests that the best and brightest women are not opting to be teachers instead of engineers, they are choosing other jobs.

facepalm5• 11 years ago

So why do women become elementary school teachers rather than high school teachers?

Although in general it's probably true that women tend to be more risk averse.

I've always said that women are probably simply too smart to go into IT. Sitting in front of a glowing rectangle in a gloomy basement is probably not the best recipe for happiness. Cliched as it sounds, but a job that involves talking to people might be much more likely to make a person happy.

RockyMcNuts2• 11 years ago

Yeah, top jobs where women dominate are all super high prestige, elementary school teachers, nursing/health aides, secretarial, retail, food service... :)

malandrew3• 11 years ago

You failed to include all the blue collar low-prestige jobs where men are far more common, like construction, factory jobs and warehouse work. For every profession that is low prestige and largely female, there is another profession that low prestige and largely male.

vonmoltke• 11 years ago

Retail and food service are not dominated by either gender.

Early childhood education has a serious bias against men. Due to social stigmas, parents of both genders are generally more comfortable leaving their young children in the care of a woman rather than a man.

I think most nursing jobs have roughly the same level of prestige as most engineering jobs. It just doesn't look that way here because this place is hyper-focused on the small subset that are high prestige.

chaostheory9• 11 years ago

You're missing the forest for the trees (assuming your assumptions are correct).

Business (executives, secretaries) is more respectable than IT (programmers, tech support).

I would argue that nurses and teachers have higher prestige than a programmer or engineer in most parts of the country. (Let's not confuse salary with prestige)

colmvp2• 11 years ago

Pharmacists are paid extremely well and have a higher representation of women (56.3) than men.

facepalm5• 11 years ago

More women than men study medicine, so for example your "nursing/health aides" example really conveys the wrong picture.

intortus• 11 years ago

You don't think it could have anything to do with attitudes toward women in each respective field?

rimantas• 11 years ago

You don't think there can be other reasons except attitude?

chaostheory9• 11 years ago

I'm not saying that the current culture doesn't factor in this. I'm just saying that there may be a stronger factor at play. Business and medicine used to be just as bad, but the large numbers of women entering those fields changed that despite the preexisting toxic professional atmosphere. I feel that it would be the same for tech and engineering, if only it were more attractive for more women.

huherto• 11 years ago

May be, but women(and men) make their decisions before entering the field.

spcoll2• 11 years ago

HN's casual nerd misogyny showing up again...

chaostheory9• 11 years ago

How is this misogyny? I didn't say that it was skill or talent that was keeping women from our fields.

birdsareweird• 11 years ago

As opposed to the special snowflake club ignoring the politically inconvenient research done in the last 20 years on gender equality? Differences in in-group bias, differences in headline coverage as victims, differences in court judgments, ...

Let's keep rewriting history so that white men are to blame. It's not like they do things like land probes on comets or anything.

fallinghawks2• 11 years ago

This is the first time I've heard engineering called low prestige.

tomp8• 11 years ago

It's now low prestige, it's just lower prestige than e.g. medicine, law or "investment banking".

facepalm5• 11 years ago

Where I went to university the engineering students had their own jokes category, usually about them never getting laid.

practicalpants• 11 years ago

Wow... really? It's absolutely viewed as low prestige in my experience. I mean our culture has an ingrained stereotype of the socially awkward, maladjusted engineer, that's definitely out there. The jocks, "cool kids," extroverts, your typical fraternity member etc. are supposed to be in finance or striving to be an executive or something.

I think it's generational to some extend. IMO the baby boomers are particularly bad w/ regards to the stereotype. My parent's friends ask about my work as a programmer, and I suggest that their son or daughter who hasn't figured out what they want to do consider taking it up (code bootcamps make it easy, great market now, etc.), and I just get such cringe reactions from them.

But... younger generations are better, given how startups are now viewed as "trendy," and I do think movies/TV like the Social Network had a big impact.

lambda• 11 years ago

Well, when I looked around a bit I found this article <http://readwrite.com/2014/09/02/women-in-computer-science-wh... which links to this study: <http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/11/220748057/why-wome... which indicates that rather than being based on prestige, it appears that the disparity can be broken down based on more rewarding but lower paying, vs. more purely mercenary jobs.

I wouldn't call being a teacher more prestigious than being an engineer, nor a social worker, but there are still a lot of women who are more interested in going into those fields than into engineering disciplines.

Other studies also point to other reasons; in computer science especially, there's a very strong effect of computers being seen as boys toys, so men come into the major with more experience and more interest in the field just to begin with: <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/s...

The gender gap in engineering disciplines, as a complex social phenomenon, is likely to have many interrelated causes. Between lower encouragement of computers as girls toys at younger ages, the fact that there is still a bit of an expectation that men will be the primary breadwinner in the family and thus women can get these lower paying but more rewarding jobs, the fact that the large existing gender gap makes it less comfortable for women in the major, in the workplace, and so on, it's unlikely that there's going to be one single cause for it.

So, in summary, while from what I found it looks like it's not prestige but how rewarding the job is perceived to be that makes more of the difference, but that's not to say that your hypothesis is wrong, just that I found some evidence to support a different effect that at least appears to be stronger than the effect you describe.

kbenson• 11 years ago

I wouldn't call being a teacher more prestigious than being an engineer, nor a social worker

I would. There's a lot of respect for people that do these things, because they are seen as somewhat selfless (partly because the monetary compensation is so low, partly because the jobs are so essential). Aid workers share in this as well. Prestige is about respect, and there are paths to respect that don't include a lot of money or power.

chaostheory9• 11 years ago

Yeah I forgot about social expectations

http://www.npr.org/2014/11/22/365968465/after-backlash-compu...

Still I can't help but feel social prestige is still a stronger factor for females than males

tomp8• 11 years ago

You can't compare being a teacher with a career in "law, medicine, politics, or finance" or a programmer. The latter all require very high intellectual aptitude, either logical/mathematical (programming, finance), memory (medicine, law) or social intelligence (finance, politics). In contrast, mostly everybody can be a teacher (and according to comment [1], teachers usually come from the bottom of their class).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9090437

sputr• 11 years ago

I think everyone discussing any gender gap should really watch this Norwegian documentary:

Brainwashed: The Gender Equality Paradox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE

The "social expectations" hypothesis fails to explain why countries with higher living standards have more polarized sectors. The idea that in a perfect world with no "social pressure" we would reach a parity between genders ignores just about all research done on the biological gender differences.

nailer4• 11 years ago

I think The Big Bang Theory is pretty awful too, but I think how you describe what you do makes a difference:

- "I'm a programmer" (people think about typing)

- "I make apps" (people think about the amazing things you create...by typing)

wongarsu• 11 years ago

That works well for customer-facing software, but I'm not so sure about the general case.

"I make a quality control system for a large factory" (people think about all sorts of boring things)

"I make payroll software" (people feign interest for a moment, then change the topic)

ffn• 11 years ago

Mechanical engineering graduate (and 2nd rate programmer) here. And I completely agree, this major is a sinkhole. Maybe 50 years ago when we were still building rockets, planes, and cars to stop the Soviets or what have you, ME was a great major (and maybe 40 years from now when fusion, Mars, and warp drive are all real it will be again). But today in an age of electronics and software, ME is an awful choice for anyone not passionate about cars, engines, or HVAC.

The ME departments in colleges have caught onto its fall from a popularity and prestige and are doing their best to retard the descent with classes like "Scientific Computing", "Microfabrication", "FEM", "Lagrangian Control", "biomechanics", "business in China", etc., that try to emulate the currently useful skills taught in other disciplines. The result is, of course, us students wind up actually majoring in "Engineering Undeclared" and it land us a hodgepodge sampler plate of introductory knowledge that never truly satisfies any market need. We are inferior to applied mathematicians when it comes to calculations, electrical engineers when it comes to modern machinery, computer scientists when it comes to AI and controls, industrial engineers when it comes to falsifying lab reports, doctors when it comes to biology, etc. And if we focused on traditionally ME fields like heat transfer and combustion? We'd have to Hunger Games ourselves for that one position at the local power plant in ten years when the current engineer retires.

So, unless she is passionate about cars and air conditioning, why should we be trying to encourage our daughters into a major that doesn't earn money like finance, have prestige like computers, enjoy purity like the sciences, help people like medicine / social science, pretty like art / design, satisfy her natural affinity for children and cute stuff like education, or even remain stable like law. In some ways, ME is the Titanic after it was hit the iceberg, it's a "boy's club" not because men are trying to keep women out (every department across the land is actually doing just the opposite), but because the captain and his crew are stubbornly going down with the ship while the women and children are on lifeboats so they can live another day.

VLM• 11 years ago

"We'd have to Hunger Games ourselves for that one position at the local power plant in ten years when the current engineer retires."

While at the same time some politician and businessman is making a speech that we have a desperate shortage of engineering talent and need to open the floodgates.

bsilvereagle• 11 years ago

That's an interesting point of view. I've had multiple people tell me they wish they could find a 'traditional mechanical engineer' that knew heat transfer, knew fluids, could build a gear train, and knew some kinematics. I think MEs that graduated 20-30 years ago are in high demand.

Extremely watered down versions of those courses are in my curriculum. Fluid mechanics is nearly all Bernoulli's Equation and Linear Momentum. Heat Transfer is 1D conduction, basic convection, and basic radiation. Machine Design, while heavily focused on gears, was extremely watered down. Kinematics, on the other hand, has been completely dropped from the curriculum! A lot of these courses have been made easier to allow students to spend time on 'lab projects' that consist of filling in the blanks of Arduino sketches. It's a sad state of affairs.

You are spot on by stating that undergraduate ME curriculums are 'Engineering Undeclared' in my experience. I think part of this is because the 'traditional' curriculum that my grandfather and father took is 'too challenging' by today's standards. I'm not half the engineer they were when they graduated from the same department.

I think this can be attributed to several things. When my father graduated, everyone took the FE with plans of becoming a PE. I know maybe 5 other people in my graduating class who plan on taking the FE. He took 3 years of math, I took one and a half. We can't really get into 2D conduction in heat transfer because no one has the math background to handle it! The 'Intermediate Heat Transfer' I'm taking in grad school is the equivalent of the 'Introduction to Heat Transfer' my grandfather took.

analog312• 11 years ago

I would go further and say... unless she is passionate about CAD.

My background is in science, but I work in a department with engineers of all stripes. It seems like the mechanical engineers are stuck living inside the world of their CAD systems. It's a dreary world, dominated by at most two or three software vendors making giant, expensive, training-intensive tools.

I know other engineering disciplines use tools too, but I don't think they are dominated by their tools to the extent that ME is.

tptacek7• 11 years ago

We're all the same social animals. Men are just as status-conscious as women are, so your observation probably doesn't have as much explanatory power as you seem to think it does.

minthd• 11 years ago

It's not exact. Man care more about their place in the hierarchy , while women care more about how they're perceived by people around them.

tzs3• 11 years ago

Speculation ahead! This may all be BS (except for the next paragraph, which Googling will turn up decent support for), but could lead to some interesting discussion.

Girls mature emotionally faster than boys, which may result in them starting to care about, and be able to understand and do something about, group status and group power structures earlier than boys do.

Anecdotally, that fits with what I saw as a kid. Going into the teen years, boys tended to have small social circles compare to girls. A boy sleepover was two or three boys. A girl sleepover was half the girls in a class.

Others I've talked to report similar, and this seems to be a common enough observation that it has become somewhat of a stereotype (hilariously parodied in the South Park episode "The List").

Now let's consider how an interest in a STEM field might develop into a career. I think for a large number of kids there is a critical period where an interest changes from a spectator interest to a participatory interest, and I think that often happens around the late pre-teen, early teen years.

(This is probably just a coincidence, but it is interesting that this is around the age that in olden days boys would start apprenticeships).

Note that the kind of participatory STEM things that you can do (outside of organized school activities) as a young teen tend toward solitary activities. Perhaps, then, boys are more likely to do these things because at that critical early teen phase boys are still oblivious to the importance of group status and power structures, and so a potential boy science nerd will spend Saturday night at home hacking alone on the computer, or building a ham radio, and so on.

By the time boys catch up on emotional maturity, and start spending time dealing with group status and power along with the girls, the boys have already set themselves on the road to STEM careers.

It would be interesting to get data on people who choose a STEM major in college, and on people who graduate with a STEM degree, and on people who go on to a STEM career, and break each of those groups down into two subsets. (1) People who decided that (or a closely related field) was what they wanted to major in while still young teens, and (2) those who discovered their interest in that field in college, such as when they took a course in it to satisfy a breadth requirement and found they liked it enough to major in it.

If my speculation is correct, the first subset (people who chose their path while early teens) will be more tilted toward men than the second subset (people who found their serious interest in the field while in college).

Finally, this suggests an interesting topic for one of those "late night, been drinking or smoking dope a bit, kind of tired, let's discuss something really wild" type discussions: will HBO's "Game of Thrones" have an effect on gender ratios in STEM? (Yes, there is a chain of reasoning to support the "yes" case that is good enough to give one a decent chance of defending that position long enough for everyone to get drunk or high enough, or sleepy enough, that discussion ends).

tomp8• 11 years ago

Not necessarily. There is a lot of anecdotal theories that women care more about how they are perceived by their peers. There might also be some research (a minute of Googling brought up this, although I'm quite sceptical of most sociological/psychological research).

The researchers concluded that women seek to regain a sense of belonging whereas men are more interested in regaining self-esteem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rejection#Ball_toss_.2F_...

abathur5• 11 years ago

The reason you're getting blowback has to do with the tone it sounds like you're taking on the issue of gender and prestige with some selective examples.

In regard to your final question: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/Harris%20Poll%2085%20...

facepalm5• 11 years ago

I found it striking in Big Bang Theory how even the smartest scientist is not deemed worthy to date a waitress. Nothing against waitresses, but I think it said a lot about values in society.

driverdan• 11 years ago

Social ineptitude is not restricted by gender.

garrisondmr• 11 years ago

I watched the FFC live and what struck me was that it was the same as any other founder conference except that it was a girl on stage instead of a dude. If we want to stop making gender a big deal then we need to stop making gender a big deal. There is no Male Founder Conference right?

nailer4• 11 years ago

I think people need people from a background close to them to really feel like 'yeah, that could be me on stage'. I don't think that's good or bad, just how it is.

colmvp2• 11 years ago

Is it easier for people to identify with gender than ethnicity?

Let's say a conference has speakers and attendees that are predominantly white men. Should I relate because I'm a man even though I'm not white? Should a white woman relate because she's white even though she's not a man?

It just seems weird to discuss disproportionate representation through only one lens.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

I think people need people from a background close to them to really feel like 'yeah, that could be me on stage'.

I don't think people inherently do. I think that lots of people actually do, and that this is a socially taught and reinforced trait just as much as sexism and racism are (and, in fact, I think it, insofar as it operates on the basis of sex and race, is a form of sexism and racism -- as it is tied to the individual judging themselves primary by the same kind of attributes -- but, unlike more external sexism and racism, isn't actively combatted because its not seen as negative, even though, in addition to its direct harms, it may serve as a foundation for the more external forms of sexism and racism.)

scobar• 11 years ago

I don't think people need someone with a relatable trait to believe they can also accomplish audacious goals. However, I am convinced that it provides disproportionately more inspiration.

jschwartzi• 11 years ago

The Male Founder Conference meets every day in every boardroom.

impendia• 11 years ago

we need to stop making gender a big deal

By your own admission, FFC didn't make a big deal out of gender and is therefore doing as you ask.

Events like these are appreciated and found helpful by the women who participate in them. Isn't that sufficient grounds to be happy that they are taking place?

jsprogrammer7• 11 years ago

If the first word of the title is a gender exclusive term, and that is not making it a big deal, what would be considered making it a big deal?

imaginenore• 11 years ago

FFC didn't make a big deal out of gender

You mean by putting "Female" in the title?

This is plain gender discrimination.

wallflower• 11 years ago

I watched most of the FFC. Like Marc Andreesen has said, software is eating the world. YC is getting such critical mass now that entrepreneurs and idealists/pragmatists with world-affecting ideas are now applying for YC. Not necessarily because they'd heard of YC - but because someone they know who cares about them had heard about YC.

YC, in my opinion, is getting to a point where it can help incubate world-changing ideas that don't necessarily sell technology to consumers directly but use technology to enable more efficiency or connection or empathy (or all of the above).

Of all the presentations, Grace's was the best. I loved Grace Garey of Watsi's stories.

About how every Tuesday night, about eight or ten of the world-wide team of Watsi, in every timezone (day, afternoon, morning) would always get together for a Google Hangout to talk about Watsi.

About how she was at a busy bar in NYC with her friends and they were in the waning hours of an online contest to win $10k for Watsi. They were falling behind, and Grace had the gutsy idea to ask the bouncer to make everyone who came into the bar have to vote for Watsi on the contest site on their smartphone. They ended up winning by the scarcest of margins (1%) and the bouncer gonged a bell and the entire bar celebrated. Like Brian and Joe of Airbnb creating their own cereal, it was a gutsy move to make it to the next critical step (raising enough funds for some of the Watsi team to go full-time and all-in). And a little different.

Congratulations to the YC team on making a ripple in the pond!

jsprogrammer7• 11 years ago

YC is still stuck in a world of ideas based on controlling others through the creation of debt and claiming lifetime ownership of others' work. That they are stuck there is not entirely unsurprising, nor is it unsurprising that there is a forming gender-class that is trying to emulate the functioning of that world. To me, continuing to carry out these decade[century, millennium?]-long ideas is not very world-changing. It may be progressive enhancement, but that has slowly been happening for awhile.

The anecdote that you shared about the bar in NYC smacks of this old-world thinking:

the gutsy idea to ask the bouncer to make everyone who came into the bar have to vote for

I'm still not quite sure if this is slavery or just tribal exculsivism. I don't know, maybe it's both?

voltagex_• 11 years ago

I'm still not quite sure if this is slavery or just tribal exculsivism. I don't know, maybe it's both?

The fuck? It's a nice anecdote about winning some money for what is ostensibly a charity!

saturdayplace• 11 years ago

YC is still stuck in a world of ideas based on controlling others through the creation of debt and claiming lifetime ownership of others' work.

I don't understand this sentiment AT ALL. There is no debt involved, so I don't see any control exerted through those means. And sure, they buy non-controlling ownership of others' work, but that ownership is sold freely. Not to mention the other consideration that lands on the selling side in these transactions. I don't think the sellers are making out nearly as badly as you seem to be implying.

SFjul• 11 years ago

Watsi = inspiring. Thanks for this jolt. I needed it to kick me in the ass when whining about funding.

stefantalpalaru• 11 years ago

What a sickening sycophantic declaration just to plug a very dangerous return to calendar-based contraception methods: http://www.readytogroove.com/the-cycle/appendix-a-the-sympto...

notsony• 11 years ago

I'm going to upvote you.

It's a very good point you've made here.

This founder is giving bad advice to women who don't want to get pregnant causing some women to ditch contraception like condoms... resulting in unwanted pregancices.

rdl2• 11 years ago

I think the "cycle tracking" stuff is usually more about "really want to get pregnant, having a hard time" vs "not willing to use one of the many other forms of birth control". (EDIT: although, this site does appear to promote it for preventing birth, too, wtf)

(It is always kind of jarring whenever I see that, because whenever I think of reproductive health my first thought is "omg please please please no", but there apparently are people who want to get pregnant/have kids.)

lucidrains2• 11 years ago

So much talk for so very little. Can we not just celebrate women in tech? We all share this world for a limited time, so who gives a fuck who wears a shinier hat. Its all a game, a game that moves our world towards a better place, a world where we can put down our hats and spend time with each other and allow our benevolent machines to take care of us.

3pt141592• 11 years ago

Before you write a comment about why women are or aren't enrolled in STEM fields, please read the Wikipedia article on it. Every time someone says a generalization like "they just choose safer employment" or "high status something, something" without first reviewing a summary of the body of research into the matter, it's kinda pointless. It's like someone saying "here's why I think computers crash" but they've never read a book on HTML.

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

nitrogen• 11 years ago

You wouldn't read a book on HTML to know why computers crash. A book on advanced C, maybe.

3pt141592• 11 years ago

You kinda missed the point. Someone reading a book on html night stumble upon a kinda sorta correct response.

schrodinger• 11 years ago

Thanks, I found that to be a really good summary of a lot of possible explanations.

Mz2• 11 years ago

Much to my surprise, it doesn't seem to say anything really meaty about the role women play in terms of bearing and rearing children. Surprisingly, the header "Biological explanations" talks about spatial ability, not reproduction. Having read quite a lot about women's issues in order to figure out where my own life went wrong, I think failure to mention the burden women bear in this regard and how it impacts their careers is a substantial oversight.

mason240• 11 years ago

Given the politics of any gender-issue related topic on Wikipedia, there is little reason to bother reading it, much less use it as an appeal to authority.

stretchwithme• 11 years ago

Carol Dweck has shown us that it is the belief that intelligence is fixed is a major problem.

If children are told that failure is just part of learning and not indicative of potential, they keep trying until they master the material.

Of course, if someone is uninterested in acquiring a particular skill, that's irrelevant. They may have exactly the same potential for learning, but just don't care.

We should not be trying to make people pursue careers because we don't like the statistics. People should be free to follow their own desires. They know better than "society", whatever that is.

ed_blackburn• 11 years ago

I nearly didn't read because so often Open Letters are public complaints, usually passive aggressive in nature and almost always divisive.

So Jennifer. Thank you. Thank you for restoring my faith in open letters. Or rather making me think hard before I pass judgement on something I've not even read.

Saunters off, with tail firmly between legs.

emcarey• 11 years ago

The female founders conference is probably one of the best days of the year. I saw so many friends, women I know on the Internet, and I cried tears of joy three times during the speeches. It's hard to be what you can't see. Jessica and Kat have done an AMAZING job of putting female founders in front of us so we can look and say, hey you know, Kathryn Minshew did YC, I CAN DO IT TO.

Even though our startup didn't make it into the last YC batch, we're applying again. We love the community, we love the yc philosophy and approach to building products and we want to inspire other women just like us to apply.

Thank you for writing this letter and sharing what we all think, yesterday was incredible.

tzs3• 11 years ago

She mentions her field of STEM (mechanical engineering) has a particularly low percentage of women among its members, and cites another site. On that site, there is this interesting list:

   39% of chemists and material scientists are women;
   27.9% of environmental scientists and geoscientists are women;
   15.6% of chemical engineers are women;
   12.1% of civil engineers are women;
   8.3% of electrical and electronics engineers are women;
   17.2% of industrial engineers are women; and
   7.2% of mechanical engineers are women.

Does anyone have an explanation as to why chemists and material scientists have such a relatively high percentage of women?

The two highest are science, as opposed to engineering, so it could be that science in general is more women friendly than engineering, but even if we just look at the engineering disciplines on that list, there still is a big difference among them. Why would chemical engineering be much more women friendly than mechanical engineering?

crazy1van4• 11 years ago

Maybe women on average just prefer some jobs more than others?

Really, I'm sure there are millions of factors that enter into to those stats -- about one for every woman because everyone woman is unique with her own goals and tastes -- but I think the occam's razor for this topic is that men and women on average have different preferences. Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?

The bottom line, whatever the reason for discrepancies, is in your daily professional life to treat both sexes the equally.

Retra7• 11 years ago

Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?

Why would you compare socio-economic inequalities to taste in media? That would be like comparing national budgets to a lemonade stand and asking why we don't put the same effort into managing a 12-year old's summer business.

These issues have entirely different scopes and priorities, and your comparison is invalid based on that alone.

wpietri2• 11 years ago

There are few things in discourse I hate more than this sort of "just", the kind of ignorance-encouraging, status-quo-supporting "just" that tells people to stop thinking.

Given that we have a millennia-long history of gender discrimination and given that women got the vote less than a century ago, this "just" is ridiculous.

Look at this graph:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

I guess in 1970 women "just" didn't like medicine or law. (That's certainly what people said then.) And now, using your helpful explanatory framework, they "just" do! It's unexplainable! Things just happen without relation to other things. Who could possibly know anything?

saraid2162• 11 years ago

Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?

FYI, there is a root cause in social pressure for this.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

Or maybe some companies in some industries took discrimination/diversity issues more serious at an earlier stage than others, leading to a disproportionate number of applicants in those fields. It's often misleading to assume everyone began at the same position on some imaginary starting line, and that present discontinuities are thus reflective of fundamental differences.

ankey1• 11 years ago

Chemistry is often seen as a "softer" science out of the others on the list with supposedly more work/life balance. That was how it was explained to me as a woman when I declared that I was going to study electrical engineering in college. A lot of people tried to steer me towards chemical engineering but I was horrible at chemistry and my interests were more aligned with electrical engineering so I stuck with it.

kansface• 11 years ago

Women make up about 50% of undergrad chemistry degrees. On the other hand, they make less than 20% of physics/math degrees (engineering funnels). I don't have any real idea why women are so low in math and physics, but I suspect you'd have to look back much further in time.

tomp8• 11 years ago

I studied math in Slovenia. There were about as many female as there were male students. In financial mathematics (and e.g. pharmacy, IIRC), there were more women than men. On the other hand, in computing and physics there were more men than women.

I am very inclined to think this is mainly a matter of preference. On the other hand, maybe the situation in the US is completely different, and Slovenia is just so much more equal when it comes to sex (e.g. the unadjusted gender wage gap is only 2.5% for Slovenia).

Mz2• 11 years ago

I'm a woman. I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta in the 11th grade, a college level math honor society. I didn't take any math my senior year in high school because I would have had to go to school an hour earlier to take the class they made available to the three people who qualified for it (the other two students did opt to go in early -- but I have serious health problems that had not yet been identified). So I got to college and was told I could either retake trig or enroll in calculus. I did not want to retake trig and I enrolled in calculus. Having had no math the year before, I ended up dropping out of calculus. I still feel scarred by the experience.

Years later, when I was going back to college and trying to choose a major, I knew I wanted to do something with the built environment. I went through university catalogs and looked at what different majors entailed. I took "civil engineering" off the list pretty early in the process because of the requirement to take multiple calculus classes.

Women often do not have great math backgrounds. They may do fine in math up through middle school, but often start falling behind in math in high school. It is not clear if this is because of social factors or innate lack of ability. But it is a known phenomenon. So I would wonder if the ones where women are very seriously underrepresented are the ones with the most significant math requirements. If that doesn't check out, I don't know what I would look at next. But that is the first thought that comes to mind for me.

rndn2• 11 years ago

You may find this interesting: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...

(I haven't read it yet though, only one of the linked articles in the third paragraph.)

lilibalfour• 11 years ago

I think it might have to do with the careers that are attached to each major.

clarebear• 11 years ago

I agree that (early) science is friendlier to women than (early) engineering. Another factor might be that, if all else is equal, pick the major that already has some women, so you have some peers.

kriro• 11 years ago

Maybe it's due to Marie Curie, arguably the most renown female scientist? Eventhough she did Physics and Chemistry she's mostly portrayed as a chemist I think.

Animats• 11 years ago

When computing went "social", I expected that women would play a much larger role. That didn't happen. The "social" companies are dominated by men.

rgarcia3• 11 years ago

Sorry ladies. It sounds like whining to me. Try Hispanic female in engineering during the 80s. I'm on my 2nd start-up in a competitive tech world. Each and every women at the FFC have had their struggles to get where they are today. So pull on your big girl pants and jump in - the water is fine - being a woman hasn't kept Tracy or Grace or Adora or Ruchi from being successful at what they do. That is the lesson that should be taken away from the day in San Fran. I went, I listen, I am inspired. Now I'm off my soap box and off to conquer my small part of the world. @vijilent

jdhouse4• 11 years ago

Perhaps next there will be a forum for older-than-30 founders?

ninavizz• 11 years ago

Could the guys on this thread please stop it with the "pipeline" discussion?! Few women actually cite that to be an issue. It's distracting. Listen more, talk less.

An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

Related Stories