discolemonade

But then you have to go back to the original question: what is it about maleness and femaleness that makes it possible that in so many societies around the world, the same patterns exist? You can't have culture without brains to create it. And the brains of males and females in different cultures seem to be producing similar patterns.

The male advantage in mathematical and spatial orientation has been replicated in many different countries. So that pretty m uch rules out the cultural explanation.

"Gender inequality is a problem that needs to be avoided"

Why is gender inequality a problem that needs to be avoided? The economy needs tech startups. What difference does it make that the vast majority are started by men? It would be equally good if most tech startups were started by women, but they aren't. Who cares? The "gender inequality is bad" meme seems to be an unquestioned default that most people hold in their heads. The first thing people will always assume is that any uneven statistical distribution of people in a profession will be due to discrimination. But that's usually not the case. Usually, it comes down to a far simpler explanation. There are significant average motivational differences between men and women when it comes to math and the hard sciences that will always ensure a gender imbalance in engineering-related fields. Statistically, it has little to do with ability (except at very elite levels). Far fewer women than men enjoy thinking about and discussing technology. It's a simple fact of the world that's easily observed in the ever day conversations that men and women choose to have. And it will forever ensure a statistical gender imbalance in tech. Most women aren't interested in technology and women (and men) who are in technology, who keep pushing for this fictional perfect male/female balance would do well to show a bit of respect to the majority of the female population that chooses to be interested in other things that females are typically more oriented towards.

These social conditioning arguments are always non-sequiters. At some point you have to ask yourself, what conditions society? Something has to create the condition where people begin to notice that engineering and tech is kind of a male thing and, say, nursing, is kind of a female thing on average. Something must have created that original pattern for people to notice it. It doesn't just come out of the ether. Once the pattern exists, it's probably reinforced, but you can't tell me that with all the effort that goes into getting girls into STEM, the tide wouldn't have been turned by now had the phenomenon been based purely on nurture. Plus, you see this pattern all over the world. And it's always evident that there's bias in this argument because nobody gets upset when somebody points out that most elementary school teachers are women. And that leads me to think that there's a lot of people (of the female variety) who deep down believe that what men do is superior to what women do. And that's sad, because it's entirely untrue.

To understand what really motivates people, it's much better to look at what they do in the real world. Sure, there have always been women getting CS degrees, but how many of them go out and become programmers or tinker with technology, electronics and hardware late at night because they want to? The people who do that have been the engines behind technological advancement and growth throughout human history. And they've been mostly males. Saying that men tend to be more interested in technology than women doesn't mean that women's interest in CS is purely fixed. It just means that there will always be statistically more males tinkering with technology than females. And those statistical disparities will always ensure that the majority of tech-heavy, companies, and inventions will be led by men.

The answer to why there are more female founders in New York than the Valley is easy: Valley startups tend to be a lot more tech-heavy than NYC startups as a whole. And women in general aren't drawn to deep technology. I find it interesting how whenever issues of women and technology come up, everyone gets all pc and pretends not to know what the root of the gender gap is. But then if you ask them to count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction, they can't. Human nature doesn't change just because we pump a few billion dollars into figuring out how to get girls to love STEM. It'll never change. Tech heavy centers like Silicon Valley will always have a preponderence of male entrepreneurs and less tech heavy centers like NYC will always be more appealing to female entrepreneurs. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls.

There's still an element of stigma around online dating. When you combine that with the fact that nobody wants to admit to others and especially to themselves that they settled, this site is a trainwreck in the making... assuming it isn't some sort of a prank or something. Nobody intentionally goes out looking for ugly people to date.

Great idea. This definitely solves a real problem.

I've found that writing about something forces you to investigate all the possible ideas and nuances around the topic in a way that you may otherwise not do. It's a great way to really understand something. It's trained me to think more logically. That's part of the reason I blog.Plus, it's what got me my current job.

How do universities and startups not matter? They're incubators of knowledge and wealth creation. And regarding multinationals, most of the biggest multinationals are either Japanese, American or European. Places like China and Indonesia do a lot of the manufacturing for them, but most of the wealth still flows back to the countries where the knowledge for that technology is developed. Most of Apple's wealth is concentrated in the U.S because that's where Apple's knowledge creators are based. Same with Nokia or Toyota or any company. The world isn't totally flat despite what Tom Friedman thinks. Pockets of innovation will always exist. I think India is a better example of a developing power with a strong innovation base than China is.

The British Empire lasted over 300 years. America as an Empire has been around for only around 100. The American Empire is like the British Empire squared because of its endless capacity for self-renewal. It's like a starfish that regenerates limbs. One of the things that makes it so dynamic is the great universities and their relationship with business. No Chinese university is even in the top 200 in the world. Of the world's top 20 universities, all but three are American. Of the top 50, all but 11 are in the U.S. And then you think about a concept like the "new economy". It's an American invention. Most of the best startups and the best software are made in America. In just about every measure of soft power, nobody compares.

It's easy to tell. You just need to use what I call the boast test. It works on countries just as well as it does on individual people because countries are made up of the sum character of the people. Basically, it says that the harder someone tries to let others know about their abilities, the less animated they are by a deep sense of purpose. People with real, deep power and deep purpose don't boast. They're calm. But you know they have power. A second rate power like Russia is eager to boast about their military capabilities. China's Olympic spectacle last summer was a classic example of this notion. The only recent power I can think of that had that sense of calm was Great Britain. They just had the right stuff. And they changed the world. Churchill's speeches could have been written by any U.S. president. The EU sort of has it, but it's not willing to back it up with muscle...not necessarily war...but just declaration of purpose in their leaders. Maybe it's because they're secular. I don't know. But they don't really have it. No one does.

I remember reading the Friedman piece several weeks ago and thinking to myself, "This guy drank the China kool-aid too." It's part of the whole American declinism notion that pops up every ten years or so and I've never believed it. We were there with Japan in the 80s, The Soviet Union, the EU, and now China (and India too). It's easy to believe China is going to be the next superpower if you look at its growth relative to the U.S over the last decade. But the thing that's always made me skeptical about any country replacing the U.S as the world's lone superpower any time soon isn't our resources. It's our sense of mission and purpose in the world. It's something that nobody else has. Only we have it because it's in our cultural fabric. It's not something you create on purpose. It grows organically out of a hapenstance of historical events. It informs everything else about us. You see it when you travel to other countries and come back. Americaness is optimism and hope. It's a source of our soft power, which is extremely attractive to the rest of the world. It's why everyone wants to be American but nobody secretly wishes they were Chinese or Nigerian or Brazilian. China or Russia or the EU or India don't have that sense of mission and purpose in their psyche. No amount of military hardware or GDP growth can compensate for that.Superpowerdom is unsustainable without it. So China could be a paper tiger.

Just out of curiosity, how did those groups with non-programmers develop their product? Did they go out and find programmers? What did they spend most of their time doing?

@icey what makes you think it's enormous? I would think that most people who have a business idea they're confident enough to pursue have it because they've discussed it at length with someone else who's also interested in the idea.

I imagine it's not that high. If I were in PG's shoes, I would be more reluctant to fund single founder groups too for the simple reason that startup ideas go through countless iterations and it's very hard to mold an idea if you have no one to bounce ideas off of. Sure, you could get the opinions of family and friends, but they'll tell you anything because they don't have a stake in the idea.

It would be interesting to see stats on the composition of groups that YC has funded since inception; ie, percentage of all programmer groups vs programmer/biz guy vs all biz guys, etc. Any insights PG?

The problem with charging for news is that news as it's presented is unspectacular. Most people, if they don't have to-- won't pay for unspectacular information because chances are they can get it somewhere else because it isn't hard to produce or duplicate. I can get the same information from the NY Times at the Washpost. I do like their opeds though. I read David Brooks a lot. But I still won't pay for David Brooks' insight because it doesn't make me money or save me time or do something to make my life easier. That's the only kind of information you can form a business model around.

Yeah, but digital sales aren't replacing CD sales. They probably never will. That wouldn't be so much of a problem if the labels didn't mind becoming smaller entities. The thing they haven't yet realized is that the industry is breaking up into many different niche entities of which they're now only a small part. It sucks losing power they way they have but complaining that the digital music revolution is unfair is like saying that gravity is unfair.It's a non-starter.

The artists are actually doing just fine. They've always wanted to free themselves from the labels. If you're an artist and you can figure out distribution and marketing on your own, all you need is about 1000 loyal fans to make a decent living because you keep most of your profits. It's not as easy as it sounds, but at least it's freedom and what's more important than that?

It's extremely difficult to feel sorry for the record labels. They all deserve their fate. They saw everything coming as far back as the mid 90s, but decided they were more powerful than the market. With all their CD boom money, they could have bought Napster and Big Champagne, which tracks P2P file sharing. They could have bought MySpace and Pandora and just about any major music portal that any person of average intelligence would have thought was a good idea.

I think the reason music makes us emotional goes beyond language. I think music also taps into the Amygdala, which is the part of the brain that regulates fear. There are certain sounds in nature that are scary or ominous. Low sounds like the sound of thunder or the low bellow of a lion are scary sounds in nature because they come from dangerous things. Things that make you disappear. Being afraid of those sounds is an avoidance mechanism, I think. People who avoided the things that created those sounds survived, therefore natural selection must have played a role in why we find certain sounds scary...or happy or whatever. It's possible to mimick those natural sounds artificially through music. That's probably a a big reason why music is so emotional. Sound informs us about what to like and what to avoid in our environment. Music just kind of fools the brain.