
For Stanford Class of '94, a Gender Gap More Powerful Than the Internet - hemancuso
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/100000003252545.app.html
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dang
Discussion from yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8784926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8784926).

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

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

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thoman23
The more I read about Thiel, the more I wonder how someone so smart can be so
dumb.

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

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rodgerd
Which wouldn't be so bad, but Thiel, Andressen, et al, seem determined to
foist their flavour of "smart stupid" on everyone else.

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eli_gottlieb
Admittedly, I can kinda-sorta understand becoming a libertarian if you grew up
in Northern California: its local/municipal/regional governments are a
_special_ kind of stupid that you only get when combining lower-class reaction
with landowner chauvinism with new money elitism.

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ameister14
That title is a bit misleading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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learc83
I've always wondered why the tech industry is so obsessed with the gender gap
and yet almost completely ignores the race gap.

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

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rhino369
The racial gap is present in almost all faucets of American life. That
suggests a society wide issue.

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

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learc83
>That suggests a society wide issue.

The gender gap is every bit a society wide issue. When I was in middle school
and high school, I didn't know a single girl who was interested in technology.
This says that this issue begins when girls are young and is either something
imprinted on them by society or something that is innate.

I haven't seen anything that suggests that our industry is more able to solve
the gender gap than the race gap. Both of these problems have complex causes
that extend far outside of the scope of what one industry can fix, but I don't
see any reason to fixate on one at the expense of the other, which is exactly
what we're doing.

>The gender gap is fairly unique to the tech industry...

This isn't unique to the tech industry at all. The gender gap is present in
numerous blue collar professions--some of which pay very well (electricians,
plumbers etc...)

>...and it is pretty extreme. My graduating class at Illinois for EE was 95%
male.

And I'm sure you can find many equally extreme examples that demonstrate the
race gap.

There are other gaps as well. Rural vs urban, rich vs poor, single parent vs 2
parent households. Yet none of these receive anywhere the press that the tech
gender gap does.

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Pyxl101
Certain aspects of male/female difference are definitely innate. For example,
among young infants, females are more interested in faces and people, while
males are more interested in mechanical objects. I believe a study showed this
effect was present & statistically significant only a short time after birth
(too soon to be influenced by culture).

There are well-known differences in brain structure, such as the portions of
brain used for language. Women have an edge in verbal reasoning, while men in
spatial.

Male IQ has more variability than female IQ, resulting in more men in both the
top and bottom percentiles. This may explain why more men are executives, and
why more men are homeless (that's just my suspicion). Studies have also found
that male IQ is higher on average by (variously) 3-5 points. From my personal
observations, men are more likely than women to focus intensively on one
activity, to the exclusion of all others, like skateboarding, or surfing, or
computer programming, or gaming.

Men weigh more than women, have more muscle mass, have 40-60% more upper body
strength, and 25-30% lower body strength, though with training the gap narrows
to 0-8% (so perhaps this difference is more cultural). Men outperform women in
most athletic areas, though perhaps not in distance running. Women live years
longer than men and have lower rates of mental illness.

Women and men earn equal pay when you control for the job worked, the hours
worked, and the amount of experience. I believe a study showed that single
male and female professionals with no dependents, equal time in the workforce,
working equal hours, earned equal amounts. The pay gap arises because slightly
fewer women work high-paying jobs, they work fewer hours per week / take more
time off, and drop out of the workforce at higher rates (e.g. stay at home
parent).

A good summary of research and sources are available in Wikipedia articles
like "Sex differences in intelligence" and "Sex differences in psychology".
Certainly do not take my word for any of this, and please correct me if I'm
wrong.

Personally, I think we should make sure that every person is judged based on
individual merit, and be encouraged and supported to pursue what they're
interested in with no preconceptions. That's what equality means to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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danilocampos
You completely missed the "proportionally more dropping out," therefore
expending three paragraphs saying nothing.

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facepalm
I didn't miss it. If they find it is not as much fun as they thought and they
have other options, they drop out.

I'm pretty sure, for example, that women tend to be less concerned about the
potential income of their profession.

I wouldn't be surprised if women are on average less antisocial than men, for
the simple reason that women are desired by the world. Men wonder how to talk
to women, women wonder how to avoid being talked to (great simplifications of
course). So computing would on average be less attractive (in the days before
facebook anyway).

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petegrif
Heard her talking about this piece on NPR. Unimpressive.

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

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eli_gottlieb
Age 42 is the _sunset_ of their careers? Really?

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

