

Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School? - jlees

I was one of the female attendees at Startup School and I was floored by the gender ratio - being in tech, I'm used to being a minority, but this was possibly the most extreme balance I've seen.<p>I'm genuinely interested in whether people have theories about why this might be, and whether any women considered attending but decided not to?  Or is this simply a real life manifestation of the HN community?
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jwise0
I was there, and the #1 thing I noticed was that of 11 presenters, exactly one
was a woman; and of the CEOs telling stories, zero were women. It was, uh, not
exactly an experience full of female role models. The 'fewer than one in ten'
ratio may be true of startups in general, but the way to balance out the
gender divide is to provide more role models, not to magnify the status quo: I
was pretty unhappy to see such an exclusionist panel.

In general, if I were a woman, I would have felt pretty unwelcome at the
event, in general: of my small amount of wandering around during the breaks, I
saw one attendee wearing a shirt with the text: "SELECT * FROM girls WHERE
free_sex=TRUE;". More distressingly, I saw a speaker (Ben Horowitz [1])
wearing a shirt with the text "No bitch-ass-ness" on it; I suspect that this
may have been a cultural reference that I missed, but that sure does seem as
unwelcoming as a shirt that would say 'man up and do it' might.

The content was, in general, high quality. I wish that the experience,
however, had been designed to avoid shutting out half of the population. A
good start for making Startup School more inclusive would be to adopt
something along the lines of the Conference Anti-Harassment Policy [2]; I hope
that Y Combinator will do something along those lines next year.

[1] Yes, I know. This is part of Horowitz's persona: he wants to come off as
'edgy', compared to, for instance, Ron Conway; he wants to show that he's hip
and with it. For instance, as I recall, he used the word 'fuck' a few times
during his speech. This is fine; now we get it! You're one of us! You can be
edgy without being a dickhead.

[2] [http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-
harassmen...](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-
harassment/Policy)

~~~
jlees
I wasn't offended by ben's shirt - I thought he had the best presentation of
the day, and content outweighs slogans.

The issue with role models is a great point though. But how to fix? If there
are no female YC alumni with great stories about working all nighters, how to
get someone on stage without risking positive selection?

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rachelbythebay
I saw it too, and I wish I had an answer. It definitely prompts feelings of
"what am I even doing here?" that merely participating on the site does not.

The whole ethnicity balance was pretty far out there, too. Considering it was
held in Silly Valley, I would have expected to see far more of a mix, but that
didn't seem to happen, either.

I wonder, are both observations the same effect in action or something else
entirely?

~~~
hobonumber1
What was the ethnicity balance like, if you don't mind me asking?

~~~
xiaoma
Asians were way, way over-represented. That's common in this sort of event.

<http://startupschool.org/zuck-sus2010.jpg>

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lisasweeney
I agree that the exposure to female role models is key. At the Stanford
Graduate School of Business, we introduced a short course about 6 years ago
called "Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Women." Each year, over a 2
week period, we bring in 25 women entrepreneurs and investors. The impact has
been meaningful; in <5 years, women have gone from representing just 12% of
the entrepreneurs in a given class to over 25% (remember, women are only 40%
of the entire class). YC can do better than this. Anyone from YC out reading
this? I'll even offer to help you!

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cpt1138
I was not there but as an older male, who doesn't drink, I am constantly
reminded of how young and alcohol obsessed "entrepreneurs" seem to be. David
Rusenko (Weebly) was still in college when he and his buds started. So to me
it seems like college boys dominate. And the kinds of technically oriented
women that would be interested in Startup School aren't as interested in
hanging around with a bunch of drunk college kids where there are not that
many women.

Id be curious if the gap was smaller watching the webcasts?

~~~
fearless
If my college days are anything to go by, the presence of drunk college kids
has never deterred women before.

~~~
cpt1138
That's why I qualified with "technically oriented women that would be
interested in Startup School"

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truebecomefalse
Has anyone considered that women just aren't as interested in tech
entrepreneurship as men are?

~~~
saiko-chriskun
Not by this wide a margin, no.

~~~
antonID
So what are you saying? YC is sexist and isn't accepting women into Startup
School?

~~~
ruby_on_rails
YC is sexist and isn't providing enough kitchen space for more women to
attend.

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kkshin
Having been to a number of "geeky" conferences, I was surprised at how large
the number of women there were at the conference.

We should also keep in mind that this community has always been aligned more
with the engineering side of entrepreneurship and less on the all the other
equally important functions, which tends to make the community somewhat
insular and under-represented.

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xoail
Women in general take less risk than men. Women in programming/hacking are far
less compared to men. Women who are married/with children find it hard to get
themselves around startup scene. I do not have any source to back all that,
just my personal view. I see things are changing and see more women in
hackathons, programming meetups etc. But it will take at least a decade to
bring balance.

~~~
marquis
>I do not have any source to back all that, just my personal view

Your view is welcome but please take care with comments such as 'women in
general take less risk than men'. The second statement you make may be a fact
but your first statement comes across as a cause for this fact, and there is
no data that suggests this. My personal experience, as a woman, would be quite
the opposite: women make more risks than men. Would that because of my gender
bias and who I spend time with talking about such things as risk, on a deep
enough level to for to consider it substantial? Quite probably, which is why I
would never make such a statement to back up a fact.

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HelenaP
We have a chance to change that! This is a shout-out to all the women out
there who are working on startups-- apply to YC!!

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31reasons
I think there were only 1% women at the event. Whatever the cause, this gender
gap is ripe for disruption!

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sgoyal360
Really enjoyed Startup School but I agree. I've never felt the tech gender
ratio as much as I did today.

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notdrunkatall
Women tend to be less interested in taking risks than men.

