

Startup boot camp Y Combinator illustrates dearth of women in tech - ssclafani
http://www.mercurynews.com/twitter/ci_15517047?source=rss

======
wheels
Statistically founding a tech startup is at the intersection of two things
which are primarily male-dominated at the moment: founding companies and IT.
It's really only when they're multiplied together that it becomes so starkly
biased towards males.

My long standing theory on the tech front has been that the hook in the 80s
and early 90s for kids getting into technology was computer games, which were
largely marketed to boys.

My little sister, however, was born in 1988, and by the time she was using a
computer the primary hook was the internet, which (as I recall) young girls
spend _more_ time on than young boys.

Like I had, she learned to program at a young age, knew HTML when she was 11,
Java when she was 14, and so on. However, also like me, she had a lot of
aptitude for music.

I was _fiercely_ discouraged from music. My parents saw it as a waste of time.
Becoming a software engineer was respectable. Heck, I started college in 1997
when it seemed like about the best thing in the universe that a kid could go
into.

Now, my sister was encouraged in music. My mom moved 90 miles away so that she
could go to a magnet high school for performing arts, my parents bought her a
$3000 flute and drove her around the country to top conservatories for
auditions when the time came. But even up to her senior year in high school
she was considering a double major in physics and music, but the interest in
physics was largely downplayed by my parents.

Now, what happened there? Two kids, both good at mathematical stuff and music,
same parents, _wildly_ different parenting approaches. I don't think my
parents in the meantime considered music any more _useful_ – it was simply
acceptable that she do something _useless_ , while I had to do something
useful. I think you see where this is going.

In college I noticed this again – the computer science department was about
95% male, while the math department was only 50% male. The difference
obviously wasn't in analytical abilities – I think anybody that could get
through a math degree could get through a CS degree. No, the difference was
that almost all of the girls were minoring in education and intending to
become math teachers.

I don't think that _everything_ in the gap is nurture; there's probably some
truth to chest-beating nature of starting a company, but the scales certainly
are tipped heavily in the direction of boys by our upbringing.

~~~
hugh3
_the scales certainly are tipped heavily in the direction of boys by our
upbringing._

Perhaps, but...

 _I was fiercely discouraged from music._

Your own upbringing sounds pretty atypical.

~~~
wheels
To be clear, it wasn't that my parents discouraged music from the get-go; they
discouraged me from taking music seriously. In high school I taught myself to
play four instruments, went into a studio and recorded a single for an indy
compilation CD with my band and spent most of my free money and time on music
stuff.

The contrast was that while I was buying new instruments with money I made
from mowing lawns and working at a burger joint, my parents _still_ complained
about me wasting the money on them. When my sister began taking music
seriously they bought her nice instruments and never pushed her to get a job
so that she could focus on music.

Ironically, by the end of college, while studying computer science, I was
paying my bills with music.

------
marquis
Speaking as a young woman in the industry whose startup has successfully
turned into a solid small business and had to deal with condescending remarks
from my male colleagues and clients (though very, very rarely on purpose), I
would say it is due to both societal issues and the way computing is currently
done.

Another issue is that young girls just don't generally like to spend a lot of
time alone, and technology is overall an isolating pursuit, at least while you
hone your skills. It's pretty easy for me to sit down with my young nephews
and hang out on the computer together, but my nieces get bored of staring at
the screen and prefer to make things, so I get their attention more when we
play with sensors and robots.

I expect at some point technology will break out of the two dimensional
confines, and young girls will pick up computing as much as they can excel at
knitting and sewing, which I use primarily as an example of complex pursuits
requiring attention to detail and logic but with a physical result.

Give it time. Bring your girls up to love technology as much as your boys and
they'll be participating equally but in different ways. Accept, and enjoy,
that girls and boys approach technology with different goals.

~~~
doron
What is it about the way computing is currently done that inhibits women
outside of social norms?

I wonder If programming syntax as it is designed might have some influence.
There is some evidence that men and women use language differently, is it
possible that common computing syntax designed mostly by men to actualize
their thought process is biased towards the gender?

~~~
vorador
Then maths would be biaised too towards boys. But studies have shown that
gender doesn't affect competence in maths.

~~~
hugh3
Other studies have shown that it has.

------
nailer
My wife works in an industry dominated by women and gay males. AFAICT, nobody
in this industry thinks this is for any reason other than women and gay males
being interested at the work and few straight males being interested. People
get that, as a whole, gender and sexuality shape your interests. There's no
scare articles about something being wrong with the industry, or large
companies trying to hire straight male quotas, but where they exist, people
like them and appreciate them for what is frequently a different and
refreshing focus.

And as a straight male, I'm OK with this.

~~~
SMrF
When I was a kid I loved dressing up and makeup, etc. My parents (thankfully)
did not discourage this type of play, but did they encourage me to make a
career out of this interest? No. Was there anything in society that pushed me,
a straight male, towards this career? Not really. Instead, while I was playing
with Barbie I was also telling everyone I wanted to be an aeronautical
engineer, mainly because I liked paper airplanes.

Kids seek approval from adults, adults approved of my interest in engineering,
not my interest in fashion. Is it a surprise that I majored in CS?

~~~
nailer
You do make a good point. Part of the reason I was attracted to my wife is an
appreciation of the traditionally creative industries, something that's always
held my interest - I use to buy a lot of fashion magazines as a kid, and I got
started programming by doing architecture inside video games. I think that
boys interested in the arts are often pushed towards 'manly' pursuits like
architecture rather than traditionally soft skills like fashion design - my
parents were this way, it yours seems yours were too. Now I'm 30, and I regret
not engaging the creative part of my brain more readily.

Perhaps we should be saying that girls who want to make stuff on computers
should be encouraged to pursue that, just like boys who want to make clothes.
No quotas, no 50% expectation, just encouragement for the kids who need it.

------
todayiamme
Something that bothers me whenever something like this comes up is that
children are assumed to be one dimensional beings. I know for sure that at
some level, be it proprioception or some difference in processing information,
male and female brains are different. However, the catch is that those
differences may not actually be that profound.

Children as young as 3 can pick up gender cues from the environment and base
their behavior on that. I know that I did. I just knew that I couldn't play
with dolls. I knew I couldn't talk about babies and things like that. I knew I
was expected to pick fights with other kids. I knew what my parents expected
from me, and in order to seek their approval I did precisely that.

There are so many subtle societal cues which govern behavior. You tend to only
notice them when you are carefully paying attention constantly. They are
undertones in conversations. It is how people look at you. It is what they
first talk about. It is in their facial expressions, and somehow unconsciously
we internalize them all.

What is even more interesting is what happens when a child is gender variant.
Societies response to such a child happens to be quite telling, and
unfortunately for a child, at least, such things matter. It mattered to me and
it matters for any child. At that age approval is everything.

So is it surprising that more women don't go into tech?

In the coming years when this generation grows up in an environment of
different expectations and viewpoints. I think that there will be more women
in tech, and they will wonder why women earlier didn't choose it as a career.

The point is that kids must be respected and loved not confined as beings who
have to grow into pre-defined roles. Only then can such things change.

------
starkfist
Taking a cue from Philip Greenspun, maybe the real question is: why are there
so many men? In my experience, at least half the people in "tech" are
miserable. HN.YC focuses on the winners, not the losers. For every young
startup hotshot, there are 1000 middling software engineers working on
connecting the invoice database to the PO database and wishing they never got
into the field in the first place.

------
ja27
There aren't very many women going into tech because there aren't very many
women in tech. Male or female, when a kid is picking a college or major, they
tend to listen to their friends (and maybe even family). If none of their
female friends are considering Computer Science, it's an uphill battle to sell
a girl on that. I don't think most teens care as much about this as parents,
but if they can't see positive role models already in that field, it's even
harder to consider that field.

I don't think it's getting much better soon. My daughter's on a First LEGO
League team (4 boys, 2 girls) and we see lots of teams without a single girl
on them. Our local Girl Scout council got a grant to fund several First LEGO
League teams. We've tried to work with them to mentor any new teams but no
success. (Now, maybe an all-Girl Scout team is unrealistic, but it has been
done.)

------
roundsquare
Random thought comes to mind: Does anyone think that Dan Brown novels might
help get more women into Math/CS? They have a tendency to have female techies.
I know at least one woman who was inspired by one of the novels to learn a bit
about crypto.

~~~
TimeForThis
Most of the sci-fi I've read have great female role models. Dan Brown is an
awful writer so would be better to push better writers - get their films made!
:)

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OasisP
Why are so many people equating math with programming with science? There
might be some bleed between the subjects, but Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, none
of these strike me as requiring particularly high level math skills.

------
ck2
Only 14 out of 450 are women? That's just 3 percent. Yikes.

~~~
ahoyhere
Paul invited me to apply for YC but I declined because I didn't want to move
for 3 months. (I'm a girl.) I don't know if that is still in effect, but it is
ridiculous, and more men than women will go to ridiculous lengths.

Compare that percentage to a course I just finished teaching, 12 weeks on
bootstrapping - how to make your first profitable product, on the side.

I had triple the percentage of female students - 4 women out of 50
participants. They were all 30 or older. I am reaching women that no seed fund
will reach, and they are going to be successful.

I expect that percentage to grow.

~~~
pbiggar
> I don't know if that is still in effect, but it is ridiculous, and more men
> than women will go to ridiculous lengths.

It isn't ridiculous, it's the whole basis of the program. I did the program
last winter, convinced that I could do it just as well from home. I'm now
convinced of the opposite: doing a successful startup (excepting side-project
type startups, which are valid but different) requires being in the valley.

It may be ridiculous in the sense that it is a hardship, and if you think men
will go through this hardship more than women, then I think we know why the
numbers are so skewed.

~~~
rdouble
When I lived in the bay area, it seemed more like a vacation than a hardship.

------
temphn
The most informative thread on the Internet on this subject is probably this
one:

<http://www.plos.org/cms/node/75>

That's an extremely informative, citation dense conversation which took place
in the aftermath of the Summers/Barres imbroglio a few years ago.

------
tkahn6
Either on the whole females are fundamentally less capable of excelling in
mathematical subjects or it's a societal thing. I believe it's the latter. I
think the article hit it on the head: "girls are often told that's OK and try
something else, but boys are encouraged to work harder."

Math is fun because it's challenging and part of my motivation comes from my
peers', parents', and teachers' expectations that I excel.

I think the problem rises from a combination of:

    
    
        "Math is hard... let's go shopping!"
    

and more insidiously

    
    
        "Physics is hard... let's go to English class!"
    

I've seen a few really smart girls get frustrated with physics or chemistry,
give up, write it off, and then focus their effort on english or history or
some other humanities class.

~~~
gruseom
My favorite professor was a mathematician who did her doctorate at Zürich in
the 1940s. Needless to say, for most of her career she was the only woman in
the department. With the advent of feminism she would get called up frequently
by activists or journalists asking her to comment on all the obstacles she
faced as a woman (a request she steadfastly rejected), and also on how to get
girls into math. Her routine answer to the latter was that if anyone had tried
to "get her into math" she would have promptly dropped math and taken up
embroidery. But my favorite story was when the controversy hit about the
talking Barbie who said "Math is hard." She was phoned up and asked what she
had to say about this. Her response: "Barbie is right."

------
david927
YC is somewhat infamous for having a bias. Their reputation is that if you're
not a college-aged Caucasian male, you need not apply.

Of course, there is a dearth of women in tech, but I think it has to be
exacerbated by this kind of subconscious preference.

