

Y Combinator’s lady problems, in three charts - epeus
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/04/y-combinators-lady-problems-in-three-charts/

======
freehunter
Is the problem that VCs are ignoring startups with female founders, or is it
that women are not becoming startup founders in general? For the first one,
that's a problem that VCs need to fix. For the second, if there's something
systemically keeping women out of tech startups, that's a problem the _world_
needs to fix.

Assuming that VCs always pick the most promising startup founders without
discrimination, the next question is would everyone rather VCs fund unprepared
or unqualified founders in order to be more inclusive and look better from a
PC standpoint, or pick the best founders that come in front of them and accept
that there may not be a diverse mix of people at the company?

It's really easy to prove that they're not funding female founders. It's just
as easy to shame them for it in the media. It's a lot harder to prove that
this is done out of bias or malice. It's even harder to make the business
decision to fund more female founders if you're fairly certain that the female
founders that approach you for funding are not prepared to be startup
founders.

So what can we do? Women leaders in tech aren't exactly uncommon, nor do they
necessarily make the news more than male leaders. I'm sure there are _fewer_
female tech leaders than there are men, but that brings us back to the
question of is there actually a problem, and if so is it for the tech
companies to solve, or is it for the world to solve?

~~~
cpncrunch
The other possibility is that women just aren't as interested in tech as men.
The same is true of other professions like pilots and car mechanics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#Female_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#Female_and_Male_Perspectives)

Men and women's brains are wired slightly differently, so this shouldn't
really be a surprise. We just need to make sure that women are given
sufficient opportunity to enter the tech industry.

------
TheEzEzz
I'd like to see these normalized by number of applications per category, but I
suppose that's a graph only YC could provide.

~~~
epeus
If YC want to put more figures in the spreadsheet I'll remake the graph.
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tZVHgKnNS5ghjkQou4QO...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tZVHgKnNS5ghjkQou4QOyQtQWX9sURgSMVYgyC76z-Q/edit?usp=sharing)

------
jack-r-abbit
That second chart is most telling:
[https://twitter.com/shanley/status/440591732283961344/photo/...](https://twitter.com/shanley/status/440591732283961344/photo/1)

Sure it took them 10 years... but they did finally get to the point that they
pretty much match the BLS number. So what is their problem exactly? They
didn't get there _fast enough_? This just strikes me as one of those _never
enough_ issues. They got there... late... but there. But damn them anyway.

And as others have mentioned, we would need to compare this to a plot of _all
applicants_ for each year. More important than "percentage of funded companies
that had 1+ female" would be "percentage of companies with 1+ female that got
funded." Those are two totally different data points.

------
jmduke
Two things prevent this from being a cogent narrative, in my opinion:

\- How do these figures compare to the overall population of applicants?

\- How do these figures compare to the entirety of VC-backed startups?

Without that knowledge, this is just extrapolation around a set of isolated
data points.

