
Paul Graham Isn't Keeping Women out of Tech - kbambz
http://thedatingring.tumblr.com/post/71463600468/paul-graham-isnt-keeping-women-out-of-tech-from-ycs
======
zainny
We're creating an environment now in which it is practically impossible to
discuss this topic in tech. Our general irrationality and desire to completely
and utterly jump down the throat of anyone who even remotely touches on this
topic means that in the future any gender topics are just going to get "no
comment" responses.

That's sad and not without a touch of irony precisely because in stifling the
discussion we're probably doing more harm than good.

~~~
jfarmer
IMO, folks on HN need to do much less discussing on this topic and a lot more
listening. For the most part, HN is collectively blind to issues of power and
privilege.

For those interested in learning more about privilege, read these two essays
by John Scalzi, _Being Poor_ ([http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-
poor/](http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/)) and _Straight White
Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is_
([http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-
th...](http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-
difficulty-setting-there-is/)).

Try to read them without being reflexive or poking holes in them. If you find
yourself getting riled up or defensive stop and ask yourself why you're
feeling the need to respond that way.

~~~
yetanotherphd
On the contrary, I would suggest listening to Ram Z Paul
([http://www.ramzpaul.com/](http://www.ramzpaul.com/))

You claim that people at HN experience privilege, and in some sense I agree
most of us do. And yet as proponent of a progressive agenda, you also have a
different kind of privilege. Most normal people will automatically identify
you with the "right" side. You will never have to fear being labelled a
racist, sexist or anti-Semite. For example, why is it that you automatically
turn to very patronizing language when addressing people you consider
insufficiently educated in their privilege? Could it be that you are used to
having your sense of moral superiority go unchallenged?

~~~
jfarmer
You got me.

------
gkoberger
Gawker was just looking for page views [1], as with the pg racism [2] claim a
few months ago.

This is dangerous. If people are scared to speak openly and honestly about
topics such as racism, homelessness and sexism because they don't want
Valleywag to label them as racist, elitist or sexist, we'll all be forced to
just go on pretending everything is great.

[1] [http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-
de...](http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-dentons-
phony-hypocritical-class-war-against-tech-workers/)

[2] [http://valleywag.gawker.com/major-fwd-us-donor-says-a-
strong...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/major-fwd-us-donor-says-a-strong-
foreign-accent-makes-1208418411)

~~~
tptacek
Gawker is horrible, but if you read the original article in The Information
that they're quoting from, it's not that distorted. Graham is asked whether YC
discriminates against women. Graham is aware that when he's asked this, the
subtext is that there is a marked gender imbalance among YC founders. Graham
could answer "no, we don't discriminate, and I don't know why the imbalance
exists or exactly what we should do to fix it". But Graham doesn't leave it at
that: instead, he writes a small essay about gender imbalance in the industry
on the fly, and a lot of what he says is both discouraging and, to my ears,
incorrect.

I think Paul Graham is a good, interesting person with a lot of interesting
and valuable insight that comes from experience I will never have. But he is
not infallible, and I think this is a huge blind spot for him.

Valleywag probably wants to see him burned at the stake, then drawn and
quartered by four Uber SUVs. Think of the pageviews!

~~~
ionforce
Despite its discouraging content, what do you feel is incorrect about it?

~~~
tptacek
I wrote a mammoth comment about it on this thread already.

------
baddox
Unfortunately for this all female team, feminists will accuse them of working
to support the patriarchy just as much as the evil men. Sadly, this is
actually what prominent feminists in technology believe:
[https://medium.com/about-work/e82b7ca7de03](https://medium.com/about-
work/e82b7ca7de03) (Ctrl-F "support the patriarchy").

For these feminists, women who fail are obvious evidence of patriarchy, and
women who succeed are obviously just working alongside the patriarchy. I
firmly believe that if next year the tech industry was 55% female and females
received 55% of funding and salaries, feminists would point to that as
evidence that the patriarchy is purposefully giving things to women to hide
the fact that they're all misogynist pigs. This prominent tech feminism is,
according to their own terms, completely unfalsifiable.

~~~
erikpukinskis
In the Medium essay you link to they are calling out women who deny the
existence of sexism in tech:

 _" The white privilege that benefits many white women in tech plays a huge
role in allowing them to occupy a position denying gender oppression,
supporting the patriarchy, and undermining feminist activism."_

This "female team" is doing the exact opposite. I think they're safe from the
feminist horde.

Also, you might get something from this comic:
[http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341](http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341) You
seem to be experiencing similar terrors.

~~~
baddox
> In the Medium essay you link to they are calling out women who deny the
> existence of sexism in tech

The essay isn't calling out women who fit that description. It is
_attributing_ those denials to successful women in tech.

------
apsec112
"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of
people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about
something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic.
For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more
of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument.
But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age
probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics
that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion
has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has
started to be driven mostly by people's identities.

When that happens, it tends to happen fast, like a core going critical. The
threshold for participating goes down to zero, which brings in more people.
And they tend to say incendiary things, which draw more and angrier
counterarguments."

[http://paulgraham.com/identity.html](http://paulgraham.com/identity.html)

------
Caligula
This article seems to be related to [http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-
says-women-havent-be...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-
havent-been-hacking-for-the-pa-1490581236)

It is the first time I saw Paul Graham appear on my Facebook. It is not worth
reading, the author is just going for clicks by making baseless accusations.
Paul also claims he was misquoted and thinks he should start bringing a
recorder to interviews.

It is a shame, one of the appeals of reading a Paul Graham interview or his
writing was that it was very open, I hope his no doubt hiring a PR filter or
being more reserved with his words will not reduce the quality.

~~~
Camillo
Was the ValleyWag article discussed on HN? I seem to have missed it.

~~~
minimaxir
Valleywag is a banned domain, so all submissions to the article were
autokilled. (and there were many submissions)

Since the original article was under a paywall, those links were also killed.

------
spindritf
_So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will
laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example--
and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask,
might this be true?_

One of my favourite essays.

[http://paulgraham.com/say.html](http://paulgraham.com/say.html)

~~~
yetanotherphd
Beautiful essay, and a beautiful idea that you quoted. I will have to read
more of PG.

------
tptacek
Paul Graham isn't keeping women out of technology. Nor do I believe he wants
to. If anything, his interests would be served by there being more women in
technology, and thus more candidates for YC.

Also, Valleywag is a cesspool. I ponied up for the whole interview at The
Information. I'd rather eat a bug than talk about what a Gawker publication
has to say.

But Paul Graham has said some things on this issue that I think are dumb.
Moreover, I believe he spends a lot of time worrying about the ways things he
says are misconstrued. Reputation is potential energy, as he (correctly) likes
to say, and I think he's aware of how much energy is tied up in what he says.
Knowing that he is speaking carefully on these issues does not make what he is
saying easier to take.

It is one thing to suggest that we should correct biases and imbalances as
early as we can, because the sooner someone gets started hacking, the sooner
they'll be able to bring those skills to bear on the market. Sure, that's true
and probably benign.

It is another thing entirely to suggest that special status is conferred on
people who started hacking when they were 13, and that it might be "too late"
for people who didn't to join the ranks of that elite.

It is one thing to suggest that there are people that have, for whatever
reason (nature or nurture) a natural affinity to working with computer
programs and technology. True. Benign.

It is another thing to project backwards from that the idea that if women were
going to be good at coding, "they would have found it on their own". That's
not true. It presumes that the most important factor in determining whether
someone's going to be a good coder is that they have the affinity. But you
need more than affinity: you need opportunity and support.

A gigantic blind spot men in technology have is that there are two sides to
the problem of gender bias. The side of the coin everyone thinks about is
prejudice and bias. Men hear about gender imbalance in technology and
interrogate their conscience. "Do I think women are inherently less qualified
then men? No! I've never made a decision based on that belief!" They're
probably even right about that.

The coin has another side: privilege. Privilege is a simple concept. Certain
kinds of people "fit the mold". Paul Graham knows what the typical successful
startup hacker looks like. So do most people who work at technology companies.
If you ask someone in our field at random to visualize an elite startup hacker
and then take bets on the attributes of that imaginary person, you would be
nuts to bet on anything but "male", "English-speaking", "20-40", and "white or
Asian".

25-year-old English-speaking white males have a privilege, whether they like
it or not, because they fit into everyone's mold of a startup hacker. They
will sometimes be asked stupid, discouraging questions at job interviews.
Like, "do you have any children, and, if so, how will you balance the work of
taking care of them with the demanding schedule of this job?". Or, "when did
you start coding? We're really looking not so much for someone who can execute
this role, but rather who _lives and breathes_ technology". You can tell by
looking at some people that they "live and breathe technology" (guilty as
charged). That's not a privilege at a bar or a White Sox game, but it is a
privilege in our industry.

The existence of privilege is not a scarlet letter on young white dudes who
code. But the forceful, repeated, insidious denial of the existence of that
privilege is a problem: it reinforces the privilege and allows it to feed on
itself.

~~~
baddox
> The coin has another side: privilege. Privilege is a simple concept.

Privilege is a bogus concept, at least in every manner it has been explained
to me. Examine the example you provided. If most elite startup hackers are
male, English speaking, 20-40, and white or Asian, then a person giving that
characterization would be giving a reasonable one based on observation. What
does this have to do with "privilege" or "fitting the mold"? And, more
importantly, why should I feel guilty or have some additional responsibility
simply because I, through no choice of my own other than refraining from
suicide and sex reassignment surgery, fit into one of these "privileged"
groups? You might as well claim that the winner of a paper rock scissors
competition has privilege.

My questions are actually genuine and not rhetorical. I would appreciate
responses, or perhaps corrections of my impression of the concept of
privilege.

~~~
jfarmer
First, privilege is not a bogus concept. If you really believe that — about
anything, not just privilege — you'll have a hard time learning it or amending
your understanding of it because of things like confirmation bias.

Second, your probability is bad. You're confusing P(A|B) and P(B|A). This is
understandable — lots of people do this all the time without realizing it,
myself included.

Third, your understanding of privilege is confused. As a successful, white
male who has started living in Silicon Valley, I acknowledge my privilege but
do not feel guilty about it. That you've bound up the idea of shame in
privilege might explain why you find it hard to understand — not because it
makes the idea harder to understand but because your "body" is going to have a
hard time swallowing an idea that tells you you're a bad person.

Here's one way to think of privilege. Privilege is the sum total of all the
things big and small that you don't have to think about on a day to day basis
but other people do.

For example, as an innocent white person being approached by a police officer,
I never have to wonder whether this police officer is coming to help me or
harass me. Indeed, I might even presume something like, "Oh, the officer must
be coming to tell me something useful."

As a male, I never have to worry about getting raped while walking down a city
street at night, or plan your evening so that I won't be in that situation.

As someone with means, I never have to think about whether you have enough
money to buy food to last a week, or what it feels like to have to made a
trade off between food or gas this week. Or the terror of being sick without
insurance.

Now, you might know these things. I don't know and I'm not presuming. I don't
even know whether you're white, male, or anything else. I'm just trying to
paint a picture.

If you want reading, I recommend these two essays by John Scalzi: _Being Poor_
([http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-
poor/](http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/)) and _Straight White
Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is_
([http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-
th...](http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-
difficulty-setting-there-is/)).

~~~
baddox
I still don't understand what to do with the concept. Anyone would be a fool
to think that you can group people by some attribute (like ethnicity) and show
correlations with other attributes (like income). (Granted, we might want to
do a bit of work to see if the correlations are stronger than would be
expected in a purely random distribution of attributes, but we can assume this
is the case.) And, given those correlations, anyone can recognize that they
are statistically likely to follow those same correlations based on their own
group memberships. If that's what privilege means, then so be it, but it's not
much more meaningful than saying "I'm thankful that I'm statistically more
likely to be successful than people who die as children. John Scalzi could
just as easily write an article about how not being born with a terrible
disease or deformity is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

~~~
jfarmer
I have a hard time believing you're genuinely interested in understanding the
concept since you're putting up resistance at every step. I'm not here to make
you _want_ to learn — I was presuming you already did.

If not, my mistake for engaging.

~~~
baddox
I'm putting up resistance because there is still very little I have heard that
makes sense. I do consider myself a skeptic, and I think skepticism is a
requirement for critical thinking rather than an obstacle to it.

~~~
jfarmer
A person willing to learn says, "That's interesting and it doesn't make sense
to me for X, Y, and Z reasons. I'm obviously not getting something and am
probably confused about something important." That is not what you're saying.

Being a skeptic is orthogonal to having that attitude.

Anyhow, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, ...

I'll just end it here and you can reply however you'd like or not at all. :)

~~~
pwang
> That is not what you're saying.

That's very much what baddox is saying, but with less self-deprecation. He/she
is continuing to ask questions and indicating that the concept does not make
sense to him/her. Asking critical questions about the utility of the concept,
etc. are all very well in line with skeptical approaches towards anything.

------
xacaxulu
"ask any female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, that
investor has used his power to sexually harass the founder"

I'd like to see some stats to back that up, i.e. police reports. Sounds like a
generalization that's probably not based in reality. Every investor isn't a
rapist waiting for a shot at a female CEO.

------
bjornsing
> Misogyny is alive and well, from Hacker News devolving into a disgusting sea
> of victim blaming after a female poster discussed being sexually assaulted
> at a tech conference, to the HR-free world of venture capital ( _ask any
> female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, that
> investor has used his power to sexually harass the founder_ ).

In my mind that last parenthesised bit stands out like I don't know what...
What the f*...?!? :(

~~~
Crito
I think you are misunderstanding this, due to poor wording.

That quote makes more sense if you replace _" that investor" with _"a
investor" _. It seems plausible that founders have to deal with many founders,
and it seems further plausible that many founders have had at least one bad
experience.

9/10ths of founders having at least one bad experience with an investor and
founders having bad experiences with 9/10 investors are obviously two very
different things.

Of course we should obviously still be asking ourselves _"what the fuck?!?" _

------
kyro
Is there something that can collectively be done about Gawker (more Vallewag)?
I know, freedom of speech, etc, but they time and time again publish the most
incendiary articles based on the wildest of intentional misinterpretations. It
is the farthest thing from "hard-hitting" or "raw" journalism, and at times
borders libelous.

~~~
rhizome
_Is there something that can collectively be done about Gawker (more
Vallewag)?_

Sure: don't talk to their writers.

~~~
supergauntlet
If there's one thing gawker sites do well, it's nerd baiting.

Yes, there are problems women face in STEM fields. No, getting everyone angry
at pg isn't gonna help.

~~~
rhizome
To be sure, "someone is wrong on the internet!" is what sites like these
depend on for a business model.

------
ksiegel
By claiming that "it's already too late" for those who started coding in high
school or college, Paul Graham is reflecting the industry bias against those
who don't fit the stereotypical white male hacker. It is not too late.

I wrote down some of my thoughts on this issue here:
[https://medium.com/p/f7efb084e8a](https://medium.com/p/f7efb084e8a)

------
geuis
Wow the cufon font on that page is awfully blurry on a retina display.

~~~
kbambz
I was just thinking the same thing...

------
sergiotapia
Why has tumblr become such a cesspool of social justice warriors just aching
to find something to be angry about?

How does the Tumblr owner feel about his platform being used by this toxic
community?

~~~
gaadd33
As someone who owns some Yahoo stock (which makes me a Tumblr owner
(admittedly 9.9009901e-7 percent)) I feel pretty good about it.

------
rfnslyr
_But that doesn’t give us free reign to ignore the problems that exist in
universities, accelerators, tech companies and venture capital. These pieces
of the funnel need to be thoroughly analyzed and optimized for inclusion - be
it for gender, race, age, or other markers, so that we’re able to produce the
best sustainable and profitable companies and organizations possible._

Why?

 _3\. ‘Not discouraging’ women isn’t enough - actively encourage them._

Again, _why_?

I don't understand this "get women in X" movement. There are women everywhere,
women are doing fine from what I can see in the tech space.

Why must I go out of my way to specifically pave a way for women in everything
I do?

Why not blacks? Why not midgets? Why not "X deviation from being a while
male?"

Read my previous comment history for my stance as I'm not going to copy paste
everything here. I honestly don't get it. You have all the same opportunities
men do, at least in this space.

Women are so entitled nowadays.

~~~
nsp
Technical jobs are 90%+ male, but our customer base is generally much closer
to 50/50\. Don't you think it's pretty plausible that having a woman working
with you might add a useful perspective when making your product? I've worked
at 3 startups(2 as a dev) and interviewed a couple hundred programmers over
that time, and don't think I've yet even had a resume from a female
programmer, and honestly that really disappoints me - I'd love to work in a
coed environment, just to get more opinions and life experiences informing our
discussions.

From a purely selfish standpoint, theres a lot of money to be made and a lot
less competition in female-customer-oriented startup spaces - take the
phenomenal success of Pinterest for an easy example - unless you're only
building for yourself, why would you be opposed to adding a perspective that
could potentially double your market size.

*I'm personally bothered by the gender gap for a plethora of reasons that go far beyond purely economic, but women control something like 70% of household spending in the USA, and there's a lot of compelling opportunities there even leaving aside any larger equitable society issues.

~~~
rfnslyr
I understand you and I fully agree. I actually work with a majority of women.
I'm in the corporate sector, and there are more women then men from what I'm
seeing.

I still don't get the movement. Everyone knows Computer Science exists. It's
just not an interesting or attractive field for everyone. Let's be honest,
when you have prospective high school grads you can't make CS more interesting
than say, Physics, Bio, Chemistry. A majority of women flock to those fields
and humanities. It's not sexism, it's not the patriarchy, it's just
statistics.

It just seems like a lot of women just aren't interested in CS, and I get
that. It's a fascinating field, but I can totally see why it's not populated
with women.

Anyways, all I'm trying to say is when it comes down to it, and I see a good
female candidate, I will hire her. I really don't care about the gender, just
I get way fewer females candidates. It is what it is.

Why not host more women friendly CS/Info tech workshops to spread interest?

These kinds of blog posts are just hot wind without any real foundation.
Affirmative action isn't the way to go about it, spreading interest in the
field at an early stage, however, is.

Example: CS classes in high school don't hold a candle to the sciences and are
very very poorly taught for the most part. Other sciences are exciting, they
out number CS classes like 20 to 1.

~~~
Crito
I believe the basic premise is that there is nothing in biology that makes
computer science more interesting to men than it does to women.

Since it is not an imbalance that can be pinned on biology _(perhaps unlike an
imbalance in world weightlifting records?)_ , the cause of the imbalance must
be somehow 'nurture' related. Even if we do not consider the imbalance itself
to be problematic, the imbalance is considered to be the result of some sort
of bias that _is_ assumed to be problematic.

For example, fewer women in tech _may_ not be considered problematic in and of
itself _(though I believe many people think that it is)_ , but the existence
of this imbalance may be _evidence of_ systematic sexual harassment, which
certainly is problematic.

I might be getting this wrong, so I welcome corrections.

~~~
rfnslyr
Well, here's my take on it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977753)

Most of the men I know and have talked to specifically about fighting for pay,
have in fact put up a fight for their pay, while the women I worked with
believed that their work will pay for itself and have no fought for a higher
pay raise. The women that are top tier managers, were actually just as vicious
as the guys, and by being this way, have attained the same things.

People are so quick to hop on to the social justice brigade when in reality
its a much more complicated and personal issue, being lumped into the gender
category.

~~~
jacalata
Have you ever read the research available on the different reactions people
tend to have when a woman asks for higher pay/displays entitlement to better
conditions in general, vs when a man does?

