

Women in Tech: The Silicon Ceiling - bootload
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maya-baratz/women-in-tech-the-silicon_b_292855.html

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byrneseyeview
Interesting. I suppose that if this is really true, and you're confident that
women are systematically undervalued by employers and VCs, you can exploit
that opportunity.

If you don't think this is true, but you still feel some kind of partisan
attachment to the idea that men and women will achieve equal results in
equivalent endeavors, you'll probably write a Huffpo article about it.

~~~
timr
What's your point, again? Is it that the article was written in HuffPo,
therefore it's wrong? Or is it that anyone who writes an article on gender
imbalance must not _really_ believe in it, because otherwise they'd be
exploiting the problem, instead of wasting their time writing?

I'm just trying to figure out which logical fallacy you're advancing.

~~~
camccann
I think the point was something like "put up or shut up". If there's a lot of
capable, motivated women out there who aren't getting the attention they
deserve, then the best way to make the point is to go _find_ them, hire or
fund them, and make a lot of money which you can rub in the face of the people
who ignored the female talent. (Similarly, one can tell people who bloviate
about politics to go put money down on InTrade.)

That noone is doing such is weak evidence that, perhaps, the cause of the
gender skew is not simply subtle endemic sexism as is often assumed. Note:
This does not imply that the reason is something as trite as "women can't do
technology", either.

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motoko
That is: if it were true that expected talent/dollars is greater in women than
in men, and this is widely known public knowledge, then why do no tech
companies select for women over men in their own self interest?

Possible answers could include: 1) They do, but you realize it.

2) They do, but you don't know about it.

3) They don't, because the premise is false, because women are not
undervalued.

3) They don't, because the premise is true, because women are not selected
over men despite having a higher talent/dollar value.

4) They don't, because organizations of people are not rational economic
decision machines, or values like "talent / dollar" are too vague to be pre-
test predictive of individual productivity, or "self interest" is not
necessarily defined by maximizing economic exchanges, or that men already in
tech simply know other men better and so tend to work with other men.

~~~
byrneseyeview
If 4) is true, it's not equally true for every company. Meritocracy varies
from one organization to another. And the more meritocratic organizations will
tend to be more successful. So choice four is just choices one through three,
delayed.

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bootload
_"... One could blame the industry's flirtation with misogyny that may shun
entrepreneurial women in the Valley away from attracting attention. Another
culprit might be the infringing expectation the industry seems to borrow from
the 1950s (as recounted by AMC's fictional hit show, Mad Men): If you're a
woman, you might get noticed for your work as long as you're attractive, not
particularly eccentric and generally easy for a company to wear ..."_

There is one aspect of silicon valley, hi-tech businesses not covered in this
description, Startups and Startup founders. Why don't more women create hi-
tech Startups?

I've often wondered about this. You don't need permission. You don't have to
ask anybody. All you need is an idea and even that doesn't have to be a good
one. You do need to be obsessed with making things and you do need to have a
technical background. You also have to find users and make something they
want. It helps if you can make your Startup _Ramen profitable_. It's not as if
it's Rocket-Science. None of those concepts are beyond either gender. You
don't even have to even be extremely bright, just more determined than you
competitors.

There is one other ingredient that you need as a hi-tech founder for a Startup
and that's another co-founder. This might go some way to explain the lack of
Startup companies founded by women. They simply can't find enough like minded
friends with similar interests. Women need to found more tech companies
instead of working in them and for them. If more Women created their own
Startups, it might go some way to reduce the kind of inequity in established
companies. There is risk, failure is the norm. So build that demo and become a
master of your own tech destiny instead of offering lame excuses like the one
above.

~~~
roundsquare
_You don't need permission. You don't have to ask anybody._

Unless there is a fear that VC/angel funding will be denied because the
founder is a woman...

Not sure if this is true, just a possibility.

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ardit33
"Where the Women Aren't?" -- They are not learing CS for sure. My Computer
Science class, had about 2 women and 40 guys.

I am assuming you have to be an engineer, or very tech savy person to be able
to be in startups as a founder, and it seems that the lack of women in the
techrunch award show, was about right.

In another anectodal evidence, I could tell where there were women. At the
Afterparty!

A lot more women. Mostly nobody's, and few of the usual vapid gdiggers, and
social climbers.

Also, from the 8-9 people I talked to in the after party, only one was an
engineer. The rest were 'wanterpenerous'.

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asdlfj2sd33
Maybe it's the statistically well supported paradox that men are
overrepresented at the extremes, both negative and positive extremes. And
start-ups, for various reasons not limited to risk, are a kind of extreme case
of (self) employment.

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ojbyrne
"Caterina Fake, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded photo-sharing site
Hunch"..."Disclaimer: I had previously worked at Flickr, one of the companies
mentioned in this article."

Kind of confused there.

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fizx
Maybe the environments and rewards of startups appeal more to men than women,
and changing this would require changing human nature. (hah!)

------
ahoyhere
How boring.

All of these deplorable "women in tech" articles fall into the following
camps:

1\. I'm more feminist than you! (written by men)

2\. We need a different perspective -- which of course means perspective
provided by genitals, not, say, people from different cultures (e.g. tech
Africans), or different original interests like design, music, or architecture

3\. I want more people to date.

4\. I want more people other than socially handicapped, unwashed men to speak
to/befriend, who understand what I'm talking about.

5\. I failed and the first potential explanation I came across was sexism, and
I'm stickin' to it. [1]

6\. It seems I'm different, and so if I don't theorize about why I'm
different, and explain it away by sexism (e.g. lots of women would do what I
do, if the world weren't so damned sexist!), I might have to admit I'm just
weird and not like other girls.

7\. Look at me, I'm a girl coder, that's like a unicorn but with boobs!

This article is a mixture of #2, #6 and #7. ("Yes, we do exist!" -- listing a
healthy number of famous tech women, and acknowledging that it "barely scrapes
the surface" -- hmm, wasn't the article about there not being enough? Oh wait,
I get it, to be good enough for the author, the women can't just hold
respectable titles in big companies, or write about startups, or head up
super-lucrative tech blogs, they have to found startups. And yet, somehow, the
evil "anti-founder" sexism that stops women from founding companies, doesn't
extend to "anti-founder-news-coverage"?)

And they often fail to take into account things like: A) women who aren't
attention-seekers go totally unnoticed by lists like these; B) computer
science enrollment is not equal to people who work as programmers; C) many
programmers, especially women ones, work in nontraditional jobs like
nonprofits and education, with job titles that are not "programmer". Also,
they often seem to set up an artificially narrow distinction to keep out many
women who would otherwise ruin their hypothesis.

For example, this article in particular mentions Leah Culver, cofounder of
Pownce, which was acquired by SixApart, but not Mena Trott, who co-founded Six
Apart and obviously made a shitload more money than Leah -- as well as now
being, in effect, her bosses' boss.

There are tons of other sucessful, low-profile women doing things that aren't
traditionally called startups. Nobody talks about SixApart any more because
they weren't bought, and the Trotts don't court attention. Those seem to be
the main differences.

And beyond that...

None of these articles EVER consider that tech is a weird industry to go into,
if you're not obsessed with it. In the tech industry, the majority of jobs are
like Office Space.

It's hard and not very fun to to achieve a moderate level of success in our
industry if you're a normal, well-adjusted person with friends and outside
interests/responsibilities.

It's much easier to achieve a moderate level of success in other industries --
which pay more, and offer more perks that women are interested in.

That is, in other industries, you can work regular(ish) hours, and not be
fanatically devoted to the latest practices, and not worry about being
upstaged by the 16-year-old prodigy who's willing to work 18 hours a day and
sleep under his desk.

Compare to biotech, which while being way more technical than all of the TC50
startups I've heard of, has many more successful women:

"While the industry is dominated by men in many aspects... by some objective
measures — such as patenting, or likelihood to lead projects — women are
actually doing better in biotech than at universities. One reason, scholars
suggest, is the more fluid approach to science favored in the business world."

\--
[http://www.boston.com/business/specials/bio2007/articles/gen...](http://www.boston.com/business/specials/bio2007/articles/gender_gap/)

Biotech is more respectable. Biotech has more concrete rewards. Biotech
probably has more people who are interesting to talk to outside of work.
Biotech obviously has fewer annoyingly prodigious 16-year-olds, because the
university book-learnin' is much more critical.

This was even true back in the days of Microserfs. Anyone read that? There was
a joke in there about how the parking lots at biotech companies are always
empty on weekends. And that the smartest woman in the valley worked in
biotech.

No wonder biotech has more women.

But hey, let's light up the pitchforks and try to convince more women to do
programming instead.

[1] (I've seen this one over and over. I was especially amused to hear a woman
at OSCON claim that OSCON in general, Tim O'Reilly was specific, because her
talk was rejected. I was on the committee and _I_ had rejected it. It was a
terrible proposal and she was a bad speaker. Men do this exact same thing as
well, naturally, but they use other flimsy excuses than gender.)

