

Arrington is completely wrong about women in technology - seldo
http://seldo.com/weblog/2010/08/29/arrington_is_completely_wrong_about_women_in_technology

======
char
Why do people love trying to make complex issues black and white? The fact
that there are so few women in tech is an issue that is likely caused by
multiple factors, some of which were addressed in this article, and some of
which were addressed in the Arrington post. No one is wrong; each just seems
to be arguing over which the greater factor is, but refuses to recognize the
other.

Arrington cites factors dealing with biological and societal tendencies of
women as reasons for them to not engage in risky lifestyle choices such as
startups, or to not be interested in tech in the first place. I agree with
this. This isn't 'bad' or 'good', but it's the truth. People need to stop
ignoring that there ARE (on average) differences between men and women. We
(women) just aren't as interested in tech or building our own businesses in
general.

I'm just one data point, but based on many experiences, I would strongly argue
that in general, women do not have the desire to take as many risks as males,
or deal with day-to-day uncertainties. A vast majority of my female friends
thought I was absolutely nuts when I first started doing startups. (They still
think I'm a little nutty, despite being able to pay my bills now). The most
common questions were, "What are you going to do for money if it fails?"
(Answer: Get a job, or build something else), and "How do you deal with not
knowing what you're going to be doing in the next [insert some time period]?"
On the other hand, my male friends overwhelmingly asked about the technologies
I'm building and admired me for taking a risk. Also interesting to note is
that the reaction of female friends to my (male) co-founder was more of
admiration than thinking he was crazy (but I was looked upon as crazy).

On the other hand, for the women who ARE interested in tech (or could be
persuaded to be interested), there are certainly existing challenges within
the field itself. Again, I'm just one data point, but I am always amazed at
the reactions I get from males in the startup world when they find out that I
code. They are SHOCKED. Not only because I'm a woman, but also because I'm a
white, blonde woman who is reasonably attractive. Sometimes I really do feel
like I'm not taken seriously by many people until I do something completely
bad ass to prove myself. The other article certainly has a point there.

~~~
Estragon

      Why do people love trying to make complex issues black and white?
    

Because they love the resulting attention.

~~~
jobeirne
Also because most people find it very easy to convince themselves they've come
up with a simple solution to a very complicated issue.

------
enjo
This is such rubbish, and I hate that we're having this argument again. The
last wave of resumes for a software engineer position came out to something
like 97% male. The one female that passed the screening was really impressive
with a degree from M.I.T. and a very impressive track record.

We couldn't afford her.

Arrington is not very often right, but he is in this case. Look around your
average computer science classroom (from which the majority of startup
founders originate) and tell me what you see. It's not because women aren't
allowed, it's because they choose not to be.

~~~
m0th87
Why can't both sides be true? I've never seen or heard of gender bias in the
hiring process, but that doesn't discount the possibility that women aren't
going into computer science for a reason.

------
philwelch
People make generalizations based upon the world around them. OK, so people
don't expect a woman to be a programmer when they see her. Similar
expectations didn't stop women from becoming lawyers or doctors or bankers,
and now when you see a woman walking around a hospital or a courthouse she
very well may be a doctor or a lawyer.

Women can and did overcome the same barriers to enter other fields. If you
want to explain why women aren't in software, there's no explanatory power in
explanations that equally apply to fields which women _did_ become a part of.

~~~
146
One thing is that it took a long, long time for women to break into medicine
and start being taken seriously as doctors. Tech is still relatively young, so
I'm hoping that we can start making movements towards that level of parity
faster than then several generations it took medicine.

~~~
philwelch
Sure, if you count from the beginning of the medical profession (though
technically, women dominated some parts of medicine, like delivering babies,
for millennia before men ever became involved, and then women broke back in).

If you count from the beginning of women-in-the-workplace style feminism,
software should have had women almost from the outset. If a new profession or
a new sector of the economy arose _now_ you'd expect it to have tons of women
because as a culture we're used to women in the workplace, right? What about
biotech--are there more women in biotech than software?

------
amalcon
_Here's how it happens: if a woman engineer starts talking, men will wait
until she says something notably clever before they start taking her
seriously. Men on the other hand are taken seriously by default, and only get
dismissed if they say something notably dumb._

I was neutral to mildly positive on the post until this point. It is simply
false. In tech, _nobody_ is taken seriously by default. I certainly never have
been, and I'm a young tall skinny white guy with glasses (the very computer-
geek stereotype if ever there was one). I have to re-prove myself every time.
I've never observed anything different with regard to anyone else.

It turns out that there is one way you can get people to take you seriously
from the get-go: "earn the respect of your immediate peers" (people take you
seriously if it's obvious that everyone else does). I suppose it might
_appear_ that this implies that the majority is taken seriously by default,
because most of the people who have the respect of their peers will be from
that majority by simple averaging.

Now, I don't mean to comment on whether or not it's _harder_ for women to
"prove themselves". Never having been a woman myself, and not being a neutral
observer, it's hard to make that comparison. My only point is that the amount
of effort is nonzero for men as well.

~~~
sprout
Techies take nobody seriously by default.

But when it comes to non-technical management types, I think what he says is
very true. As a clean-cut, twenty-something male who speaks articulately,
simply me saying "I'm a computer guy" gives me an enormous amount of
credibility, far more than a girl my age could get.

------
metamemetics
Michael Arrington's real argument was:

Few women choosing to study CompSci\Engineering -> Few women in tech
_startups_.

As long as you agree that a subset cannot be larger than its parent set, I
don't see how you can disagree with that. It's as close to observational fact
as you can get.

------
whalesalad
Funny enough, I'm in the group that thinks EVERYONE is incompetent and
absolutely worthless until they prove themselves to me. This might not be as
big of a deal in the bay area where tech is a bigger deal, but here in LA
there are posers everywhere.

We ask candidates in interviews to hand-code a front-end page, assuming that
is the position they're applying for. Some will actually be able to write
markup on a piece of paper, which is a pretty stressful test. "Code this page,
here." (slides pen and paper) But a lot of people end up saying something like
"Oh well I'd just throw a div here, throw a div there." It's literally a joke.
I've had to stop laughing in meetings. We'll ask a rails developer what kind
of stack he's familiar with, and they'll look at you like a deer in the
headlights.

I don't go into an interview with a woman assuming she wont be nearly as good.
In fact, right now the ladies are 1 for 1. Unfortunately she's no longer
working with us due to some family issues. A lot of the guys we've interviewed
are actually quite literally living in their parents basements and building
porn websites with their buddies. I could care less what people do in their
personal time but holy shit, make something of yourself.

Anyway, this doesn't really side with either particular argument in this whole
man/woman debate, I just personally have gotten so jaded with worthless people
who have no skills or drive whatsoever that their sex doesn't matter.

------
Towle_
This is the United States of America in 2010. It's not ancient Egypt. It's not
feudal England. It's not even the U.S. in 1950. You can do whatever you want
to do and be whoever you want to be. Nobody is stopping you but yourself.
Might your climb to the top be steeper than mine? Sure. But realize that
nobody who's ever made it to the top of their mountain complained about how
steep it was. They just climbed. If you want to be the best, whatever that
means to you, you have to go Jackie Robinson that shit. No matter what the
douchebags throw at you along the way, you have to just smile back and hit
home runs.

~~~
philwelch
You should find some new material:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643294>

~~~
Towle_
If it can be used again, I'll use it again. No sense it paraphrasing just for
the hell of it. You can't plagiarize yourself.

~~~
_delirium
Imo, a good rule of thumb for when you're copy/pasting the same comment you've
made before is to mark it somehow, e.g. "as I said the last time this same
issue came up (perhaps link to comment here): [paste]".

A bigger question might be why you're saying the same thing over and over to
begin with, paraphrasing or not. Is your one-paragraph comment filled with
self-help-type platitudes _really_ interesting enough to spam in every
relevant discussion?

~~~
Towle_
You're right, I'll do that next time.

I didn't get the kind of discussion I was interested in last time, so I
thought I'd try a second time. Not "over and over." A second time.

------
javajones
You do realize that this is a Western societal phenom? I work with women who
are from India and China. Quite a few of them in fact. What is different in
their cultures that they have so many women in this field and we do not?

~~~
Goladus
Yes I've noticed that in the "Women in IT" phenomenon. That doesn't really
explain tech startups, though. All the Indian and Chinese engineers I know
work for established, stable companies.

------
zaphar
I must work in a really weird office then because I know 4 women engineers
personally and several others in our office peripherally and no one in our
office takes the attitude this guys seems to think is the norm.

Everyone I've heard in this debate argues from a subjective personal
experience/viewpoint. I haven't really seen any hard data on the subject
presented so it's strange that everyone is so certain they are right. (ok not
really all that strange, human nature being what it is.)

------
Goladus
Men don't get taken seriously by default. Almost every man I know has to work
pretty hard to be taken seriously, and in my experience reputation is the
overwhelming factor anyway. If you've got a good reputation you'll tend to get
a favorable bias, otherwise you won't.

------
indiejade
The WSJ article cited in Arrington's article:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-
th...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-the-lack-of-
women-leading-tech-start-ups/)

It's one thing to aspire to focus on small-scale businesses that benefit a
local area / community (as do most female entrepreneurs). It's another thing
entirely to focus on some kind of ambitious VC-funded enterprise that's
visioned to scale big / globally from the get-go.

Ambition is an interesting animal.

------
gojomo
_...offensively wrong..._

Why wasn't 'wrong' enough? Why should any honestly-presented, based-on-
experience opinion like Arrington's generate 'offense'? Why not assume good
faith?

~~~
Towle_
It's "offensively wrong" because the author (a male) is striving for an
_image_ of being genuinely sympathetic to The Plight. "Look at me, I'm so
understanding."

~~~
gojomo
So you think he's lying about his internal mental state and specific efforts
in areas he controls?

Why not assume good faith?

~~~
Towle_
I don't think he's lying to us, I think he's lying to himself.

~~~
146
I think that's a rather unfair assumption to make. Do you have evidence that
he's being disingenuous?

~~~
Towle_
'Disingenuous' isn't quite the word I would use. I'm sure the author really
does think he's contributing to The Crusade, which is precisely the problem.
He can't just dissect the errors in Arrington's logic. No, that's not good
enough.

He needs to put on a Crusader uniform and act like he thinks those people are
supposed to act: offended. He can't just BE offended, he must explicitly tell
you he's offended, and start swinging his sword around so you know what a
noble Crusader he is.

If he were responding to a blog post offensive to men, would he have used that
language? No, because being offended for yourself isn't noble, it's being
offended for others. And telling everyone about it as much as you can. How
else will people know what an altruist you are?

~~~
gojomo
All this thread I thought you were criticizing Arrington as having been
genuinely offensive!

(Note to self: avoid pronouns in replies, so anaphor collisions are recognized
asap.)

------
lawlit
"... the expectation that women don't get into tech is what keeps them out of
it..." Yeah well, how did this stereotype got built in the first place? and
why isn't it the case with marketing? why this same expectation is not
happening in sales? why tech?? The answer is clear: Women did it to themselfs.
Men are not to blame. Women are not hackers by nature. It's usually a man who
gets dirty. In my classroom, despite having the same teacher and the same
lessons, it's always the boys who are trying to explain how things work to the
"lot" of ladies who didn't get it. I personally can't imagine a lady creating
C, Python, or running facebook on her dormroom. Ladies usually have guys over
there, not data servers. I just can't imagine a bunch of ladies locked in a
garage working on something. Whenever I think of a group of women, The only
thing that comes to my mind is that they are talking about how cool is
desperate housewives, or how great was Sara's date. This is not my fault, they
are responsible for what we the men think of them. And don't tell me there's a
white male controlling their brains to do such things. They just do them. face
it. SO WOMEN, STOP BLAMING THE MEN and BE PROUD OF WHAT YOU LOVE. be it
cooking or dating magazines or what ever. why do you want to hate what you
love and force yourself in men things? are you ashamed of what you do? Why do
you consider what you do as the work of a second class citizen? Women tend to
love different things and I don't understand why people are trying to force
them into tech. PEOPLE, women DID NOT ask for your help. Too sad for the
ladies who have this computer addictivness syndrome, your group did not follow
you, you are just an exception.

~~~
araneae

      "Ladies usually have guys over there, not data servers."
    
     "Whenever I think of a group of women, 
     The only thing that comes to my mind is that they
     are talking about how cool is desperate housewives, 
     or how great was Sara's date."
    

Men don't spend a lot of time having women in their bedrooms? They don't talk
about football or getting laid? Your language seems to be angry and aggressive
towards women. Yet both articles you are responding to were written by men. I
think your aggression is misplaced.

~~~
lawlit
The difference is that for men, that's not the main activity. But for women,
it tends to be it.

~~~
araneae
So you're saying that the amount of sex that takes place in colleges occurs
predominately in the girl's dormroom, as opposed to the boy's?

~~~
lawlit
Nop.

