

Hot Startups Lack Female Employees (even as applicants) - KirinDave
http://www.observer.com/2010/media/hottest-startups-full-bros

======
jerf
At some point, "accommodating women" turns into "telling women what they
want". If they aren't even _applying_ , isn't this at the very least
_perilously close_ to the latter? Regardless of what you are going for, you
have to at least _show up_.

Consider what is really being asked for here; startups are now "supposed" to
go seek women out who aren't even indicating they are searching for a job and
hire them? That's not a sensible demand; translated into real action that
borders on harassment.

~~~
jdp23
Because there are fewer women then men in the technology space, they're a
scarce resource. Startups who want diverse teams need to compete for them.

Also, parts of the YC universe have a bit of a reputation for being
uncomfortable with women. Reaching out sends a clear signal that you're not
like that -- you're the kind of company that wants women to work there enough
that you're willing to take the initiative.

~~~
thedz
You're asking for startups to compete for a scarce resource (women) in an
already scarce subset of engineers (good ones).

That's a pretty tall order for startups. And an almost impossible one if you
expect them to take time out of (likely) much more pressing matters to
expressly reach out (in some as yet undefined "woman-friendly" way) to females
just to that they'll apply.

Not hire females. Just to get them to apply.

~~~
jdp23
It comes down to whether you see diversity as valuable from a business
perspective.

If so, you treat this just like you would any other important business
problem.

If not ... well, then I guess it's not surprising that women don't want to
work there.

------
p01nd3xt3r
I am really sick of these articles; why cant we just focus on talent. Put the
best people in the best positions. It should not matter if they are male,
female black or white.

~~~
dtran
How do you measure talent while recruiting? The person with the most
accomplished resume or who can answer your technical questions most aptly?
Both are only proxies, albeit usually pretty good ones, for measuring talent.
Perhaps that interviewee was nervous or maybe they're really really bright,
but just haven't been programming as long as some of their counterparts.

Tracy Chou of Quora wrote a really insightful post about being a female
software engineer: [http://www.quora.com/Tracy-Chou/Women-in-Software-
Engineerin...](http://www.quora.com/Tracy-Chou/Women-in-Software-Engineering-
Part-I). It really opened my eyes to some of the reasons why maybe there
aren't more women who even get started in the field - even if there isn't
outright prejudice, women in engineering still face a lot of challenges that
men simply don't. Sure, you can argue that you should give the most talented
person the job, but keep in mind that the methods we use for measuring talent
are hugely subject to circumstance. For example, I'll bet the average age when
most female engineers start programming is higher, so they simply haven't been
programming as long. It is rather naive to believe that talent is the primary
indicator of whether someone gets a job or gets into a particular school -
success is just as much a product of circumstance, getting the necessary
opportunities, and other external conditions as it is of one's own inherent
talent and work-ethic. And let's face it, women in software engineering face a
wholly different set of circumstances than their male counterparts, so let's
stop pretending that it's just about talent.

~~~
robwgibbons
By making the "women in tech" conversation about anything other than talent,
you are immediately creating another "affirmative action" situation.

Why should female applicants get a hand-out over more qualified male
applicants? That doesn't do a damn thing other than even out some cosmetic
"gender gap."

If I am passionate about programming, having done it from an early age, and I
lose a position to a person who just discovered he/she could make a pretty
penny at this "computer stuff," well, that really pisses me off.

~~~
dtran
I'm not advocating affirmative action or anything even remotely resembling
that. In fact, I'm not offering any kind of solution at all. Just responding
to having my eyes opened a little bit by a first-hand account of the struggles
a woman in engineering faces.

I don't advocate affirmative action, but I acknowledge some of the
reasoning/merit behind it. For example, I got into my dream school. Sure, I
worked my ass off, and sure I wouldn't have been happy if someone else got in
instead of me in part because of their race/gender/socio-economic status, but
I also know that deep down, I'm really lucky/fortunate. I'm from a low-income
family, but had tons of support/opportunities that a lot of other equally-
deserving, equally-qualified people simply didn't. If affirmative action
worked in a perfect world where out of two equally-qualified candidates, the
upper hand went to the one who overcame more obstacles, then I wouldn't have
any problem with it. Again, I'm not espousing choosing an applicant solely
based on race/gender/socio-economic status, but if you turn a blind eye to an
applicant's circumstances, your methods of evaluating candidates is extremely
flawed.

------
nostrademons
I wonder how much of this is because of the company and how much is because of
the company's stage in its lifecycle.

Google today is known as a pretty female-friendly employer, at least among
tech companies. The gender balance in the cafes seems about 60/40 male, and
engineering is about 10% female (which sounds terrible but is actually better
than many undergrad CS departments). Several top executives are women.

But Google's first female hire was Marissa, who was something like employee
#20. Which means that when Google was the size of FourSquare or Tumblr or
Kickstarter, it was even more male-dominated than they are.

It could just be that women have no desire to pad their egos by working at a
successful startup. If you don't care about the cash and cachet of that,
there's no reason to put yourself through the risk and uncertainty of it.

~~~
reso
MM was actually Google's first female engineer, not their first female hire.

~~~
aamar
No, Lori Park holds that distinction.

------
guelo
I don't know why we should focus on startups when this is a much more global
issue. If you look at your typical college's CS, Engineering, or Math
departments you'll find similar ratios of females as you find in the tech
workforce. I have no idea why that is but it's not caused by who startups are
hiring. If you look at a typical college's marketing department you'll see a
lot more women, how is it surprising that there are more women in marketing
positions?

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
Agreed. I think the issue is exacerbated in startups because they inherently
have fewer employees.

------
vietor
It's important to highlight and actively try to fix this because it's a
bootstrapping problem. Tech is male dominated, so it is a less comfortable
work environment for many women, so few women go into tech, so tech is male
dominated. (There are of course many other factors in play, but this is one
which can be nicely isolated and is important on it's own)

The principal problem with objections centered about "but why can't we just
focus on talent" is that they are short sighted greedy optimizations which are
actively trapping the tech industry in a local talent maximum.

------
ig1
I don't know the figures for the US, but in the UK roughly 10% of developers
are female. So it's not surprising that a startup with 9 developers might have
no female developers.

There might be an issue due to hiring methods (i.e. recruiting through venues
that are male dominated, adverts being tailored to males, etc.), but the
overwhelming reason is likely to be the lack of female devs across the
industry.

------
auxbuss
When I started out, about 30 years ago, the male/female ratio in IT was about
60:40. But I presume that men were also a larger percentage of the total
workforce at that time, at least in "professional" roles.

The first time I really noticed the change was at Sun around 1998/99 when my
group, containing about 100 engineers, only had two women in it.

~~~
auxbuss
Bad form to reply to myself, but I just went and read the Tracy Chou post
mentioned elsewhere here [http://www.quora.com/Tracy-Chou/Women-in-Software-
Engineerin...](http://www.quora.com/Tracy-Chou/Women-in-Software-Engineering-
Part-I)

I have to say that I recognise everything she says. For the record, I am male.

On reflection, the IT world has become a place where a huge amount of male
posturing and faux competitiveness goes on. It wears me down. I know a lot of
guys behave this way, but the IT world is best powered by cooperation and
collaboration, not by a lot of willy waving.

It's interesting that she mentions her mum being in IT 25 years ago and gave
it up 10 years ago, as I know a lot of women who did just that. A lot.

------
Alex3917
So I run a conference, Swagapalooza, which involves companies launching new
consumer products to bloggers. The products are mostly food, fashion, tech,
books, music, clothes, parenting stuff, etc. While I do get a decent number of
applications from women who want to present their products, most of them are
for Etsy-like stuff, which generally doesn't work as we are only looking for
products that we have the potential to help tip. The percentage of women-run
consumer product companies whose products are interesting[1] and mass
produceable are probably just as low as the percentage of women-run tech
companies.

[1] Genuinely novel. Not just a company that silkscreens t-shirts with their
own designs.

------
rue
What about the more tepid startups?

------
tjarratt
I've often heard companies saying they would love to hire more women, but they
lack the applicants. Can anyone that handles hiring for a company speak out on
even the perceived ratio of applicants?

For what it's worth, I recently recommended my old boss at an unnamed large
company in Silicon Valley hire a female colleague for a technical position I
used to hold. If they won't apply, recommending a job to a woman you know is
the next best step.

------
jdp23
"I just scanned through all the applicants we have received for advertised
'making' positions. To date, we have yet to receive a single female applicant"

When I see statements like this, I wonder what they've been doing to reach out
to women. Usually the answer is "nothing" or "well, we asked our friends" ...
in other words, they're not investing any significant effort.

EDIT: downvoted. I know you're shocked.

~~~
thedz
What kind of outreach do you expect a new startup to do? They don't exactly
have an excess of free time or resources to invest significant effort.

And perhaps more fundamentally, are the job descriptions looking for
applicants biased towards males in such a way that it warrants an explicit
female-oriented recruiting outreach?

~~~
jdp23
There's a bunch of suggestions on the Geek Feminism Wiki at
[http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Hiring_discrimination#Sol...](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Hiring_discrimination#Solutions)

Yes, most job descriptions give the appearance of being biased towards males.
The best thing to do is get feedback on it from a couple of women with the
skills you're trhing to attract and a diversity/recruiting expert. We did that
at my previous startup and it made a huge difference.

If a company sees diversity as important, it doesn't really take that much
time or money to reach out.

~~~
btipling
'If a company sees diversity as important'

Maybe they seek success as important. How does a focus on diversity help a
company succeed?

~~~
Mz
I work for a large company. They think it's important. The framing is along
the lines of "How can we sell to everyone if we don't hire everyone?" If you
are dominated by white males, you may be making wording choices and other
decisions which subtly exclude women, blacks, hispanics, etc and you probably
have no idea you are doing it. (Subtle does not necessarily mean the effect is
small either.)

~~~
jdp23
Exactly. Also, diverse teams outperform -- Scott Page's book The Difference
presents the underlying cognitive diversity model for why, and there's been
some great recent empirical work as well.

Conversely a lot of white guys don't believe that diversity leads to success
-- and many of them talk primarily to other white guys who reinforce their
views (or to women and people of color who agree with them). So, companies
they run wind up with mostly male and mostly white development teams, building
products optimized for white guys. It's a crowded market space ...

~~~
Mz
Anecdotally, my recollection is that the most successful organized crime group
ever was successful in part because they would work with anyone, so long as
they had the necessary skills. Prior to that, the Irish stuck with the Irish,
the Italians stuck with the Italians, etc. Inclusiveness of people = not
excluding skills/talent based on some arbitrary, irrelevant detail (like skin
color, gender, etc).

------
shawnee_
There are a lot of things working against us.

In my experience, it basically boils down to not being given a chance.

~~~
jdp23
Yes, very often it does.

------
Mz
A lot of the comments here seem to focus on sexual harassment as The Issue. I
wonder, though, about the issue of how close-knit and intimate start-up
culture tends to be. There was a (flagged, dead) thread not terribly long ago
where some married man had gotten his female co-founder pregnant and was
looking for suggestions on how best to handle this big mess. Long hours, late
nights and possibly no one else around in a close-knit, small social unit (aka
a startup) is probably also a concern for some women, even if the men are all
perfect gentlemen. They might not fess up to this angle but I think any
concerns about this which one might normally have for work generally would be
magnified by the type of intimate environment of a startup. An affair at work
can lead to being fired (and sometimes other ugliness). So if someone has a
brain and considers this to be a potential issue, it seems to me the wisest
thing to do is not go there to begin with.

~~~
sn
So the wife wasn't the co-founder?

~~~
Mz
Apparently not.

------
chailatte
Because most women are not good at programming. Because their brain lacks the
wiring [1]. Otherwise they would've already jumped at a chance to secure
$150k/year jobs.

Stop writing superficial articles that don't address the fundamentals.

[1]
[http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/09/why_arent_mor...](http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/09/why_arent_more_women_in_scienc.php)

"Mental rotation tasks (see this CogDaily post), which require working with a
three-dimensional representation of an object, have been found to have very
large sex differences favoring males"

~~~
SpikeGronim
Most people aren't good at programming, at least until you train them. It's
hard to convince women to spend ten years becoming excellent programmers when
their peers disrespect and harass them. I've never seen credible evidence that
women's brains "lack the wiring" - that's an awfully Victorian era sentiment.
The fundamental problem here is with the behavior of men in the field of
computer science.

~~~
robwgibbons
If I were interested in becoming a cook, I would take the classes and become a
cook.

If I were interested in becoming a dancer, I would damn well become a dancer.

You can't just say it's the mens' fault. That is disingenuous and insulting to
me as a male programmer.

The fundamental problem has nothing to do with men: it's that women aren't
interested at all in computers. They're interested in babies, families, and
things that are warm, cuddly and emotional. I'm not being sexist, I am quoting
my girlfriend.

~~~
sn
Your girlfriend is sexist then.

