
What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women - Alex3917
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/06/what-silicon-valley-thinks-women-302821.html
======
raldi
_> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench
of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley._

I agree that parts of the tech world are really horrible, and I think we need
to be doing everything we can to make women feel more welcome in our industry
(not just for them, but for us), but isn't it at least a _little_ exaggeration
to say that Silicon Valley is the main "trench of the global gender war"?

I'd think we'd be ranked after at least a couple of these:

* The construction industry

* The Bible Belt

* The restaurant industry

* West Africa

* The movie industry

* The Vatican

* The sportswriting industry

* The people who make Superbowl ads

* Japan

* The adult entertainment industry

* The Middle East

* Wall Street

* Nepal

* The upper echelons of American politics

~~~
Alex3917
The bible belt isn't exactly eating the world.

We live in a society where more people now aspire to be tech CEOs than pro
athletes or rock stars, and tech is one of the main centers of power both
politically and economically.

It's easy to dismiss the article because there are a few mischaracterizations
and exaggerations. But you need to remember that most people get their
information about the tech world from second hand sources, and SV is largely
opaque and closed off to the general public.

If you actually read it for what it is rather than just judging the author
based on her knowledge of obscure inside-baseball tech scandals then I think
there are some valuable points.

~~~
raldi
Ah, you're saying SV is the front line not because it treats women worse than
anyone else in the world, but rather (to use the military analogy) because
it's an extremely strategic piece of territory.

~~~
tptacek
It doesn't treat women worse than _every other place in the world_ , no, but
it treats them worse than _many other places_. Computer science has a sharply
worse gender participation gap than other professions, and even from other
STEM fields. It also continues to allow that gap to reinforce itself, for
instance with apologia about how women aren't taught computers when they're
younger and (by implication) how they're too far gone by the time they're 20
to remedy that problem. And that's one of the more charitable pathologies to
focus on.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It doesn't actually treat women worse than lots of other places that have
plenty of women. Islam, acting and modeling all treat women worse than
computing (flogging them for rape, casting couches), yet have far more women.

Women are sometimes treated badly in technology. Technology also has few
women. But what evidence do we have that the former is a significant cause of
the latter? It's hard to even demonstrate a correlation, let alone causation.

~~~
tptacek
The notion that there is some intrinsic property of women that makes them
uncompetitive in computer science, but not in accounting, actuary, law,
medicine, &c is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence. No such evidence has been presented.

The notion that a male majority which happens to almost entirely comprise the
upper echelons of the technology industry might, intentionally or (just as
likely) not, set up self-reinforcing cycles of encouragement for men and
discouragement for women is not an extraordinary claim. It is bog-standard
human pack-animal clique behavior. And nevertheless, clear, ringing evidence
of these phenomena are published routinely.

~~~
sheepmullet
I think you are ignoring the much more likely scenario that women see computer
science/software development as a bad bet or it simply does not appeal to
them.

For example it is a field where if you take 5 years off you are treated worse
than a fresh graduate... Funnily enough a lot of women might want the ability
to take a few years off.

Or for example it is an industry which has a lot of instability and lack of
internal mobility. This means that you often are forced to leave jobs you love
and where you have close friends in order to progess, or because they pivoted,
or simply went out of business. Less women are willing to put up with this
crap.

I've worked as a software developer at a couple of larger companies where
maybe 15% of the developers were female. However, about 40% of the systems
analysts/business analysts/project managers/testers/QA were female. These are
roles in which you interact with the developers on a daily basis.... Surely if
the issue was software developers being sexist then women wouldn't want to do
these other roles either.

There is some sexism in the industry, but no more than many other industries
which have plenty of women.

~~~
tptacek
No offense, but I'm not sure you've actually said anything here. Take this
exact comment, substitute "women" for "men", and it seems equally valid. If
you can't explain why things would be different specifically for women, you're
not addressing the fact that there are four men for every woman in software
development.

~~~
sheepmullet
I'm saying that women, on average, might value the attributes/factors I listed
more than men. I.e.

Being able to take 1+ years off when you have children without serious career
damage is more important to woman than men.

The research I have read suggests that women are much less likely to leave a
job they enjoy and where they have made friends in order to get a pay rise
than men are. It's not much of a leap for women to consider this issue before
entering a field.

Likewise there is considerable research on women being more risk averse than
men and surely this at least has an impact on joining the startup world.

My last two paragraphs basically boil down to a question for you: why are
women who are, in your opinion, not becoming software developers because of
sexism still entering into roles that interact heavily with these sexist
software developers?

~~~
tptacek
Easy: because those roles you referenced are fed by a career track that starts
in university programs with a much better gender balance. Some of those role
are MBAs, and some of them (the project management stuff) are generic liberal
arts with some industry training (like PMP).

That doesn't mean that the solution to the problem is in university
enrollment, but it does explain why it's easier to find women in non-tech
roles in software companies: it's because those roles don't require an early
life commitment to a career in technology.

------
JamesArgo
>It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of
the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. In that sense, Silicon Valley
culture echoes the Wolf of Wall Street culture in the ’80s and ’90s.

Signal the right politics and even this nonsense gets upvoted. Scott Alexander
wrote about why differences in outcome in highly technical fields might not
imply a vast economically-counterproductive misogynistic conspiracy
here:[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-
required...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required-
ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-
gap/)

Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals.

~~~
logn
I like that article a lot. GRE Quantitative and SAT Math skew heavily toward
men. And the SAT covers very basic reasoning skills that would be related to
programming aptitude. GRE Quantitative covers topics essential to surviving a
CS major.

We should figure out where the educational system is failing women here. And
we should also consider a new curriculum focused on programming, because
traditional Computer Science isn't necessary for success as a tech worker.
I've seen some colleges offer both a BA and a BS in Comp Sci which I think is
smart, because in the BA they strip out physics, chemistry, calculus, etc
which in my experience cause most CS majors to drop out.

~~~
learc83
What CS degree requires physics _and_ chemistry ?

Also I don't think a degree without calculus can really be called CS. How are
you going to understand analysis of algorithms without at least a basic grasp
of the concepts of calculus. A person who failed out of calculus definitely
wouldn't have survived the rest of my CS program.

I wouldn't advise anyone to do a CS degree with all the math stripped out.
Sure you can build CRUD apps all day long without an understanding of math,
but you don't need a degree to build CRUD apps.

I think people who are happy doing that kind of work should skip college all
together (or get a degree in something other than CS) and learn on their own
or maybe do some kind of bootcamp.

~~~
logn
Personally I think you can understand algorithms knowing only algebra and
finite math. However, I should clarify the BA programs I'm aware of still
required a semester or so of calculus versus others which require a few
semesters.

At my college, almost every CS major ended up being 1 credit short of a minor
in Math. I don't think that much math is necessary.

~~~
learc83
>Personally I think you can understand algorithms knowing only algebra and
finite math.

How are you going to understand the growth rates of algorithms without
calculus?

Are you just going to keep it at the level of: in f(n) = n^2 + n, n^2 grows
much faster, so it's like comparing an elephant to a goldfish.

Intuitive explanations work fine as an introduction, but again I don't think
you need a college degree to understand algorithms at this level.

It seems like what you're looking for would be better implemented as a 2 year
programming degree at a community college.

------
jongraehl
John Carmack's "we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want.
It doesn’t matter what they look like." is pretty much all you need to say,
over and over, until they give up.

There are two problems w/ 'white male' dominated engineering fields (really,
male, unless you insist on the slander that asian+indian are 'honorary
white'). One is optical. It just looks bad to shallow thinkers who don't care
to pause to find out what the pool of able+willing workers looks like.

The other is that techies are too insecure about their value and virtue;
they're inclined to actually respond in good faith to slanders like this one.
Big mistake. You _do_ see also occasional diversity attacks against the really
high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD,
maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty
much left alone.

Yes, everywhere I look around me are a bunch of guys. ( _maybe_ 10-20% women).
Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.

~~~
hagan_das
_You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners
(managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD /PD, maybe some
doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left
alone._

I posted a question elsewhere in this thread asking why the tech industry has
been getting the brunt of the diversity shakedown. I think this is part of the
puzzle.

The type of mind that lends itself well to tech tends to have less political
acumen and social intelligence. We're prone to taking things too literally and
sometimes miss the bullshit below the surface.

Are we really expected to believe that people who write software are any more
sexist than lawyers or the population in general?

Let's call the diversity hounding of tech exactly what it is: the playground
bully picking on the kid who they know wont fight back.

~~~
geofft
Ah, but there's an alternative hypothesis. Tech is an industry that people
enter because they see a new world being created and want to participate in
the making of it with their own hands. Finance, corporate law, so forth, not
so much.

So it seems believable that tech is a place where you will find people
sympathetic to do difficult, tradition-destroying things to build a better
world, much more than finance or corporate law. (The way that tech has
publicly embraced things from LGBT rights to non-college-degreed people, more
than finance or corporate law has, is evidence in favor of this belief.)

Given that, the pressure on tech to do better than the rest of the world, and
thereby set an example for the rest of the world, makes a lot of sense. It's
not that tech is the most sexist industry (it isn't), it's that it's the
industry that's most likely to get significantly better in a short period of
time.

------
greggyb
Does anyone have a good source for industry-wide ratios that relate to the
ones given in the article?

A couple examples:

2.7% of firms funded have female CEOs. How many of firms seeking funding have
female CEOs? How many have a female cofounder rather than just looking at the
CEO position?

80% of female founders used personal savings as their primary source of
funding (it sounds like this is for the seed phase, but unclear in the
article?). What is the industry-wide percentage?

Female founded firms do 31% better on average (in an industry where average =
a failed company what does this mean?). Is the sample size (which the article
makes sure to tell us is far too small on a moral basis) large enough to make
this statistically significant?

Note: I am not trying to undermine the article - I don't have enough knowledge
of the industry to say much. I am honestly looking for context for these
numbers and wondering if anyone can help.

~~~
Kalium
As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to
contextualize them. For instance, you'll get a statistic about what percentage
of funded startups have a woman co-founder but no information about what
percentage of startups considered have a woman co-founder.

~~~
shard972
> As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to
> contextualize them.

So the rule is to gimp data in order to fool people into believing things that
may not be true?

~~~
Kalium
That's the cynical reading, yes. A more optimistic one is that people believe
the numbers are scary enough that no context is needed.

------
kordless
If you want to think forward about solving the challenges women face here,
companies would do well to start taking a hard look in the mirror about how
much they pay operations staff.

Operations keeps the company humming along while it's simultaneously trying to
fly off the rails of the rocket sled that is a startup. Unfortunately, a large
quantity of dicks (literally) in SV think that operations positions are cookie
cutter and can be filled by anyone hungry for a job. I can assure you from
first hand experience that's not the case, and have seen many a company
encounter additional struggles because they lacked (or lost) the operations
support to keep the team together in hard times.

Operation's positions are primarily filled by women. Women who work their
asses off to keep the rest of the company fed when they are in crunch time.
Women who ensure the office is warm, friendly and receptive to creative work.
Women who make sure the ADD CEO is where they need to be on time to make deals
happen. Women who understand the business better than most of the executives,
because that's what's required to be good at helping the executives to get
their shit together and get stuff done.

And, sadly, these women doing operations are paid a fraction of what men are
in other equally critical roles. Personally, I think it's time to fix this
discrepancy.

(Literally downvoted 2 minutes into posting this. Nice.)

~~~
hkmurakami
I'm genuinely curious -- does the women in tech movement advocate for
improvements in the treatment of such operational staff (HR, admin, etc.) or
is the narrative mostly limited to engineering (and maybe including product
and marketing)?

~~~
geofft
Yes. Model View Culture, which is as good a sample of tech feminism as any,
published this good piece on exactly the subject:

[https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-myth-of-the-non-
tech...](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-myth-of-the-non-technical-
startup-employee)

~~~
Kalium
If Shanley is the touchstone of good tech feminism, then it's time to give up
and pack it all in.

~~~
geofft
I chose my words carefully. :) The topics in Model View Culture are a good
representative sample of the topics popular in tech feminism, the article
isn't by her, and it was published while Amelia Greenhall was still involved
in the publication, for whatever that's worth. (Also, if your impression of
Shanley is her Twitter feed, it's worth being aware that MVC is pretty
different.)

~~~
Kalium
I gather my impressions of Shanley from the parts of herself she chooses to
show the world, both on Twitter and otherwise. I found her extremely hostile
reaction to a journalist writing a profile of her very interesting.

------
png_hero
>Two founders got less funding then they wanted, sexism? The idea for the
company seemed reasonable, after all.

Maybe sexism.

The more likely answer is: most founders get less money than they want, in
fact most founders fail.

There is under appreciated carnage in the founding game; acknowledgement of
this, is one of the things that made PG such a fresh voice when he came on the
scene years ago. That realism.

reality is that the founder game is a suckers bet, and one that men take at a
vastly, vastly greater degree than women.

Men fail hard, and men themselves internalize the failure(most often) or blame
larger forces outside of their control. Either response is fine (they usually
don't blame "sexism" but they are plenty happy to blame other conspiracies).

But, when it comes time to talley the toll on men, society is largely quiet,
why? Males are disposable.

Women, on the other hand, largely expect to be valued on the mere fact of
their personage. They deserve respect for them being them. A noble belief, but
one that does not exist in the hyper-competitive modern economy.

>yeah, if I was a professor I'd give your business plan an A-... Does that
mean you "deserve" funding? No.

So, I could go on, but until women start throwing themselves into the grinder
at the same rate men do, the ratio of men at the top will always be lopsided.

And I say this not as a man that is bitter (I actually won the game against
all odds) but I say this as somebody who believes that women's strategies on a
whole are better than men's.

That is: men are stupid to take so much risk! It shouldn't be venerated!

The true non-sexism is to realize that women's choices are valid (and probably
smarter) and women are more than just "poorly performing men"

~~~
sheepmullet
Spot on. Startups are a high risk industry and most fail.

We sell young men a dream... And the same dream just doesn't appeal to young
women.

------
rockmeamedee
This is not a good article. It's badly written and shit for nuance.

It divides things into a "Global Gender War" purely for the sake of
heightening the mood."Look at these terrible gang-bang interviewers!" is all
it has to say. There is no mention of the massive amount of work women are
doing in the space, and when there is, it as an example of how terrible they
are being treated. Here is a women-led company that offers peer mentoring, but
they too are struggling because of gender bias. It calls Model View Culture an
"acid-penned, widely read website". MVC is actually doing the social justice
work and newsweek calls them "acid-penned". It puts fucking Vivek Wadhwa up as
a better example of feminism than the actual women fighting for their
humanity. Vivek Wadhwa isn't a good person, in general he's just a terrible
male ally. (what he says just in _this piece_ is disrespectful to women, see
[http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy-
feminists](http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy-feminists))

There are no humans in the piece, only victims and demons. Two examples of
struggling women-led startups, and a female VC who was forced to touch a
penis. These are women in SV according to newsweek.

This is as badly thought out and less researched than that Rolling Stone
article. One of the subheadings is "Asking for It" as a pun on women asking
for money. That's an actual rape joke.

------
birken
These are always tough pieces to respond to, because there are certainly a lot
of gender inequalities in the startup world.

But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of the
situation instead of just a description of its current state.

They mention this particular pair of founders was turned down by YC and their
trouble raising funding, but not any of the stats YC shares about how they
have funded more and more female founders, and all of the outreach efforts
they do.

They mention Ellen Pao concerned a lawsuit, but then only say she is "at
Reddit", instead of saying she is currently the CEO. The CEO!

Also, they mention Peter Thiel and David Sacks are the new generation? I
honestly didn't know who David Sacks was until I just looked it up. What about
all of the partners at YC? What about Mark Zuckerberg? What about all of the
non-sexist people?

~~~
potatolicious
> _" But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of
> the situation instead of just a description of its current state."_

I admire the leadership being shown at YC right now and the progress that has
been made.

But I'd caution against mistaking these accomplishments for trajectory. Just
read the most upvoted posts in this very thread, and the number of men here
who perceive that "women in tech" or feminism is a vendetta or war against
men.

While we certainly appear more willing to call out the most egregious and
obvious sexism in the industry (see: the Tinder fiasco), there are an alarming
of young, supposedly enlightened participants who are vocally and virulently
against any kind of reform, and adamant in their belief that women are
"shaking down" the industry with their rabid bands of "SJW" lapdogs.

Note the sheer number of posters here who have completely not addressed any
substance of the article and instead are focusing on how the tone is overly
abrasive or the wording ineloquent.

No, I'm not willing to optimistically call the trajectory upwards - I'm not
sure if I'm willing to call the trajectory level.

~~~
Kalium
In all honesty, this article reads like a hackneyed retread of several dozen
other articles I've read. It trots out the same statistics, quotes the same
people, and so on. It's hard to take an article seriously when it feels like
one giant repost.

~~~
potatolicious
It's a repost for us maybe - because this is an issue that's _finally_ being
talked about within the industry. Keep in mind that Newsweek is a mainstream
publication, so for many readers this is the first they'll have heard of tech
industry sexism.

The significance of this article isn't that it makes any revolutionary
advancement in thought or argument (it doesn't), but that it is one of few
high-profile accounts of the problem accessible to mainstream non-tech
audiences.

And this is IMO important - maybe unmasking the festering sores that blight
this industry to the wider world would be a motivation to address them.

I agree with you in spirit though - in fact I take issue with them quoting
Wadhwa so liberally, the guy's promotion of women in tech reeks of opportunism
and chauvinistic paternalism - just read his quotes in this article where he
paints women founders as a bunch of lost lamb who are too dumb to know when a
VC is hitting on them, who are then saved by his sagely advice.

~~~
Kalium
Perhaps seeing the constant stream of do-nothing protests in the Bay has made
me cynical. So take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

I have exactly zero faith in the power of "awareness" or similar to affect
much of anything. Beyond clogging up BART because someone has chained
themselves to something again to raise awareness for something-or-other.

Doubly so when it plays neatly into a larger cultural narrative about nerds as
The Other, in need of forcible correction by right-thinking people.

~~~
geofft
I've been thinking for some time about the environmentalists. I'm relatively
young, but I recall in the '90s and a bit in the '00s, the environmentalists
were portrayed in media (sometimes older media) as bleeding-heart liberals,
people who chained themselves to trees, vegans like PETA, ecoterrorists like
Greenpeace, etc.

Today, the stodgiest, most conservative industries have email footers reading
"Save a tree -- think before printing."

I can't find anything else to explain that other than "awareness". And I
usually am one to believe in the power of protests, but this particular change
baffles me... yet it still happened.

~~~
Kalium
Given that this "change" consists mostly of cookie-cutter email footers
instead of drastic environmental change, I think we see the power of awareness
laid bare.

It also shows that arguments about how printing costs more money than email-
only were better-received than what preceded them.

------
Thriptic
I'm actually consistently surprised that gender bias is really a problem
(although I'm out in Boston so perhaps I don't see it). I would have thought
that economic incentives would have stamped this stupid behavior out ages ago.
The idea that team-killing unprofessional behavior on this reported scale is
being allowed to continue by investors / management, or that VCs and hiring
professionals are purposely ignoring strong opportunities because of peoples'
gender just strikes me as being so stupid and shortsighted as to be almost
unbelievable. Is this really happening, or are these types of articles simply
exaggerating the extent of the problem?

~~~
geofft
This is the same Silicon Valley where having Mahbod Moghadam is an asset.

Revenue, especially in the form of VC, is so disconnected from productivity
that massive inefficiencies can exist (provided you have the capital to power
through them). You _can_ build a sufficiently-successful company ignoring half
your resumes. In some places it's way more than half, and there are biases to
top-tier schools, biases to personal referrals, etc., and things work.

Also the nasty thing about those sorts of biases is that they're self-
perpetuating. If someone else previously hired you for a job you were well-
suited for, you now have nice experience on your resume, a good referral, and
usually connections. So a company hiring experienced local developers, or a VC
firm judging founders by what they've built in the past, gets the result of
everyone else's biases. There's also explicitly some allowance for mistakes if
you look like you should have been and could still be successful, ranging from
the acceptance of pivots to giving people funding even if their last exit
wasn't so great. While useful, this also tends to defang the savagery of the
free market significantly.

This is not to say that anyone is guaranteed free money. There's certainly
hard work required, and also certainly some blind luck. But the market won't
shake out mistakes as quickly as you'd hope.

------
bbarn
I would love to see the numbers of bootstrapped companies run/founded by women
vs. those recieving investments. Until there are more women VC's, you're not
going to see more women getting VC money. Why? Because purely evaluating a
potential fundee on metrics alone will fail. VC's that use too much math and
not enough "gut" will finance the wrong companies.

The problem with that is, all the dudes got all the money, and human tendency
is to think highly of things we most identify with. ergo, dude investors are
more willing to go out on a limb on an idea if they can identify with the
person giving it (currently, lots of white males). It's unfortunate, but it's
not purely inequality, it's just a sad fact of human nature that we seek
what's most alike us.

It takes a particularly well educated, and self-understanding individual to
look past emotional bias. The problem then becomes that others around them
don't necessarily have that skill, so there becomes a cascading effect of lack
of belief in something. (be that other investors, potential clients, or even
quality employees) In effect, our prejudices create the successes on a larger
scale that seed the next generation (of VC's, not generations of people)
that's making the same emotional decisions.

I don't have a solution. Maybe it's screaming about inequality, as some do,
maybe it's succeeding in spite of it. I don't deny it's existence, but I just
can't figure out how to change it.

I think it just has to come down to each person realizing it in themselves and
changing it. For me it was in round 4343239534 of potential front end
developers, when a dorky looking hipster girl came in, and I realized half-way
through her interview I had already set her up for failure because I'd assumed
she was a poser. It took her being beyond great at what she did to make me
realize that in myself, and let me tell you, that's an awful, awful feeling to
have. When you're sitting there thinking you're a good person, fair to people,
and realize you've made such a sweeping - and wrong - assumption about some
one else because of their sex, race, lifestyle, whatever, it's really damn
hard to accept it. I can completely see how people let themselves continue to
ignore that little nudge in the back of their mind. It's not easy to change
the way you think.

TL;DR - Fucking sucks, and it's really hard to change, but it exists.

------
throwaway6761
Throwaway account given the topic.

As someone who has been in the valley along while, the disrespect from women
seems to come from a couple of angles -- the bro culture (define as you wise,
Uber excels in this), racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst), and
many of those that grew up outside the bay area.

Some of us have been seeing each other as equals for years, judgement based on
merit, but many a*holes still perpetuate issues.

My data set -- several startups, a few big companies, bay area native; my wife
non native, white, a number of large prominent technical companies. One of us
in engineering, the other in project/program management.

The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a
difficult one.

~~~
SafariDevelop
> racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst)

> The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a
> difficult one.

I'm not going to call you a racist, but the least you could do is provide
examples or, at best, statistics to backup your allegations. None, but one, of
the feminist accusations of the tech industry in the American media involved a
non-white male.

> caste loving people

As if Americans are not caste-loving?
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-
di...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-
dismissed/307274/)

~~~
jongraehl
Surely you can admit that Americans are _less_ caste-loving. We treat talented
individuals of all races+genders+GLBTQBBQ pretty damn well compared to the
majority of the world (the mentally ill, on the other hand ...). I give us an
A-, globally speaking.

~~~
SafariDevelop
> Surely you can admit that Americans are less caste-loving. We treat talented
> individuals of all races+genders+GLBTQBBQ pretty damn well compared to the
> majority of the world

I'm not really sure about that. If you are talking about overt treatment, sure
we tend to be nice and well-mannered compared to the majority of the world.
But underneath that facade we really aren't any different from the rest. Why
do you think an HN user had to create a throwaway account (throwaway6761) to
denigrate an entire race of people? I'm sure he tends to be nice and well-
mannered to the minorities outside the Internet. Finally note that the comment
you are responding to points to the class/status system between Americans (not
just between races):
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-
di...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-
dismissed/307274/)

------
colmvp
> Zuckerberg, Gates, Thiel, Musk—these are our Carnegies and Morgans and
> Rockefellers, whose names will be on museum wings and university halls 100
> years from now. And there’s not a female among them.

Wow, yeah, it's crazy that a shortlist of four people of 316 million that none
of them are women. Despite Asians having large representation in tech, should
I be offended that none of those these heavyweights are Asian?

------
7Figures2Commas
Many of the concerns raised in this article are legitimate, and obviously
aren't exclusive to tech. But the narrative presented by this article is not
as compelling as it could be because the author relies so heavily on the
experience of two founders whose struggle raising seed capital mirrors that of
countless male founders.

Is it possible that Glassbreakers simply isn't the $100 million/year
investment opportunity the founders believe it is? The author devotes just a
single paragraph to this possibility:

> To be fair, there are many reasons Glassbreakers might not appeal to a
> Founders Fund or Andreessen Horowitz, or any of the dozens of other all-male
> VC partnerships on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, reasons that have nothing
> to do with sexist bias. It’s not likely to be a Facebook, or even a Houzz,
> the home-remodeling site launched by an Israeli husband and wife, financed
> by Sequoia and now valued at $2.3 billion. Glassbreakers is by definition
> “gender-gated,” thereby excluding 50 percent of potential users. It also
> presumes that many women do feel the need for female mentorship, when in
> fact there is quite possibly a significant cohort of working women who think
> they are getting along just fine without another woman’s advice.

The author then minimizes this argument by pointing out that Uber founder
Travis Kalanick was able to buy a San Fransico mansion when he sold a "now-
forgotten" file sharing service. This has nothing to do with Glassbreakers,
and anybody who stays in this game long enough will inevitably see more
inexplicable fundings and acquisitions than can be counted. Good people and
ideas go without funding and exits all the time.

The Glassbreakers founders were able to raise $100,000 in seed money, which
the article's author humorously refers to as "pre-seed." They were looking for
half a million dollars in "pre-seed" funding, but a lot of companies have
problems raising. It appears Glassbreakers has _some_ traction (1,500
registered users) since launch, but without significantly more than this,
raising $1.5 million might be difficult for the founders in today's ultra-
competitive environment. Just because they want an 18 month runway doesn't
mean that investors are obligated to provide it.

Meanwhile, there are companies like Chronus
([http://chronus.com/](http://chronus.com/)) and MicroMentor
([http://www.micromentor.org/](http://www.micromentor.org/)) that offer
mentoring software corporations can use to build their own mentoring programs
for employees. There is also an ecosystem of firms like Insala
([http://www.insala.com](http://www.insala.com)) that help corporations
implement mentoring programs end to end. So if Glassbreakers is ultimately
going to pursue revenue through corporate opportunities, which is allued to in
the article, Glassbreakers has to prove that it can differentiate itself from
and compete with what's already out there. Nothing in the article suggests
that it has at this early stage.

~~~
ANTSANTS
It's particularly ironic that the author included this quote:

>“When I coach women, I tell them how wonderful they are. Women won’t make the
ridiculous projections about their companies that the guys will. They won’t
say the really stupid thing the nerds do. They are a lot more realistic and
practical and humble.”

Soon after this line:

>They told investors their project was the next Pinterest—the way
screenwriters tell movie moguls their scripts are the next Titanic.

And then they quoted Shanley Kane and I lost the ability to take the article
seriously.

------
plikan13
Attitudes towards women in IT environments would become a little more relaxed
if a fair number of programmers would have the courage to stop denying and
come out of the closet. There, I said it.

------
hagan_das
"Gang-Bang Interviews"? Really?

SV tech is getting the diversity shakedown hard these days. Plenty of other
fields have sex ratios just as skewed. Why is tech getting the brunt?

~~~
learc83
I've wondered that myself. There are plenty of other well paying jobs that are
even more skewed than tech. Look at electricians, and plumbers to start.

I don't see a constant barrage of articles lamenting on the lack of women
electricians.

~~~
saraid216
How many articles do you see about electricians to begin with?

~~~
learc83
I think that's the point. The reason you see articles lamenting the lack of
women in tech is because tech is currently a sexy career, while electrician
isn't.

My point is that if people really cared about improving women's lives, they'd
be pushing for more women in skilled trades _in addition_ to pushing for more
women in tech.

Unlike software development, being an electrician require an apprenticeship
instead of college. Apprenticeships are paid and therefore more accessible to
people with lower incomes.

I'd argue that trying to improve the lives of less educated lower income women
specifically is more beneficial than focusing on the smart, ambitious, college
graduates (and future college graduates) who we are trying to entice into
software development--women who would probably go on to high paying jobs in
other fields anyway.

~~~
geofft
I'm a software engineer. I have a voice among software engineers, and not so
much among electricians. I'll focus on the change that I have half a chance of
making some progress on. I don't think this means that I don't _really_ care
about improving women's lives, any more than how, as a Linux user, me not
writing Windows tutorials means I don't _really_ care about improving user's
lives.

Why aren't there analogous articles written by electricians? You'd have to ask
the electricians.

~~~
learc83
>Why aren't there analogous articles written by electricians? You'd have to
ask the electricians.

Software engineers aren't the ones writing these articles, and this is an
article in Newsweek not a tech blog.

>I'll focus on the change that I have half a chance of making some progress
on.

We're not talking about software engineers getting together and deciding to
make our workplaces more hospitable to women (which I fully support). We're
talking about people from outside singling us out for societal problems, while
wrapping themselves in moral superiority.

This isn't bout helping women, it's about getting clicks by picking on an
unpopular easy target. The same way we had articles blaming San Fransisco's
housing prices on Google buses.

Again if they really cared about women, they'd be pushing for programs
designed to get women into skilled trades.

~~~
hagan_das
Exactly. The diversity hand wringers could be targeting any industry they want
right now but are lasering in on tech.

They smell the blood in the water.

------
nsxwolf
The cover art just sucks all the air out of the room. I immediately know you
SV folks aren't going to get a fair shake in this article.

------
redwood
Wish they'd mentioned Theranos

~~~
ladytron
Theranos imo is a special case. It was founded by a woman with tons of family
money and friends in high places. She did not need to play the funding game to
get started. I doubt she would have held onto her position today if she had to
use regular funding channels in the beginning.

Most likely, she would have lost control of her company.

------
dang
This post was briefly flag-killed by users. (That's what "[flagkilled]" means
on a post.) We've unkilled it, obviously.

~~~
laurenkay
Thanks for unkilling, but it's pretty ironic that a piece about Silicon Valley
being a boys' club was flag-killed. With HN's prominence in SV, I really wish
this were a progressive enough community to at least acknowledge the existence
of sexism, and realize why articles like these continue to get written.
Getting past the clickbaity photo that was used (we can save journalistic
ethics for another night), this was a relevant profile of one type of startup
that isn't well understood by SV. I'm glad the moderators viewed it as worth
saving, but I really wish this community didn't need babysitting when it comes
to discussions on sexism.

~~~
emcarey
thanks so much lauren!! Appreciate you standing up for us - we were really
upset this was taken off hacker news considering how deeply involved we are
with this community.

------
michaelochurch
Silicon Valley is where the future is allegedly built by people living in the
past.

For just one of a zillion examples: why's the place so expensive? Fucking
NIMBYs who refuse to allow 21st-century housing density. Also, California
isn't that liberal. It's what 1960s liberalism would be if drained of all its
leftist color and its impressive work ethic, leaving just nostalgic
remembrances of the hippie era. The '60s leftists stood for something (like,
civil rights and economic equality) but their 2015-era California remnant just
wants to live in some silly suburban watered-down hippy-dippy utopia (see:
Agrestic in _Weeds_ ) that never existed and doesn't even make sense on its
own terms. Unfortunately, the not-fit-for-life soft-skulls become the Prop 13
assholes and the hair-trigger NIMBYs who block new development (it might
shadow the gluten-free tomato garden I would start if I actually had
ambition!) and drive house prices through the roof.

I like some people in California, for sure, but the Prop 13 NIMBY people
should be forcibly relocated to the Pacific Garbage Patch... until we have
something like The Raft in _Snow Crash_ to put them on.

In the same way, this supposedly innovative industry is run by people who
still subscribe to the _Mad Men_ playbook of gender relations, never mind the
fact that the rest of the world (yes, even Wall Street!) has moved beyond that
and the sort of disgusting behavior (such as the investors who come on to
women during pitches, or otherwise attempt to use their positions of power for
sexual access) described in this article would get a person fired, if not
more.

------
PhoenixWright
I really wish I could go to at least one site related to something I'm
interested in be it sports, tech or gaming and not have to listen to this
feminist propaganda.

~~~
normloman
Yeah it would be nice to just enjoy distractions without my beliefs being
challenged all the time. Why can't I ignore all the problems of society, and
just read blogs all day?

------
oldmanjay
Some day someone will convince me that sexism can be fixed with more sexism.
That day has not arrived.

~~~
epistasis
This is the same type of sloppy thinking that endorses "if you're so tolerant,
why don't you accept my bigotry."

It barely deserves a response, but I would like to point out that it is far
more revealing of your ignorance of other people's experience than of any
cleverness or wit on your part.

~~~
refurb
I'm pretty sure your response did nothing but attack the author and completely
failed to counter the argument. Well done.

------
jecjec
The front line of the gender war is the American courtroom, where men are
subject to grossly unjust and discriminatory divorce and custody law.

~~~
lkbm
In contested custody cases, fathers win about half the time. Granted, there's
probably selection bias there.

The custody issue is clearly a result of gender stereotypes. I'm a feminism in
part because it's the one movement that's actively and effectively fighting
against that root cause.

I don't think tech sexism in SV is _the_ frontline, or that the courts are
_the_ frontline, but they're both important fights. (SV might be the frontline
_in tech_, but not in gender or sex equality overall, or even in the US.)

