
What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders - katm
http://blog.ycombinator.com/what-we-learned-from-40-female-yc-founders
======
tptacek
I've been coding since I was ~13. I can understand why people who haven't
might have valid reasons to wish they'd started earlier. I'd just say: beware
self-fulfilling prophecies and selection bias. Lots of really excellent
software people I've worked with got late starts. Lots of people who started
early coasted or are still coasting. In the 25 years I've been coding, only a
few years worth of that time really grew me as a developer, so _what_ you work
on has just as much impact as how long you've been working on it.

Work with a bunch of different enterprise L.O.B. developers to get a sense of
what I'm saying here. The average age of a backoffice developer is higher,
meaning they have more experience. Hiring in enterprises is regimented,
meaning that they tend to come from CS backgrounds. Are they uniformly high
quality developers? No. In fact: there's a stigma attached to coming from a
long stint in enterprise development.

As a lever for getting more women engaged with startups, the idea that an
early start is important makes even less sense. Much of the day-to-day work
that happens even at companies with difficult problem domains is rote and
uncomplicated. A few years experience is more than enough to lead a typical
web project, and, more importantly, to have a sense for whether a dev team is
firing on all cylinders and to authoritatively manage it.

Obvious subtext/bias here: I do not believe that starting women in software
development earlier is going to resolve the gender gap. By all means, start
early; there's nothing wrong with that. It's just probably not the root of the
problem.

~~~
scott_s
It's possible that it's not the actual coding experience that matters, but the
implicit message of "it's okay for you to do this."

I'm male, 33, and I do systems software research and development. My family
did not get a computer until I was a sophomore in high school. In high school,
I played with technology (some webpages, lots of internet time), but I did not
understand it. My senior year, I did some very basic programming in a course.
But I did not start _really_ programming until college, in a computer science
curriculum. I was impressed how much more some students knew than me. But by
the junior year, I don't think that edge made a difference.

So it's tempting to say that I am an example of the kind of person you and
some others on the thread are talking about. But I don't think we can discount
the "okayness" effect. While I did not start really programming until college,
I liked technology before that, and that was not seen as unusual by anyone.

It's possible, then, that encouraging young girls to program early may help
resolve the gender gap, but not because they then become young adult women who
already know how to be good programmers by the time they arrive on college
campuses. Rather, it could be a cultural ripple-effect where if enough young
girls program, more people see it as gender-neutral, and when a young adult
woman with no prior programming experience wants to take up computer science
in college, no one says, "Really?"

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _when a young adult woman with no prior programming experience wants to take
> up computer science in college, no one says, "Really?"_

Don't you think that a young adult deciding to take further study in a subject
they have no experience in - which _suggests_ they have no real desire towards
- should at least be asked by educators/parents "Are you sure that's what you
want? Really?". If I'd never baked a thing in my life and said "I want to go
to catering college" I'd pretty much expect teachers to say "Really?"; why is
this different?

I'm not at all suggesting you need experience in a domain to begin studying it
at a higher education institute - but I'd want someone to double check that
I'd at least considered [considering] the possible consequences of that route
of study. I wouldn't want to stop someone following an impulse, just that I'd
want to try and get them to do it with at least some thought.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Don't you think that a young adult deciding to take further study in a
> subject they have no experience in - which suggests they have no real desire
> towards

Er, since when does lack of _past_ experience indicate no _present_ desire? Or
even no _past_ desire?

~~~
smokeyj
I think there should be evidence of passion, which typically manifests in a
proactive approach to education and experience.

Edit. As I think of this more, I feel like we're having two different
discussions in parallel. The first, how do we get more women in technology.
The second, how do we get people involved in their passion. These are two
distinct conversations, and the first shoe-horns a subset of the population
into a career track for the sake of a misguided notion of gender equality.

~~~
onion2k
Claiming someone needs to have 'passion' for a job is just a way of putting up
a barrier to maintain the status quo.

There's no reason why anyone needs passion. They need technical ability and
incentive. That's it. Just look at _any other industry_ and you won't see a
requirement to be passionate about the subject. You'll find thousands of
quantity surveyors, radiologists, retail managers, cleaners, etc who are
entirely dispassionate about what they do for a living yet they still do
brilliant work because they do it for the money rather than the love. And
that's perfectly alright.

~~~
smokeyj
> There's no reason why anyone needs passion.

Is this advice you'd give to your kid?

~~~
onion2k
Yes.

In the IT industry (here in the UK, and particularly in smaller companies)
everyone pretends to be wildly enthusiast about learning the latest tech, and
as such companies have realised that while everyone says they live and breathe
this stuff _companies don 't need to give much incentive to people._ If
everyone gives up their evenings and weekends to learn the latest things then
companies profits increase because they don't spend anything on training. Add
to that no one gets paid overtime. No one gets a decent payrise. No one gets
promoted. The only way to advance is to leave your current job and move to a
better job somewhere else. All this because companies know that their staff
are ' _passionate_ ' and will learn this stuff in their own time.

You don't need to be _passionate_ about what you do for a living. You should
_like_ it otherwise you'll not enjoy day-to-day life very much, but if you're
spending your own time doing things you should be learning in work you're
wasting your life. _You can always be passionate about something that isn 't
your job._

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I think you're confusing being passionate about something with it being your
favourite activity and being passionate about something with being a walkover
for an exploitative firm/boss.

I used to work in IP and was passionate about it, ultimately I realised that
my moral objections meant I couldn't continue in it. However I never did
unpaid overtime. When I got home I messed with computers, went biking, and
other things because I was also [more] passionate about those things. I'd
devour popular media mentions of IP related to my work, but that wasn't doing
work.

> _if you 're spending your own time doing things you should be learning in
> work you're wasting your life_ //

Not if you'd do them anyway.

> _You don 't need to be passionate about what you do for a living._ //

I agree completely. But if you're spending 40+ hours doing something every
week isn't it better if it floats-your-boat just a little?

------
eah13
This is a great story and project.

An apology (in the original sense) of Jessica's work for those who think that
the experiences of these individuals don't matter: What I think people don't
get about Jessica's interviews is that they're part of a scientific process of
understanding what makes great founders and great companies. Many discredit
qualitative, observational scientific data. But for new, rare, or poorly
understood phenomena, observation is the only way to make scientific progress.
In engineering the phenomena are often well understood, common, and within the
discipline, familiar. In this case deductive logic, reasoning from known
principles, is quite fruitful; but its success biases engineers against
inductive reasoning. But for other subjects, such as what makes a great
startup founder, or what makes a great _female_ startup founder, the inductive
method is much more fruitful.

This is not some anomaly: all sciences started with observation and the
inductive method. These are the beginnings of insight, generating hypotheses
to be tested. We're still quite early in our understanding of startups, and
even more so in our understanding of female-founded startups, that this
approach is not just warranted, it's the only way to make true progress.

Jessica is like the Jane Goodall of startup science. Even though she's
studying individual founders she's ultimately helping us understand more about
ourselves.

~~~
angersock
Along the ways of furthering our understanding, it'd be really fascinating--if
it hasn't been done already--to see a demographic breakdown of the YC
founders.

For example, I notice that there don't appear to be any second-or-later
generation African-Americans or Latino-Americans represented in the 40 women
shown.

Similarly, it takes a little digging through all of the interviews to suss out
whether they're immigrants, visiting, what they studied, whether they've had
previous business experience, etc.

~~~
eah13
Agreed. A focus on gender is warranted, but not to the exclusion of other
demographics. There are likely a great many large startups waiting to be built
in each under-represented demographic. These startups aren't yet built because
not enough domain experts have the technical ability and startup knowledge
they need to build them. Which, I believe, is YC and 500's business rationale
for encouraging diversity.

------
iufwe87
I am from India and on H1B visa in United States. I still don't understand why
there is more hustling in recent years about women participation ? Be it
playing games, developing games, women in tech or women in NFL or women in
______ ( fill in blank here).

I studied engineering in India from one of the premier university and 30 % of
my class were girls. Toppers of the class for all 4 years were girls. I know
at least 50-80 girls from India and China in my linkedin contacts who are
actively engaged int tech.

Keeping aside social problems faced by women in India for a bit ( and
excluding poor people) , still there is very high participation from girls /
women in India. Throughout my education of 1st to 12th grade there were more
girls than more boys in my class.

So my question is ----

1\. Why is US only facing this problem of women in ..... ?

2\. Is this some political gimmick being played for 2016 preparation ( and I
ask with all seriousness without affiliation to any party )

I have always considered people in US are more vocal about their rights,
responsibilities and more aware of problems in general. Lately though, I see
lots of thought policing happening, view manipulation going on at large.

My last and most important question is ,

3\. Since you folks are now actively advertising and creating social
conditions for women's participation in tech are you not depriving them of
their freedom to choose whichever path women in US prefer ? In an ideal
scenario, women would have tech as one of choice for career and not
necessarily manipulative information representing tech is only best choice
career.

~~~
dyno12345
Countries with lower levels of economic development often have the highest
ratios of female engineers and wealthier countries often have the lowest
ratios.

One explanation is once you're free to do whatever you want and you don't have
to worry about expectations or putting food on the table so much, the
influence of subtle innate genetic preferences actually become much more
apparent in some ways.

However, this explanation goes against the rules of the western view that
predominates, that the gender ratio of fewer women in some area (but often not
when there are fewer men in some area) mean is proof in point that women are
being harmed and should be given assistance.

If discrimination causes the difference, why do countries like Iran or Saudi
Arabia have around the highest ratios of female engineers and countries like
the Netherlands or Norway around the lowest?

~~~
spcoll
Are you denying that women are being heavily discriminated against in
developed countries, like Norway or the Netherlands?

Technology and entrepreneurship are very attractive in terms of social
prestige and salary, therefore if women weren't being harassed and discouraged
by men from entering these fields, you would be seeing roughly 50% of female
engineers and entrepreneurs.

Maybe even somewhat more, since women tend to be smarter than men on average
(which is why girls tend to succeed better in school than boys).

Edit: here come the downvotes from males in denial. If you feel the need to
downvote me because I am stating a simple fact, you are part of the problem.

~~~
aragot
> since women tend to be smarter than men on average

Ok, we need to stop with sexist insults right now, and it's valid for men too.
Define "smarter".

~~~
barry-cotter
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence#Current_research_on_general_intelligence)

 _According to the 1994 report "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" by the
American Psychological Association, "Most standard tests of intelligence have
been constructed so that there are no overall score differences between
females and males." Differences have been found, however, in specific areas
such as mathematics and verbal measures.[9]

When standardized IQ tests were first developed in the early 20th century,
girls typically scored higher than boys until age 14, at which time the curve
for girls dropped below that for boys.[8][10] As testing methodology was
revised, efforts were made to equalize gender performance.[10][11][12]

The mean IQ scores between men and women vary little.[9][13][14][15][16] The
variability of male scores is greater than that of females, however, resulting
in more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution.[17]_

~~~
aragot
It says differences in average IQ gender gap are either small or biased by the
methodology, unless I'm mistaken.

------
jandrewrogers
The importance of learning to program at an earlier age conflates two patterns
in my opinion. I benefitted immensely from teaching myself how to program at a
young age but that is not why I have the computer science and software skills
I do today per se. It is an artifact, not a requirement.

Computer science skills roughly follow a sigmoidal curve over time with long
tails at the top and bottom. You really do not become useful as a programmer
until you hit the hockey stick part of that curve. _There is no substitute for
time in the field to get to the hockey stick part._ The primary advantage of
learning programming when you are much younger is that you essentially burn
down some of that initial time investment before you are really paying
attention to how long it actually takes to be an effective programmer. You do
not hit the hockey stick faster, it just seems like it to other people because
you started down the path to get there earlier.

This is discouraging to people that start in college or later because there
really is no shortcut to time spent doing it. The people that become good
programmers faster usually just started earlier, it isn't necessarily that
they are naturally more skilled. Nonetheless, the time required to become a
good programmer is not that onerous in the big picture. The key is sticking
with it even when the payoff seems distant.

As an added comment, people that do well at the top of the hockey stick, where
there return on additional investment is diminished, do tend to be the people
that started much earlier. Again, this is not due to talent per se but the
same people sufficiently obsessed with computer science to teach themselves at
a young age also have the obsession to learn and master the more esoteric
parts after they've become excellent programmers even though the practical
utility is much less in practice.

~~~
eah13
> this is not due to talent per se but the same people sufficiently obsessed
> with computer science to teach themselves at a young age also have the
> obsession to learn and master the more esoteric parts after they've become
> excellent programmers even though the practical utility is much less in
> practice

Agreed. I'd add this thought: code is a human language and like all languages
fluency is most easily developed as a child but immersion and repetition can
help adults develop it too.

~~~
jacalata
Do you have any sources to argue that code is more similar to human language
than it is to mathematics?

~~~
eah13
False dichotomy. Mathematics is also a human language. Code and mathematics
are more similar in many respects than code and Spanish. but they all share
common features of being cultural, mutable, consensus-based, imperfect, and
historically embedded.

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics might be interesting to you. His
description of calculation as a linguistic process should settle the issue if
you buy it.

Edit: just found this related item on HN, a math prof examining the nature of
a proof: [http://profkeithdevlin.org/2014/11/24/what-is-a-proof-
really...](http://profkeithdevlin.org/2014/11/24/what-is-a-proof-really/)

~~~
jacalata
ok, sure. So you are saying that the OPs statement "code is more easily
learned as a child because language is more easily learned as a child" is a
pointless narrowing of the idea that "code is more easily learned as a child
because all cultural, mutable, consensus based concepts are more easily
learned as a child"?

~~~
eah13
I believe they're roughly synonymous, yes. The processes of aging and
aculturation both involve an ossification of our ideas and concepts that make
learning new ones comparatively difficult. Vinod Khosla has talked extensively
about how he has to fight these processes in himself to bring a 'beginners
mind' to bear on new startup ideas. The median effort required to do this is
lower in younger people.

By the way, older people who share the characteristics of being only lightly
acculturated (i.e. eccentric) share the relevant characteristics with children
and may be able to learn things like languages with childlike speed. Hence, I
believe, PG's observation that startup founders of any age tend to be weird,
quirky, or poorly socialized in various ways.

------
ChuckMcM
My experience raising three daughters is that they were always very aware of
what others were doing. Their male peers were pretty uninformed (as I expect I
was as a teen). I observed that the men were much more inclined to pursue an
"unusual" activity (ie not what other people are doing)than the women were. It
seemed motivated not by feeling "weird" rather it appeared to be motivated to
not do something that their friends were not interested in participating with
them. From a sense of inclusion they didn't spend group time on activities
that other members of the group were not interested in.

I worked with my middle daughter to build a knitting pattern illustrator in
Perl[1]. She and her friends could talk for hours about knitting, which is
essentially programming as Jacquard proved, because they all were interested
in the ways to produce interesting weaves. My friends were interested in
talking about computers when I was a teen because we were interested in
machines that could 'compute'.

The question I wonder about is if the disparity goes away when women develop
group activities around programming.

[1] I liked the pun of using Perl for a knitting application.

------
djb_hackernews
> One of the most consistent patterns is how many founders wished they'd
> learned to program when they were younger.

I wonder what some of the reasons would lead them to have this wish. Is it a
matter of having a missing skillset that slowed down growth of their startups
or they later found that the really liked to write software and regret not
finding out until later in life. Or possibly other reasons?

~~~
zxcvvcxz
Seems fairly obvious. A lot of web startups need little more than an MVP to be
effective for proving the concept or even gaining users and revenue. Something
that can probably be put together in 3 months.

Being able to do this yourself - a skill accessible to anyone who coded for a
few years - seems like a better alternative than haggling over 120k/yr
developers and dealing with the struggles of no product / no dev / no money.
Either of those factors could lead to gaining the others. So instead of having
none, you could be the dev!

~~~
Alex3917
This is absolutely true, and teaching myself to code is one of the best
decisions I've ever made for exactly these reasons (and more).

That said, I'm not upset that I wasn't a CS major in college. While there are
certain things that I'll probably never have the skills to build, at the same
time I see so many CS majors making fundamental product and business errors
that I'm able to recognize and at least hopefully avoid thanks to previous
experience in other areas.

Knowing how to code is really important, but there are other skills and
knowledge areas that are important also. We absolutely need people who are
really good at coding and CS to the point where that's all they focus on. But
for everyone else, what's important isn't so much when you learned to code but
rather what you've spent your time learning and doing in general.

------
dmritard96
"In the most recent batch (W15), we asked about gender on the application form
for the first time. The percentage of startups we accepted with female
founders was identical to the percentage who applied."

There are application videos and have been for a while. And each founder has
names listed on the application. With [https://gender-
api.com/](https://gender-api.com/) you could probably figure out gender
without asking explicitly and could have done so acceptably well with previous
classes. I would be curious what the stats look like back tested against each
class over time.

~~~
eah13
+1 to back-testing the stats.

Edit: whoa, downvoters! This comment was about getting more information to
inform productive discussion. Not sure who would disagree with that?

------
jkmcf
I wish my parents had let me take more shop classes, because right now I'm
interested in home renovation.

The thing is, you don't know where your future interests will take you. Even
if you are exposed to stuff when you are younger, you may hate it regardless
of how great the presentation may be.

I personally think encouraging women, or anyone for that matter, to be
programmers/scientists/mechanics is missing the point. You have to encourage
people to find passions, be proactive, enjoy learning, and make these a habit.
Life isn't static.

I also think the "gender gap" is a fallacy. It's true that all professions
could be more welcoming to people of different persuasions, but it would be
more interesting to know the gap between "people who want to do X but feel
excluded" and the "people who are already doing X".

~~~
joycey
The issue isn't just that the gender gap in tech exists and should be fixed.
The bigger issue is that the gap exists, and is actually getting worse over
time. There are half as many women studying CS today as there were in the 80's
[0]. I think it's much more believable that cultural factors that have
inadvertently hurt women have caused this than asserting that the innate
interests of women have evolved in the past few decades.

You believe the "gender gap" is a fallacy because you believe tech is a
meritocracy but the fact is that there are less women in tech. That means that
either tech is not a meritocracy because there are subtle biases that women
have to work against, or that women are inherently uninterested in tech. If
you refuse to be skeptical of the fact that maybe, just maybe, tech is not
_really_ a meritocracy, then you will never be able to acknowledge the fact
that subtle sexist microaggressions exist and affect the numbers we see.

[0] [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-
wom...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-
stopped-coding)

~~~
chrishynes
Or is it possible, just possible, that freedom has increased in the past few
decades? Women can now choose whatever they want to do rather than being
guided down the path of housewivery or a couple of other vocations?

Maybe the underlying desires that were always there are being revealed, rather
than "innate interests evolving".

But no, you'd rather dismiss that possibility out of hand and presume that
"subtle sexist microaggressions" halved the number of women in tech.

Are you suggesting that women have it twice as bad in tech now as they had in
the 80s?

~~~
joycey
You are definitely right in that there are biological influences that have
caused men and women to want to pursue different career paths. But you must be
kidding if you don't believe this effect isn't exacerbated by cultural
factors.

Where do these underlying desires come from? Are they generated exclusively by
biology, where not having a Y chromosome will make you more likely to pursue
x, y, and z interests? Are these underlying desires not at all influenced by
the environment kids grow up in--a world that depicts almost exclusively male
programmers in the media, a world where the media glorifies young boy
geniuses, a world where Lego's are marketed to boys and dolls are marketed to
girls, a world where computer games are marketed almost exclusively to boys, a
world where computer science role models are exclusively male? It's hard to
call any of this "sexist" because it's so subtle and each individual thing
isn't really a big deal, but it all contributes to an environment that makes
tech less appealing to young girls.

~~~
chrishynes
If there are biological influences on choice of profession based on gender,
than a diversity goal of a 50/50 split of genders in a profession is misguided
and artificial at best, and harmful at worst.

I never said culture has zero effect. Obviously it does have some impact. But
how big is that effect? If there are half as many women in tech today than 3
decades ago, and you argue that culture is the main driver of that effect,
than you must also be arguing that sexism in tech has gotten dramatically
worse since the 80s.

Somehow I think we have made progress since the 80s, so there must be
something else at work in the decrease of women in tech.

~~~
joycey
If you're curious, I can explain to you my personal theory for why there has
been such a substantial decrease of women in tech.

Most of the developers I know play video games. This is relevant for a couple
reasons. Gaming (especially PC gaming) means that you're more likely to be
tech-savvy because you might wonder why a game is running so slowly on your
family PC, and then read cool stuff about why your CPU sucks or something.
Video games also can be a "gateway" into tinkering with programming by writing
bots or writing your own games. Playing the same game as one of your peers
means that you have a common interest, and are more likely to be friends. The
more friends you have that are also developers, the more likely you are to
feel like you "belong" and that you are in the right field.

Now, read this article on how the stereotype that video games are for boys was
developed: [http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-
girls-a...](http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-girls-
allowed)

It's pretty long, but the tl;dr is: Once upon a time, video games (like pong)
were designed for the whole family to play. The video game industry bubble
popped because people have short attention spans. To try to figure out how to
survive, companies like nintendo did a lot of market research and found that
more boys were playing video games than girls. It is easier for the marketing
team to direct their resources to a specific demographic of people. Since
there are more boys than girls who play video games, nintendo starts running
marketing campaigns to explicitly target boys in the early 90's. Nintendo
starts launching products that are literally named the gameboy.

The article doesn't really go into this at all, but kids started experiencing
heavily genderized video game marketing in the early 90's, and by the time
they choose to major and graduate from college, that roughly maps to the sharp
decrease in women in CS starting in the early 2000's. This obviously isn't the
only factor, and also possibly doesn't even account for half of it, but I
definitely think it's a significant factor that nobody really talks about.

~~~
chrishynes
That's an interesting theory. It's got to have some impact, but I'm not sure
how much. That's how I started, though -- coding games with my dad, and just
got the juices flowing there and kept doing little project after project.

If it is a factor, hopefully it's being evened out, what with female gamers
nearing 50% of the market over the past decade or so.

I also wonder if the dot com bubble had anything to do with it. Recessions
seem to hit women and men in different ways and influence different outcomes.

~~~
joycey
Well, that's the thing. You can't even prove that any factor has any effect at
all. All I know is that from my anecdotal experience a lot of my male peers
got into programming tangentially through gaming because they liked playing
games and wanted to learn how to make games. And there's a fair amount of
proof that young boys are more likely to play video games than young girls.

As for whether or not it'll rectify itself, I'm a little more skeptical. Girls
are more likely to be casual gamers, and casual gamers are less likely to like
games enough to want to build their own. Of course, this could easily be my
projection bias showing, as I am a casual gamer who has never felt a strong
passion to build my own game.

~~~
chrishynes
Right, and again, my case shows a difference even there: I went into software.
But my brother went into carpentry and animal husbandry. Same family, same
environment -- gaming, coding with dad, etc. He's just as smart and could've
done tech if he wanted, but he had different interests.

That's an interesting point on casual gaming. However, it's also balanced by
the fact that casual games are the only games you can easily create as a one
man band or hobbyist.

If you're into puzzle games, say, you can probably put together your own with
a bit of HTML/JS. Or use one of the puzzle game builders.

If you're into Call of Duty, though, you've got no chance of writing your own
version of that until you've graduated and gotten a job somewhere. Even the
ubiquitous modding community that used to be a path into development has
diminished as games are increasingly locked down.

------
timedoctor
For women who also want to have children at the same time as co-founding a
startup, I think it's important not to underestimate how difficult this is.

When my wife was first breastfeeding I timed how long she spent breastfeeding
and changing nappies and bathing the young baby. It was LITERALLY over 9 hours
per day (timed to the minute). To think that it's possible to ALSO run a
startup at the same time is in my opinion crazy. With older children it's a
lot easier but still difficult.

I have several female friends who are also successful entrepreneurs. Some seem
to make it work with their family life, but my experience is with most that
they have a very hard time and that it often devastates their family life and
relationships.

So yes there examples of women who run a company and also have young children,
but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.

For women who do not want to have children, or who are not going to have
children for many years in the future, no issue.

~~~
marvin
No need to single out women in this context. If you want to be a father that's
there for your children, both on the infant stage and later stages of their
lives...being in a top-level leadership position is simply not possible. Ditto
for most other career paths that require your undivided attention.

Cultural norms is the only reason we single out women in this context. A lot
of people don't appreciate the level of dysfunction that can occur in other
areas of life simply from being ambitious and hard-working. I personally know
many professionals that I greatly admire and respect (while acknowledging that
I would never make the sacrifices they do to be where they are), but I'm sure
as hell glad I'm not married to them.

------
mikeleeorg
This is probably impossible to do, but it would be very interesting to
contrast these anecdotes with anecdotes from women who _could_ have become
technology startup founders, but didn't for some reason.

YC's stories are awesome and these entrepreneurs will serve as important role
models for young women. They unfortunately contain a "survivor bias" though,
and there may be many other hidden factors preventing other potential female
entrepreneurs from following in their footsteps.

I don't mean this as a criticism at all though. This effort by YC is a
tremendous first step and for the sake of my daughter and young girls
everywhere, I hope they continue.

EDIT: I'd love to hear the sentiment behind the downvotes. Hopefully I didn't
come across critical of YC's effort here; that wasn't my intention at all.
This is an important issue and I suspect the stories of those who were
deterred are just as informative as those who have gotten this far.

------
jgdreyes
I think this is a great project. But one quote stood out:

> Interestingly, many said it got them attention for being unusual, and that
> they'd used this to their advantage.

This is what I have experienced as well. But do I want to be `unusual`?

Instead, let's strive for making it a norm that female developers are just as
common and just as good as their male counterparts. Stop looking at me like
I'm some freak for being a competent woman developer.

------
pskittle
"Not surprisingly, most of the women were domain experts solving a problem
they themselves had. That's something that tends to be true of successful
founders regardless of gender."

How much domain experience is necessary to solve the problems you have. isn't
that something you learn/pick up once you start solving em?

~~~
dragonwriter
> How much domain experience is necessary to solve the problems you have.
> isn't that something you learn/pick up once you start solving em?

If you are a domain expert when you start, then the problems you have are more
likely to be real, significant problems in the domain, and your attempted
solutions are more likely to be both novel and well-considered in terms of the
problem than is the case for someone with less domain expertise at the outset.

~~~
pskittle
edited

you make fair points. However the most common advice you get is , "focus on
user experience". Most domain experts focus more on the tech as opposed to
users. Also some of the great/successful startups have been started and run
buy people who've never done it before.

~~~
dragonwriter
> However the most common advice you get is , "focus on user experience". Most
> domain experts fail to do that.

A domain expert scratching their own itch often is _unwittingly_ focussing on
UX of the target audience, which is one of the reasons that open source tools
by and for developers that don't have a lot of deliberate focus on UX beyond
what works for the people building it often are fairly good, while the same
kind of things built by developers in more consumer-oriented markets often
have very bad UX.

Ultimately, its the same principle as dogfooding -- the most effective way to
really understand UX deeply is for the developer to _be_ the target user.

~~~
pskittle
are you talking out of experience of being in a founders shoes? asking just to
get some context

------
skywhopper
Interesting stuff. One detail I'd like to respond to. Jessica writes:

    
    
         And as YC has grown, so has the number of female
         partners. Now there are four of us and we are not
         tokens, or a female minority in a male-dominated
         firm. At the risk of offending my male colleagues,
         who will nevertheless understand what I mean, some
         would claim it's closer to the truth to say that
         that we run the place.
    

Many times women find themselves in the situation where they are the more
responsible employees, working harder than the men, taking care of the details
many men overlook for far longer, and too often earning far less money and
respect. So I just hope that Jessica and the other female partners are being
compensated consummate to their contribution to the success of YC.

~~~
girvo
While I'm not disagreeing with your point, I'd like to point out that

 _> working harder than the men, taking care of the details many men overlook
for far longer, and too often earning far less money and respect_

is a problem not just for women, but something I see constantly across our
industry in general. Definitely something we should deal with better.
Thankfully, the steps we should be taking to bring more women into this
industry and deal with this problem are possibly interrelated, so it's one of
the many cases where we can help everyone :)

------
mentos
Computer science is the language of the future.

It bothers me that I spent so many years learning latin/french/italian when
their real world applications are very limited relative to say C/Java/Python
which are much more important foreign languages to be learning in school.

~~~
1123581321
Liberal arts (classics/literature in foreign languages) and mathematics (the
foundation of computer science) are complementary fields of study. People who
understand both tend to have a significant advantage over their entire career.
Right now, you wish you were more specialized, but if you someday want to
broaden your technology career, combine disciplines into one career or lead
people, you will probably be thankful for your background.

I suggest reading some biographies of famous computer scientists to help
understand how few of them had a specialized background, and how many of them
had a rich, liberal arts education that may or may not have incorporated
computer science.

~~~
daigoba66
It's never a waste of time to learn something new.

~~~
teddyh
I have a demon of the second kind to sell you…

“ _We want the Demon, you see, to extract from the dance of atoms only
information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines,
blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to
clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and
almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever
appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future…_
”

— Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

Also, this:

“[…] _to making many books there is no end, and too much studying afflicts the
flesh._ ” – Ecclesiastes 12:12

------
d0m
One sure thing is that having a child and a startup is a hell more difficult.
I applaud founder moms/dads.

~~~
tptacek
We had our first a year into the first startup I founded myself, and our
second just before I left for a senior role at another startup. Balancing work
and home responsibilities is always hard. Having a young family might not be
an especially difficult burden for founders.

~~~
d0m
It might be an unrealistic ideal, but I hope that when I'll be a father, I'll
be able to give it my 100%. I don't like the idea of always considering
"Should I spend time with my kids" vs "Should I do my best to make the startup
succeed". I think this is what scares me the most about having a startup and a
young family at the same time.

~~~
tptacek
What's unrealistic about this is the idea that you'd ever, under any
circumstances, give 100% of yourself to your children. That's not a grown-up
perspective on parenthood.

~~~
jamesdelaneyie
I think the point is that a healthy work/life balance would allow you to give
100% of yourself to the child at the particular moment you're with them. Not
having to check an email when you're reading them a bedtime story. Being able
to take a week off and not have an excess work-related ruminations badgering
the gullet in the background of a family-holiday that detract from you're
daughter saying "DAD! WATCH THIS!"

 _unobserved pool splashes_

------
cauterized
As a woman in software development (and a former founder) what I appreciate
most about this collection of stories is that rather than men sitting around
hypothesizing about why someone else whose experience probably doesn't match
their own made different choices than they did, it tells actual women's
stories. The ongoing discussion of gender in computing needs more of this.

Next, I would love to see (for contrast) the stories of some women who did
drop out or who considered STEM majors/careers but ultimately chose other
directions. Any takers?

------
logn
Generally, I think the value of programming at an early age is that you have
the time and context to develop an earnest interest in programming. You're
doing it for fun. And then when you proceed to take courses on it, you're
genuinely excited to learn, and you're not just struggling for a passing
grade.

Most of this is just the broken nature of schooling.

------
debacle
Not to be callous, but I'm not really interested in any of these founders as
people. I would be much more interested in an aggregated feedback discussion
about how (or if) startups with female founders are different, what YC did
right for them, what it didn't, etc.

~~~
nostrademons
You can't actually understand startups without understanding the people behind
them. This is a hard lesson born from experience: when I was younger I was
just interested in the mechanics, and thought that if I learned enough about
the technology, the business, the financing aspects, etc. I'd find success.

What ultimately happened was that I gave up (temporarily, it turned out, but
it took me 6 years to pick it up again), because I didn't understand _myself_.
When the stress picks up and you're knee-deep in building a product, a lot of
the decisions you make, of necessity, have to be on autopilot. And if you
don't understand your emotions and the emotions and background of everyone
else in the ecosystem, you'll be fighting that force instead of working with
it.

------
brlewis
I'm interested in reading more findings from the 40 stories in addition to the
ones Jessica describes, but I'm too lazy to read all 40. If you've read them,
what did you find interesting?

------
fillskills
Even as a male entrepreneur, this collection is pure gold. So much to learn.
Thank you for doing this.

Any chance this series could be made as videos? I would like my daughter to
see them as she grows up.

------
pskittle
Also the link to the female founders conference has last years dates.

[http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/](http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/)

~~~
katm
It's updated now - just refresh!

~~~
pskittle
great! thank you

------
xchip
What they should do is to marry men that want to stay at home taking care of
the kids.

------
StronglyTyped
I'm in a graduate CS program. Half, maybe more, of my cohort is female.

------
klunger
If they wanted to back up this claim "...from the start I've made sure YC had
an environment that is supportive of women," they would provide affordable
childcare.

~~~
dugmartin
I don't think affordable childcare is a women's only issue. Men have children
too.

~~~
pistle
Nobody says that it's only a women's issue. But, if that servers your
rhetorical needs, you keep putting those words in peoples' mouths.

Childcare is vastly a burden born by women, thus considered a women's issue.
That doesn't mean "there are no men who are burdened by childcare." It means
that, in aggregate, the impact falls far more on the women.

It's so egalitarian of you to not want it to be so, but until women are paid
the same and men are taking on equal responsibilities (in aggregate) with the
child rearing, the feigned "equality uber alles" cry is the fight song of the
MRA.

"I found an outlier, therefore WOE ARE THE MEN MEN MEN!!"

~~~
tptacek
Child care is not a "women's issue". That idea has the unique property of
being insulting both to women and to men in equal measure.

No institutional change is going to solve child care for company founders ---
which is, after all, what we're talking about here. If your "investors"
provide child care, double check to make sure their proper title isn't
"employer".

Tech workers with young families should be especially careful about asking for
child care benefits. They're a powerful form of lock-in for employees.
Altering child-care arrangements is often traumatic for everyone involved, and
is at the very least a logistical headache that most people who change jobs
don't have to face.

Tech jobs are already very amenable to child-care arrangements. They almost
always feature flexible hours and often support WFH arrangements. The problem
with tech isn't that it fails to account for child care. The problem is that
tech companies have a terrible habit of stigmatizing child care
responsibilities†. That's what needs to change, not the child care itself.

†
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4npejyy4hg76tj/Screenshot%202014-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4npejyy4hg76tj/Screenshot%202014-11-24%2013.11.08.png?dl=0)

~~~
DanBC
I feel like you and parent comment agree and are talking at crossed purposes.

> Child care is not a "women's issue". That idea has the unique property of
> being insulting both to women and to men in equal measure.

You ignore the reality of very many women who cannot work because sexist
society has decided that child care is something the woman needs to sort out.

It's changing, but not fast enough.

There are very many more women than men unable to get work because of a lack
of child care.

~~~
tptacek
There is no child care fix to women's low participation in tech
entrepreneurship. Founders need to provide their own services. That's the
nature of starting a new firm.

And, if we broaden the discussion to women's participation in the tech
industry as employees, there are good reasons to be cautious about company
interventions in child care.

There is a child care issue in startuplandia: it's that child care is
stigmatized. A more cynical commenter might say that an attempt to bring child
care into the discussion at all is simply an effort to keep pushing back on
founders with young families. Surely, I'm not that cynical.

Obviously, I don't think it's right that women should be forced to shoulder
more of the child care burden than men. But we don't even have to reach that
argument to dispose of the "child care" issue on this thread.

------
ddebernardy
The first paragraph, and the implicit message that females were in unusual
need of help and support, struck me as belittling and patronizing... which is
probably not the desired PR outcome. :-|

It seems to me though that a much better way to convey the right message would
be to compile a "what we learned from 100 VC founders" and ensure that
diversity is absolutely all over the sample: females, muslims, african
americans, non-US natives, gays and lesbians, whatever. Doing so would convey
the implicit message that diversity is normal.

~~~
danielweber
Not everyone goes through life seeking to be offended.

