I support these kinds of lists. Like #BlackLivesMatter, the focus on a purportedly disenfranchised group doesn't mean that the "main" group doesn't matter -- but it's an acknowledgement that we see plenty of representation of the main group -- in this case, men -- by default. Unless you believe that there really are no barriers specific to women (and it doesn't necessarily have to be sexism) and that women just are terrible at business/tech, why see such lists as threatening to non-women?
Note: There's a (very gray) "View All" button in the top-right of the slideshow. I was just going to complain about the hypocrisy of stuffing a list of purportedly successful women into a photo slideshow in a cynical attempt to increase page views.
I don't think any of us feel "threatened" by these identity politics articles. Just a little sad that we still patronise women and minorities in this way.
Why do we see women and minorities as fair game to be tokens for our social engineering and clickbait?
Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?
To me this is like entering female athletes into the paralympics on the basis of their gender. Without any evidence of their consent.
There's a happier, less-dramatic sane-area leaving out overt misogyny and social-justice warrior cry-bully behavior. Also, in hiring there needs to be process removal of as many cognitive biases (ie blinding resume names/personal details) as possible to foster as fair of a messy ordeal as humanly possible.
Another issue is the promulgation and veneration of taboo, protected groups as being automatically special proportional to an university-proscribed, identity/attribute(s) neoliberal caste system. Bollocks.
I think such lists come from a positive intention for there to be less arbitrary discrimination and to motive likely-targeted/underrepresented individuals to succeed. I'm not sure how a special list helps motivate people with fundamental confidence, but instead may temporarily confer false confidence based on non-skill attribute(s) except by an inkling of almost getting on a generic list.
Note: the word "neoliberal" has nothing to do with social justice or even modern left wing movements and activism. It describes an economic policy that discourages regulation and government oversight.
> Have we stopped to ask any of these women if they want to be on our special-interest gendered side-shows, or whether they'd prefer to be part of the "main" competition instead?
No, it is more like giving them separate awards, like the mens 400m and the womens 400m.
We don't. We recognize that there is a significant gender imbalance in technology professions, markedly larger than that of any other cognitive non-routine profession, and are happy to acknowledge anything that might suggest a countervailing trend.
Since Sweden has this handy institution that provide statistics, I have taken a nice look at different professions (recorded as part of tax collections) and their gender distribution.
How do you support the rather extraordinary claim that the technology professions have markedly larger gender imbalance compared to other cognitive non-routine professions? From the data I saw, 2014 numbers placed technology professions around the 70%-30% gender distribution which puts it directly into the majority of professions of any kind.
The two extremes: Fair distribution (40%-60% or closer to 50%/50%) has as group a rather poor 10% of all employed people. Unsurprising, it has about the same number of women and men that works in those professions.
The second extreme are those with 90%-10% or higher, and if I remember right about the top professions in that list, it was topping with midwife nurse (99.7%), nurse with dentist specialization (99.4%) and carpenters that construct floors (99%). Going down from that you got several other specializations of nurses, mechanics, midwifes, construction workers, and kindergarten teachers (94%). You have to travel really far into the list to reach professions with as high gender equality as 70%-30%. To name a few cognitive non-routine professions at the 80%-20%, we got professions like veterinarian, psychologist, librarian, and teacher, all with worse gender distribution than technology professions.
I don't accept the premise of your question, that noting female founders in the tech industry is "tokenization". A token is someone selected in order to represent a cohort of people. But that's not what this list is: presumably any successful female founder would be on it.
His question is still valid if you remove that word and replace it with something more accurate.
FWIW, I think it's a great idea and a good way to encourage women to join a field that they perceive as not being welcoming to them but I don't have any hard data to support this (and don't think I need any)
So would you say sexism is the only thing that differentiates technology professions from other "cognitive non-routine professions", or is that criterion ("cognitive non-routine") perhaps handpicked to frame tech as anti-women?
"Cognitive non-routine" isn't a term I made up. It's one of four broad classes of labor, one way economists use to divide up the working world.
It's so broad a classification I'd have trouble seeing how it created biased framing. It's just a more precise way of saying "the professions" (in the traditional sense of medicine, the law, accounting, and engineering).
If it is such a broad classification, maybe it is not very meaningful then to say "tech has less women than any other non-routine cognitive profession".
Why use the classification at all, if it so broad? If you use "all professions", you get perhaps things like garbage men and miners who are worse than tech? So you can always select a filter that makes tech look worst.
I don't understand the premise of your objection. The point of the comparison is that tech is uniquely unbalanced among the professions. I'm also disinclined to try to rebut an argument that seesaws like yours now is --- first the comparison is so idiosyncratic that it must be biased, then so broad as to be meaningless. If you object to the classification of labor as "cognitive" or "manual" and "routine" or "nonroutine", you should probably take that argument up with r/badeconomics.
My question is/was: do you think sexism is the main thing that differentiates tech from other non-routine cognitive professions? That economists created such a classification is pretty irrelevant. The point about the broadness was that if it is so broad, you might as well take all professions and get a different result.
Are you sure you can not decipher the argument I am making? Feel free to either replace "only thing" with "main thing" in my first comment, or "main thing" with "only thing" in the later comment, to make it consistent enough for you to parse.
May be more necessary than usual – I got the feeling that women were overrepresented in the "Founder-does-something-terrible" articles, at least on HN.
Some was certainly deserved, although I'm not sure about the proportionality of the 20th "No, seriously, Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible terrible person!" - article.
Some was offensive, misogynistic, backwards bullshit that I can only hope is highly correlated with the writer's chances at next year's Darwin awards – like about 90% of anything ever written about Ellen Pao.
Some was in between – Marissa Meyer comes to mind.
I have no idea why about a third of men feel threatened by the whole idea, but I believe those are problems that need to be addressed offline. I've seen a few cases where some measures to reduce discrimination succeeded even with some initial scepticism. 1:1 talks seem to work quite well, as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country). Once you get a team above a certain threshold (around 35% women I'd say) the whole dynamic shifts. Suddenly there's picnics and Tuesday morning runs and journal clubs etc. That's something that everyone notices and I believe it has dramatic impact.
The effects continue with any other measure of diversity you can introduce: having a few different nationalities around is an improvement, having someone with a completely different background can be a plus (met a 75-year old office manager once who was beloved at her startup) etc.
> as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country
Unfortunately, very few efforts seem to focus on immediately applicable solutions like this that solve the problem (if there is one) fundamentally.
None of the Big Tech companies for example (Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft come to mind) currently do application blinding where possible, as far as I know. All of them however are very eager to promote movements like Girls Who Code because it's generally good PR and (I think) because it increases the available labor pool for them.
Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.
But if I had to guess, I'd say these large companies are actually quite fair in their hiring processes. Discrimination at that step in the process seems to be more common at smaller or older companies. The worst, most blatant actual case I have seen was the IT dept at a medium-sized bank.
At FB and Google I'd guess "career advancement" is more susceptible to biases. As company tries to create "shallow hierarchies", the risk of competition devolving into the law of the jungle increases (but, as I said, only guessing. Have no experience with them).
> Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.
How about blinding during resume screening? Replace female or male names with a number or made up names. Phone screening even maybe, using some kind of audio processing. I have never heard of these companies using any such process.
There has also been a study showing tech interviews went less favorable for women when their voices were masked as male voices.
As for "Girls Who Code" as PR - does it increase the popularity of these firms with male coders, too? My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...
For the last two years I have only seen ads with exclusively female engineers from Google, for example the "I look like an engineer" series.
I haven't seen any effort to attract male talent. Of course having more women on the team will probably make a company more attractive to men, but I doubt that is the only thing they should bank on to attract men.
I think over the past two years I've seen a sum total of one video about working at Google, and it featured a woman and a man. From what you're saying I can only assume I stumbled on a super rare video. Is that accurate?
I'll include a link to my paper where I use the method of autoethnography to show how Google has turned into a misandryst megacorporation.
Just kidding - I didn't write a paper about it, nor did I conduct a rigorous study. Most of the Google Ads I have seen came via various Google Twitter accounts, like https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle (Life at Google seems to be dedicated to hiring people for Google).
So my filter bubble might be to blame. I haven't seen the video you mentioned which features a man.
(Edit: I just scrolled through the first several dozen tweets from "Life At Google - I think there is definitely a bias to only show female engineers there.... However, it is of course only one Google Twitter account dedicated to hiring, I don't know how many others exist. Maybe it was created explicitly to target women and minorities, but then maybe they should somehow say so).
> I'm not sure about the proportionality of the 20th "No, seriously, Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible terrible person!" - article.
Out of interest I googled the hits on HN for Holmes and 2016's other medical industry bête noir, Martin Shkreli. Holmes wins by 325 to 141, although I'd personally be hard pressed to say which of them was more terrible.
Not the same kind of story at all. Holmes first became famous (As a unicorn), then fell from grace. Shkreli never was admired, or was he? He was just scorned right from the start.
While that's factually true fail to see the causality. It's like: "These are completely different stories, she was born in Canada and he is an excellent tennis player".
One grabs peoples anttention more than the other. The original claim was because they are both in pharma, they should receive the same attention. But being in pharma is not the only aspect of their stories.
It's like arguing apples should be the same as oranges because they are both fruits.
You're either lucky or inexperienced to have never been in a professional environment by 2016 where you and/or other men had to grit their teeth because they couldn't criticise a woman's ideas because of your gender (and her's). We all know the tactic of emasculation you're using: "are you not man enough to handle competitor from women?!" As you can see by the other comments in this thread, you can see most men have learned to ignore the ad hominem in these cases and focused on rational cause-and-effect approaches.
I suspect if there is a bias toward criticising women who fail in technology, this might be a direct backlash to the many articles that fetishise women in technology.
That's not to condone the backlash, of course.
But perhaps we ought to stop focusing on identity politics - and start treating women as people, not tokens in our social engineering project.
I looked up people from first list on linkedin to see what path they took to end up there. One commonality that immediately obvious is studying at Ivy league/private university.
Perhaps a more inspiring new year list would have been " where you are born doesn't seal your fate list", but thats not clickbait enough.
1. Alex Depledge - University of Nottingham and the University of Chicago
2. Minnie Ingersol - Stanford University and Harvard Business School
3. Tracy Young - California State University-Sacramento
4. Melody McCloskey - University of California, Davis
5. Robin Chase - MIT and harvard
6. Angie Nwandu - ?
7. Payal Kakadi - MIT
8. Maran Nelson - UT austin
9. Adi Tatarko - ??
10 . Christina Lomasney - Harvard and University of Washington
Partially. But I suspect it's more a case of attending one of those expensive institutions signals "Having the freedom to fail." If you attended one of those institutions, you have backup if things blow up.
People whose parents struggled to send them to college aren't starting startups. They're probably paying off loans and attempting to bank money for 5-10 years. At which point, they probably start a family and still won't be starting a startup.
I don't know about this theory. There is no shortage of people, including right here on HN, who've founded businesses.
I'd like to see the rate at which alum from these schools found businesses vs everyone else; also, the percentage of successful founders in both groups.
I do think that parentage counts in other ways, including as part of the overall network to which these folks have access.
My parents absolutely could not have afforded to pay for college without extremely generous financial aid. Thankfully, that's exactly what elite universities provide.
I know plenty of other people who are interested in tech and startups who come from similar circumstances.
Also, for the record, if people's parents are genuinely poor then they will not have any loans from an elite university. It's all grant money.
'Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles'[1].
We already have an accurate system of measuring privilege in form of parent wealth.
I'm not disputing that many students at elite universities have wealthy parents, but you can't just claim that anyone who went to an elite university automatically has wealthy parents. For one thing, it's very unfair to the people who have worked hard to get there despite not having wealthy parents.
I'm really skeptical that the financial aid you speak of is as accessible as you think it is.
Speaking completely anecdotally, someone very close to me chose not to go to Stanford, simply because her family couldn't afford it. And that was with a scholarship.
I've never asked her about financial aid, and if she investigated it. My guess is though that she fell into the category of middle class... aka, too rich to qualify for financial aid, too poor to afford $100K+ a year college.
Upper middle class, maybe. This can happen when your household income is $200k. Not $55k (national median) and certainly not below.
Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class.
The line where this happens is a lower income in mediocre private schools, and a higher income on good ones.
Higher ed financial aid leaves middle-upper middle class kids in a tough spot because their parents don't feel like they have income to spare, but the financial aid office doesn't feel they need charity. But this does not really happen to socioeconomically disadvantaged children, only those too far into the upper middle class.
They've got this thing nailed down to a T. Upper/middle kids can't go because their parents can't afford it. For a variety of reasons, lower income kids can't get the marks to get in to these schools so they never reach the point where financial aid would matter.
This lets these schools preserve their elite enrolment while providing nominally generous support.
About 14 percent of the incoming freshman said their families earn above $500,000
Sure it does. If everybody in the US had equal access to primary and secondary education and Harvard had income-blind admissions, do you really think that number would be so high?
While I agree that legacy admissions should probably be phased out, they're still "income blind." Knowing someone's a Harvard graduate does not mean you know their income.
> For a variety of reasons, lower income kids can't get the marks to get in to these schools so they never reach the point where financial aid would matter.
Again with the sweeping generalizations which are completely incorrect.
Because all low income kids are too stupid to get good marks, right?
> While I was growing up, my dad worked on startups in the financial services industry.
> Eventually my dad started his own company and I worked for him from age 13 to 19.
>I was extremely rebellious at this point and, despite scoring a 1390 on the SAT and a high GPA, I didn't apply to any colleges at all.
Not exactly an underdog story. Almost nobody on the planet get this type of deal. Forget about jumping in with startup founders, I don't think most people know one in real life.
If this list was "Young founders" or "xyz state founders" no one would bat an eye.
Please let men and women be differently abled. Equality is the opposite of specialization. Specialization is power in a complex world. Video on that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNz5WXwKHsU
Sexual dimorphism has outcompeted equality. Equality lost.
There are plenty of non-programmer/startup articles posted regularly on HN, often about societal and demographic trends, politics, and history. Even on the topic of sewers and plumbing:
I'm not sure its representative of the interests of sewer technicians, or the contemporary issues they are concerned about, though. Op is "waiting for a list".
BLM is a group that represents economically disadvantaged people. This list is pulled from the upper most echelons of society. Do you think it's ok to represent the wealthy as somehow oppressed?
Please don't take my question as an attack, I'm genuinely curious how people who support these initiatives view wealth.
I appreciate the question and I don't take it as an attack, nor do I think the topic is an easy one. My rough analogy was just meant to argue that focusing on the achievements of women entrepreneurs does not significantly devalue the achievements of men entrepreneurs, as the status quo is heavily weighted in favor of men. I wasn't saying that women entrepreneurs were facing the same burden as what BLM fights against, just that some people think that BLM is "racist" against non-blacks.
To put it another way, most people agree with MLK Jr's dream of people not being judged by the color of their skin. At the same time, MLK Jr. also argued that racial equality wouldn't just come about on its own after victories for the civil rights movement, but would require a concerted effort by society to make up for past inequality:
> "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."
It's indisputable that the achievements of female founders are not as significant as what male founders have achieved. Part of the way to encourage potential female founders is to celebrate what female founders have done so far, even if on certain metrics (e.g. market cap) they are far behind men.
BLM is a group that exists to call attention to the ways that American society structurally devalues the lives of African Americans, most significantly by stubbornly assuming that African Americans killed by police officers (and by their surrogates, such as homeowners patrolling their property with firearms) represent justifiable homicides.
It is not primarily an economic justice movement and cannot therefore reasonably be attacked on the grounds you're attempting to attack it on.
This is, obviously, a tangent not relevant to article. 'danso was drawing an illustrative parallel, between the (implied) "All Lives Matter" rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, to "where's the men-only event" rebuttal to women-in-tech initiatives.
How is this list presenting these people as needing extra help? They're all on the list because they have successful companies or had successful funding rounds, and also fall in the category of 'female'.
If it was 'top Silicon Valley founders' no one would think 'needs extra help'; if it was 'top Midwest founders' probably HNers would think 'needs extra help'. There's nothing in the article format that says 'needs extra help' -- that idea is brought by the reader.
Black Lives Matter could consist predominantly of wealthy white people and it would remain coherent as a movement.
Similarly: there simply is a profound gender imbalance in technology, and celebrating progress toward correcting that imbalance is reasonable regardless of the underlying economic story.
It is reasonable to have concerns both about the structural privileges afforded to wealthy people in technology and the gender gap. What's not reasonable is to use one issue as a cudgel to beat back concerns about the other. If you think the tech gender gap doesn't matter, you'll have to argue that directly.
The teaching and nursing industries both talk about gender imbalance in their own industry communication channels. The fact that tech receives all the attention in tech-oriented news outlets should be no surprise.
> Why is this gender imbalance receiving all of the attention, as opposed to teaching and nursing, both of which are heavily skewed towards the opposite gender imbalance?
It isn't, they are, and have been for many years. Maybe you should read more nursing or teaching sites?
> little more than class warfare against males who didn't have the privilege to go to Harvard
There's obviously a good point to be made about class here, but when you optimize for provocation rather than exploration, that's ideological battle. Not only is that not thoughtful discussion in its own right, it damages that possibility for the rest of us. In other words, comments like this are actively destructive to Hacker News, regardless of the position they argue for—indeed, the thing they damage most is thoughtful discussion of their own argument.
We wouldn't ban an account for a single comment like this, but we've explained this to you many times and asked you to stop abusing HN this way. Since you can't or won't stop, we've banned your account. These topics are divisive enough even without commenters coming to the well to poison it, and HN's requirement for thoughtful discussion is easy enough to follow for anyone who consciously chooses to.
Edit: There are other comments in this thread making a similar point about class but more in the form of inchoate rage. Obviously, inchoate rage is not thoughtful discussion, so those comments also break the site guidelines. Yet I'd rate them as less abusive than this one. One can still connect with the human feeling behind them, which is exactly what is missing in the hardened ideologue reciting predefined positions.
> There are other comments in this thread making a similar point about class but more in the form of inchoate rage. Obviously, inchoate rage is not thoughtful discussion
You know, Dang, this whole thread is a flame war topic. Why didn't you delete that? Oh, I know why, because it supports your side of the ideological narrative.
All people are asking is that you apply your own rules to your own selves. It should be obvious by now that these double standards do not make for community harmony.
It's a matter of degree. The OP has flamebait aspects, but it also has substantive, on-topic material. Obviously we're not going to treat all such stories as off-topic just because some people make flamewars out of them. If we did that, people could kill any story just by flaming enough.
"Blah blah blah what about nurses fuck you", on the other hand (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873), has no merit as a subtopic at all—not after the number of times we've all endured it. I trust that most HN readers understand that when we make a call like this, it isn't about ideology, but about not subjecting the community to tedium.
> your side of the ideological narrative
We hear this often enough from a minority of readers who feel strongly about ideology. However, it varies (quite reliably in fact) with the ideology of the beholder. To me that seems like evidence of cognitive bias at work, since it's same body of moderation decisions being interpreted in conflicting ways.
Social dynamics often make it so that "nearly all male" is actually not that different from "male only". If you have better ideas about fixing the inequality, a lot of people would be very interested.
I haven't watched your video, but "this female only conference is a good idea" does not mean "all female only events are always great ideas".
A bit of side note, but in the video the organizer give a few examples of profession that the girls can become from studying science and the first one they mention is veterinarian. When asking the girls themselves, they too say veterinarian as the reason to study science.
Veterinarian is a profession which got around 90% women and only 10% men, with a trend that predict all women and no men in a few years. Kind of ironic example of gender equality activism.
One side demanded equal opportunity, but actually have greater opportunity than other side. However equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcome.
I always feel sad when I see these lists. I've always heard once we have female founders then we will see companies that are useful to women. But all those companies looks so useless to me. I think the problem is that they're targeted toward rich women. I hope someday people will create companies for poor women.
Most valley startups are targeting rich/privileged people as customers. They have money. I don't there is anything unique about this batch of companies in that regard.
I thoroughly agree about some of these (artisanal tampons, eyebrow pomade), but Open Bionics is a great thing and some of the others definitely look like worthwhile ventures.
To claim Samantha was the founder of Open Bionics does a massive disservice to the CEO, Joel, who is the guy that actually came up with the concept (before Sam joined as a "bizdev" person). It's Joel who had been making bionic hands since his teens, and who spoke at the Hacker News London conference about his work.
But hey ho - I suppose we have important social engineering to do...
> But hey ho - I suppose we have important social engineering to do...
Please drop the ideological vitriol from your comments here. It breaks the rules, poisons the discourse, and discredits the substantive point you were making.
That's the problem with these kinds of lists - why not lists for gay founders and over-60s founders and disabled founders? Making lists of people in groups that suffer discrimination doesn't do any harm, but it's not clearly helpful either.
That an initiative to correct an imbalance doesn't correct all imbalances is hardly an meaningful criticism. It's true: there aren't enough technology entrepreneurs of color, and probably not enough disabled founders either. Start the thing that helps those cohorts, by all means.
Note: There's a (very gray) "View All" button in the top-right of the slideshow. I was just going to complain about the hypocrisy of stuffing a list of purportedly successful women into a photo slideshow in a cynical attempt to increase page views.