I think this post is skipping the crucial factor in all this. It's not about children--at least not directly. It's about risk.
Several years ago I read an article that analyzed the work preferences of the genders. It demonstrably showed that:
- Men are more likely to do riskier jobs;
- Men are more likely to travel further to work (including internationally);
- Women tend to choose that are closer to home.
Basically it came down to risk-aversion. Women are, on the whole, more averse to risk than men.
A startup, compared to any salaried job, is far riskier. You can work for years on substandard pay and much longer hours and end up nothing. Of course you could also end up a millionaire (or even a billionaire).
Obviously children will be a factor for some (both men and women but more women than men, on the whole) and you can argue that the risk aversion is a product of the child factor but I think you see these same traits in women who are childless (so you then have to stretch the child factor to women who may one day have children, which applies to pretty much any women under 40 so is really a non-argument).
Tech Crunch had a post about this a few months ago. The tech press wants to write stories about women entrepreneurs. Companies and business schools have diversity policies the result of which is that the entrance requirement for women are generally lower than their male counterparts.
Equality isn't the same thing as being identical. If less than 50% of entrepreneurs or programmers are women is not a failure of equal opportunity. Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes.
Yes, women are more risk averse... but why is that? Is it possible it cycles back to the same instinctual genealogical pulls to continue the bloodline?
An evolutionary argument could be made that it's because a man that does extremely risky things (like, say, sleeping with every woman that he is able to) can spread his genes far and wide as a reward for such behavior (he'll have a lot of children). Whereas a woman engaging in the same behaviors can only be have one child every nine months, and for most of human history, every pregnancy carried with it a high risk of death, so there was a pretty hard limit to the "payoff" for such risk-seeking in women.
Put another way: as far as natural selection goes, women undergo a selection process that, depending on their fitness (and chance, of course), replaces them with maybe 0-6 copies of their genes; men, on the other hand, can be replaced with many more (even if, on average, they are not, the distribution is much wider), and those that hit the "jackpot" will tend to very quickly spread their genes throughout the pool.
The extent to which this actually happened is unclear; I don't know off the top of my head if there are good ways to investigate the landscape of possible fitness outcomes based on only the genome, but if this did happen to any significant degree we'd likely find that wild genetic variations stabilize more quickly on the Y chromosome than on the X (we'd also find that wild variations elsewhere, good and bad, tend to spawn more often from males rather than females, but I'm reasonably sure there's no way to see that without a full DNA history because any genetic material not on the Y chromosome ends up in females as well as males).
I'm currently very interested in this because I think it might be a useful approach in genetic algorithms to cut a balance between the two common strategies for selection - the male replacement strategy (weighted by fitness) is very useful for spreading good characteristics quickly through a population, but the female one (flat selection via a fitness cutoff) is good at preventing one particular trait from forcing fixation of all the genetic cruft that happens to sit beside it.
For instance, imagine that we're evolving zubbins, and each one has two traits, color and size. It turns out that the optimal zubbin for this environment is red and tiny, where "red" is extremely important, and "tiny" less so. If we started out with a population mixed between tiny green zubbins and large red zubbins, a fitness-weighted reproduction strategy would cause the large red zubbins to very quickly overtake the entire population, and we'd lose the "tiny" trait altogether, and the only way it could be recreated would be by mutation (which is a relatively weak evolutionary force, typically). On the other hand, if half the population was selected by a cutoff, there are more "spots" available for less fit zubbins, some of which will be tiny, so eventually we'll see some tiny red zubbins, which is what we're after, and these will still reach fixation quickly enough because of the massive benefit that the male offspring will have.
If only the male reproductive strategy was in play, the crappy "large" trait hitchhikes along with the useful "red" one, destroying the "tiny" trait altogether; conversely, if only the female strategy was happening, fixation would take much longer.
What I'm not sure about, though, is whether there's any real benefit to separating the two strategies (i.e. creating both male and female classes) rather than coming up with one method that cuts a good balance between them (offering a slight extra benefit to highly fit creatures, but just setting a cutoff at some point). There are a lot of other reasons that sexual reproduction is evolutionarily useful in the real world, and many of those don't carry over to code.
Also, aren't women the population bottlenecks? A population's growth is constrained by the number of fertile women, and so, it's prudent that, for the continuation of a species, that women be more risk averse to prevent the species from dying off altogether.
I've been sitting here thinking about this for ~20 minutes now. I'm about 70% sure you're onto something useful. Seems like it could be a nice way to do the trade-off between population variation and selection pressure.
The trick is, the optimal trade-off between variation and selection pressure is highly dependent on the problem domain (selecting to maintain variation is great when navigating a broad fitness landscape with many sparsely distributed peaks of different sizes, whereas strong selection pressure is best when climbing to the top of one of those peaks). I'd ideally like to pick out a way to embed this trade-off inside the evolutionary process itself, so that individual selection could implicitly seek out a good balance between variation and hill-climbing, based on the current complexity of the problem being solved. I think allowing for some sort of speciation (to some extent, speciation boils down to running natural selection on groups of naturally selected individuals - the recursive possibilities are clear, here, though I don't know if they're useful) as well as allowing the genetic material to (in some manner) specify how it "uses up" its fitness is one approach to this, but I haven't settled yet, that approach still seems a bit ad hoc to me and I'd really like to find a more natural way to achieve something similar.
As a rule, I definitely think that playing with the rules of evolution, and more specifically, letting those rules (perhaps implicitly) evolve themselves, will be a key idea if we want to exploit evolution for all it's worth; finding a way to let the process significantly improve itself is, IMO, the Holy Grail of evolutionary computing. Evolution is, in some sense, a process of emergence that's been optimized by emergence, and I suspect that our best shot at creating intelligence may be to follow that pattern and attempt to achieve an evolutionary process that's optimized by evolution.
What results when you have intelligence optimized by intelligence is another matter, and (IMO) a far more dangerous one, but that's another story for another day...
I encourage you to write this up, as it is a fairly novel take on potentially quantitatively testing evolutionary psychology theories one way or the other. Do you have an email or contact info? If you write me at the email in my profile I could put you in touch with some senior population geneticists who I'm sure would be interested.
I have absolutely no idea whether any of this is new or not, I'm a complete novice to bio and evo psych. For the most part I've been exclusively focused on taking inspiration from what seems to work in natural evolution as a guide to improving genetic methods in programming, so I haven't really thought too much about drawing conclusions from the real world (an unfortunate side effect of majoring in math, the real world seems so mundane :P ).
Re: writing something up, I'll add it to my todo list, hopefully it will happen eventually, though I'm fairly slow at more formal writing... I am planning to do a series of posts on evolutionary methods in programming, where I want to cover (and hopefully prove useful) a lot of biologically inspired things usually left out of vanilla genetic algorithms/programming (speciation, gender, chromosome/gene separations, automatic evolution of coding schemes, embeddings of meta-evolutionary abilities within the normal evolution process, and hopefully more), but I'm lagging on actually trying out all the things I'd like to, and I also want to find some more compelling practical uses for this stuff...can't make any promises, this is currently a total side-project for me, but I'm plugging away at it, so I'll do my best to write it up eventually. I'll start thinking more about what might be possible to infer from real DNA; my brother is working on his bio-informatics PhD and I've had a lot of conversations with him about this type of thing, so I know that some of the stuff they're able to pull out of the data is truly incredible, they very well may have the data necessary to answer questions about fixation speeds in each chromosome, which would be extremely interesting whatever the results were.
Sent you an e-mail, and added info to my profile (didn't realize that it wasn't already available from the e-mail field, that should be more clear IMO) - if you really think any of this is worth pursuing, by all means let me know.
According to the article: "... their [Men's] aim is for their businesses to grow as big as possible. Women start businesses to be personally challenged and to integrate work and family..."
It seems that men build startups, but women build lifestyle businesses.
"Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes."
Begging the question. As you point out, there are no laws or physical barriers preventing women in the US from doing just about anything, so their heavy relative underrepresentation means by definition they're choosing not to. The question is: why not? Choices aren't made in a vacuum. What is it about our culture and society that has led to the percentage of women in tech/computing to drop pretty much consistently since the field was invented while their numbers increase in many other formerly all-male professions?
You posit that women are observed to be more risk-averse, and that this explains why they avoid founding startups. Leaving aside whether this is true, I repeat my question: why?
(Tangentially, as I think someone else pointed out, the "women are biologically risk-averse" trope can only explain why women "choose" to not found startups, not why they "choose" to not work as a dev at a big tech company, for example, where the risk level is close to nil. Have you looked at the health benefits/maternity leave/termination policies at places like IBM or Microsoft?)
Everyone loves to triangulate complex evolutionary explanations to this kind of question, but a cultural argument is even simpler to make: women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Moreover, women are explicitly told from an early age not to dress too provocatively, never leave a drink unattended, never ever ever walk home alone at night. . .and that's leaving aside the more subtle cultural pressures that discourage them from the sciences. Women are at higher "risk" than men just by virtue of their gender, and they're reminded of this, with an implicit or explicit injunction to be careful, all the damned time. That might serve as a reasonable explanation for why they'd be more risk-averse, but is unfortunate in that it can't be shrugged aside with a trite evolutionary explanation.
Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.
women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day.
Conversely, men are less likely to attend college, are more likely to be unemployed, are more likely be injured in the course of employment, are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, are more likely to be incarcerated, etc etc, every single day.
Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.
Just because there are inequities in one direction does not mean that there aren't also inequities in the opposite direction.
"Conversely, men are less likely to attend college, are more likely to be unemployed, are more likely be injured in the course of employment, are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, are more likely to be incarcerated, etc etc, every single day."
Yes. I never claimed otherwise. I was making an argument as to the cultural conditioning that might lead women to be, on average, more risk averse than men. This doesn't mean that bad things don't happen to men. The two statements, in fact, have nothing to do with one another.
"Just because there are inequities in one direction does not mean that there aren't also inequities in the opposite direction."
Yes. Again, I never claimed otherwise. Inequities are bad. That's my point. Inequities that disadvantage men are also bad and, had that been the subject of the conversation, I would have made that point too. However, we're not talking about inequities that apply to men, we're talking about a field in which there are demonstrably fewer women participating than men and we're asking why. I was arguing that first, we need to go beyond a conclusion that states "women are choosing not to do X, so it's not a problem", second, that women may be risk averse for cultural reasons that may be worth addressing, and finally, by extension, that it's insufficient to claim that so long as women are legally treated the same way as men the playing field is equal so we shouldn't worry about it.
>we're talking about a field in which there are demonstrably fewer women participating than men and we're asking why
I'd like to ask why you imagine that in any field there would be equal numbers of men and women? Or indeed why there should be any reason beyond simple preference. More women like milk chocolate; more men like dark (pulled that one out my arse incidentally). Does it matter?
If you take a gender blind view then you only have to look at individuals and say - "were you discriminated against due to prejudice?" if not then no foul.
There's a natural skew I think: if both men and women equally wanted to start families then more women would normally be able to than men (artificial insemination, one-night stand, stop using birth control, decide contrary to the male to not have an abortion, whatever). This leaves more men doing startups whether they prefer that to starting a family or not.
No, I'm not saying this accounts for any discrepancy I'm just saying this seems to be a reasonable explanation as to why there might be an imbalance and that these sorts of possibilities lead me to think that should it be clear there is no discrimination then it is highly unlikely that equal numbers of any two sub-populations (male-female, blue eyes-brown eyes, ...) occupy a particular field.
"I'd like to ask why you imagine that in any field there would be equal numbers of men and women? Or indeed why there should be any reason beyond simple preference."
Listen: "Women are choosing not to as a matter of preference so there's nothing wrong" is a cop-out. I'll grant you that the reason for the lack of equality is "simple preference." Clearly, because if women "wanted" to do startups/tech, they would. There are no laws preventing them.
"More women like milk chocolate; more men like dark (pulled that one out my arse incidentally). Does it matter?"
Intrinsically? No, of course not. But if we start from the assumption that gender shouldn't matter, we would expect a distribution that cleaves pretty closely to the gender distribution in the population. The fact that that it's doesn't isn't necessarily bad per se, but it suggests that maybe something is going on that may be worth investigating a little further. To do otherwise is intellectually lazy.
It's totally possible that the discrepancy is completely innocent, or that there's some reasonable gender-based explanation that involves no negative cultural messages, discrimination, whatever, to explain the massive differences in the number of women and men who choose to go into tech. <snark>I suppose there's a first time for everything.</snark> I just haven't been convinced by any of the pat explanations so far. None of them have explained, for example, the relatively low number of women working for large, stable tech companies (some of the best employers in the world if you're looking for benefits and stability), nor why the relative percentage of women in tech has been dropping pretty consistently over the last 30 years (actually since the early days of computing, but whatever). The point of my original post was mostly that we should go farther than saying something simple like "Women are risk averse!" and ask, well, why? Because it's not totally out of the question that cultural forces are at work, and it might behoove us to at least think about them a little bit.
"There's a natural skew I think: if both men and women equally wanted to start families then more women would normally be able to than men (artificial insemination, one-night stand, stop using birth control, decide contrary to the male to not have an abortion, whatever). This leaves more men doing startups whether they prefer that to starting a family or not."
If it were that simple then tech/CS/startups should have a gender imbalance roughly equivalent to that of the rest of the working world.
In the past, simple, personality/preference/constitution-based explanations for gender discrepancies have proven false many times - women didn't have the constitutions to be doctors, women didn't have the temperament to be lawyers, etc etc - so I'm inclined to distrust this sort of explanation, at least initially. I'm not saying "Oh because it wasn't true that women just didn't want to do law and medicine it can't be true here.", or that we need 50-50 male/female representation or I'm burning my bra, or even that we should change anything or that anyone is suffering any overt injustice at the hands of anyone else. I'm just advocating for a little critical thought about our society/culture instead of just shrugging our shoulders and assuming that there's no problem.
> But if we start from the assumption that gender shouldn't matter
There's your problem. By using the word "shouldn't" you seem to be conflating "our best guess at objective reality" with "what we think would be morally correct". It is unfortunate that thinking like this is still allowed to infest some higher educational institutions but it doesn't cut the mustard when nobody's funding is on the line.
In terms of objective reality this assumption is unwarranted. There are significant documented differences between the distributions of intellectual capabilities of genders including the higher variance in IQ for men and men's aptitude skew towards maths and away from language.
> In the past, simple, personality/preference/constitution-based explanations for gender discrepancies have proven false many times - women didn't have the constitutions to be doctors, women didn't have the temperament to be lawyers, etc etc - so I'm inclined to distrust this sort of explanation, at least initially.
In the 70s, 80s and even 90s this would have made more sense. But as the years of higher university attendance of women stretch out, as women continue to succeed in previously male dominated areas such as medicine and law you have to ask 'why not in tech/CS/startups'. It isn't as if it is a area that has ever been reputed as having a history of institution chauvinism. To me, the weight of evidence points more and more towards the differences in distributions of capabilities and preferences between genders playing a significant part in participation rates in tech. However much of an 'Inconvenient Likelihood' this may be for both the tech industry and many women, it shouldn't blind us to evaluating the evidence as objectively as possible.
"In terms of objective reality this assumption is unwarranted. There are significant documented differences between the distributions of intellectual capabilities of genders including the higher variance in IQ for men and men's aptitude skew towards maths and away from language."
Are there? Cite some for me. And then explain why they mean there are fewer women in tech but not in other fields. Higher IQ variance means that there are more super geniuses and more mentally retarded men. You don't actually need to be a super genius to go into tech. Maybe to found a startup, though that's also a reach, but certainly not to go be a dev somewhere. And moreover, why do you assume that those differences are innate? Maybe they are, but there is also plenty of [uncited] evidence that suggests that many of those differences are learned.
I'm not assuming a priori that women are being screwed, but it mystifies me as to why this community tends to assume A) that the tech community is totally immune to societally constructed gender forces that have at some point affected pretty much everything else in the world and B) discrimination is the only bad thing in society that could be keeping women out of tech.
"It isn't as if it is a area that has ever been reputed as having a history of institution chauvinism."
…say what now? Maybe not like law/medicine did, but there's been plenty of chauvinism in tech.
"To me, the weight of evidence points more and more towards the differences in distributions of capabilities and preferences between genders playing a significant part in participation rates in tech. However much of an 'Inconvenient Likelihood' this may be for both the tech industry and many women, it shouldn't blind us to evaluating the evidence as objectively as possible."
What evidence? I'm very happy to evaluate the evidence objectively. But it seems so far that there's been very little evidence presented either way, and a common response then becomes "well, I don't see a problem, there must not be one!", despite the fact that A) this hasn't worked out as an explanation in the past B) there exist several societal factors we could point to that might explain the problem, if we bothered to think about it for two minutes instead of constructing some complicated and totally unfounded explanation based on evolution.
Instead of assuming that I'm a crazy and irrational feminist who cannot be convinced by facts, which is not the case, why not respond to the original argument I made, which was that our society conditions women to be afraid, which may explain why they're more risk averse?
I'm sure you are aware of them and if you had any actual contradictory position on this you would have mentioned it.
> You don't actually need to be a super genius to go into tech.
I'd say you need to be well above average in 'math IQ' to be useful programmer. When you combine a lower mean in math-like capability with a smaller standard deviation this significantly cuts down the percentage of women who'd be expected to cross that 'threshold'.
> Maybe to found a startup, though that's also a reach, but certainly not to go be a dev somewhere
Can you actually program competently? Cause I'm getting the vibe that you don't have much respect for the art.
> why this community tends to assume A) that the tech community is totally immune to societally constructed gender forces that have at some point affected pretty much everything else in the world
Because at it's heart, the nuts and bolts of tech work is not about social interaction, it is about you and the computer/system. At some level it doesn't matter whether you are an bipolar lesbian midget with major personal hygiene issues or a privileged WASP, the computer doesn't care - your program will either work or not. True geeks don't need to ask for anyone's permission, approval or assistance to get into the area - they just start learning and coding. Sure, this is 'back room' stuff but at the heart of most successful tech startups you will find a healthy 'inner geek' that respects results above contemporary social mores.
> What evidence? I'm very happy to evaluate the evidence objectively. But it seems so far that there's been very little evidence presented either way
I agree in that none of he individual arguments presented are knockout blows. But when you accumulate the maths vs language gap, the variance difference, a reasonable explanation for different attitudes to risk, the successes in previous male bastions (law/medicine) versus the individualistic/mathy tech - it starts to look a lot like mutually supporting evidence.
When it comes to the 'complicated and totally unfounded explanation based on evolution' I see it as stronger than the 'secret societal forces that nobody can seem to put there finger on that stops women from entering tech'. Your argument about fear makes some sense but it is just as easy to argue that founding an ambitious startup is actually irrational in terms life result pay-offs - even for men.
In general I think it is quite too fall into the trap of thinking of people as fundamentally more similar to ones self than they really are, and to explain away the differences as societal influence. Modelling the rest of the world as 'slightly different versions of me' certainly has power but also great inaccuracies. This particular article called 'Generalizing From One Example' was a real eye opener for me.
BS! The highest risk in the modern world for both men and women is to form a lasting marriage with children!
The difference as in other professions is the unfair and unjust burden women face in having a family as Men of the world are not yet up to the task of full sharing of child rearing duties.
Has very little to do with the want..cost of the want however different story
Risk aversion makes sense from a biological standpoint, though. Males are expendable, thus must show off to get mating rights (because we don't live in a world where women are won (in most places)).
As to the Modern World, men rarely take maternity leave. That's a long time to be away from a job, a large risk for the company, at a possibly highly inopportune moment. Risk.
As I read this, I couldn't stop thinking about my sister:
Age 25 - met her future husband
Age 26 - got married
Age 27 - Child #1
Age 27 - graduated law school
Age 29 - Child #2
Age 33 - Child #3
Age 35 - Child #4
Age 39 - Child #5
Age 46 - Child #6
Now - runs a minor league baseball team
(I don't really know how she does it. But, then again, no one does.)
You know, rats can have more offspring than your sister in just a month. I don't see what's admirable about fulfilling one's biological destiny. And who cares about law school or baseball teams? If she had gotten a PhD in Quantum Field Theory while raising 6 kids, then...
I think you've got it wrong. I think the point he was trying top make is the time management aspect (as parents know, kids are a huge time sink, god bless'em). I've got only one, and he's making it extremely hard to put extra time on anything. So, actually having N kids is nothing to boast about, doing so while being able to do anything meaningful is.
I know a medical doctor who had 14 kids (oh, those catholics). And she still managed to practise medicine when she was not spreading her legs to launch another baby in this world. Sounds much more impressive than managing a baseball team, imho. The OP wants the HN crowd to assure him of what a special and unique snowflake his sister is, when she's merely doing something that is the norm in some parts of the world.
"Intellectual pursuits are more respectable and rewarding than non-intellectual ones". Personally, I'd say it might be okay to run a little baseball team and make a few dozen people's lives more interesting. Even doing a phd in QFT, as you note, might help some people in the long run. But are you trying to define a heuristic that proposes that one human is better than the other solely due to the field of work?
I find this trend rather disturbing. It's almost parallel to the "nerds don't get laid" paradigm. For the record, I'm a physics major. And I'd any-day prefer to be a little-league team manager than troll on comment threads.
"But are you trying to define a heuristic that proposes that one human is better than the other solely due to the field of work?"
No. I am merely stating that having kids is not an accomplishment, it's one's biological programming. One should admire people who do things that are challenging and difficult, like proving hard theorems or sailing around the world solo. It's not about status nor academic pedigree, it's simpler: if everything is admirable, then nothing is.
"I'd any-day prefer to be a little-league team manager than troll on comment threads."
Just because I am being downvoted, that doesn't make me a troll. But thanks for the remark. Now you can be all happy that you're on the side of the "moral majority". You're a self-righteous sheep. Be proud.
I didn't _disagree_ with what you said. Yes there are certain people who have spent a good amount of their time working towards noble and challenging causes who have my utmost respect. I fully agree with your first point.
By saying things like "And who cares about law school or baseball teams", you are belittling a whole set of people. Saying "sailing solo is more admirable than working towards law school" might be accurate, but the way I read it - "law school? You haven't sailed solo around the world, hence your existence is invalidated".
As for the troll remark, you're a new user with no real identity making relatively controversial and somewhat personal statements with a relatively disrespectful tone. I'm not too sure what the textbook definition of a troll is, but this is the closest one I've seen over here.
In families with such large numbers of kids, it seems it is often the older kids who at some point start to be charged with looking after the younger ones so, yeah it's "doable" but the parents aren't doing it all.
She seems to have the tendency to take what is true for her and extrapolate that to a general theory of what is true for everyone else. Oh well, certainly not the first person to do that.
wow. this is a real sad story :( Looks like she got lied into to the whole Feminism lie of "you gotta get a career" and ended up getting an abortion. Then, she did it again.
From the headline, I was hoping this involved some research, some sort of new finding, at least with tentative causality ("because" is hard to prove, but there is evidence that is more persuasive and less persuasive). But it's just someone's opinion based on anecdotes.
And it's not really a new one: the "women do more/less of X because they want to have a family" argument is written about all the time. It vies with "inherent biological differences" and "discrimination" for the most-frequently-suggested explanation for gender differences in any field. You can get dozens of entire books on it.
It's also somewhat at odds with the (admittedly spotty) research that's been done in the area. For example, one in-depth series of case studies found that a large proportion of women who opted out of work to raise a family did so largely because they wanted out of the work, rather than because they wanted to raise a family and weren't able to do the work at the same time: quitting to raise a family was the plan B that they turned to when plan A (have a career) turned out to suck for various reasons: http://www.amazon.com/Opting-Out-Women-Really-Careers/dp/052...
On the other hand, it's perfectly fine for people to write personal blog posts about their own experiences. I think I'm mostly objecting to the attempt to generalize it based on one example; a "why I quit my startup to raise a family" post would've been fine.
Agreed, this is pretty much a shallow version of the same argument that many people have been making for quite some time now. It would also seem to suggest that we should see major shortages of women in other fields that are extremely intense to start out in (medicine and law, for instance), and IIRC the gender ratios there are much more balanced. "Working hard" is not something women tend to be put off by; "building software", on the other hand, is, and I think any helpful suggestion needs to avoid catching the first in the same net as the second.
IMO the main reason this is getting attention is that it's a woman and she's not arguing the "discrimination" line. That's fine and all, but at this point it just seems like fanning the flames rather than adding anything new to the conversation.
Really, most of this whole debate is a polarization issue: the only people that care very much about this are at the fringes, either arguing the "men are pigs" position or getting really pissed off about people arguing the same. I think there's probably a balance between "discrimination" and "inherent biological differences" that conspire to turn women off from programming altogether, but each side is working so hard to shut the other side down completely that we don't see any balanced views coming out of this debate.
The comparison to law/medicine is particularly interesting, and I haven't seen a good explanation of the differences with that (one might exist, but I haven't found it). My feeling is that 20-30 years ago, computing, law, and medicine were all seen as being fairly similar gender-wise, both in terms of their ratios and perceptions of how friendly/attractive to women the fields were. But in the years since, they've gone in opposite directions: women now make up more than half of med-school students, and an ever-increasing proportion of law-school students, but they make up a smaller portion of CS students today than they did in the 1980s.
Another interesting comparison, IMO, is to banking and finance, where the atmosphere is even more distinctly "big swinging dick", yet the gender ratio is still not as imbalanced as in IT (IIRC, the ratios in finance are more like 65:35, whereas in IT it's somewhere around 80:20 or maybe even worse, depending what sector of IT).
This is one of the main reasons I don't buy the argument that women stay away because men are assholes in tech: the men I've interacted with that are in finance put the worst of the IT douchebags to shame when it comes to misogyny (the guys in the money fields often really hate women, or at least have no respect for them, whereas in tech, they just don't really interact with than many women, so most things tend to be male-centric, I rarely see actual hostility), yet women work in that field far more readily than they do in tech.
I'm sure the remunerative aspects play some role here; it's pretty easy to get rich if you can make it through hell-year at a hedge fund, whereas being code-monkey #8 at some random startup is likely to do little more than pay the bills for another year or two.
But still, you'd think any financial disincentives would apply equally to men and women.
I definitely think there's something else going on here, and it seems to have a lot to do with interest, not incentives or disincentives. To me, the main question is whether the interest discrepancy is cause by an innate difference between men and women (for whatever reason, men like building stuff, writing code, solving problems or whatever, and women don't) or a social one (men are encouraged to do it, women aren't).
Given that I ended up in this field with pretty much zero influence from anyone (I started messing around with APL when I was about 8 and found the executable while poking around for games on my dad's computer), and to this day I've met a grand total of maybe 4 females that were interested enough to learn to program at all, as compared to hundreds of males, I'm skeptical of claims that it's purely social, the numbers are just too extreme for that if the same natural urges exist in all of us.
Ignoring even Penelope Trunk's tendency to extrapolate from her experiences to the rest of the female world, the conclusion she's drawing doesn't actually follow from her own experiences. She says she's taking time away from her third startup to spend time with her children. Therefore women don't do startups because they want to have time with their children. What now? Wouldn't that suggest rather that women who want to do startups can do so and then have time for children afterwards?
The internet has actually enabled a whole generation of female entrepreneurs to 'do their start-up thing' and have children to boot.
It's the perfect tool to have a company and be around the house all day long (or as long as you want to be), I'm not exactly female but I would have found it very hard to decide for children if I had been a person with a 9 to 5 job.
If you and your spouse can work together on a start-up (not always the best for everybody, but there are definitely cases were it worked very well and plenty were it worked good enough) then you can find some pretty good splits between raising children and running a company.
Things like web design and programming go very well with working from home and raising kids, I see it as a win for everybody.
If your idea of a start-up is to have lots of employees, a huge office and turnover in the millions then that's another case entirely, but on a lesser scale it is perfectly doable.
Yup. Didn't we only yesterday have an Ask HN thread on side projects that are making money?
The great thing about software today is how much you can do on a small scale. If her theory about commitment was correct, you would have a bunch of women who had started small side projects and then said "oh this has really taken off and I don't want to work 100 hours a week so I want to sell it". Where are they then?
I am pretty convinced that the answer is a lot simpler and is simply related to the number of women who code in the first place.
Agreed. If you have a husband with a job, you don't have to starve to death. Starting a start-up is safer.
Theoretically if you're a man with a wife with a job, you can do the same thing... except there are a lot fewer wives that are willing to do that than husbands.
The author points out that women who want to have kids can't wait very long, generally don't have time to do a startup first, and that you'd have to be crazy to try to do a startup and raise young kids at the same time.
I'm not sure that I believe her arguments about men, though:
For men it’s different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle when it comes to raising kids. The kids are fine. Men are more likely than women to think they themselves are doing a good job parenting. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Men have to trust that the kids will be okay so that they can leave and go get food or make more kids.
It seems to me that she's ignoring the most important factor: Men have more time to do a startup before having children because men are usually older than their wives.
The average age difference is 2 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if the gap increases with education and income.
(Then again, maybe this is just wishful thinking from a single 29 year old who still hopes to get married and have 2.5 children some day.)
I'm with you as I'm also a single 29 year old working 80 hour weeks on my startup, and still hoping one day to get married and have a lot of kids.
The difference is though, we as men can (hopefully) keep spending 80 hour weeks on work now, get insanely rich by 35, meet a woman of our dreams at 40, get married at 45, and have kids at 50. Women don't have that option.
Alternatively, I have a 6 month old and I'm only 26. I'm glad I had him early: being up late has allowed me to work on my startup and maintain a full time job. I'd love to be independently wealthy by 35. He'd be set up for life, and I would have plenty of time to spend with him and pursue other ventures. No way I'd want the burden of a child at age 50.
I know at least 8 married-with-kids guys in the startup scene. None of their wives are more than a year or two younger (and in some cases, several years older). But their wives all have a very different career path.
I'd like to call bullshit on this one. Disclaimer: I'm probably one of those insane women who wants to do a startup.
1) I'm tired of articles like these which have little to no research backing up their claims on why there are so few women doing startups. Penelope isn't making a sweeping generalization in the article, but she might as well make a generalization here - the effect is quite the same.
2) I'm also tired of the set of women I refer to as "the angry feminists" who are easily insulted everytime someone (especially a male author/speaker) points out that there are so few women in tech or that women lack qualities X and Y to do a startup. To all the women of the afore-mentioned category, you're wasting your time. An ounce of action is better than a ton of theories.
3) And last, I honestly don't know why there are so few women in tech. I don't have theories. All I know is that there ARE few women in tech (and fewer doing startups). I don't think we are all risk-averse. Sure, some of us may not like taking chances, but I'm pretty sure it's not every one of us.
I've been involved in writing software all my adult life. I'd like to do a startup one day. It's a tough world out there if you're doing anything on your own, irrespective of your gender. So stop analyzing and start doing.
Had this article been written by a man, people would zero in immediately on Penelope's real issue:
She is trying to blame her failure on being a woman.
She's started several startups, and each time has failed to create anything that matched her original entrepreneurial dreams. Unfortunately, because this is such a hot topic in tech, and it "verifies" (with purely anecdotal evidence) many people's biases on the issue, people aren't even pointing this out.
I'm calling BS. Trunk is looking for an excuse to explain why her failures aren't her fault (Biology). Instead of writing a meaningful postmortem on how difficult entrepreneurship can be, we get this tripe that's supposed to apply to all (or most) women. Nevermind that there are women in a variety of incredibly demanding professions with children.
Beyond that, I really don't get this notion that you have to be in your children's faces every moment of the day in order for them to be well-adjusted. There's a huge difference between parenting/discipline and hovering/coddling.
Exactly. Working smarter/slower at first, and focusing on a well thought out minimal viable product, then scaling up makes more sense than working insane hours to bang out something fast then burn out.
I figure I have about 60-80 good hours of applied, useful thought a week (not all of which is spent on work related items).
The slow start approach doesn't work well for novel, or large-scale fast growing businesses.
The former case, one needs repeated iteration and trial and error to discover/create a new market. You will deviate several degrees from your original direction within the first 2-3 years.
In the later case, you have no choice to grow "smart" if you have something viral. You don't choose your scale or the speed of your growth once a few people discover you. You will end up working insane hours just to keep the infrastructure alive. (this is strictly for software businesses, btw. but I can think of an instance of D.C. hole in the wall sandwitch joint that got reviewed on NPR. Nothing like a flesh-DoS, and you can't tell that guy he doesn't need to put in insane hours.)
I'm a 29 year old start-up founder in Tokyo, I'm also carrying my first child.
I don't know all of the stats regarding women and start-ups and to be honest, I don't care. I have learned that in order to be successful in anything-- sacrifice, hard work, knowing your stuff and the right people goes a long way and opens up a lot of opportunities, especially for Americans or start-ups in the US. The amount of support I receive being pregnant and founding a start-up is unbelievable, and I'm and American in Japan.
Penelope is known for writing articles like these, which do more harm than good in my humble opinion.
If you want to start a company, male or female, recognize that it won't be easy, be prepared to work harder than anyone else and dismiss the naysayers.
There are still questions about nature vs nurture. There are lots of social pressures to be a certain kind of woman, a certain kind of mom, etc. I'm not sure any of her examples prove that things are biologically this way, just that they are. I wish she would just ask the questions, and not answer them. Why aren't men full partners in parenting? Who's fault is that? Why aren't young women encouraged to take on greater risks in their lives? Is it really true that you can only have a successful start-up if you surround yourself with exploitable young men who will work long hours for a minimal payoff?
1. If by "startup" you mean tech startups as opposed to bricks and mortar businesses, there are fewer women programmers around to front tech startups. The law of averages is at work there, but I don't think it accounts for the whole disparity.
2. The VC model specific to tech startups is not what you'd call kid friendly. Please note that we are discussing this issue at Y Combinator. Submitting your startup to YC requires that you be willing to move to the Valley for three months. This is incredibly difficult if you have kids; if you are primary custodial parent, it is virtually impossible.
3. When women do run tech startups, they are not necessarily granted the credibility or profile. Penelope Trunk's article appears on Techcrunch. Ravelry has 850,000 members. It's been covered exactly once by TC, when it rolled into beta, with the line "If you’re a knitter, join the waiting list immediately. Everyone else, nothing to see here." Thanks, Michael.
All of that said, it is being done - just not necessarily according to the popular startup formula Penelope herself followed for Brazen Careerist.
"Running a startup" and "being in tech" are very different things. It's totally possible to work in tech without running a startup, so if her thesis is correct you'd expect women engineers to be equally represented in medium to large tech companies and under-represented at startups. Instead, they are vanishingly rare at both.
So I don't buy it. One datapoint does not yield a conclusion.
One thing I find interesting is that with the ever increasing ability to telecommute and work from home, many very talented women are able to stay employed and have kids at the same time. Employment is there if you can think and work "outside the box".
Example: My father is an attorney who started hiring skilled female lawyers with young children to handle a few hours of legal calls a day from home (the business design was phone-based legal services). The structure meant these women could work reduced hours from their own homes while taking care of their kids. Best of all they earned some income while not letting their skills go to waste.
There are so many creative ways to find/create employment for those willing to think beyond traditional work structure parameters.
I think children and the whole biological clock thing are a huge factor in this (and in the low percentage of women in any job that has crazy long hours, like law or medicine). But I also believe that the effect is both more subtle and far-reaching than is generally appreciated.
There are studies that show that people from a racist culture who believe "racism is wrong" will still tend to believe secondary and tertiary things that are basically racist but aren't directly about skin color per se -- like conversations I have had with people who say they would vote for or hire a black person if they were articulate enough and claim it is not racist, it is just that most blacks aren't educated/articulate enough. My reply to that is "If articulation were the issue, then George W Bush should have never been elected president. He is infamous for butchering the English language." Of course, he's white and male and went to the right schools and came from the right family. It makes people very uncomfortable to point out the flaw in their logic and point out that this is a social form of "Jim Crow Law".
So, basically, I think there is kind of a female version of social "Jim Crow Law" going on: Even women who don't specifically want to have kids may still make choices that are rooted in the goal of having mom available to the kids. Or may be discouraged by subtle social things that are rooted in those assumptions. People who make such assumptions usually don't even realize they are making them. So it gets hard to root out.
Let us say that the writer actually believes that every single assumption (and oh, there's so many you will lose count) in this article is true (they are not) and it is not just flamebait/linkbait (it most certainly is).
Even so, surely she believes in exceptions. Surely, she does not think that every woman in the world is exactly like her? Why the $$$$ would she advise other people who run startups to "stick with..men in their 20s".
Running the company has been absolute hell. Not that I didn’t know it would be hell. It’s my third startup. Each has had its own hell before we were solidly funded, but this one was so bad that my electricity was turned off, and I really thought I was going to die from stress.
Male or female, babies or not... maybe she's just in the wrong line of work? I've been the first tech hire at 3 startups, and I'm kind of undecided as to how much I actually like programming, but they were all kind of fun. There were a few stressful moments, but I wouldn't describe any of the experience as "hell," nor did we ever get our electricity shut off.
I mean, if it's always hell and you're on the brink of disaster, why would you bother doing it again... 3 times?
There was a time when I never wanted to work in tech because of what my parents went through. How fun could working for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week be? Not all that fun. Now, I work in tech. I guess I was wrong.
I was a toys'r'us kid. I didn't ever want to grow up. When I hit 27, I changed my mind. I guess I was wrong.
Today, I never want to have kids. But I've felt this with many things - many more than I mention here, most of which I've likely long forgotten. Instead, I tell my girlfriend that I don't think I want to have kids, but can't promise anything. Previous experience with the term proves it a rather dubious conclusion. Afterall, never is a long time.
Not this woman. Ever since I was young I wanted to build a big business (i.e. NOT a 'lifestyle' business) and also raise a family. I never, ever saw it as an 'either/or' decision and maybe that's why I'm doing both.
I'd love to hear the author say this to the women in my family with a straight face.
- My mother and her best friend (also a woman) started a business last year (her 2nd), and she's looking at starting a third.
- My stepmother founded/runs a non-profit (her 2nd or 3rd, not sure).
- My sister declared she wanted to be a dean at age 18. 12 years and 3 degrees later, she's now a dean at American.
- All 4 of my aunts run their own businesses, three have done several and the fourth started hers this week. One currently owns/runs one of the larger companies in Germany.
If there was an "education blogosphere", I wonder if they'd have a constant stream of articles trying explain why there are so few male elementary school teachers (14%).
> My startup is me and a bunch of twenty-something guys. And if you’re a woman launching a startup, my advice is to stick with this crowd. They never stop working because it’s so exciting to them: the learning curve is high, they can move anywhere, they can live on nothing, and they can keep wacky hours.
Certainly, as a 20-something guy, that DOES sound pretty exciting, and I can't imagine any of my female friends going for it.
I think children themselves _are_ startups. They require a ton of effort and long hours getting started, have a growth phase, and then start to pay returns and become more self-sufficient.
In a sense, women are involved in startups when they choose to have kids.
Background info: In the past year, I've started my family (first baby) and worked on several startups as a Rails developer (FYI, I'm a man).
As a woman (and someone who is friends with the Brazen peeps) this is highly insulting. It assumes that all women want to have children, that men are mostly absent/dismissive in their children's lives (if they have them), and insinuates that women just aren't biologically fit to run a company. I know Penelope has kind of made a name for herself in saying things that shock people, so I wouldn't doubt that this is in the same vein. I run a company, work ridiculous hours, and the other devs on my team are male. I don't think any of us puts it fewer hours or energy based on the number of ovaries each has.
Apparently it only took 16 minutes for the take-offense-out-of-context strawman to rear its ugly head. Did you even read beyond the headline?
The author doesn't say "all women" to the point that a single counterexample disproves the hypothesis. Not only does the auther qualify statements such as "fewer women" but any such analysis is a statistical study of a group. It says something about a group and similar groups but nothing about a specific individual (in a definitive non-probabilistic sense at least).
It's a bit like arguing that the research into the ill-health effects of smoking are nonsense because your Uncle Jack smoked 3 packs a day for 80 years and died at age 95 when hit by a bus (ie not lung cancer).
The offense taken at this article is intentionally undertaken to change the norm, to encourage men to take more responsibility for their children and for women to take more responsibility in society at large.
The offense is not at the statement of fact, the offense is that the fact is stated as if it were the good and proper order of things. The good and proper order of things is equality.
Now, you're free to disagree, but don't misunderstand us.
The article says "And I’m not even going to go into the idea of women having a startup with young kids. It is absolutely untenable. The women I know who do this have lost their companies or their marriages or both. And there is no woman running a startup with young kids, who, behind closed doors, would recommend this life to anyone." How much more contet do you want?
It's a bit like arguing that the research into the ill-health effects of smoking are nonsense because your Uncle Jack smoked 3 packs a day for 80 years and died at age 95 when hit by a bus
Except she does not cite one bit of research to back up her claims.
What do you call research without data? Assumptions.
Headlines omit qualifiers. If you read the headline as "Fewer women than men want to run startups because many of them would rather have children", I think it's entirely accurate. Sure, there are women who don't want children, just like there are men who want nothing more than to be stay-at-home dads -- but they're the exception, not the rule.
It wasn't just the headline. Example: "even the most child-oriented men are not as child-oriented as their wives." This line isn't merely lacking in qualifiers, it explicitly denies exceptions, saying that even outliers fit the stereotype.
This also assumes that having children means one or the other parent's job is to stay at home with them, which hasn't been true for a number of years because of the amount of money needed to sustain a family and the fact that women no longer need to give up their careers to have children.
I know tons of successful women who run businesses who are fine without having children; I also know quite a few who have children and are still able to run a business.
This whole argument goes back to the beginning of the feminist movement and people not being willing to hire women because they should be making some man sandwiches and popping out babies.
Just like almost everyone on HN, you are a statistical anomaly.
(This is nothing to do with you being a woman - that just increases the factor by an order of magnitude or two.)
Even the people you know are probably outliers. So you have to be a bit careful relying on your experience and instead look at broader demographic trends.
Nearly all of the people I know well have no TV. Should I assume that TV is hugely unpopular with everyone?
You'll get fewer downvotes if you respond to the article's specific claims that you have a problem with, using data from studies (and absolutely no anecdotes).
I run a company, work ridiculous hours, and the other devs on my team are male. I don't think any of us puts it fewer hours or energy based on the number of ovaries each has.
All of which is completely irrelevant.
It's great that you ended up in tech, nobody is suggesting you're in any way less suited to perform well than men are (at least not in any reasonable discussion).
They're simply suggesting reasons why other women don't choose the field; clearly there are some causes for this phenomenon, and they've got to be pretty strong given the overwhelming disparity.
It assumes that all women want to have children, that men are mostly absent/dismissive in their children's lives (if they have them),
No, it assumes that many women want to have children, and tend to take greater roles in their lives if and when they do so. Do you really disagree with that? I know it's anecdotal, but both these things hold true for such a vast majority of the people that I know personally that I'd have trouble believing it wasn't the case, not to mention the overwhelming biological imperatives in play here.
and insinuates that women just aren't biologically fit to run a company.
That's a radical interpretation of the text; the closest thing that she said to that was that women with children have a difficult time putting in the insane hours that a venture-backed startup requires.
FWIW, despite my apparent defense, I don't think that this article really pins down a significant reason we don't see more women running tech startups - the sad fact is, most women never get interested in programming in the first place, and that happens way before they're thinking about having children or what sort of career might go well with that goal.
Evolutionary pressure in our society will tend toward women that have children, not women who don't have children.
If women all run business, go to wars, and the like. All of which implies that women won't have time to have children because it take 9 months to make a baby as well the maternity leave that come with it. It will be a population disaster if that were ever to happen. Pretty soon, you won't have a self-sustaining population.
In time, women like you will be the exception or already is an exception. Sad, but true.
Not necessarily. Birthrates in developed countries where resources are plentiful and infant mortality rates are low tend downward, not upward. Our species has adopted the strategy that it is better to put more resources into fewer offspring than the shot-gunning approach. We only need to maintain replacement levels or slightly above to be self-sustaining.
And for every woman like you there are 10 more women who are stay-at-home mom's and/or just like Penelope's characterization. The exceptional cases do not invalidate the general rule.
it saddens me that such linkbait generalizations make it to the frontpage of HN
it strikes me as insane that discussion on these issues centers around the mean (pun intended). being an entrepreneur one is a few sigma away already; we can't even see the average from here so why are we wasting time chatting about it?
I do wish women with a chip on their shoulders would stop getting all aggro about observations that are not prescriptions. You saying "that's not true" is just as globalizing as "this is true."
There is just something about women and product businesses that's weird. I recently put on a conference about bootstrapping paying products only, and I looked for ages to find a single woman bootstrapper like myself. They can't be found.
There are uncountable zillions of women freelancers, women running agencies, women coding, women designing, women writing, women coaching.
There are way more women running tech startups that have VC funding than there are with bootstrapping.
I can name 5 to 7 female founders with VC off the top of my head -- to my mind, they have better brand name recognition than male founders (the only men I can think of by name, I know personally).
But, after days and days of searching and mining my (RL) social networks, I was able to identify only ONE single fellow bootstrapper (and she's "only" part of a 4-person team). And she's not from The Land of Opportunity, if you know what I mean.
Outside of tech, there are lots of women who've gotten loans or other capital to make ands sell physical goods, of all the risky-ass things they could do. Or restaurants, shops and cafes.
So, obviously there are many women who are not afraid of entrepreneurship and not really risk-averse. Selling specialty shoes or front-end web dev is much, much riskier than creating a paying digital product, and less remunerative than doing a startup with funding. (And most of those funded startups are "social long shots" -- not product businesses.)
I don't have the answer, but there is something weird going on there. But I don't think it's an external thing. Nobody is keeping those other women down.
That said, I'm a married woman in my mid-20s. I married when I was 24 and launched my product business right after. If I ever wanted to have kids (which I do not), I would definitely wait, because the "have it all" thing is definitely a myth. You end up either shortchanging your kids or your work, unless you're totally unstoppable (and who is?).
There are way more women running tech startups that have VC funding than there are with bootstrapping.
Really? I'm not so sure. Perhaps it is just hard to hear about the women that are bootstrapping tech companies. Companies that are being bootstrapped typically are pre-traction, and have not received the buzz in the tech media that comes with raising a funding round.
Women aren't launching tech/web/software companies at twice the rate of men, so that's irrelevant. Few other fields do VC the way tech/web/software does.
Correlation, causation, everybody's heard that old saw. I certainly didn't say what you claim I said. What I said was: Few other fields do VC the way this one does. By which I mean, most fields don't do VC.
At all.
VC is almost purely a tech/bio/med thing. Most small businesses - which is what startups are, by the way - take loans. That's how it usually works.
There are lots of bootstrapped companies that are not "pre-traction," and, in fact, making hundreds of thousands of dollars (or millions). You'd be very surprised. The "startup" press (including HN) is a real echochamber, and this lack of awareness about bootstrapping is one of the side effects. Check out my speaker list at http://schnitzelconf.com.
That's why I asked everyone I knew - and asked them to ask everyone they knew. I have my feet planted very high on the hierarchy of "famous devs" in more than one circle, so my reach is greater than the average joe. In addition to browsing every women entrepreneur's directory I could find. Including http://startupprincess.com. No joy.
Nary a female product bootstrapper around. Except the lady who's part of the team at Mite.
Agreed, but once a company is already making lots of money I tend to drop the "bootstrapping" adjective to refer to their present state of operation. :)
There are a few women in the NYC startup scene who are "bootstrapping" their companies for months (or longer) until they have revenue or are ready to raise funds.
Your speaker list looks great. And if you are only looking for women coders, who have built successful product companies, that have never taken VC then I agree they are hard to find! But keep in mind that there are not many startup teams that raise VC where there is a founding female coder either.
Hi Marilyn. Awesome. But by "pre-traction" are you referring to List Central? Because, by my definition, that isn't a product. Bootstrapping to me means you have to charge.
It's not that hard to find women heading up traditional web 2.0 properties, like social networks and social media tools (that don't charge).
Wooohoooo!! Welcome to the beautiful land of products that make money. It's a nice place to be!
Let me give you a little piece of advice-- unstealth yourself!
When we shipped Freckle, we had $1500 in monthly billing at the end of the first round of 30-day trials, because we put up a little teaser page just like this (for our 2nd SaaS product): http://charmde.sk/.
We had about 400 names on it, from tweeting and talking about it, and a pretty decent conversion rate on that. That headstart was worth at least $18k that year (and probably more, since our main factor for growth is word of mouth). We now have 320 names on the Charm list and that's a much narrower audience, so I think our actual rate of emails vs audience is even better.
Typically speaking, "stealth mode" doesn't do a lick of good for paying products. Most people are too stubborn to make a paying product to begin with, much less copy one that isn't out yet. On the other hand, people love the opportunity to put their name in for a new product that will help them -- and if you don't capture their email, they'll just forget about it.
I'm a female bootstrapper and I know many more in my network. My contact info can be found in my profile; feel free to DM me next time you put on a conference.
Several years ago I read an article that analyzed the work preferences of the genders. It demonstrably showed that:
- Men are more likely to do riskier jobs;
- Men are more likely to travel further to work (including internationally);
- Women tend to choose that are closer to home.
Basically it came down to risk-aversion. Women are, on the whole, more averse to risk than men.
A startup, compared to any salaried job, is far riskier. You can work for years on substandard pay and much longer hours and end up nothing. Of course you could also end up a millionaire (or even a billionaire).
Obviously children will be a factor for some (both men and women but more women than men, on the whole) and you can argue that the risk aversion is a product of the child factor but I think you see these same traits in women who are childless (so you then have to stretch the child factor to women who may one day have children, which applies to pretty much any women under 40 so is really a non-argument).
Tech Crunch had a post about this a few months ago. The tech press wants to write stories about women entrepreneurs. Companies and business schools have diversity policies the result of which is that the entrance requirement for women are generally lower than their male counterparts.
Equality isn't the same thing as being identical. If less than 50% of entrepreneurs or programmers are women is not a failure of equal opportunity. Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes.