Since the offer is actually open to "anyone", I will suggest the title of the piece is more intended to say something like "Yes, even you women! The word anyone is not code for any white male with SV connections. Honest!"
A lot of underrepresented people know that generic invitations don't really mean they are also invited. It's really only open to the existing in-crowd. As a woman who gets a lot of reactions that suggest to me that women are not supposed to so much as initiate conversations with men, I can kind of understand the logic here.
Having been burned by an extremely toxic classist group where, no, the rules absolutely are not the same for "the wrong kind of people" -- by which we mean poor people (in this case, though they also do really shitty things to anyone who can't somehow establish in-group standing) -- I can understand why a lot of members of underprivileged groups err on the side of "They don't really mean me when they say anyone/everyone."
My mind doesn't work that way. I generally take folks at their word, even when I know they may not really mean it -- and recently got banned from a forum for doing so because they were full of shit and didn't mean any of the high minded BS that came out of their lying mouths. I'm willing to live with that.
But I'm also very well aware that if you get that result often enough, shunning can mean you de facto have no income at all, there is no place for you to go, etc. It can be essentially a death sentence, and I don't mean metaphorically. I mean literally.
I don't know what the fix is. I'm not really all that crazy about the framing of this promo. But my suspicion is that is the real impetus here -- to make sure women don't feel that the subtext is "Not really you, though we say anyone."
And, honestly, I don't have a better answer, so I'm not going to dog them for it.
>A lot of underrepresented people know that generic invitations don't really mean they are also invited.
This is kind of interesting and in stark contrast to much of the hacker mentality that doesn't really care "what they really mean" when "they" make rules. In fact, the hacker mentality is usually to twist interpretations and tease out any technical loophole. It goes along with "ask for forgiveness, not permission." Certainly, something to think about.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. It's sad (but somewhat unsurprising at this point) that in a discussion about gender, the only post recognizably written by a woman is at the bottom of the page.
I didn't know they had an event. That makes your comment one of the more substantive comments here.
But what is your explanation for them having an event specifically for female founders if not the logic I outlined above that some groups need to be clearly signaled that they are equally welcome too?
I can’t say for sure but it’s possibly related to [0] and [1]. It appears that Aylin has a passion for fostering leadership in women. Can’t think of any reason not to take this at face value.
[1] she saw firsthand the importance of fostering leadership skills and self-confidence for young women at an early age.
[0] We built Stripe Atlas to help entrepreneurs from all over the globe start and run an internet business, no matter which industry they're in, where they're based, or their gender or ethnicity. However, women are still not starting companies or raising money at nearly the same rate as men—women made up only 7% of founders whose companies received more than $20M in VC funding between 2009 and 2015.
Which fits with my description of recognizing a need to actively reach out to women because (reasons).
That in no way questions her genuine passion, etc.
Social stuff is complicated and one of the things that keeps oppressed groups oppressed is the fact that the rules are de facto different for them. So if you really want change, you need to somehow account for the fact that generic invitations won't be seen as "We really are actually inviting you, too" by some members of some groups.
Is that any clearer for you? Because I don't think it's a rant at all.
It isn't clear. Women are not 'oppressed', especially not in the tech industry. Far from it indeed. The only way I've seen the rules be different for women is that there are lots of events, funds, trainings and jobs specifically reserved just for women.
Given this long history, I would assume from the headline on this page that men are either not allowed to apply or are strongly discouraged from doing so (like a group of men turning up at a "women in tech" event would be)- and if that isn't the case then Stripe are surely giving a very misleading impression.
Yeah, that's why I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN (under a different handle): Because women are so fully integrated into the tech world.
/s
One name out of more than over 100 over the years. That's dramatically worse than the figure I have repeatedly seen of 17 female CEOs out of every 100.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, I love HN. But the idea that there is no sexism in tech is laughable.
Given how many people post under pseudonyms how do you know you're the only woman who spent time there? That's a huge presumption isn't it?
Anyway, let's imagine it's true. Nothing keeps women away from Hacker News. They aren't discouraged or told HN is a "site for men". Despite that, they exclude themselves:
If you really think society has a problem with sexism amongst men you are clearly seeing what you want to see. Men build things that are for everyone. Women build things that are explicitly labelled as being "for women".
Nope. I usually qualify the statement, as I did above. In this case, I wrote that I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN. At other times, I use the framing openly female member.
It's based on data collection and on the fact that claiming to be, for example, the highest ranked openly female member for the past 2 or 2.5 years has not resulted in substantive evidence to the contrary coming to light. So far, no one has come forward to state "I (or X person) post as openly female and I have more karma than you/ I'm on the leaderboard" or similar substantive rebuttal.
I just get comments like yours asserting that I can't know that for certain, never mind that I typically carefully qualify the statement. Given how often individuals like you try to shoot me down and the fact that this is a huge group of pedants, I strongly suspect the lack of real evidence to the contrary confirms it.
So I'm pretty confident that my qualified statements on this are accurate.
There are people on the leaderboard who give out little or no personal info. I allow for the possibility that one of those individuals could be female. Even so, they don't post as openly female. I do.
If there are women on the leaderboard hiding their gender, to my mind, that only lends more weight to the assertion that sexism is an issue. Men here do not feel compelled to hide their gender and never get told they "should," a thing I have been told more than once.
For the record, I am not a member of Leap currently. I think it unlikely that I will become a member.
youre making up rationalizations for a infinite number of reasons why someone is not "openly" female, whatever that means and as if you browsed the history of all top posters
you dont know who is male or female with usernames and why would anyone really care to correct you on a claim like that for a site where the points are meaningless?
> Given how many people post under pseudonyms how do you know you're the only woman who spent time there?
DoreenMichele had never claimed to be the only female to spend time here, she claims to be the only (open) woman to have spent time on the HN leaderboard (under a previous handle), which seems a pretty solid claim.
> That's a huge presumption isn't it?
Well, in the absence of history of the leaderboard and obsessive monitoring of everyone's posts who had ever been on it it might be a bit of a presumption, but it's not a huge one; the nature of the leaderboard is that people on it are naturally fairly visible in their posting.
Now, it could be that the other prominent participants who are women are just extra careful to avoid indicating their gender, but while that's different than them not being here, it didn't actually make her point about HN any less valid if true.
> Nothing keeps women away from Hacker News. They aren't discouraged or told HN is a "site for men".
Not in so many words, sure, but if you haven't seen that subtextually, you are missing a lot.
> If you really think society has a problem with sexism amongst men you are clearly seeing what you want to see.
If you think it doesn't, you are seeing, well, very little of society, or through badly distorting lenses.
Looks like this post is angering some people so I will mention it looks like the promo is regardless of gender? Aside from the header "Stripe for female founders has invited you to join Stripe Atlas." there is no suggestion that gender is a limiting factor for the discount.
Since the title has now been rephrased to something more representative of what Stripe is doing, I have to point out that my comment was made when the original title that zhangela made caused an absolute shitstorm
I can't delete it now, so don't downvote it unless you're aware of the context it was made in
I'm not a fan of the mod teams decision to unflag this with a rephrased title, as the discussions that were spawned by the original title really don't belong
I've learned when an article is submitted with a changed title, to always reference that title in my comments. Most of the time, it'll get changed.
> so don't downvote it unless you're aware of the context it was made in
"zhangela's inability to read?" is a bit of an attack regardless of context, unless the context is actually discussing literacy. HN downvotes comments with that kind of tone, and more so one-liner comments with no explanation. Reddit probably wouldn't.
If you read the page carefully, they will waive the fee for anyone that uses the link. Assumption is they will be generally pushing this out via marketing channels that target women. Regardless, its a very nice thing for them to do!
There are thresholds and regimes for many things in life. And Stripe probably thinks that there are so few female founders, that to get to a healthy state of things they need to "affirmatively actionize" them.
I don't know if they are right or not, but it can be argued that to correct hundreds of years of negative discrimination you need some positive discrimination.
Due to path dependency of history it's silly to look at proposed policies in an idealized world (or in a vacuum as physicists would say).
So the question becomes who much unfairness is now due to the past practices (the past negative discrimination of women), and can that be corrected through giving some kind of advantage to women?
Maybe the answer is that none at all, because people will just think that every women founder is just there because of the gratis advantage.
Or maybe it'll really help push a lot of women toward entrepreneurship and the market won't look at how they started.
I bet Stripe did a lot of discussion about this and they are at least somewhat better informed than us. (And since Atlas is available internationally it could help a lot of women to break out of their respective seemingly hopeless situation - 500 USD is worth a lot in quite a few places in the world.)
Discrimination, just as the Latin word it derives from, is a process through which you distinguish between multiple groups or people. Just like to discern.
The way you choose to to the distinction might be unfair: you either put someone at a disadvantage, or give them an unfair advantage.
Most usage was focused on unfair disadvantage but it can be either really.
But by giving someone an advantage you then immediately give a disadvantage to the ones not within the group you have chosen to advance. Even if perhaps your original intention was merely to do the opposite and help people.
Not necessarily. Not all games are 0 sum games so it is possible to give one an unfair advantage without subtracting from another.
For example giving someone a free movie ticket doesn't mean that everybody else is penalized. They get to pay exactly what they were told and expected, and nothing changes their situation. But one person is subsidized, gets an advantage without it subtracting from the others. They all get to see the movie but one does so for free.
In a university admission exam giving one person an unfair advantage might mean that they get admitted instead of someone else. So someone has to lose for this person to win.
Discounts for children aren't because children don't have money. They're for two reasons in particular:
1) Children, particularly much younger ones, will remember less of the experience specifically. They're certainly likely to have an overall positive memory of the experience though.
2) If you're a family of 5 that's a lot of tickets. Making the children's tickets cheaper and the toddler's ticket free makes it much easier to go to the zoo on a budget. Children aren't going to the zoo by themselves but the zoo is likely not losing any revenue by discounting child tickets because they're able to get so many more families to come in the first place.
People who immediately shout about something being unfair when they're the ones who aren't benefitting but don't say anything at all when they do really bugs me. It's just plain selfishness.
Fortunately I'm sure the people commenting here stand up to all discrimination and not just the things affect them.
The next time someone ask me if I identify as male and after I answer yes and I get a free entry, I will remember this post and call out the explicit discrimination for what it is.
When do men unfairly benefit from things in the tech industry? Can you show something specific, that isn't a strong assumption of invisible discrimination on the basis of statistically differing outcomes?
Cuz I don't recall encountering any "men in tech" events, or investment funds that invest only in men, or efforts to encourage white boys to study computers.
There aren't explicit posters on the wall pushing young white men into studying comp sci, but there are historical and sociological reasons for why they're over-represented.
> When do men unfairly benefit from things in the tech industry?
There's a systemic problem which benefits men over women, regardless of which industry. For example, men have a more positive sentiment for the same resume than women do: https://www.aauw.org/2015/06/11/john-or-jennifer/
Moreover, this sentiment might extend to women, as well, as reportedly 69% of women ask for less than their male counterpart for the same role https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report
> investment funds that invest only in men
I'd be surprised if most investment funds didn't invest in women, but this is a very surface-level view. You're ignoring privileges that a man would have over a woman in getting investments, such as: connections made through school, fraternities, or other networking phenomena; and men have a greater perceived ability (see the resume discrimination above).
> efforts to encourage white boys to study computers
> Can you show something specific, that isn't a strong assumption of invisible discrimination on the basis of statistically differing outcomes?
Statistically differing outcomes might make sense if we were talking about smaller differences, but--when 11% of executives are women, women are earning 1/4 of computer science degrees, and the declining rate of women working in tech has fallen--you notice a pattern of exclusion across the entire spectrum of experience levels.
there are historical and sociological reasons for why they're over-represented.
This appears to be a strong assumption of the sort I asked to avoid. How do you know the reasons are historical and sociological and not simply that men like computers more?
You're ignoring privileges that a man would have over a woman in getting investments
But again, I asked for concrete discriminations not hypothetical "privileges" based on working backwards from unequal outcomes. You're speculating that "connections made through school" are important for men and not women, but that's nothing concrete and doesn't even make much sense - startup founders typically find VCs or the other way around the time they create a company and need money, and men and women are not segregated at universities. It's not like investors pick companies on the basis of being at the same college together. See the article yesterday about the flood of money from Softbank who have more or less single handedly killed any talk of a bubble pop.
Statistically differing outcomes might make sense if we were talking about smaller differences, but--when 11% of executives are women, women are earning 1/4 of computer science degrees, and the declining rate of women working in tech has fallen--you notice a pattern of exclusion across the entire spectrum of experience levels.
No. This is exactly the kind of argument I asked people to avoid - you are observing statistical trends and then assuming it must be caused by invisible discrimination. You can't point to any actual examples of companies stating they won't hire women or investors saying they won't invest in women, whereas I can do both these things for men. Instead you resort to strong assumptions of invisible discrimination you can't actually point to, based on observation of disparate outcomes.
Oh, and you can explain 11% of executives being women and women not going into tech very easily using ordinary and undisputed biology/psychology - men take more risks and women prefer working with people. These aren't even controversial aspects of biology: no "pattern of exclusion" required.
You're asking for a hard-science demonstration of a soft-science problem and this is causing you to refuse understanding a deeply rooted systemic problem if it can't be immediately displayed.
Ahh, your post history is illuminating and an interesting walk through the reactionary mind:
> Historically speaking fascists were hard left
> You know what Nazi stands for, don't you?
> Implying someone is racist when they've not said anything racist is unacceptable ad-hominem.
I don't think you're equipped to have this conversation.
Your post is heavily downvoted because you are simply engaging in ad-hominem - presumably you ran out of arguments and know you can't win this one?
There is no such thing as a "soft science problem" for which "hard-science demonstrations" are invalid. That's a separation you've made up on the spot.
What I'm asking for isn't even science, I'm not even asking for data. I'm asking for anecdotes! That should be easy! Just show a bunch of cases of companies explicitly refusing to hire women or refusing to promote women because of their gender. You don't even have to show that amounts to the entire cause of the disparity. That's an absurdly low bar.
Because men in software don't agitate for them in the same way (some) women do.
But in other fields sometimes such events are organised, to encourage men into female-dominated jobs. Guess who comes out of the woodwork to attack them:
The University of Sydney is under fire for a new scholarship of nearly $30,000 that gives preference to male applicants, with the head of the scholarships office likening it to grants that “discriminate” against students who are not Aboriginal.
...
“The way I think about it, affirmative action should only apply to people who have structural barriers to receiving an education – that’s what the exemption in discrimination law is about, so you can procure particular benefits for women in Stem [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], Aboriginal students and so on,” Grant said. “It’s not for further advantaging men. It’s really quite bizarre.”
I get your point but there's a strong bias against any program target at specifically helping men.
For example, there are few events targeted at recruiting more boys to college, even though only 40% of college students are male; and few programs specifically targeted at helping homeless men even though most homeless people are adult men.
Contrast that to the PR value of program like this that's targeted at helping women.
It's the opposite of stupid - asking for explicit evidence is the only way to test whether this so-called "implicit bias" actually exists or is merely a conspiracy theory.
To end these discussions I will mention the following.
I contacted the Stripe Atlas team about this offer and as they say, if they read the website, it refers to the offer is only for women (but it is not the case), the offer is open to any person / gender that wants take advantage of it, they only put "For women" to continue promoting in which more founders are united to the emprendimiento of this decade.
For example, I just got the offer as a man, they did not charge me the $ 500 fee, so I understand that everything is correct.
Do not take everything as literal, one thing is what the web says and another is what they really offer, anyone can be wrong.
It strikes me that it's rare that you hear an outcry about things being "marketed specifically to women" unless those things are ones that have traditionally been the domain of men. If an offer about makeup or diapers or Zumba class was clearly targeted at women, or even jobs that orient around similar themes, my guess is that it wouldn't merit much of an outcry on HN.
There's totally an outcry over "shrink it and pink it" as a marketing strategy. But, that's not what you were getting at, and indeed, you won't see much fuss about "shrink it and pink it" on HN.
I do not understand why Stripe choose a headline that does partially cover the content of the article. In a sexist, but politically correct way. I also don't understand why comments about this being sexist get flagged. Finally, I wonder why the moderators changed the original HN headline to the same headline that Stripe uses. Isn't it HN policy that headlines that seems clickbaity or wrong get changed by the moderators, so that they become more factual and understated?
Anyway, great move from Stripe. Seems that they want remove barriers for starting and running a company, which is good for the creation of wealth and jobs. Be it Stripe Atlas, the card business, Indiehackers or the publishing company. Al those newly founded companies are also target customers for Stripe. Which is completely ok and speaks of good common business sense!
How is this not sexism? Are women somehow less capable than men and need services handed to them in order to be successful? I don't think that's the case and I'm surprised Stripe appears to!
That is a very, very different thing. I guess no electric vehicle will mind being told "ah, you're a woman, you had it so easy, you had everything given to you" after its lifelong work. Women will be hurt by this.
Why is it based on gender and not financial ressources though? I'm fairly sure there are women who can afford to pay $500 for this service and men who can't, sounds like yet another unnecessary divisive PR move that no one needs right now.
Here in Sweden we have a rather good statistics over employment as part of tax collection and it is public record.
Men and women are employed in the same rate, with 85% of men working in gender segregated professions and 86% of women. As such it is rather simple math that is indeed supported by the actually numbers for each profession that about half of the professions are dominated by women and about half is dominated by men, with a small minority of 14.5% that has a minimum 40% men and women in them (The official minimum line for gender segregation).
You want a top 10 list? Last time I check the highest segregated profession was midwife at around 99.7% women to 0.3% men. Second highest is dentist nurse with 99.6% women. Third highest is stone brick layers with 99.4% men. Forth to ninth was all 99% and are listed as mechanics, tinsmith, carpenter, concrete construction worker, electrician, and plumber. Then its pediatric nurse at 98%. (2012 data)
If one goes by the 30 most common profession in Sweden (ie most employees per profession group), female dominated professions are 17/30, male dominated professions are 11/30, and equal is 2/30. In that list the top groups are truck driver, construction worker, secretary, mechanic and nurse. (2004 data)
Now if any of those professions have programs to address gender segregation is an other question, but since most of those have around 90-99% gender segregation one can guess that the efforts are not that effective if they exist.
Ah, there's an offer. And it sounds pretty sweet. Then I went to the article and it says that it is a £30,000 fund. So that's enough for 10 male nurses :/
I was wondering about this as well. Did some googling. Saw many articles about how there is a strong demand for male nurses. Found nothing about special incentives or other benefits for being a male and entering nursing. Maybe they exist but don't show up in the top of the SERPs.
Semi-related. I have a male friend go into respiratory therapy. One of 4 men in his class out of 60 overall classmates. All else being equal, the men had advantages in placement at desirable hospitals to do hands-on learning because the staff there wanted to attract gender diversity onto their team.
I ran into something similar when I applied for an editorial assistant at some entertainment blog in 2009 or so. This was based in San Francisco. The entire staff was women. I was told by some that they were eager to get a different perspective on the team. I did not get that job, but I felt like I was given some preference based on being a guy.
I guess the roughly equivalent move here would be for a nursing school to reduce or waive certain fees for male applicants, based on a desire to encourage more men to apply, enroll, and ultimately enter the nursing field. It’s not immediately obvious to me what the public reaction would be.
Are female less represented than, say, gay people? Are they less represented than, say, trans-black-woman or a non-binary-gender person.
Shouldn't we rise above and instead of helping minorities, just help/accept "everyone" already. A side benefit is to remind them that there is no such thing as "minority" and they are regular persons. And that no particular person no matter what his gender/color/religion is still a person and welcome.
And is it actually legal to give woman an unfair advantage? Or advertise capitalizing on it (I'm aware the offer is open to anyone).
This is sexist. They should also allow Introverted Males WithOut Rich Parents to form a company for free.
It is very difficult for an IMWORPs to start a company and raise funding these days.
How many IMWORP CEOs are there these days? Probably close to 0.
The worst part is that people make no distinction between IMWORP and EMWRPs even though we're the opposite.
"Form your new company as either an LLC or C Corporation in Delaware." - Isn't Delaware the new patent troll capital. Why would I want to start a company there?
"Stripe Atlas will waive the one-time $500 company formation fee for anyone that uses the link below by October 15th." - Not just females? Otherwise it could be considered discrimination.
A lot of underrepresented people know that generic invitations don't really mean they are also invited. It's really only open to the existing in-crowd. As a woman who gets a lot of reactions that suggest to me that women are not supposed to so much as initiate conversations with men, I can kind of understand the logic here.
Having been burned by an extremely toxic classist group where, no, the rules absolutely are not the same for "the wrong kind of people" -- by which we mean poor people (in this case, though they also do really shitty things to anyone who can't somehow establish in-group standing) -- I can understand why a lot of members of underprivileged groups err on the side of "They don't really mean me when they say anyone/everyone."
My mind doesn't work that way. I generally take folks at their word, even when I know they may not really mean it -- and recently got banned from a forum for doing so because they were full of shit and didn't mean any of the high minded BS that came out of their lying mouths. I'm willing to live with that.
But I'm also very well aware that if you get that result often enough, shunning can mean you de facto have no income at all, there is no place for you to go, etc. It can be essentially a death sentence, and I don't mean metaphorically. I mean literally.
I don't know what the fix is. I'm not really all that crazy about the framing of this promo. But my suspicion is that is the real impetus here -- to make sure women don't feel that the subtext is "Not really you, though we say anyone."
And, honestly, I don't have a better answer, so I'm not going to dog them for it.