There's a group in Toronto called Ladies Learning Code http://ladieslearningcode.com/. The group holds events for learning how to program and constantly sells out. Once while I was in Toronto, I walked into the event and it was so jammed pack that you couldn't walk from one side of the room to the other. The women were diverse and evenly distributed in age and ethnic background.
What interested me most is that the group session was held at 8 am on a Saturday. A couple of speculative thoughts later and it seemed to make sense to me. A lot of traditional developer events are held on weeknights and evenings and involve drinking at bars. If you're a woman with a family, it's probably preferable to carve out a Saturday morning, let your partner (hopefully, if you have one) take care of the kids and come home (not sloshed) to your family than it is to head down to the bar after work to have a couple of pints. It's just a lot more feasible.
Side note: That site is incredibly well designed. The color scheme is aesthetically pleasing as well as fits the theme (yes, ladies=pink themed. get over it). The navigation is easy to understand and use. The text is well organized, easy to read, and well written. It is elegant in its simplicity yet completely functional. Also, another huge plus is that the social links are re-designed to fit the color scheme and are much less obnoxious (in fact not obnoxious at all).
I know this is probably totally off topic but thought it was interesting enough to mention. Kudos to the developer.
sigh still to point out. As a father, and a startup enthusiast, I think the same problem applies to both sexes. Women have the problem of actually carrying the child, and post birth. In that case... sorry there's that one year time when you would have to be on lower stress of the startup spectrum. However good thing about your 20s and 30s is you have plenty of time. In that base, just carve out a year or two for kids, and spend the rest of the time like I do on startups. I love my daughter, and she is not holding me back, in fact she is motivation. Like everyone in a startup will tell you, kids come first, male or female. I would never advocate for a male to ignore their kids and work on a startup. How is that any different than a female? You rely on your partner in all cases. The game changes for a single parent, its hard, but its equally tough for men and women.
I always find it weird when people say "what women want". As a man, I find it easiest to illustrate the problem to other men by simply asking them to substitute 'man' for 'woman'.
Who can say "what men want". Sure, if you listen to comedians, all men want is sex sex sex and maybe some cars and sports.
But even before you look at what individuals are like, if you just look at male archetypes, there are clear and common contradictions. The 98-pound weakling versus the musclebound beach bum. The hot stuff young programmer and the technically clueless grayhair. The expensively dressed high finance wizard and the smelly protesting hippy. The sex-mad pickup artist and the asexual man who simply isn't interested. The sports-mad bloke who hates literature and the literature-mad bloke who hates sports. The deadbeat dad versus the father who lives solely for his children.
And these are just archetypes, not actual individuals. They all have different wants, needs, skills, and desires. How stupid it is to say "what men want", to lump half the race into one generalisation. If you're a man, you should feel viscerally just how bad this kind of generalisation is; why should women feel any different when the same is applied to them?
It's a fascination brain hack to "see how the other half lives". If you're a programmer interested in this whole field of gender/sexism, it's very eye-opening tool to use.
I don't think the archetypes correspond to 'what people want'. The 98-pound weakling may be playing world of warcraft all day telling everyone he is a muscle bound beach head for example. People often want what they are not, "The grass is always greener".
There is an artificial idealization of a 'Man' and an idealization of a 'Woman' in almost all societies around the world. The closeness of the individual to the idealization doesn't always change their want for the idealization. This is how we get media that often portrays the 'ideals' in various forms. People live vicariously through that which they want to be but aren't willing to work to be.
Second this, on behalf of my wife, who is a theoretical physicist. Most women also don't want to do physics, because they'd rather have babies, or so she's always been told. And got passed over for a grant because she had a husband and therefore didn't need the money. I'm still pissed, not least because she's naive enough to believe it's right for her to be treated this way.
My grandmother was a theoretical physicist (G. R. Caughlin, co-author of the FCZ papers on element formation in stars). She found it difficult to succeed as a woman in physics. She also raised four kids (without child care). She taught at Montana State University, Caltech, and others, and worked with Willie Fowler, Fred Hoyle, and other great minds of her day.
However, having talked to women in academic sciences today, she had it easy. No long post-doc programs, tenure was an easier process, and so forth. I hear over and over from such women that they have to choose between having the family life they want and a tenure track. This is an indication of an institutional barrier to women in the field (as is your wife being passed up for the grant).
These are the sort of things that need to be fixed. I am afraid simply asking how we encourage interest among women will make the problem worse because it will make the positions more competitive and hence lead to longer post-doc programs and more family sacrifices in order to achieve tenure.
This gets back to my point. Focus on institutional issues only and stop worrying about outreach.
>Most women also don't want to do physics, because they'd rather have babies, or so she's always been told.
Do you actually think this is not the case? The claimed causation seems weird, but it's clearly true that most women don't want to do physics (neither do most men, but even on top of that, certainly far fewer women than men want to). And I expect that most women want to have babies (though a lower percentage than those who don't want to do physics).
>And got passed over for a grant because she had a husband and therefore didn't need the money.
That sucks and is awful and wrong. I don't think it disproves the claim in the first sentence of your article though. Nor should it be justified thereby; your wife clearly does want to do physics if she's applying for grants, so it shouldn't apply to her.
Both Klein and Trunk seem to be missing the point that just because women are choosing do X instead of Y doesn't mean there's no sexism in the Y.
Anyway, to me the arguments here about babies and startups are eerily reminiscent of the arguments against women becoming professors. Stuff like: women want to have babies, how will they advise their students when they're pregnant? They can't bring in grant money for a whole two years! Blah blah blah. Think of our academic standards.
Fortunately that argument has been thoroughly debunked by the large number of successful female professors who are also mothers. Frankly, I don't buy the argument that having a pregnant co-founder hurts a startup. If women can get tenure at a top-10 university while raising a kid, I'm pretty sure they can also keep your startup going while raising a kid.
EDIT: Heh, I've been downvoted. Why am I not surprised?
It really depends on how you plan to run your startup. If you require 80 hour weeks then no, a women with a young child isn't going to cut it. However, neither is a man with a young child.
If you are demanding that working for your startup is your employee's number 1 priority then you probably only want a specific type of person--young and single (male or female).
However, if you run a more sane company married with 3 kids would probably work fine.
"Fortunately that argument has been thoroughly debunked by the large number of successful female professors who are also mothers."
The argument hasn't been debunked. I don't have the facts to back this up, but I'd guess that on average, men work more hours per year than women with the same jobs, because women tend to give birth and take care of children more than men. The reason there are so many successful female professors is because we've decided as a society that optimizing for hours worked per year is a bad idea with detrimental effects on our lives.
If someone were choosing between a man and a woman of equal skill to work at a startup, wanted to maximize hours worked per year, and didn't care about the law or the effects of their decision on society, they'd pick the man. Fortunately, there are far better indicators than gender of how prone an individual is to take extended leave.
Providing counterexamples to a generalization is not a debunking.
Every stat I run into on the matter shows career focused women being less likely to have children or have them much later in life. Apparently there is a limiting resource whether it is time, money, or energy.
If women can get tenure at a top-10 university while raising a kid.
If by raising you mean outsourcing to a factory farm....
The fact is that today it's getting harder and harder for women to both have careers and raise their kids (instead of outsourcing that to day care centers and the like).
What you think women want is clearly not what women want, because you're only one woman, and women are complex and varied, and want different things.
Also, I want a different thing to what you want, and lots of women want what I want. So you are twice as wrong! Not only for assuming other women want what you want, but also that you want what other women want!
Ahem. Now that "want" and "women" have started sounding less like words and more like an arbitrary sequence of sounds, is anyone willing to contribute actual science to the discussion? People yelling at each other "women are like me!" "no, women are like me!" has, I fear, outlived its usefulness.
Are there any studies covering, say, startup success by founder gender? Any documentation on attrition rates from school -> university -> startup? Has anyone even been bothered to go out and survey the attitudes of women towards startups rather than just projecting out their own?
Rather than shutting up about what women want, I think a better idea would be to actually find out what women want. Gender balance is clearly an issue in the startup community, and not talking about it isn't likely to help. Are there few women because women don't want startups, or because startups don't want women?
I don't know, but there comes a point where more opinions are not useful.
Whats the problem with having babies? Its not impossible to continue working and taking care of babies, after the first year or so. During that year your husband can take the work or someone you hire. Big deal.
This argument what woman want is kind of sexist, since nobody talked what men want before. Do whatever the fuck you want and stfu, gay, lesbian or baby-creator.
> So, when a publication like TechCrunch spews some nonsense about what women want, it means that the next time I go into an interview with a male founder (and they are overwhelmingly male for some reason that I’m not going to address here, but that Penelope assures us has nothing to do with bias) who has read that nonsense, he may be thinking, consciously or subconsciously, “she doesn’t really want to work at this startup because she wants to have a baby.”
I don't think this is true at all. As the original TC article pointed out, the VC community bends over backwards to get as many women as they can working for and speaking about startups. And frankly, regardless of whether someone has told me or whether I believe that "most women want to have babies", when a woman walks into an interview for a startup position, I'm going to assume that she wants that position and probably doesn't want babies. That makes sense since she probably wouldn't be there otherwise.
I hope that wasn't the point I was making. The point I was trying to make was that telling people that, "most women want x" isn't helpful, regardless of whether it's true right at this moment in history. More to the point, it makes life harder for women who DO want to work at startups (whether or not they want to have babies), because it reinforces the stereotype that we don't want to work full time.
I don't want an investor thinking that's true when I walk into a meeting to ask for money. I don't want a CEO thinking that's true when I'm looking for a job. I don't want them thinking it's true about all women, because it's not true about the woman who matters most to me - ME.
It's about more than letting women do what they want. It's about believing women can do the things they want to do - in this case work at startups. It's about believing that many women do, in fact, want to work at startups and that more will want to work at startups if we talk about how awesome it is. It's about the fact that what we do want changes based on a lot of things that have nothing to do with biology or nature, and that sometimes changing what we want is a really good thing for everybody.
Thanks for reading and commenting. I appreciate the feedback.
I think you are being too generous to the Techcrunch piece.
It wasn't saying "stand back and let women do what they want". It was saying women don't want to run high pressure startups, as their genetics and biological clocks tells them to settle down, have children, and only run little lifestyle business between having children.
(I can dig out exact quotes for that, if anyone wants to to, but don't have time right now)
The problem with this article is that you're basically telling a stupid person to stop saying stupid things because other stupid people will listen to it. Also the post could be shortened to: "please don't make sweeping generalizations because the assumptions they create breeds stereotypes and hurts others' credibility."
There seems to be an assumption that people (specifically women but same logic applies to men) can either be entrepreneurs or take care of young children, but not both.
I believe that startups can provide the flexible environment that bigger corporations really struggle with. Focus on results not attendence, telecommuting, flexible hours, etc. Maybe some VCs would struggle with the concept, but I know it can work because I've seen it done.
Would you know of resources that help share practical information on how to make that work? Often, simply don't know how and making some sweeping statement that "it can be done" is typically insufficient to help spread the practice.
(I know from first-hand experience as my attempts to tell people "X can be done" often fail to fill them in adequately on the how and this gets me lots of ire. I struggle with that. I am often shocked at what other people do not know that I take for granted they "should" know. I continue to try to work on that.)
(offtopic) Genuinely wondering: I once said "fuck" in an HN comments and got 10 downvotes. Used some other form of very slight rudeness (often considered humour where I'm from), downvotes again. Assumed it was an American thing, tried to adapt.
Now here's an article full of profanity, and an excellent read also because of that, and nobody complains. Don't get me wrong: I love it. I wish everyone on the internet would get their heart out so well. I'm just surprised HN digs it so much. Anything cultural I'm missing?
Though using curses or any kind of emotional outburst is generally frowned upon intellectually, this is ignored if the person doing the outburst is seen to be fighting bigotry. 'Fuck Node.js' is not an acceptable use of cursing, but 'Fuck Sexism' is.
I strongly agree to the issue at hand where we our patriarchal culture tends to drive women into choosing between career and babies.
I also abhore the fact that our patriarchal culture makes it very very easy for men to have very little participation in taking care of our own children, therefore agravating the issue.
I would suggest that 'maternity-leave' be exchanged for 'family-leave'. Why don't we allow fathers to participate in the care of a newborn baby, or rather, why don't we enforce it.
Not only the care of the child is made a burden on women only, also they have to shoulder the career burden as well.
Maybe then the whole thing would be less of a career problem and turn into a career fact, where it'd just acceptable that anyone employee might at sometime in the future need a leave to care for their respective babies and it would be just normal to do so.
I would suggest that 'maternity-leave' be exchanged for 'family-leave'. Why don't we allow fathers to participate in the care of a newborn baby, or rather, why don't we enforce it.
I believe that this is the case in many places in Northern Europe. From memory, in Sweden parental leave is 6 months and can be divided between the parents as desired. I believe there may also be a minimum for each of them.
Edit: Wikipedia says it's actually 16 months, with 2 months minimum for the "minority" parent, usually the father.
This is an appropriate argument basically any time somebody claims that [insert group here] [insert behavior of an individual here]. Groups of people do not behave uniformly; when they behave in statistically significant ways, it is not for uniform reasons.
It's difficult to reason abstractly about groups as they actually are, so we abstract that group into a uniform body - that way we can make abstract claims about their behavior without the benefit of an education in applied statistics and research methodology. It's a useful tool for intuiting behavior, but try to avoid making non-statistical claims about the members of a group of people; you will almost never be correct.
I agree with you but in how many other cases are stats so clear? It's not like we're talking about slight margins of significants. ~80% of women have children and most of them do in what would peak years of career development.
It doesn't explain why the female involvement for CS is so pathetically low compared to other traditionally male careers but I think it explains the values with which many woman are making lifestyle decisions.
<Quote>...who has read that nonsense, he may be thinking, consciously or subconsciously, “she doesn’t really want to work at this startup because she wants to have a baby.” </Quote>
Based on the above quote, looks like the author is more concerned about her interviewers being prejudiced against her(since she is a woman) rather than actually delving into the veracity of Tech Cruch's article!
Stereotypes exist. Women like this. Men like that. Men are more good at that, Women are better at something else etc. As an interviewer if he is prejudiced, its not your fault. I would not think that it is right to control his prejudices by censorship of inconvenient truths!
The specific problem she is addressing is that when a woman promulgates a stereotype about women, that makes it more believable (and acceptable) to men and, therefore, makes her life worse.
Well, I agree to how you pointed things out but look closer to the article in TC, she says: "People are pretty good at making choices for themselves. Men can stay home. Women can do startups. The thing is, most don’t want to. And that’s okay." And there is the word 'most' in her phrase.
She's expressed her opinion pretty clearly. And believe me, most of the time you, me and all of us runs on generalization. So this is no exception, except you just freaked out because you just didn't fit in this generalization. And frankly, you are just as an exception to that.
Now really, tell me how many of womens really think as you do?
The whole question seems to come from the fact that once there were a number of things women weren't allowed to do and it was deemed a good thing to work on making the playfield equal for both sexes. Turns out, when the gates were opened for one particular activity, many women did indeed want to engage in it and over the decades the gender distribution converged towards 50-50.
However, from that, some people extrapolate that if the gender distribution in some field is too far from 50-50, then there must be something in place that is horrible and sexist and blocking women from that field. Even if technically women can apply and graduate, they conclude that the field still has some implied male chauvinist bias against women. Whenever it gets to that level, it's simply not an option that women might not want it that much.
Other professions took maybe decades before women started to want them, even if they were already allowed to work as such. We can conclude that women today don't want programming badly enough. Those who do are already enrolled or working in the field. They are few in number but merely because they all had no alternative they could themselves live with.
The situation today is that it's not mainstream for women to want to be programmers. It's not wrong, people just aren't sure yet.
This is a very different statement that women aren't explicitly or implicitly allowed to become programmers in the contemporary society. Barring a few ploughers, people often don't know what they can want unless they see a supporting example many enough times. If you're a young woman and you don't know what you want to do, you could become a nurse. Many nurses started like that, regardless of whether they actually like their job or not.
It might be a few decades forward when enough women get into programming, that the field also begins to appeal to women. It may also never happen, or it might happen to an extent. Maybe roughly 1% of women would like to do programming where as roughly 2% of men want to do it. If so, then eventually roughly one programmer out of three will be women some day, in the average.
Thanks for the article writer to voice a loud counterexample that hopefully reset people into confusion about the true state of matters.
It's thinking like yours that makes it harder to get into fields where women are "under" represented.
I battled sexual harassment and derogatory comments about my ability to work in tech (specifically about being female) to stay in the industry.
If I'd have bowed out years ago, it wouldn't have been because I "don't want programming badly enough" - it was because I had better things to do than prove my vagina makes absolutely no difference to my ability to code.
Just because the writer or a few women decided to do a startup or decided not to have children doesn't mean that most women are doing the same thing.
I'm not a fan of tech crunch but their article was more of a general fact based on statistics and biology/nature, it should not be taken as an insult, starting a blog post with STFU won't make your point any more valid.
I heard people telling women to have babies and quit learning (let alone starting their own companies) more than what Penelope has portrayed. Matter of fact, NO ONE has ever told me to join a startup or start one. This is not a first time Ms. Trunk has lectured us about what women think and want. Please, you don't present every female and all this talk should stop. Just do your job or whatever you want.
[+] [-] 9oliYQjP|14 years ago|reply
What interested me most is that the group session was held at 8 am on a Saturday. A couple of speculative thoughts later and it seemed to make sense to me. A lot of traditional developer events are held on weeknights and evenings and involve drinking at bars. If you're a woman with a family, it's probably preferable to carve out a Saturday morning, let your partner (hopefully, if you have one) take care of the kids and come home (not sloshed) to your family than it is to head down to the bar after work to have a couple of pints. It's just a lot more feasible.
[+] [-] angrycoder|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgrass|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earbitscom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skizm|14 years ago|reply
I know this is probably totally off topic but thought it was interesting enough to mention. Kudos to the developer.
[+] [-] dlikhten|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|14 years ago|reply
Who can say "what men want". Sure, if you listen to comedians, all men want is sex sex sex and maybe some cars and sports.
But even before you look at what individuals are like, if you just look at male archetypes, there are clear and common contradictions. The 98-pound weakling versus the musclebound beach bum. The hot stuff young programmer and the technically clueless grayhair. The expensively dressed high finance wizard and the smelly protesting hippy. The sex-mad pickup artist and the asexual man who simply isn't interested. The sports-mad bloke who hates literature and the literature-mad bloke who hates sports. The deadbeat dad versus the father who lives solely for his children.
And these are just archetypes, not actual individuals. They all have different wants, needs, skills, and desires. How stupid it is to say "what men want", to lump half the race into one generalisation. If you're a man, you should feel viscerally just how bad this kind of generalisation is; why should women feel any different when the same is applied to them?
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
There's a great Chrome extension 'Jailbreak the Patriarchy' that does that to web pages. http://www.daniellesucher.com/2011/11/jailbreak-the-patriarc...
It's a fascination brain hack to "see how the other half lives". If you're a programmer interested in this whole field of gender/sexism, it's very eye-opening tool to use.
[+] [-] mbell|14 years ago|reply
There is an artificial idealization of a 'Man' and an idealization of a 'Woman' in almost all societies around the world. The closeness of the individual to the idealization doesn't always change their want for the idealization. This is how we get media that often portrays the 'ideals' in various forms. People live vicariously through that which they want to be but aren't willing to work to be.
[+] [-] Vivtek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einhverfr|14 years ago|reply
However, having talked to women in academic sciences today, she had it easy. No long post-doc programs, tenure was an easier process, and so forth. I hear over and over from such women that they have to choose between having the family life they want and a tenure track. This is an indication of an institutional barrier to women in the field (as is your wife being passed up for the grant).
These are the sort of things that need to be fixed. I am afraid simply asking how we encourage interest among women will make the problem worse because it will make the positions more competitive and hence lead to longer post-doc programs and more family sacrifices in order to achieve tenure.
This gets back to my point. Focus on institutional issues only and stop worrying about outreach.
[+] [-] endtime|14 years ago|reply
Do you actually think this is not the case? The claimed causation seems weird, but it's clearly true that most women don't want to do physics (neither do most men, but even on top of that, certainly far fewer women than men want to). And I expect that most women want to have babies (though a lower percentage than those who don't want to do physics).
>And got passed over for a grant because she had a husband and therefore didn't need the money.
That sucks and is awful and wrong. I don't think it disproves the claim in the first sentence of your article though. Nor should it be justified thereby; your wife clearly does want to do physics if she's applying for grants, so it shouldn't apply to her.
[+] [-] microarchitect|14 years ago|reply
Anyway, to me the arguments here about babies and startups are eerily reminiscent of the arguments against women becoming professors. Stuff like: women want to have babies, how will they advise their students when they're pregnant? They can't bring in grant money for a whole two years! Blah blah blah. Think of our academic standards.
Fortunately that argument has been thoroughly debunked by the large number of successful female professors who are also mothers. Frankly, I don't buy the argument that having a pregnant co-founder hurts a startup. If women can get tenure at a top-10 university while raising a kid, I'm pretty sure they can also keep your startup going while raising a kid.
EDIT: Heh, I've been downvoted. Why am I not surprised?
[+] [-] learc83|14 years ago|reply
If you are demanding that working for your startup is your employee's number 1 priority then you probably only want a specific type of person--young and single (male or female).
However, if you run a more sane company married with 3 kids would probably work fine.
[+] [-] natrius|14 years ago|reply
The argument hasn't been debunked. I don't have the facts to back this up, but I'd guess that on average, men work more hours per year than women with the same jobs, because women tend to give birth and take care of children more than men. The reason there are so many successful female professors is because we've decided as a society that optimizing for hours worked per year is a bad idea with detrimental effects on our lives.
If someone were choosing between a man and a woman of equal skill to work at a startup, wanted to maximize hours worked per year, and didn't care about the law or the effects of their decision on society, they'd pick the man. Fortunately, there are far better indicators than gender of how prone an individual is to take extended leave.
[+] [-] da_dude4242|14 years ago|reply
Every stat I run into on the matter shows career focused women being less likely to have children or have them much later in life. Apparently there is a limiting resource whether it is time, money, or energy.
[+] [-] einhverfr|14 years ago|reply
If by raising you mean outsourcing to a factory farm....
The fact is that today it's getting harder and harder for women to both have careers and raise their kids (instead of outsourcing that to day care centers and the like).
[+] [-] sgentle|14 years ago|reply
Also, I want a different thing to what you want, and lots of women want what I want. So you are twice as wrong! Not only for assuming other women want what you want, but also that you want what other women want!
Ahem. Now that "want" and "women" have started sounding less like words and more like an arbitrary sequence of sounds, is anyone willing to contribute actual science to the discussion? People yelling at each other "women are like me!" "no, women are like me!" has, I fear, outlived its usefulness.
Are there any studies covering, say, startup success by founder gender? Any documentation on attrition rates from school -> university -> startup? Has anyone even been bothered to go out and survey the attitudes of women towards startups rather than just projecting out their own?
Rather than shutting up about what women want, I think a better idea would be to actually find out what women want. Gender balance is clearly an issue in the startup community, and not talking about it isn't likely to help. Are there few women because women don't want startups, or because startups don't want women?
I don't know, but there comes a point where more opinions are not useful.
[+] [-] lauraglu|14 years ago|reply
Women leave technology because of overt and subtle sexism and harassment; http://rachelappel.com/stats-data-and-answers-as-to-why-ther...
And there are plenty that get cut off in the "university" step of your funnel because they aren't equal there either: http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html#What%20the%20Committ...
That being said, the trend is moving towards women running both the business and the home, solo if need be: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-end-of...
Do those help?
[+] [-] ColdAsIce|14 years ago|reply
This argument what woman want is kind of sexist, since nobody talked what men want before. Do whatever the fuck you want and stfu, gay, lesbian or baby-creator.
[+] [-] jyrkesh|14 years ago|reply
I don't think this is true at all. As the original TC article pointed out, the VC community bends over backwards to get as many women as they can working for and speaking about startups. And frankly, regardless of whether someone has told me or whether I believe that "most women want to have babies", when a woman walks into an interview for a startup position, I'm going to assume that she wants that position and probably doesn't want babies. That makes sense since she probably wouldn't be there otherwise.
[+] [-] einhverfr|14 years ago|reply
The point abut the Tech Crunch piece was exactly this. Stop saying "we want women to..." and simply stand back and let women do what they want.
[+] [-] lauraklein|14 years ago|reply
I don't want an investor thinking that's true when I walk into a meeting to ask for money. I don't want a CEO thinking that's true when I'm looking for a job. I don't want them thinking it's true about all women, because it's not true about the woman who matters most to me - ME.
It's about more than letting women do what they want. It's about believing women can do the things they want to do - in this case work at startups. It's about believing that many women do, in fact, want to work at startups and that more will want to work at startups if we talk about how awesome it is. It's about the fact that what we do want changes based on a lot of things that have nothing to do with biology or nature, and that sometimes changing what we want is a really good thing for everybody.
Thanks for reading and commenting. I appreciate the feedback.
[+] [-] CJefferson|14 years ago|reply
It wasn't saying "stand back and let women do what they want". It was saying women don't want to run high pressure startups, as their genetics and biological clocks tells them to settle down, have children, and only run little lifestyle business between having children.
(I can dig out exact quotes for that, if anyone wants to to, but don't have time right now)
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] peterwwillis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davros|14 years ago|reply
I believe that startups can provide the flexible environment that bigger corporations really struggle with. Focus on results not attendence, telecommuting, flexible hours, etc. Maybe some VCs would struggle with the concept, but I know it can work because I've seen it done.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Mz|14 years ago|reply
(I know from first-hand experience as my attempts to tell people "X can be done" often fail to fill them in adequately on the how and this gets me lots of ire. I struggle with that. I am often shocked at what other people do not know that I take for granted they "should" know. I continue to try to work on that.)
Thanks.
[+] [-] skrebbel|14 years ago|reply
Now here's an article full of profanity, and an excellent read also because of that, and nobody complains. Don't get me wrong: I love it. I wish everyone on the internet would get their heart out so well. I'm just surprised HN digs it so much. Anything cultural I'm missing?
[+] [-] peterwwillis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gldalmaso|14 years ago|reply
I also abhore the fact that our patriarchal culture makes it very very easy for men to have very little participation in taking care of our own children, therefore agravating the issue.
I would suggest that 'maternity-leave' be exchanged for 'family-leave'. Why don't we allow fathers to participate in the care of a newborn baby, or rather, why don't we enforce it.
Not only the care of the child is made a burden on women only, also they have to shoulder the career burden as well.
Maybe then the whole thing would be less of a career problem and turn into a career fact, where it'd just acceptable that anyone employee might at sometime in the future need a leave to care for their respective babies and it would be just normal to do so.
[+] [-] lemming|14 years ago|reply
I believe that this is the case in many places in Northern Europe. From memory, in Sweden parental leave is 6 months and can be divided between the parents as desired. I believe there may also be a minimum for each of them.
Edit: Wikipedia says it's actually 16 months, with 2 months minimum for the "minority" parent, usually the father.
[+] [-] rythie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply
I don't have the numbers, but I think women wanting to have children is still a pretty likely thing.
More women studying law could also happen for any number of reasons.
[+] [-] nevinera|14 years ago|reply
It's difficult to reason abstractly about groups as they actually are, so we abstract that group into a uniform body - that way we can make abstract claims about their behavior without the benefit of an education in applied statistics and research methodology. It's a useful tool for intuiting behavior, but try to avoid making non-statistical claims about the members of a group of people; you will almost never be correct.
[+] [-] da_dude4242|14 years ago|reply
It doesn't explain why the female involvement for CS is so pathetically low compared to other traditionally male careers but I think it explains the values with which many woman are making lifestyle decisions.
[+] [-] thewisedude|14 years ago|reply
Based on the above quote, looks like the author is more concerned about her interviewers being prejudiced against her(since she is a woman) rather than actually delving into the veracity of Tech Cruch's article!
Stereotypes exist. Women like this. Men like that. Men are more good at that, Women are better at something else etc. As an interviewer if he is prejudiced, its not your fault. I would not think that it is right to control his prejudices by censorship of inconvenient truths!
[+] [-] Anechoic|14 years ago|reply
The specific problem she is addressing is that when a woman promulgates a stereotype about women, that makes it more believable (and acceptable) to men and, therefore, makes her life worse.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] _pcpe|14 years ago|reply
She's expressed her opinion pretty clearly. And believe me, most of the time you, me and all of us runs on generalization. So this is no exception, except you just freaked out because you just didn't fit in this generalization. And frankly, you are just as an exception to that.
Now really, tell me how many of womens really think as you do?
[+] [-] yason|14 years ago|reply
However, from that, some people extrapolate that if the gender distribution in some field is too far from 50-50, then there must be something in place that is horrible and sexist and blocking women from that field. Even if technically women can apply and graduate, they conclude that the field still has some implied male chauvinist bias against women. Whenever it gets to that level, it's simply not an option that women might not want it that much.
Other professions took maybe decades before women started to want them, even if they were already allowed to work as such. We can conclude that women today don't want programming badly enough. Those who do are already enrolled or working in the field. They are few in number but merely because they all had no alternative they could themselves live with.
The situation today is that it's not mainstream for women to want to be programmers. It's not wrong, people just aren't sure yet.
This is a very different statement that women aren't explicitly or implicitly allowed to become programmers in the contemporary society. Barring a few ploughers, people often don't know what they can want unless they see a supporting example many enough times. If you're a young woman and you don't know what you want to do, you could become a nurse. Many nurses started like that, regardless of whether they actually like their job or not.
It might be a few decades forward when enough women get into programming, that the field also begins to appeal to women. It may also never happen, or it might happen to an extent. Maybe roughly 1% of women would like to do programming where as roughly 2% of men want to do it. If so, then eventually roughly one programmer out of three will be women some day, in the average.
Thanks for the article writer to voice a loud counterexample that hopefully reset people into confusion about the true state of matters.
[+] [-] Jem|14 years ago|reply
I battled sexual harassment and derogatory comments about my ability to work in tech (specifically about being female) to stay in the industry.
If I'd have bowed out years ago, it wouldn't have been because I "don't want programming badly enough" - it was because I had better things to do than prove my vagina makes absolutely no difference to my ability to code.
[+] [-] level09|14 years ago|reply
I'm not a fan of tech crunch but their article was more of a general fact based on statistics and biology/nature, it should not be taken as an insult, starting a blog post with STFU won't make your point any more valid.
[+] [-] captainaj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seejay|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davedx|14 years ago|reply
Positive change requires social awareness and participation in that change, not just from the disenfranchised.