> And while it's possible for women to be sexist too, if you think Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn are sexist, I'd like to see you say it to their faces.
That... is not an argument? There's ample evidence to show that members of underrepresented groups within individual companies/industries experience unconscious biases in hiring/ranking/etc, even towards groups of which they're a member.
I'm not judging particular people (I have no opinion on the individuals mentioned), and I honestly haven't kept up with this whole narrative so there are certainly no statistics I can cite. I'm saying that stating that someone belongs to a class is entirely insufficient to demonstrate the assertion that they are not biased against that class, particularly in a context where that class is systemically biased against.
The personal opinions of individuals are pretty irrelevant when discussing systemic issues, so I don't see that as very productive to focus on. In either direction, actually; personally well-meaning people can nonetheless be complicit in systemic racism/sexism/etc., and personally bigoted people might not be.
I do think YC is probably more open to women as founders than the VC norm, but it's the overall statistics that convince me of that more than some attempt to discern what its principals personally think about things. That was the most interesting part of this post as well, talking about what YC is actually doing.
Systems are made of (or by) people. Systematic biases are not curses handed down by gods, they originate from somewhere within organizations.
It is therefore relevant to consider the individuals involved when we are talking about systematic biases of the system which is composed of them. You cannot talk about the biases of YC without talking about the biases of the people who comprise YC. It would be like talking about the structural integrity of a building while trying to never consider the physical properties of the building materials.
(Of course, even if we strike off this entire thread of conversation as irrelevant, that does not make the comment I was responding to any less problematic.)
Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.
None of this is relevant to the discussion at hand.
The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]. None of the men overlap in expertise with the positions held by the women. None of the women overlap in expertise with the positions held by the men. The "model" person the firm likes to do business with is a caricature of only <one> of the sub-sets of staff. Because there is no gender overlap in these two sets, this is "strucurally" sexist...at least arguably...regardless of which sub-set does the selection [2,3].
[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant.
[1] The rest of the staff are all Hackers or Designers.
[2] The allocation actually doesn't matter. Only the stratification.
[3] Note, however that the "model" personality type is de-facto gendered [male]. This is not a logical necessity. It could be the case that the roles are reversed--either all of the hackers were/are women, etc...or the target Founders could be Hr/ops-legal-accounting...etc.
The "appeal to statistics" is just re-proposed racist talking points. You would not accept it in a discussion involving race, and you should not accept it in a discussion involving sex or gender.
> Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.
1) See above.
2) I am not baiting anybody into disparaging these women, and do not see how my comments could honestly be misconstrued as such. I don't want @zorpner to insult these women, I want zorpner to realize that unless they have specific information about these specific women, then there is no justification for assuming such disparaging things about these women.
3) I have made absolutely no threats, veiled or otherwise. Where the hell are you getting this from?
> "The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]...""[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant..."
This has been addressed in this discussion by one of the women in question, I am genuinely stunned that you are repeating it.
I also still can't reconcile how a month and a half ago pg apparently believed that Silicon Valley is a near perfect meritocracy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795606) and now he's been working hard(er than average) to address systemic inequalities.
For the record though; I thoroughly applaud his efforts on improving gender equality and I very much appreciate the first baby steps he's taking here on behalf of the industry. I really hope though that one day he'll be able to look back on this essay and realise this was really only just the start of it.
> Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely.
He's saying that a useful definition of meritocracy does not mean that everyone is only judged by his abilities. He's saying explicitly that such a thing does not exist. Further:
> And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good.
I don't know how you jump from "pretty good" to "near perfect meritocracy".
This was on an article about one of Silicon Valley's particular problems with diversity being that it thought it was more meritocratic than it actually was.
Given that context pg then goes on to use math as a rhetoric device to illustrate an inherently perfect meritocracy and then states SV is nearly as good; hence 'near perfect'.
In general, meritocracy's tend to have market inefficiencies. It's one of their traits that allows those who should rise based on merit but may be held back by other factors to thrive: by exploiting those inefficiencies. Female founders may currently be the market inefficiency that will be corrected next, the same way young founders were when YC was founded. It's not a perfect analogy, but the Rays and A's have been able to be some of the most successful franchises in baseball simply by targeting those inefficiencies. Hopefully something similar happens in the founder world soon.
Also, a bit unrelated but since Billy Beane became GM, the A's have never won less that 74 games. It seems like exploiting market inefficiencies is extraordinarily effective at minimizing downside risk.
Everyone is sexist to some degree, even women, even me. We all have unconscious biases because that's the way the human brain works. We do pattern matching. And we currently live in an environment where women are _usually_ not amazing programmers and startup CEOS. Admitting that would add a lot more strength to PG's piece.
For more info and facts on unconscious bias and women in tech:
He's not talking about evidence as much as a lack of acknowledgement of internalized oppression: the fact that there are plenty women who believe their rightful place is indeed in the kitchen, plenty of gay men who think gay love is indeed disgusting, etc. etc.
If any evidence would be relevant here it would be something like results of implicit association tests on the topic. I for one would be very interested in the (effects of the) results.
As long as the ratio isn't much worse than 3:1 (men or women are at least 25% of the workforce) either way I'd argue that it's a pretty balanced work environment all things considered. Shooting for 50/50 equality would potentially make more inequality problems than it solves, just for a different subset of the population.
In other words in nursing if you paid men 2x what women make you'd sort that shit out it quite a hurry and get a bunch of dudes helping take care of people. I'm not sure you could find anyone who would agree that it's an equitable or desirable way to achieve the "right" outcome, though.
Equality is definitely a goal, I think we should have more male nurses, but that's not really a priority when men are over represented in most of the higher paid fields (doctors, lawyers, CEOs .etc). Let's work on helping the more disadvantaged party first, yeah?
I'm an engineer. I was in grad school at the same time as some of my friends were in law school. I know lawyers who make $40k per year or even less if they're public defenders. Prosecutors don't make a lot more than public defenders.
Then I moved to Houston for work. There are plenty of jobs out here that pay substantially more than what your average doctor or lawyer makes. I know of welders who are making $80/hr, quadruple what some lawyers I know earn. I know of machinists who own their house and cars and boats and whatever.
I think you're confusing prestige with pay which is totally understandable. But with the education bubble having happened and the resultant unbalance in the workforce prestige != paid well, nor does "uneducated" mean bad pay.
The really great part of all this is that welding or machining or some of these skilled trades are actually much easier than startup founding. It's nearly impossible to get filthy rich that way (not that a startup is any guarantee but there are more billionaire startup founders than billionaire welders) but it's much, much harder to go broke. In other words the income distribution has a shorter right tail but also a shorter left one.
Trying to get more women as startup founders as a way to reduce income inequality seems like a fools errand due to the speculative nature of startups. I'm not saying that there should be fewer women founders, not at all. But to suggest that we can have more equality in the world by balancing out startups totally misses the bigger picture.
It's like pushing for more women princes in Saudi Arabia. Yeah men dominate that right now, but even if you made it 100% equal you're still talking about a trivial percentage of the world's population.
I don't know if we drove some men into nursing from high paying engineering jobs then there would be more space for women in engineering. Salaries would raise for everyone still in engineering so it would become more attractive to women.
First, it's not only a question of paychecks but about how it affects society as a whole. That you want more women leaders because you want the decision makers to have less biases and blindsights, on average. Perhaps you also want more men elementary school teachers because you want more male role models for children, and perhaps less chances of biased behaviour towards schoolchildren based on gender. Not just because you want the men who are already wanting to be elementary teachers to have an easier time. These two seem more important on the societal level than bringing more women in to tech and more men into nursing.
Secondly, this looks similar to the argument that 'men are over represented in positions of power, so men are better off as a whole'. This assumes that men are a collective soup that automatically benefits from being collectively better off. Perhaps by assuming that more men in positions of wealth and power means that all men have an easier time getting into it, ignoring that men come from different backgrounds and social classes and may not ever get a shot at something like that, anyway. I doubt that many have the conundrum of becoming a big-shot CEO, or taking on a high-risk fisherman job because he needs the risk premium (yes, you've probably already read about men being over-represented in some jobs that aren't really featured items on 'career day'. They come up often enough in these threads). Another assumption behind this is that men necessarily benefit from other men being in power. That's a problematic assumption. Why would all men necessarily benefit from that? In fact, assume that a man in power things of women as inferior, and only think that men are a threat to his position of power; then he has a motivation to keep men down, or at least the swaths of men that aren't immediately useful to him.
Sure - my wording was poor. I mean to say that the women wield enough collective and individual power to ensure that they are not an ignored minority. It's not yet close enough to 50/50, the female voices are clearly central to the group.
Let's remember that this is a journey, that YC seems to be at the forefront of it and we should encourage the progress to date while maintaining high expectations for the future.
Meanwhile there are genuine benefits to being at the forefront of diversity, as it widens the pool of awesome founders.
Moreover other players tend to take note of what YC does, and as the evidence builds this will help change the industry.
This reminds me of the industry groups going after Apple for their manufacturing practises, which turn out to be amongst the best in the game. While I felt that Apple was unjustly accused, they did open their books about their sustainable practices, and that's helped improve industry expectations.
That... is not an argument? There's ample evidence to show that members of underrepresented groups within individual companies/industries experience unconscious biases in hiring/ranking/etc, even towards groups of which they're a member.