11 ms·

Paul Graham Isn't Keeping Women out of Tech

86 points by kbambz 13y ago

Caligula 13y ago
This article seems to be related to http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-been-hacking-for-the-pa-1490581236 http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-be... It is the first time I saw Paul Graham appear on my Facebook. It is not worth reading, the author is just going for clicks by making baseless accusations. Paul also claims he was misquoted and thinks he should start bringing a recorder to interviews. It is a shame, one of the appeals of reading a Paul Graham interview or his writing was that it was very open, I hope his no doubt hiring a PR filter or being more reserved with his words will not reduce the quality.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  It should be noted that the misquote was on The Information's end, not Valleywag.
- sgdesign 13y ago
  Seeing how badly people reacted on Twitter, I don't see any upside for anybody to say anything about this issue at all. Which probably won't help matters much…
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    pg will be writing a clarification soon. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/416994260995416064 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/416994260995416064
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    Separate from the merits of the discussion, Twitter is in a phase where it LOVES to get outraged about things. It's very mobbish right now. It's really a turn-off. But I do think it's a fad that will self-correct. Once it goes too far people will lose followers for joining the mob-du-jour and will adjust accordingly.
    - xgarland 13y ago
      Seems like people are just looking for any and everything to be offended by these days.
- bluekeybox 13y ago
  > It is the first time I saw Paul Graham appear on my Facebook Amazing times we live in, isn't it? If this is how the average person finds out who someone like PG is, what hope is there for the world at large? Please note that had PG been known through standard mass-media channels way earlier, there might have been even a fighting chance that more women (i.e. outsiders) had joined the tech world early on, since this way the news about YC wouldn't spread through what are predominantly male/engineering-graduate-heavy word-of-mouth channels, and we would have avoided this mess in the first place. Yet the press and the world at large is not even interested in the success of something like YC until the YC is big enough to throw rocks at because of some juicy inclusion/exclusion controversy. So what we have is a controversy that, like hundreds of others like it, is nearly "manufactured" by the press itself. The moment you become big is the moment you become torn apart by the world.
  - Crito 13y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. If somebody isn't interested in either programming or being involved with tech startups (and the overwhelming majority of people in the world are not) then I don't see any particular reason to expect people to have heard of PG. Experts in fields are typically widely unknown by the general public. I first learned of Andre Geim (A Nobel Prize winner in Physics; not my field) from a youtube video about beer and magnets. I don't think that suggests anything dreadful about society.
    - bluekeybox 13y ago
      I'm commenting on the role of mass media in a contemporary society. This is important because I'm afraid that soon everyone is going to hear about PG/YC because "oh no, patriarchy!" To repeat, look at engineering circa 1990s -- nearly entirely male-populated field, moderate prestige. Now look at engineering circa 2010s -- slightly more diverse field, significantly higher prestige. If you start with a 90+%-male base and you achieve moderate, growing success via entirely word-of-mouth advertising and by absorbing people from that base, you are setting yourself up for a situation where your organization reflects the base it grew out of (i.e. male engineers). And yet the media is not going to pay attention to you until your field is large and successful enough for spoils to be had from throwing rocks at you, at which point obviously they are going to criticize you for being "exclusionary". So what you have is a nearly entirely media-manufactured controversy. Why didn't the media focus on getting more women into engineering in the 1990s? Because it wasn't a prestigious enough field at the time for organized entryist action to exist. Why is there a problem with this controversy? Because entryism exists. Entryists are interested in entering any high-prestige field and taking it over for themselves. They are not below taking up social justice banners to accomplish their goals. In fact, the most successful entryists utilize those banners to the highest effect. The whole controversy is pure manufactured evil. This is not about women's rights or social justice. It's about entryism.
- andrewliebchen 13y ago
  Having the full interview behind a $400 paywall doesn't help anyone evaluate his words "in context."
- Camillo 13y ago
  Was the ValleyWag article discussed on HN? I seem to have missed it.
  - gkoberger 13y ago
    Gawker is blocked (or at least heavily penalized), and nobody else really wrote about it.
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    Valleywag is a banned domain, so all submissions to the article were autokilled. (and there were many submissions) Since the original article was under a paywall, those links were also killed.
  - kmfrk 13y ago
    People have tried submitting it a handful of times through the mentions of other sites, but they all get censored from the frontpage.
- caycep 13y ago
  For what it's worth it IS a gawker media property and so I usually take these interviews with a few shipping containers worth of salt...
rfnslyr 13y ago
But that doesn’t give us free reign to ignore the problems that exist in universities, accelerators, tech companies and venture capital. These pieces of the funnel need to be thoroughly analyzed and optimized for inclusion - be it for gender, race, age, or other markers, so that we’re able to produce the best sustainable and profitable companies and organizations possible. Why? 3. ‘Not discouraging’ women isn’t enough - actively encourage them. Again, why? I don't understand this "get women in X" movement. There are women everywhere, women are doing fine from what I can see in the tech space. Why must I go out of my way to specifically pave a way for women in everything I do? Why not blacks? Why not midgets? Why not "X deviation from being a while male?" Read my previous comment history for my stance as I'm not going to copy paste everything here. I honestly don't get it. You have all the same opportunities men do, at least in this space. Women are so entitled nowadays.
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  It's just a fad in the US.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- nsp 13y ago
  Technical jobs are 90%+ male, but our customer base is generally much closer to 50/50. Don't you think it's pretty plausible that having a woman working with you might add a useful perspective when making your product? I've worked at 3 startups(2 as a dev) and interviewed a couple hundred programmers over that time, and don't think I've yet even had a resume from a female programmer, and honestly that really disappoints me - I'd love to work in a coed environment, just to get more opinions and life experiences informing our discussions. From a purely selfish standpoint, theres a lot of money to be made and a lot less competition in female-customer-oriented startup spaces - take the phenomenal success of Pinterest for an easy example - unless you're only building for yourself, why would you be opposed to adding a perspective that could potentially double your market size. *I'm personally bothered by the gender gap for a plethora of reasons that go far beyond purely economic, but women control something like 70% of household spending in the USA, and there's a lot of compelling opportunities there even leaving aside any larger equitable society issues.
sergiotapia 13y ago
Why has tumblr become such a cesspool of social justice warriors just aching to find something to be angry about? How does the Tumblr owner feel about his platform being used by this toxic community?
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  Wait, are you referring to this article?
- gaadd33 13y ago
  As someone who owns some Yahoo stock (which makes me a Tumblr owner (admittedly 9.9009901e-7 percent)) I feel pretty good about it.
gkoberger 13y ago
Gawker was just looking for page views [1], as with the pg racism [2] claim a few months ago. This is dangerous. If people are scared to speak openly and honestly about topics such as racism, homelessness and sexism because they don't want Valleywag to label them as racist, elitist or sexist, we'll all be forced to just go on pretending everything is great. [1] http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-dentons-phony-hypocritical-class-war-against-tech-workers/ http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-de... [2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/major-fwd-us-donor-says-a-strong-foreign-accent-makes-1208418411 http://valleywag.gawker.com/major-fwd-us-donor-says-a-strong...
- gms 13y ago
  It's very unfortunate. I am too scared to voice opinions on these subjects on public forums due to the potential outrage people would react with, which may effect my career. I really think that people secretly enjoy being outraged.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    People love being outraged. And, even without being outraged, having something to criticize makes writing easier and more enjoyable; it's a quick, cheap path to "flow".
- tptacek 13y ago
  Gawker is horrible, but if you read the original article in The Information that they're quoting from, it's not that distorted. Graham is asked whether YC discriminates against women. Graham is aware that when he's asked this, the subtext is that there is a marked gender imbalance among YC founders. Graham could answer "no, we don't discriminate, and I don't know why the imbalance exists or exactly what we should do to fix it". But Graham doesn't leave it at that: instead, he writes a small essay about gender imbalance in the industry on the fly, and a lot of what he says is both discouraging and, to my ears, incorrect. I think Paul Graham is a good, interesting person with a lot of interesting and valuable insight that comes from experience I will never have. But he is not infallible, and I think this is a huge blind spot for him. Valleywag probably wants to see him burned at the stake, then drawn and quartered by four Uber SUVs. Think of the pageviews!
zainny 13y ago
We're creating an environment now in which it is practically impossible to discuss this topic in tech. Our general irrationality and desire to completely and utterly jump down the throat of anyone who even remotely touches on this topic means that in the future any gender topics are just going to get "no comment" responses. That's sad and not without a touch of irony precisely because in stifling the discussion we're probably doing more harm than good.
- fiatmoney 13y ago
  Why should the tech world be any different than every other industry which forbids meaningful discussions as a matter of course?
- daleharvey 13y ago
  Its probably worth mentioning that it is technically impossible to have a discussion about this (on hacker news) because virtually every submission about the topic is killed, as it is with previous times this comes up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824157). Fully agree that stifling / censoring is causing a lot more harm than good (as is apparent by a lot of the reactions here)
- Einstalbert 13y ago
  That everything is baited with stuff like the all "white/male bro" tech industry is really what gets me. You're not inviting anyone to change anything with that mindset. I was eager to read and consider their suggestions up until that last bit, when I immediately backed off and just shrugged. How many gender-blind software architects were out there through this entire technology boom we've seen in the last 40 years? Just tinkering away at platforms and code and programs, not really thinking about anything other than their craft. Someone will jump in and say that it was their privilege to be able to just focus, unlike X minority trying to do the same, and I'll agree with you there. To think that there's some odorous force emanating from these privileged folks, working to keep others out, strikes me as strange. The "bros" in tech are hardly the ones that built or stand near the entry-gates.
- jfarmer 13y ago
geuis 13y ago
Wow the cufon font on that page is awfully blurry on a retina display.
- kbambz 13y ago
  I was just thinking the same thing...
kyro 13y ago
Is there something that can collectively be done about Gawker (more Vallewag)? I know, freedom of speech, etc, but they time and time again publish the most incendiary articles based on the wildest of intentional misinterpretations. It is the farthest thing from "hard-hitting" or "raw" journalism, and at times borders libelous.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Is there something that can collectively be done about Gawker (more Vallewag)? Sure: don't talk to their writers.
  - supergauntlet 13y ago
    If there's one thing gawker sites do well, it's nerd baiting. Yes, there are problems women face in STEM fields. No, getting everyone angry at pg isn't gonna help.
    - rhizome 13y ago
      To be sure, "someone is wrong on the internet!" is what sites like these depend on for a business model.
spindritf 13y ago
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true? One of my favourite essays. http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  Beautiful essay, and a beautiful idea that you quoted. I will have to read more of PG.
baddox 13y ago
Unfortunately for this all female team, feminists will accuse them of working to support the patriarchy just as much as the evil men. Sadly, this is actually what prominent feminists in technology believe: https://medium.com/about-work/e82b7ca7de03 https://medium.com/about-work/e82b7ca7de03 (Ctrl-F "support the patriarchy"). For these feminists, women who fail are obvious evidence of patriarchy, and women who succeed are obviously just working alongside the patriarchy. I firmly believe that if next year the tech industry was 55% female and females received 55% of funding and salaries, feminists would point to that as evidence that the patriarchy is purposefully giving things to women to hide the fact that they're all misogynist pigs. This prominent tech feminism is, according to their own terms, completely unfalsifiable.
- erikpukinskis 13y ago
  In the Medium essay you link to they are calling out women who deny the existence of sexism in tech: "The white privilege that benefits many white women in tech plays a huge role in allowing them to occupy a position denying gender oppression, supporting the patriarchy, and undermining feminist activism." This "female team" is doing the exact opposite. I think they're safe from the feminist horde. Also, you might get something from this comic: http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341 http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341 You seem to be experiencing similar terrors.
  - baddox 13y ago
    > In the Medium essay you link to they are calling out women who deny the existence of sexism in tech The essay isn't calling out women who fit that description. It is attributing those denials to successful women in tech.
- MorningInfidel 13y ago
  I was all interested to read the article you linked until I saw the by-line. Read some of Shanley's posts on Medium - her opinion can be safely discounted. Not because she's a woman, but because she's a wacko. Thankyou for putting into coherent thought what I was never able to - a lot of these arguments you hear from the 'leg up for women in tech' crowd are just that - unfalsifiable. They can never be wrong.
tptacek 13y ago
Paul Graham isn't keeping women out of technology. Nor do I believe he wants to. If anything, his interests would be served by there being more women in technology, and thus more candidates for YC. Also, Valleywag is a cesspool. I ponied up for the whole interview at The Information. I'd rather eat a bug than talk about what a Gawker publication has to say. But Paul Graham has said some things on this issue that I think are dumb. Moreover, I believe he spends a lot of time worrying about the ways things he says are misconstrued. Reputation is potential energy, as he (correctly) likes to say, and I think he's aware of how much energy is tied up in what he says. Knowing that he is speaking carefully on these issues does not make what he is saying easier to take. It is one thing to suggest that we should correct biases and imbalances as early as we can, because the sooner someone gets started hacking, the sooner they'll be able to bring those skills to bear on the market. Sure, that's true and probably benign. It is another thing entirely to suggest that special status is conferred on people who started hacking when they were 13, and that it might be "too late" for people who didn't to join the ranks of that elite. It is one thing to suggest that there are people that have, for whatever reason (nature or nurture) a natural affinity to working with computer programs and technology. True. Benign. It is another thing to project backwards from that the idea that if women were going to be good at coding, "they would have found it on their own". That's not true. It presumes that the most important factor in determining whether someone's going to be a good coder is that they have the affinity. But you need more than affinity: you need opportunity and support. A gigantic blind spot men in technology have is that there are two sides to the problem of gender bias. The side of the coin everyone thinks about is prejudice and bias. Men hear about gender imbalance in technology and interrogate their conscience. "Do I think women are inherently less qualified then men? No! I've never made a decision based on that belief!" They're probably even right about that. The coin has another side: privilege. Privilege is a simple concept. Certain kinds of people "fit the mold". Paul Graham knows what the typical successful startup hacker looks like. So do most people who work at technology companies. If you ask someone in our field at random to visualize an elite startup hacker and then take bets on the attributes of that imaginary person, you would be nuts to bet on anything but "male", "English-speaking", "20-40", and "white or Asian". 25-year-old English-speaking white males have a privilege, whether they like it or not, because they fit into everyone's mold of a startup hacker. They will sometimes be asked stupid, discouraging questions at job interviews. Like, "do you have any children, and, if so, how will you balance the work of taking care of them with the demanding schedule of this job?". Or, "when did you start coding? We're really looking not so much for someone who can execute this role, but rather who lives and breathes technology". You can tell by looking at some people that they "live and breathe technology" (guilty as charged). That's not a privilege at a bar or a White Sox game, but it is a privilege in our industry. The existence of privilege is not a scarlet letter on young white dudes who code. But the forceful, repeated, insidious denial of the existence of that privilege is a problem: it reinforces the privilege and allows it to feed on itself.
bjornsing 13y ago
> Misogyny is alive and well, from Hacker News devolving into a disgusting sea of victim blaming after a female poster discussed being sexually assaulted at a tech conference, to the HR-free world of venture capital (ask any female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, that investor has used his power to sexually harass the founder). In my mind that last parenthesised bit stands out like I don't know what... What the f*...?!? :(
- Crito 13y ago
  I think you are misunderstanding this, due to poor wording. That quote makes more sense if you replace "that investor" with "a investor". It seems plausible that founders have to deal with many founders, and it seems further plausible that many founders have had at least one bad experience. 9/10ths of founders having at least one bad experience with an investor and founders having bad experiences with 9/10 investors are obviously two very different things. Of course we should obviously still be asking ourselves "what the fuck?!?"
apsec112 13y ago
"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan. Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities. When that happens, it tends to happen fast, like a core going critical. The threshold for participating goes down to zero, which brings in more people. And they tend to say incendiary things, which draw more and angrier counterarguments." http://paulgraham.com/identity.html http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
xacaxulu 13y ago
"ask any female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, that investor has used his power to sexually harass the founder" I'd like to see some stats to back that up, i.e. police reports. Sounds like a generalization that's probably not based in reality. Every investor isn't a rapist waiting for a shot at a female CEO.
ksiegel 13y ago
By claiming that "it's already too late" for those who started coding in high school or college, Paul Graham is reflecting the industry bias against those who don't fit the stereotypical white male hacker. It is not too late. I wrote down some of my thoughts on this issue here: https://medium.com/p/f7efb084e8a https://medium.com/p/f7efb084e8a
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

86 points by kbambz 13y ago

This article seems to be related to http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-been-hacking-for-the-pa-1490581236 http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-be... It is the first time I saw Paul Graham appear on my Facebook. It is not worth reading, the author is just going for clicks by making baseless accusations. Paul also claims he was misquoted and thinks he should start bringing a recorder to interviews. It is a shame, one of the appeals of reading a Paul Graham interview or his writing was that it was very open, I hope his no doubt hiring a PR filter or being more reserved with his words will not reduce the quality.

minimaxir 13y ago
It should be noted that the misquote was on The Information's end, not Valleywag.
sgdesign 13y ago
Seeing how badly people reacted on Twitter, I don't see any upside for anybody to say anything about this issue at all. Which probably won't help matters much…
- minimaxir 13y ago
  pg will be writing a clarification soon. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/416994260995416064 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/416994260995416064
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Separate from the merits of the discussion, Twitter is in a phase where it LOVES to get outraged about things. It's very mobbish right now. It's really a turn-off. But I do think it's a fad that will self-correct. Once it goes too far people will lose followers for joining the mob-du-jour and will adjust accordingly.
  - xgarland 13y ago
    Seems like people are just looking for any and everything to be offended by these days.
bluekeybox 13y ago
> It is the first time I saw Paul Graham appear on my Facebook Amazing times we live in, isn't it? If this is how the average person finds out who someone like PG is, what hope is there for the world at large? Please note that had PG been known through standard mass-media channels way earlier, there might have been even a fighting chance that more women (i.e. outsiders) had joined the tech world early on, since this way the news about YC wouldn't spread through what are predominantly male/engineering-graduate-heavy word-of-mouth channels, and we would have avoided this mess in the first place. Yet the press and the world at large is not even interested in the success of something like YC until the YC is big enough to throw rocks at because of some juicy inclusion/exclusion controversy. So what we have is a controversy that, like hundreds of others like it, is nearly "manufactured" by the press itself. The moment you become big is the moment you become torn apart by the world.
- Crito 13y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. If somebody isn't interested in either programming or being involved with tech startups (and the overwhelming majority of people in the world are not) then I don't see any particular reason to expect people to have heard of PG. Experts in fields are typically widely unknown by the general public. I first learned of Andre Geim (A Nobel Prize winner in Physics; not my field) from a youtube video about beer and magnets. I don't think that suggests anything dreadful about society.
  - bluekeybox 13y ago
    I'm commenting on the role of mass media in a contemporary society. This is important because I'm afraid that soon everyone is going to hear about PG/YC because "oh no, patriarchy!" To repeat, look at engineering circa 1990s -- nearly entirely male-populated field, moderate prestige. Now look at engineering circa 2010s -- slightly more diverse field, significantly higher prestige. If you start with a 90+%-male base and you achieve moderate, growing success via entirely word-of-mouth advertising and by absorbing people from that base, you are setting yourself up for a situation where your organization reflects the base it grew out of (i.e. male engineers). And yet the media is not going to pay attention to you until your field is large and successful enough for spoils to be had from throwing rocks at you, at which point obviously they are going to criticize you for being "exclusionary". So what you have is a nearly entirely media-manufactured controversy. Why didn't the media focus on getting more women into engineering in the 1990s? Because it wasn't a prestigious enough field at the time for organized entryist action to exist. Why is there a problem with this controversy? Because entryism exists. Entryists are interested in entering any high-prestige field and taking it over for themselves. They are not below taking up social justice banners to accomplish their goals. In fact, the most successful entryists utilize those banners to the highest effect. The whole controversy is pure manufactured evil. This is not about women's rights or social justice. It's about entryism.
andrewliebchen 13y ago
Having the full interview behind a $400 paywall doesn't help anyone evaluate his words "in context."
Camillo 13y ago
Was the ValleyWag article discussed on HN? I seem to have missed it.
- gkoberger 13y ago
  Gawker is blocked (or at least heavily penalized), and nobody else really wrote about it.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Valleywag is a banned domain, so all submissions to the article were autokilled. (and there were many submissions) Since the original article was under a paywall, those links were also killed.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  People have tried submitting it a handful of times through the mentions of other sites, but they all get censored from the frontpage.
caycep 13y ago
For what it's worth it IS a gawker media property and so I usually take these interviews with a few shipping containers worth of salt...

rfnslyr 13y ago

But that doesn’t give us free reign to ignore the problems that exist in universities, accelerators, tech companies and venture capital. These pieces of the funnel need to be thoroughly analyzed and optimized for inclusion - be it for gender, race, age, or other markers, so that we’re able to produce the best sustainable and profitable companies and organizations possible. Why? 3. ‘Not discouraging’ women isn’t enough - actively encourage them. Again, why? I don't understand this "get women in X" movement. There are women everywhere, women are doing fine from what I can see in the tech space. Why must I go out of my way to specifically pave a way for women in everything I do? Why not blacks? Why not midgets? Why not "X deviation from being a while male?" Read my previous comment history for my stance as I'm not going to copy paste everything here. I honestly don't get it. You have all the same opportunities men do, at least in this space. Women are so entitled nowadays.

sergiotapia 13y ago
It's just a fad in the US.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nsp 13y ago
Technical jobs are 90%+ male, but our customer base is generally much closer to 50/50. Don't you think it's pretty plausible that having a woman working with you might add a useful perspective when making your product? I've worked at 3 startups(2 as a dev) and interviewed a couple hundred programmers over that time, and don't think I've yet even had a resume from a female programmer, and honestly that really disappoints me - I'd love to work in a coed environment, just to get more opinions and life experiences informing our discussions. From a purely selfish standpoint, theres a lot of money to be made and a lot less competition in female-customer-oriented startup spaces - take the phenomenal success of Pinterest for an easy example - unless you're only building for yourself, why would you be opposed to adding a perspective that could potentially double your market size. *I'm personally bothered by the gender gap for a plethora of reasons that go far beyond purely economic, but women control something like 70% of household spending in the USA, and there's a lot of compelling opportunities there even leaving aside any larger equitable society issues.

sergiotapia 13y ago

Why has tumblr become such a cesspool of social justice warriors just aching to find something to be angry about? How does the Tumblr owner feel about his platform being used by this toxic community?

PavlovsCat 13y ago
Wait, are you referring to this article?
gaadd33 13y ago
As someone who owns some Yahoo stock (which makes me a Tumblr owner (admittedly 9.9009901e-7 percent)) I feel pretty good about it.

gkoberger 13y ago

Gawker was just looking for page views [1], as with the pg racism [2] claim a few months ago. This is dangerous. If people are scared to speak openly and honestly about topics such as racism, homelessness and sexism because they don't want Valleywag to label them as racist, elitist or sexist, we'll all be forced to just go on pretending everything is great. [1] http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-dentons-phony-hypocritical-class-war-against-tech-workers/ http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-de... [2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/major-fwd-us-donor-says-a-strong-foreign-accent-makes-1208418411 http://valleywag.gawker.com/major-fwd-us-donor-says-a-strong...

gms 13y ago
It's very unfortunate. I am too scared to voice opinions on these subjects on public forums due to the potential outrage people would react with, which may effect my career. I really think that people secretly enjoy being outraged.
- tptacek 13y ago
  People love being outraged. And, even without being outraged, having something to criticize makes writing easier and more enjoyable; it's a quick, cheap path to "flow".
tptacek 13y ago
Gawker is horrible, but if you read the original article in The Information that they're quoting from, it's not that distorted. Graham is asked whether YC discriminates against women. Graham is aware that when he's asked this, the subtext is that there is a marked gender imbalance among YC founders. Graham could answer "no, we don't discriminate, and I don't know why the imbalance exists or exactly what we should do to fix it". But Graham doesn't leave it at that: instead, he writes a small essay about gender imbalance in the industry on the fly, and a lot of what he says is both discouraging and, to my ears, incorrect. I think Paul Graham is a good, interesting person with a lot of interesting and valuable insight that comes from experience I will never have. But he is not infallible, and I think this is a huge blind spot for him. Valleywag probably wants to see him burned at the stake, then drawn and quartered by four Uber SUVs. Think of the pageviews!

zainny 13y ago

We're creating an environment now in which it is practically impossible to discuss this topic in tech. Our general irrationality and desire to completely and utterly jump down the throat of anyone who even remotely touches on this topic means that in the future any gender topics are just going to get "no comment" responses. That's sad and not without a touch of irony precisely because in stifling the discussion we're probably doing more harm than good.

fiatmoney 13y ago
Why should the tech world be any different than every other industry which forbids meaningful discussions as a matter of course?
daleharvey 13y ago
Its probably worth mentioning that it is technically impossible to have a discussion about this (on hacker news) because virtually every submission about the topic is killed, as it is with previous times this comes up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824157). Fully agree that stifling / censoring is causing a lot more harm than good (as is apparent by a lot of the reactions here)
Einstalbert 13y ago
That everything is baited with stuff like the all "white/male bro" tech industry is really what gets me. You're not inviting anyone to change anything with that mindset. I was eager to read and consider their suggestions up until that last bit, when I immediately backed off and just shrugged. How many gender-blind software architects were out there through this entire technology boom we've seen in the last 40 years? Just tinkering away at platforms and code and programs, not really thinking about anything other than their craft. Someone will jump in and say that it was their privilege to be able to just focus, unlike X minority trying to do the same, and I'll agree with you there. To think that there's some odorous force emanating from these privileged folks, working to keep others out, strikes me as strange. The "bros" in tech are hardly the ones that built or stand near the entry-gates.
jfarmer 13y ago

geuis 13y ago

Wow the cufon font on that page is awfully blurry on a retina display.

kbambz 13y ago
I was just thinking the same thing...

kyro 13y ago

Is there something that can collectively be done about Gawker (more Vallewag)? I know, freedom of speech, etc, but they time and time again publish the most incendiary articles based on the wildest of intentional misinterpretations. It is the farthest thing from "hard-hitting" or "raw" journalism, and at times borders libelous.

rhizome 13y ago
Is there something that can collectively be done about Gawker (more Vallewag)? Sure: don't talk to their writers.
- supergauntlet 13y ago
  If there's one thing gawker sites do well, it's nerd baiting. Yes, there are problems women face in STEM fields. No, getting everyone angry at pg isn't gonna help.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    To be sure, "someone is wrong on the internet!" is what sites like these depend on for a business model.

spindritf 13y ago

So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true? One of my favourite essays. http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html

yetanotherphd 13y ago
Beautiful essay, and a beautiful idea that you quoted. I will have to read more of PG.

baddox 13y ago

Unfortunately for this all female team, feminists will accuse them of working to support the patriarchy just as much as the evil men. Sadly, this is actually what prominent feminists in technology believe: https://medium.com/about-work/e82b7ca7de03 https://medium.com/about-work/e82b7ca7de03 (Ctrl-F "support the patriarchy"). For these feminists, women who fail are obvious evidence of patriarchy, and women who succeed are obviously just working alongside the patriarchy. I firmly believe that if next year the tech industry was 55% female and females received 55% of funding and salaries, feminists would point to that as evidence that the patriarchy is purposefully giving things to women to hide the fact that they're all misogynist pigs. This prominent tech feminism is, according to their own terms, completely unfalsifiable.

erikpukinskis 13y ago
In the Medium essay you link to they are calling out women who deny the existence of sexism in tech: "The white privilege that benefits many white women in tech plays a huge role in allowing them to occupy a position denying gender oppression, supporting the patriarchy, and undermining feminist activism." This "female team" is doing the exact opposite. I think they're safe from the feminist horde. Also, you might get something from this comic: http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341 http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341 You seem to be experiencing similar terrors.
- baddox 13y ago
  > In the Medium essay you link to they are calling out women who deny the existence of sexism in tech The essay isn't calling out women who fit that description. It is attributing those denials to successful women in tech.
MorningInfidel 13y ago
I was all interested to read the article you linked until I saw the by-line. Read some of Shanley's posts on Medium - her opinion can be safely discounted. Not because she's a woman, but because she's a wacko. Thankyou for putting into coherent thought what I was never able to - a lot of these arguments you hear from the 'leg up for women in tech' crowd are just that - unfalsifiable. They can never be wrong.

tptacek 13y ago

Paul Graham isn't keeping women out of technology. Nor do I believe he wants to. If anything, his interests would be served by there being more women in technology, and thus more candidates for YC. Also, Valleywag is a cesspool. I ponied up for the whole interview at The Information. I'd rather eat a bug than talk about what a Gawker publication has to say. But Paul Graham has said some things on this issue that I think are dumb. Moreover, I believe he spends a lot of time worrying about the ways things he says are misconstrued. Reputation is potential energy, as he (correctly) likes to say, and I think he's aware of how much energy is tied up in what he says. Knowing that he is speaking carefully on these issues does not make what he is saying easier to take. It is one thing to suggest that we should correct biases and imbalances as early as we can, because the sooner someone gets started hacking, the sooner they'll be able to bring those skills to bear on the market. Sure, that's true and probably benign. It is another thing entirely to suggest that special status is conferred on people who started hacking when they were 13, and that it might be "too late" for people who didn't to join the ranks of that elite. It is one thing to suggest that there are people that have, for whatever reason (nature or nurture) a natural affinity to working with computer programs and technology. True. Benign. It is another thing to project backwards from that the idea that if women were going to be good at coding, "they would have found it on their own". That's not true. It presumes that the most important factor in determining whether someone's going to be a good coder is that they have the affinity. But you need more than affinity: you need opportunity and support. A gigantic blind spot men in technology have is that there are two sides to the problem of gender bias. The side of the coin everyone thinks about is prejudice and bias. Men hear about gender imbalance in technology and interrogate their conscience. "Do I think women are inherently less qualified then men? No! I've never made a decision based on that belief!" They're probably even right about that. The coin has another side: privilege. Privilege is a simple concept. Certain kinds of people "fit the mold". Paul Graham knows what the typical successful startup hacker looks like. So do most people who work at technology companies. If you ask someone in our field at random to visualize an elite startup hacker and then take bets on the attributes of that imaginary person, you would be nuts to bet on anything but "male", "English-speaking", "20-40", and "white or Asian". 25-year-old English-speaking white males have a privilege, whether they like it or not, because they fit into everyone's mold of a startup hacker. They will sometimes be asked stupid, discouraging questions at job interviews. Like, "do you have any children, and, if so, how will you balance the work of taking care of them with the demanding schedule of this job?". Or, "when did you start coding? We're really looking not so much for someone who can execute this role, but rather who lives and breathes technology". You can tell by looking at some people that they "live and breathe technology" (guilty as charged). That's not a privilege at a bar or a White Sox game, but it is a privilege in our industry. The existence of privilege is not a scarlet letter on young white dudes who code. But the forceful, repeated, insidious denial of the existence of that privilege is a problem: it reinforces the privilege and allows it to feed on itself.

bjornsing 13y ago

> Misogyny is alive and well, from Hacker News devolving into a disgusting sea of victim blaming after a female poster discussed being sexually assaulted at a tech conference, to the HR-free world of venture capital (ask any female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, that investor has used his power to sexually harass the founder). In my mind that last parenthesised bit stands out like I don't know what... What the f*...?!? :(

Crito 13y ago
I think you are misunderstanding this, due to poor wording. That quote makes more sense if you replace "that investor" with "a investor". It seems plausible that founders have to deal with many founders, and it seems further plausible that many founders have had at least one bad experience. 9/10ths of founders having at least one bad experience with an investor and founders having bad experiences with 9/10 investors are obviously two very different things. Of course we should obviously still be asking ourselves "what the fuck?!?"

apsec112 13y ago

"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan. Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities. When that happens, it tends to happen fast, like a core going critical. The threshold for participating goes down to zero, which brings in more people. And they tend to say incendiary things, which draw more and angrier counterarguments." http://paulgraham.com/identity.html http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

xacaxulu 13y ago

"ask any female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, that investor has used his power to sexually harass the founder" I'd like to see some stats to back that up, i.e. police reports. Sounds like a generalization that's probably not based in reality. Every investor isn't a rapist waiting for a shot at a female CEO.

ksiegel 13y ago

By claiming that "it's already too late" for those who started coding in high school or college, Paul Graham is reflecting the industry bias against those who don't fit the stereotypical white male hacker. It is not too late. I wrote down some of my thoughts on this issue here: https://medium.com/p/f7efb084e8a https://medium.com/p/f7efb084e8a

deleted 13y ago

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