The statement that the preceding paragraph referenced Zuckerberg and thus the "these" had no contextual meaning is unbelievable to me.

Q: What about lowering the bar for women? A: Take a hacker like Zuckerberg, he started when he was 10. There's nothing we can do to help these women.

What seems more reasonable?

pg responded to a question about women by referencing Zuckerberg then in an entirely separate and new thread started being misogynistic?

-or-

Pg responded to a question about women by describing what a hackers path looks like then came back to more directly answer the question.

Jessica Lessin is too smart a person to be confused here. I'm calling bs.

Humans are designed to think tribally. Not fooling yourself for your cause makes you an outlier.

1) the "pool of potential startup founders" is programmers,

2) it's non-discriminatory and self-selecting, and

3) women are underrepresented in this pool because it's hard to get 13 year old girls interested in programming, and

4) rather than encouraging women to become startup founders it would be better to fix that 13 year old girl problem

This debate about whether he was referring to "just programmers" is a complete red herring. Programmers == startup founders, to him.

The really damning quote is this:

If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it own their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now.

Repeat: pg literally said it would be better to discourage women from starting startups now.

Not "these" women. Not "non programmer" women. All women.

......

The problem is not that pg is some huge sexist. It's that he's defensive. He's passing the buck 10 years up the chain, saying that's where the problem lies. In CS curriculum or something.

But in actuality, parents and educators could just as well say that 13 year old girls don't have enough 23 year old female hacker role models to look up to.

So perhaps YC, PyCon and the industry as a whole could be more proactive. For example by spotlighting and giving extra support to the best examples of female hacker role models, and connecting them with girls.

Not by discouraging women from starting startups now.

It's like getting upset that there are no 5'2 guys playing in the NBA. Although height is not a job requirement, if you don't have it it is highly unlikely that you will get the job, unless you can demonstrate that you have other skills to make up for height (speed, highly accurate shooting, and a 5' vertical jump for example). To bring the analogy back to ycombinator, I'm pretty confident that a woman that shows up with only 6 months experience hacking, but she already has a decent chunk of her product built, that the ycombinator crew will consider her application very seriously, because she would have already demonstrated that her lack if experience was not a handicap to her hacking.

The problem with pg's statement, which I quoted directly, is that he blames 13 year old girls and middle schools and gives industry a pass. We're already non-discriminating and self-selecting. The problem is getting girls into code, and god knows how to do that.

Parents and teachers might have a response to that. Where are the female hacker role models for the 13 year old girls to look up to?

That's one of the proactive things industry can do. Shine the spotlight on positive role models. Counteract brogrammer culture at conferences and in companies, too. That requires active intervention, not just an open door policy.

And that was the whole question he was responding to -- not just whether we're actively discriminating against women, but whether there's something more proactive we should be doing.

Just pointing his finger up the line and saying "it's their fault" is kind of disappointing.

b. I know a certain number of woman who were 13 roughly 10 years ago. None is now working in programming, or that I know looking to start a company. Several are in the technically demanding field of architecture. One is an RN, which requires a good deal of intelligence. All seem reasonably happy with their choices.

c. For it may be hard to see in the world of HN, but programming, let alone programming as founder of a startup, is not the be-all and end-all of vocations.

This is why I try to avoid reasoning by analogy. Every analogy is flawed, but some end up making the wrong point entirely.

Height is a physical attribute that cannot be influenced (without questionably unethical means) from any age. A better analogy would be someone picking up a basketball for the first time at 25 and expecting to play at an NBA level.

I agree with everything else you said though.

> If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. It’s already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that.

I don't think he meant to say that women should be specifically discouraged from starting startups. And that interpretation does not fit with the rest of what he said in the interview.

He said it's "too late" for women at this stage, if they haven't been hacking since 13. What part of "too late" suggests that pg thinks there's more proactive stuff we can do?

pg's point is clearly that we're fine and the problem lies 10 years up the line because middle school isn't doing enough to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking, because god knows how the heck you do that. It's passing the buck.

FWIW, whatever point you are trying to make was lost the second you started 'literally quoting' PG in your post. As it turns out, changing a few words here and there and putting emphasis where it suits your agenda happens to be an egregious misstep in having empathy for someone's position and being heard yourself. Makes me sorta sad to see this behavior continue well after it's been explained thoroughly.

Your choice though.

This is a bit of a naive sentiment. Quotes, unfortunately, aren't always provided in easily-digestible form. This is particularly the case in informal, spoken-word interviews -- which seems to be the situation here.

Most people, when faced with questions they don't know in advance, speak in very ungrammatical, broken sentences. They interrupt themselves, they use the wrong words because they don't have the time to pick better ones, and (as pg said) they sometimes stop talking when the interviewer understands what they're trying to say.

If you're listening to these interviews, they make sense because it's slower, and you can usually intuit their mood, watch their body language, and figure out the point they're driving at. Transcribed without edits, it'll probably need a few re-reads, and you'll question their ability to communicate. I'd bet a lot of spoken interviews would fail the Turing test.

For an example of this, listen to a few random interviews with people who aren't in the business of public speaking on a news network, or tune in to a game and listen to the sportscasters. Imagine you were reading it exactly as spoken, and imagine how difficult it would be to make sense of it.

Thus: editing. It's entirely reasonable for a journalist to make small transcription edits for clarity. Readers get confused or irritated or bored if they need to struggle to make sense of the interview. It's entirely ethical if the edits don't change the meaning of the quote. That's what happened here -- but do we know it was necessary unethical? (As opposed to being negligent?) Well, as with the quote itself, we need to look to the context.

It's uncertain to what degree the nature of the interview was made clear to pg. He says it was clearly communicated as one thing, and Jessica Lessin says it was clearly communicated as another. We can't really know without seeing the actual communication between them.

If we assume that Lessin's account is accurate, and the discussion was intended to be used as an interview, then it's reasonable to assume those pieces would be polished up and pushed out at some point. It's also reasonable to assume the removal of "these" was an honest mistake, for the reason The Information gave; it referred to a group that pg didn't explicitly mention. It's also reasonable to think that the person making the edits thought it would be obvious pg was referring to female startup founders, since the question to which he was responding does explicitly mention it.

With this assumption, and since it was a different publication that raised the controversy, I can very easily see it as an honest mistake -- in other words, negligence. Lessin and The Information owe pg an apology for that.

Now, it's within the realm of possibility that the quote was altered intentionally, which would be highly unethical. But again, if they wanted to do that, they probably would have pointed it out themselves, rather than waiting for ValleyWag to do it.

For what it's worth, I call myself a feminist and at this point I really super don't give a shit about this controversy. PG isn't my favorite, and hanging this whole thing on a single word in a single sentence seems fraught. If that's his fig leaf, he's entitled to it.

Call it a misunderstanding, miscommunication, whatever. It's a distraction from the actual issue under discussion, the dearth of women in tech and what we as an industry can do to fix it.

Editing improperly is very bad form indeed - particularly, editing without telling the reader that you've done so, in the form of "..." for omitted text, and "[ ]" for inserted text .