Actually by pointing out the degree to which women run things at YC it's closer to saying "I'm not racist! I'm black." 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.

And I do know something about groups working on getting girls and women interested in programming. In fact we've funded two that are partially focused on that: Hacker School and one of the nonprofits in the current batch. The reason I didn't go into detail about it is that I'm not an expert on the topic. I wasn't going to write about something other people understand so much better than me just to send the message that I care.

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.

You are judging particular people based on statistics that you think you know about groups of people. I don't think I have to explain the irony here.

Responding with statistics about women in general, rather than relevant information about those particular women, is problematic.

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.

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.

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".

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'.

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.

For more info and facts on unconscious bias and women in tech:

http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/ncwit_the...

Unconscious bias is the reason a resume with a female name is rated more poorly, even by women.

Sexism is everybody's problem. (Although as a guy who has benefited from it, I think it's my job to use that unearned power to reduce the inequity.)

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.

"While 3 out of 12 is not 50-50,"

http://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing

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.

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.

You're right, we should pay garbagemen and janitors more. Maybe that will encourage more women to go into those fields.

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.

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.

To put my experience in context, I didn't know a single soul interested in programming IRL. So the only way I could have come to it is from a deeply genuine place.

In my adult life, I've heard many men talk about their excitement for coding/programming at a young age, and it is almost always about the love of simply building things. Because building is fun.

Unfortunately, my experience could not have been more different. Reflecting on my thought processes at that age, I remember it being entirely about 2 things:

1. Expression. Nothing could have sounded more dull than building aimlessly-- I wanted to DESIGN. (My definition of this being "carrying out a specific communicative purpose through look and function.") I wanted to make a website that demonstrated my tastes and values to my friends. (Which is likely why I went straight to websites and not desktop software.)

2. Social dynamics. Similar but different to the aforementioned point, I wanted to actually affect other people with what I was making. As a young girl, that typically meant impressing potential friends and boyfriends. I had a poetry site at one point. I made sites for a fake band my girl friends and I talked about forming. I had tons of blogs. I really should have segued into games at that time, as that would have fallen in the same category, but sadly I did not.

That said-- while I know every human being is different, I was what you'd consider a "girly girl." So I believe the difference between myself and a young boy was quite pronounced in a stereotypically feminine direction-- which is where one should be investigating a subject like this, in my opinion.

[1] The most important thing about any relationship is that the other party will at least listen and consider what you have to say. People online (and spouses or girlfriends) who cut off without even considering are persona non grata to me. I wouldn't marry or date them and I wouldn't invest in them.

Can you share more about what Hacker School is doing to get girls and women interested in programming? "Hacker School is currently only for people who already know how to code," according to their FAQ, which seems counterintuitive to getting people (women or otherwise) interested in programming.

You're correct that Hacker School is not for people who have never programmed before. We are not directly working on helping people write their first line of code.

But we do help people, including many women, take the next step (e.g., we've had women come to HS as little as eight weeks after they wrote their first lines of code). Learning to code is a continuum (and something that takes place over many years), not a binary thing, and we help at just about every point except the first month or two.

We've also put a lot of work into fixing the leaky-pipeline problem. For instance, a female Stanford CS grad told us that Hacker School is why she decided to take a job as a programmer (she was planning not to go into programming after her experience at Stanford).

A few ways we've worked to support female programmers:

- We've built an environment that we think is more human-friendly (and therefore also more female-friendly) by having explicit social rules and norms that work to fight impostor syndrome and other fears and insecurities that get in the way of people's education (see: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment).

- We've awarded over $500,000 in grants for female programmers, which were generously funded by numerous companies including GitHub, Etsy, Dropbox, Palantir, Jane Street, Tapad, Tumblr, and others (note that Hacker School is 100% free for all students, so these grants are purely used for living expenses).

- As a result, Hacker School has been 30-45% women for our past five batches.

- We've helped numerous women (and men) move from being very beginner programmers working in other fields to being employed as programmers at excellent companies.

- We've helped experienced female programmers become even more awesome and progress personally and professionally.

Towards this last point, we're working on visibility and gender equality on the higher end. Here's a testimonial from a recent alumna who was already a pretty accomplished programmer when she came to Hacker School:

"Hacker School gave me a lot more confidence in my programming abilities. I wouldn't have even considered proposing a conference talk before Hacker School, but now I've spoken at LambdaJam, Strange Loop, and Strata this year! I had previously believed that contributing to open source was just too hard for me to do (big unfamiliar code base with no help!), but now I don't hesitate to make pull requests when I find minor bugs in software I use. The most important thing to me about attending is that you become part of this network of supportive, technical people. They connect you to interesting opportunities, help you when you ask, and support you when you're stretching to do something new."

I think increasing the number of female role models for women who don't yet code indirectly helps bring more women into the field. And additionally, many of our alumnae volunteer and mentor new female programmers outside of Hacker School, and many of them would not have been in a position to do so without the confidence, experience, and skills they acquired at Hacker School.

(Sorry if my response is all over the place; I'm supposed to be in a meeting now so this is a little rushed.)

Edit: Typos and formatting

In fact, one of the rules in Hacker School is that you are not even allowed to discuss sexist, rascist, etc things at all. From the manual [1]:

"Why don't we want public discussions of sexism, racism, etc. at Hacker School? For many people, especially those who may have spent time in unpleasant environments, these conversations can be very distracting. At Hacker School, we want to remove as many distractions as possible so everyone can focus on programming. There are many places in the world to discuss and debate these issues, but there are precious few where people can avoid them. We want Hacker School to be one of those places."

[1]: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual

The second paragraph was mostly fine but it did come off a little... unhumble. And humility is usually the tone you want when talking about how your company is doing good for X cause, but it could be doing more.

Up until about the 70s or so, racists campaigned heavily against interracial marriage. Most racists likely still hold these views, though after 1967 they are no longer relevant so you don't hear about it very often.

I do not recall any sexist groups ever campaigning against heterosexual marriage. Now, sexists have campaigned against laws that would equalize the rights that people in marriages have.

Therefore "I am not sexist because I believe that my wife and I are equals and should be treated as equals by the law" would be an analogous statement.

So effectively they have veto powers. This sounds a bit like "my wife runs the house, I'm only allowed to do what she lets me do." I know that's not what you mean, but you come off sounding too defensive in most of the essay. Stop playing defense with words, let your actions (or YC results speak for themselves). More importantly, take a step back to truly understand the problem and perhaps study some solutions that have worked in other industries.

Why do I think you should do some more studying?

Because you still make comments like this: "You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like. There’s a bunch of ways you can do it. You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon." You made a similar comment two years ago [1].

Because of statements in your essay like the ones highlighted by parfe in the parent post and by me in this post. These statements don't mean anything, they carry no weight, and I'm surprised you would think they do. All your best friends could be Martians and you could be actively trying to destroy every Martian on Mars, except your friends of course. One does not preclude the other.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256052

While I don't agree (really, I know virtually nothing about those women and haven't met them), I think you would find that many of your critics from the original controversy do think they are sexist and would say it to their faces.

He meant the post to be a statement of his position, not a rallying cry to fix a societal problem. You seem to have wanted the latter, not the former. That's fine, but it's not a failing on his part that he didn't write the post you wanted him to write.

That's a huge distinction.

The first three sentences of his post disagree.

He was accused both of being a sexist himself and of YC being sexist. I would say the "he is sexist" (for the sake of argument, let's assume that "sexist" means "particularly sexist" because it's hard to argue ANYONE is entirely innocent of being sexist) were pretty tenuous, but his attitude toward whether or not YC was biased toward men were pretty off.

This does a great job of explaining the latter, which I feel were a legitimate problem.

PG: "A lot of people outside the startup world seem to assume that investors have the same sort of naive bias ordinary people do when deciding who to invite to join a club—that they simply fund the people most like them. That is not true."

John Doerr, famous investor: "That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest."

I feel PG wants to do the right thing but is a little handicapped by his reluctance to believe that there could be something structurally wrong with Silicon Valley and/or the functioning of markets w.r.t. male white privilege. This leads to unfortunate gaffes along an otherwise positive trajectory.

John Doerr is saying that sometimes one of factors in making a funding decision is similarity to other massively successful founders, not the people making the funding decisions. PG has been pretty open about the fact that pattern matching to other successful founders is very common.

Thankfully PG does not actually take as extreme a position as Doerr. He merely downplays the existence of it in the VC community.

Are we really going to blame algorithms now for promoting prejudice? The reason sexism-related stories fall down is not because of lack of interest or due to prejudice, but quite the contrary: too much interest, causing an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, and a subsequent sinking.

This is HN. Come on, we should know better.

Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.

Either way, it absolutely does not apply here. HN's algorithms sinking sexism-related stories is a side effect. The fact of the matter is it will sink any story that has an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, whether it's about sexism, Haskell or the Church of the SubGenius.

This is the same logic as saying that encryption is evil because it can be used by terrorists to hide information. Encryption always does the same thing, it's fundamentally neutral, regardless of what's being encrypted. The same way HN's algorithms are fundamentally neutral, regardless of what happens to trigger their procedures.

If you don't want to apply a label to the algorithm, how about "Foo Bar's decision to run Algorithm X against Dataset Y resulted in consequences that predictably increased prejudice, so it would have been better if he hadn't done it"?

If that's okay, note that this is pretty close to what parfe said -- he's clearly upset at the fact that pg chooses to run an algorithm on Hacker News, rather than at the algorithm itself.

Let's assume that it's a bad design decision. Your logic behind it being prejudiced is still faulty, as it ascribes a fallacious cause.

The algorithm merely shuffles page rankings based on two criteria: upvotes and comments, both of which are user-supplied. The algorithm does not support prejudice, it simply behaves in the fashion it is programmed to. You're completely ignoring all of the mundane stories that go down due to the same factors, and cherry picking the ones about sexism.

Time for dinner. heh.

Don't blame the algorithm for the fallacies of the people using it. The only fault in your scenario is the PEBCAK.

All known halting program/input pairs are inherently a little bit prejudiced.

What you get is a small group of vocal people eager to discuss the topic while everyone else simply avoids the post. This is similar behavior to what is seen in a flamewar, but could we agree that there might possibly be a better way to rank posts that is able to differentiate between an important discussion that not many people want to have, versus a petty internet argument?

Sorry for being insensitive, but complaints about presentation slides mentioning porn stars (unnecessarily edgy IMO, but not misogynistic unless you stretch the definitions of freedom/dignity/exploitation to mean that all porn is exploitative), late night invitations to drink coffee and dongle/forking jokes haven't made me more sympathetic to having a debate about sexism in tech; if anything, they've made me avoid reading or commenting on anything related to sexism. I don't want to keep women who feel wronged by some event from retelling the experience, but most of the stories about sexism in tech I've read have made me form a pattern of avoiding sexism stories altogether.

I fear I might be missing insightful essays from women about their experiences (good, bad, and anything in between) in tech.

Stories by women* about their perceptions of the hostile sexualization of many work and conference environments are themselves part of the case being made that women are being held back.

(You would perhaps be shocked how many men share many of the same concerns, and not just out of solidarity with women.)

Ambivalence of the sort you claim and the concomitant disinclination to engage and try to understand things like the late night coffee invitation incident is part of what is holding women back.

I'm not* saying that you're actively choosing to make the world a worse place. Further, as beings of finite attention and lifespan it's quite true that we can't possibly pay attention to everything.

In your writing I do hear a bit of something that makes me thing you might want to understand what the big deal is, but it just hasn't "clicked" for you. Perhaps this is because you find the existing discussions off-putting, or perhaps because the things you read about are about situations that wouldn't be a big deal for you personally.

If you're interested in understanding more, I'm wiling to continue the conversation here or elsewhere.

Even if not, I'd encourage you to keep dipping your toes in the conversation from time to time.

The sexism-related posts have a large number of upvotes, yet they are penalized anyway by the controversial algorithm under discussion.

   * The Tumblr SJW PC brigade flinging poo
   * The people who wish the first group would FOAD, flinging poo
   * The people who have something interesting to say lamenting the existence of
     the first two groups, who wish they'd both FOAD.
   * The people who make meta posts about the whole thing.

I would have flagged it myself, but somehow I don't think flagging a PG article is conducive to my further ability to use the feature...

Its been very clear for a long time that almost all discussion about women in tech is as good as censored on hackers, which is a shame because its giving a lot of well intentions but naive people the impression that there is no problem.

They are unrepentent and relentless. Flagging the threads is the only way to defend https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments from horrible halfwits.

Tangent: if I am attempting to prove that I am not bigoted against group X and by doing so I point out that I have members of group X amongst my friends, haven't I made my point if they really ARE my friends?

Or is it up to the mob to define what "friendship" is?

No, having friends that are members of group X does not disprove prejudice against group X. Finding specific people of group X meet your bar from friendship, no matter how high that bar is, does not mean that you don't have a bias -- even potentially a very strong bias -- against people of group X, it just means that if you do some people have other characteristics that have weighed sufficiently in your favor to outweigh any general bias you have.

Perhaps you and I have different definitions of the word "friend", then.

I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.

I think the problem has nothing to do with the word "friend" but the word "prejudice".

> I'm talking about the pre-Facebook version, where they were earned.

So what? The fact that people in group X can earn any given position with you doesn't mean that they don't, just by the fact of being members of group X, start out in a worse position in your view. So, that people in group X may have earned the designation "friend" from you does not in any way prove that you don't have a prejudice, even potentially a very strong one, against group X.

The man accused described his black golf caddy as a friend. Of course, he was no such thing no matter how cordial their relationship.

Without information about the external constraints on your hiring, I'm not sure it would really constitute meaningful evidence (e.g., if the entire available employment pool was black, hiring only blacks wouldn't be evidence that the process you had implemented wasn't biased, just that the bias has no opportunity to manifest.)

(This is the kind of thing that would work mostly to burden shift, but then the burden would already, IMO, be on the person making the accusation from the start.)

OTOH, it would be very challenging (though not impossible) for anyone to have evidence that your system was biased against blacks with a hired-all-blacks outcome.

It is entirely possible to find evidence of things that turn out to be false. For example, you could take the seemingly chaotic retrograde motion of the planets in the night sky as evidence of the existence of gods with self-determination. We know know that isn't true, we have better explanations for that phenomenon (notably the notion of heliocentricity).

The planets moving differently from the stars was never proof that there were gods up there, but evidence? Sure, it was evidence. Evidence can be of various qualities, evidence of thins has to be judged critically, and weighed against the alternatives.

Facts which do not provide a basis for comparisons of how different values on that axis are treated are not much evidence for or against bias, this include facts about outcome (e.g., all the people I hired are black, etc.) without additional information from which the expected outcome in the absence of bias can be inferred.

Generally, in practice, one can't prove the presence or absence of prejudice on a particular axis. I mean, to prove its absence, you'd have to prove that your subjective assessment of people is not affected by their status on the axis in question.

EDIT: If one is accused of bias based on a particular example of supposedly unequal treatment based on the status in question, of course, one can always provide the actual basis for the specific treatment at issue, or simply rebut the factual characterization of the treatment.

Someday, the community can wake up and decide that witch-hunting is not a respectable hobby.

So why would Paul try and talk from his zero years of experience as a woman and explain how to get more women in coding? Why not simply state "Please stop calling me a sexist, I don't like it, here's some facts about sexism at YC and in the industry in general."

You're looking too deeply into this, I think.

That's what HN does.

I dunno. Allow me to share some thoughts as a young woman.

I had no problem getting into computer programming when I was young.

I had no problem getting accepted to a high-ranking university and graduating mathematics.

I had no problem completing a master's in computer science.

I had no problem finding resources for programming because they're already there, written by men and women. They just don't have "women's" or "for girls" written on the cover in large, brightly-coloured, friendly script.

So I don't really see what the fuss is about. Couldn't the low number of female computer scientists be due to the fact that not many girls are actually interested in such things? Maybe women can think and perceive what is around them for themselves, and don't need charities to show them the "hidden option" of programming?

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Addendum: before somebody jumps to the conclusion that I'm from a wealthy background, I'm working class, a humble chain-smoking serf. I'm from a bloody poor family and my CV has more bartending credentials than tech. I've never even dreamed of owning a current-gen Macbook, in stark contrast to every student I see these days, all seeming to have thousands of pounds worth of hardware without working a day in their lives. I've been using the same Linux machine for half a decade.

Libraries are free. If you're interested in doing something and you have the aptitude, you don't need to be spoon-fed by liberals.

That really doesn't help anything. Why are they not interested? Are you saying something in the core of being a woman makes them not want to code?

> spoon-fed by liberals.

Something something true colors.

We have different hormones, definitely. But different values and priorities? Different conclusions? I (a man) have very different values and priorities from quite a lot of men. Men often come to different conclusions than other men.

This is not a fundamental men vs women difference. People are different. Men and women are both people.

Such articles mostly repeat feminist/misandric boiler-plate amounting to little more than defending female privilege (e.g. no draft, longer life, many more opportunities to avoid having to work, better medical care, earlier retirement, more lenient sentencing for equal crimes etc, more social services, etc). I think a common term for this is "privilege blindness". Why would a thinking person want to read this again and again?

Suppose that you walk up to someone who earns $100,000 a year and donates 60% to charity, and you see that although he rarely goes on vacations abroad and lives in a 500 square foot apartment he does have a relatively new car. You then say "how could you? If you had gotten a slightly crappier car you could have saved $3000 and sent that off to fight malaria in Africa and saved someone's life! Do you really value that tiny dose of comfort above a human life?"

It may be a valid moral point depending on your personal morality, but acting that way is absolutely useless if not counterproductive toward the general goal of getting more money donated to charity to fight malaria in Africa.

I can see you are trying to help the subject and advance the discussion forward. I wonder if it would be more productive to instead just criticize point by point pg's post (which I think was decent), instead write what you would suggest would be an alternative.

You pointed to What about Girls Who Code? (http://www.girlswhocode.com/) and another one and mentioned how he has done no research. Alright, what about CWC? What is your research? Instead of just shutting down point after point in the original post, maybe explain why you think GWC or BGC is a better alternative.

> I don't think he should have written this post.

Then we would have seen comments complaining about "PG has has this incident in a while and hasn't followed up, that is so typical of such and such ...".

Being specific - are you suggesting more outreach? Overpaying to take funding opportunities away from others? Lowering the bar? Offering more coaching to promising candidates?

Even Seinfeld isn't immune: http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s

It bothers me unduly much that it has become a common meme that saying this amounts to saying "I am a racist!" That may be convenient pattern-matching, but if someone has friends that are black, that is definitely some evidence that they aren't racists.

I think this really comes down to pattern-matching and goalpost shifting. There are many definitions of racism, and conflating them serves the purposes of people on both sides of the argument, which makes it an anti-useful rather than merely useless term. When someone says "I'm not a racist, I have black friends" they are referring to the casual/common definition of racism, which is that they judge individuals as individuals and not based on their membership of a racial group. Under this definition, calling someone a racist is essentially saying that they have views that are sympathetic to the views of extremist groups like the KKK. Under this definition, saying, "I'm not racist, I have black friends" makes perfect sense, because it implies that, even if they have tiny biases against people based on race, they are at least not so strong as to preclude having close personal relationships with them.

Another definition of racism, used by people arguing against them, amounts to "everyone is racist in some ways, so it's basically always wrong to say you aren't a racist." (Obviously this is a caricature of another end of the spectrum, there are intermediate definitions) Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what. If this is the definition of racism you are using, there is literally no evidence you can provide other than to be black yourself to avoid claims of racism against black people. People who subscribe to this definition have had arguments with people who they believe to be self-evidently racist, yet who used "I have black friends," so many times, that it pattern-matches in their brain to "this person is a racist." This is an uncharitable view.

Having black friends or black family members is Bayesian evidence that someone isn't racist as it is defined in casual discourse, and I think it's time that people stop pretending it's the opposite. Similarly, having a female co-founder is valid evidence that you view females as having the capability of equal business acumen to men, no matter how much people dislike the way the argument pattern-matches.

Unfortunately, there is literally no way to be so careful with your language use to avoid this argument, because the issue has long, long since diverged from the norms of reasonable discourse. There will always be people on the side of "everyone is racist" who will just say, "He's just hiding his racist views by trying to use alternate terminology."

In some limited cases, even being a member of the group that you are accused of being biased against is not enough to save you from the accusations.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew

" "Within the logic of the concept, those who accuse others of being self-hating Jews may themselves be self-hating Jews."[14] Gilman says "the ubiquitousness of self-hatred cannot be denied. And it has shaped the self-awareness of those treated as different perhaps more than they themselves have been aware."[5]"

That is some 'next level shit' right there.

"PG, of the three female partners you mentioned, one is in charge of legal, the second: taxes, and the third (largely) of founder relations.

How many full-time or part-time YC partners actually advise companies on business strategy?"

I would estimate that, collectively, I have worked with Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica for upwards of 500 hours over the past 2 1/2 years. And I would estimate that 80-90% of that time has been on product development, business development, sales, customer acquisition, fundraising assistance ... I could go on.

Outside of our company, there is nobody who has been more involved with our "business strategy" than Carolynn, Kirsty and Jessica. There is not one part of our business that they have not been critically and deeply involved with.

(minor edit for grammar)

"That's good to know - I wasn't aware of that. I'm happy to hear this isn't the case, but I've heard this from YC founders many times which is why it was my perception."

I wouldn't have just told Charlie Rose "All Hail Jessica Livingston" if her role were just "founder relations" -- without going into the roles all the partners (male and female alike) play in YC, that simplification is way off.

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-without-their-permission-cha...

(1) First off, it's great that several YC founders are so quick to come to the female YC partners' defense, which lends a lot of credence to PG and JL's claims about the large role of female partners at YC.

(2) We all know that even the greatest product can be held back by poor marketing. I don't personally know the YC founders my friend above referenced (via my username), but the fact that some~many YC founders would think that at all, shows that there's a lack of good marketing/branding around how active and influential women (i.e. JL/KN/CL) are at YC.

The (positive) reality clearly does not match the (negative) perceptions.

I don't know what the solution would be, and you could certainly argue that PG/JL/et al. shouldn't have to "market" or "brand" this aspect of YC at all, but clearly this a problem, especially in light of PG's latest essay, the Information/Valleywag incident, etc.

And yet there is no sense of remorse or apology for that.

Where is the indignation now towards yourself and them? Or is that only reserved for people who are actually doing something in the world?

But my greater point was that there is generally too much criticism and indignation that are substituting for listening and understanding. Put yourself in the place of PG and YC in having unjustified criticism like you posted directed at them. And maybe take that to heart before you throw stones.

"Yes, I absolutely am sorry and saddened to have made JL upset. Again, it's been my understanding that while the female partners are great and I'm sure sit in on important decisions, they are primarily YC's accountant and lawyer. If that's not their main role at YC, I and others are mistaken. For the record, I think JL is /great/ and YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like her."

Based on my extensive experience with all of them, I would shuffle your words around a bit and suggest a more accurate characterization is:

YC's female partners are great and make and participate in important decisions. Though it is not their main role at YC, two of them have chief responsibility for YC's own finance/accounting/legal needs.

In hiring Kirsty and Carolynn, YC did hire other women like Jessica, at least on the "great-ness" scale.

And I wholeheartedly agree that YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like all three of them. Just as it would do itself a lot of good to hire other men like pg, pb, Robert, Trevor, Kevin, Aaron, Geoff and Garry.

1) whether they can actually describe in some detail what JL / KN / CL do at YC (hint: they're easily seen to be quite active, so one might wonder what's keeeping them so busy)

2) whether they ever bothered to arrange office hours with any of them to see whether they could be helpful (YC partners' schedules are oversubscribed so you can't expect them to come to you to offer help)

3) whether they ever drafted a contract or financing document during their early stages without consulting KN or CL (and if so, why they chose to make important decisions without the advice of experts who are strongly incentivized to help them free of charge)

4) whether their company survived long enough to need advice on financing, contracts, or founder issues such as a departing founder or bringing on a late-stage founder

I think that would help to clarify how justified the initial claims were.

Careful, you're not fitting the narrative these people want believe. But seriously, disappointed pg even wrote this. Just engaging with these people is losing.

http://youtu.be/VXbDJ3uBl9M?t=1h26m36s