What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women

Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by laurenkay on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @11:01PM (#8964258)

Thanks for unkilling, but it's pretty ironic that a piece about Silicon Valley being a boys' club was flag-killed. With HN's prominence in SV, I really wish this were a progressive enough community to at least acknowledge the existence of sexism, and realize why articles like these continue to get written. Getting past the clickbaity photo that was used (we can save journalistic ethics for another night), this was a relevant profile of one type of startup that isn't well understood by SV. I'm glad the moderators viewed it as worth saving, but I really wish this community didn't need babysitting when it comes to discussions on sexism.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by _tlf7 on Thursday January 29, 2015 @12:30AM (#8964507)

thanks so much lauren!! Appreciate you standing up for us - we were really upset this was taken off hacker news considering how deeply involved we are with this community.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by jdp23 on Thursday January 29, 2015 @12:35AM (#8964516)

Ironic but not particularly surprising. It's almost like there are a bunch of guys here who don't like discussions of sexism.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by SeoxyS on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @10:13PM (#8964112)

Curious, why the resurrection?

Personally, I found the post distasteful, though not enough so to merit a flag. I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright. I think that does the women in our industry a disservice and exacerbates the problem.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by smtddr on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @10:20PM (#8964127)

>>I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright.

This only happens because the problem is constantly ignored. Personally, it's clear to me that nearly every single time anyone tries to talk about *ism in tech it degrades into a meltdown of horrible and/or needlessly pedantic comments. So much so that the actual problem never gets addressed. No choice but to try again and again; focusing harder and harder on examples. I do notice though, over a wide enough range of time, the conversations do very slowly inch towards maturity. And just think, if not even HN can handle the topic... what hope is there for anywhere else? Seriously, if anyone knows of another online community of mature discussion comparable to HN I'd like to know. Right now, HN seems to be in a class of its own in regards to quality of comments.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by natural219 on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @10:55PM (#8964237)

Hacker News is no longer really a community for serious debate or challenging insights WRT non-technology subjects. YCombinator's position as a public face of the tech industry sort of requires that submissions/comments, especially relating to gender issues, be whitewashed to some degree.

The intelligent discoursers I know have all moved to communities like slatestarcodex, LessWrong, potentially-vile "neoreaction" sites (you can read Mencius Moldbug's writings for a primer), and other obscure parts of the Twitterverse. Your mileage may vary with any of these subcultures, and there is plenty of "toxic" content, but IMO the quality of discourse is vastly higher that what you'd expect on a typical Hacker News thread for anything not explicitly related to startups or programming.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by tptacek on Thursday January 29, 2015 @10:21AM (#8966573)

Just so I can be sure I understand this: you're suggesting that YC whitewashes gender topics off HN, so instead you discuss gender at LessWrong?

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by jongraehl on Thursday January 29, 2015 @11:20AM (#8966998)

Although I don't read LessWrong much any more, people always seemed willing to talk about their actual beliefs in depth. It's about as male-heavy as HN, I guess. There was, a long time ago, some controversy over 'here's what you need to do to get more women', which, as you'd expect, enraged a few folks.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by natural219 on Thursday January 29, 2015 @04:56PM (#8969115)

I actually don't read LessWrong itself, but I've interacted with lots of people and sub-communities that are associated with / spun off of the rationality movement. These were just rough pointers to directions I've followed to find higher levels of quality discourse. Ribbonfarm is another such community.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by webehere on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @11:39PM (#8964378)

Why don't we remove ALL *isms, and call them biasses?

"The X bias is Y, and from the data we'd expect a bias of Z, therefore the bias is D".

By calling it sexism, we make it a value judgement. By talking about bias, we remove judgement.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by irishcoffee on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @10:39PM (#8964183)

was in a class of its own.

religionism.

People here (and everywhere google is a verb) ignorance is not only implied, but encouraged.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by _tlf7 on Thursday January 29, 2015 @12:29AM (#8964505)

Hey this is [redacted] from the article. We are a part of this community - on hacker news every day - was sad to learn this has been flagged so much. This isn't an us vs them - we're all in this together. Hope by sharing our startup story more of you who were so offended by the article can see that we're just like you, hacking and hustling on a product we love.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by akamaka on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @11:19PM (#8964314)

I wish you hadn't unkilled it, because I ended up clicking on it.

I stopped reading and flagged the article after getting to this part: There is, though, one thing these two founders are missing, and it is almost the sine qua non of the fabled Silicon Valley startup. They don’t have penises.

This is trashy writing and flamebait, and I don't want to see in on HN. There is a vast library of quality literature on gender issues out there, and I think it's fair for us to reject articles that cannot rise above vulgarity.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by Alex3917 on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @10:12PM (#8964108)

It's pretty obvious why it was flag-killed, and not entirely unfair. But the reason I submitted this is that if you can get beyond the sensationsalist clickbaity sections then there are actually some good insights, and I think there is value in knowing how people who consider themselves to be outsiders perceive the world in general.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by jennita on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @10:10PM (#8964100)

Thanks for fixing that.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by empressplay on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @11:39PM (#8964380)

Thank you for unkilling it. It might be mildly controversial but so are many stories that get posted on HN. It was unfair of people to use the spam-flagging mechanism to try to dispose of it. If they have an objection, they can make an argument in the comments. Thanks again.

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Re:What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women by owenwil on Wednesday January 28, 2015 @10:11PM (#8964104)

Thanks!

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