I think different interests and aptitudes, not sexism, explain why there are more men than women in tech. Venture capitalist Paul Graham was asked why there are more tech startups founded by men. His answer was that more boys than girls are hacking from an early age. My 11yo boy installed Linux on his own onto a Windows PC. He thinks Linux is simpler than Windows because you can do stuff from the command line rather than dealing with a GUI. He has already programmed in Scratch, Basic, C, and Python. I bet far more 11yo boys than girls have done those things. When they get to college, more boys than girls will have programming and other tech experience, which affects their choices of majors.
YC’s Paul Graham: The Complete Interview Does YC discriminate against female founders?
I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. You could argue that we should do more, that we should encourage women to start startups.
The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.
If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on 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.
It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.
How can you tell whether you are discriminating against women?
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, for example, which is this big Python conference.
That's a self-selected group of people. Anybody who wants to apply can go to that thing. They're not discriminating for or against anyone. If you want to see what a cross section of programmers looks like, just go look at that or any other conference, doesn't have to be PyCon specifically.
Or you could look at commits in open source projects. Once again self-selected, these people don't even meet in person. It's all by email, no one can be intimidated by or feel like an outcast for something like that.
Ok, yes, women aren't set up to be startup founders at the level we want. What would be lost if Y Combinator was more proactive about it?
No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23...Like Mark Zuckerberg starts programming, starts messing about with computers when he's like 10 or whatever. By the time he's starting Facebook he's a hacker, and so he looks at the world through hacker eyes. That's what causes him to start Facebook. We can't make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years.
It is changing a bit because it's no longer so critical to be a hacker. The nature of startups is changing. It used to be that all startups were mostly technology companies. Now you have things like the Gilt Groupe where they're really retailers, and that's what they have to be good at because the technology is more commoditized.
