Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Changes in technology education

People may also have different presentations or manifestations of the same types of talents, which may be more easily recognized or acknowledged in some cultural contexts than in others.

She finds this fascinating, btw. She's observed it anecdotally, too-- that her friends (mostly male) who are all STEM geeks, and most of them guys, tend to view her more self-effacing approach as a lack of ability rather than a lack of brashness/bravado-- all other things being equal, I mean, and her class rank/transcripts certainly show that if anything, she's MORE than equal. KWIM?

I think this applies across cultures too in that I find that Europeans and Far Eastern Asians (and to a lesser extent Americans) are far less likely to gauge their skills as excellent and that the ones that do are excellent. Whereas I have personally experienced (and have compared notes with colleagues that have had the same experience) offshore resources not only outright lying on their resumes but also self rating themselves much higher than they objectively turn out to be.

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.

That's probably why we have more female founders than we used to in the past, because the nature of the startups that they're working on is different. You don't have to be a hardcore hacker to start a startup like you might have had to be 20 years ago. It's partly software eating world, and partly that there's just more infrastructure.