If you asked college admissions officers in the 1950's what kind of student would be most likely to succeed, they would probably describe someone who was white, male, and came from a middle-to-upper-class background. Not because those kinds of students are inherently superior, but only because the vast majority of college students at the time came from this very limited demographic.
There's the same danger with VC. It's probably/hopefully an unconscious bias, but it's very tempting to want to invest in a "type" of founder that has succeeded often in the past - Young, white, male, Harvard/Stanford dropout, wears a hoodie, etc.
Every VC wants to invest in the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but the more we fixate on past successful archetypes, the more likely we are to (unconsciously) dismiss other possibilities.
It's my same gripe with the job interview process. Obviously every company wants to hire "the smartest, hardest-working people who are a good cultural fit". But how do you measure that in a way that's both accurate and efficient/scalable? You usually can't, which causes you to use certain heuristics which optimize for efficiency/scalability at the expense of considering everyone who might be a good candidate.
For example, the heuristic of using internal referrals for hiring works, because if you're a company like Google where everyone is smart, then smart people are likely to know other smart people, and since you're referring friends, it's likely they will be a good cultural fit. But obviously, in the long run internal referrals will lead to a very homogeneous culture, which can be good (everyone gets along) and bad (lack of diversity).
Easier said than done. First, how do you define "best"? Certainly personality traits like confidence are a factor, but it's naive to believe that men and women display confidence in the same way. So YC's selection criteria need to be updated to be more fair at identifying "best". Everyone on the team needs to re-learn all their methods of evaluation and all the processes need to be re-thought.
On top of that, there's a feedback loop involved. Women have traditionally been at a disadvantage and it takes conscious effort to dig out of that hole. The only way to fight entropy in a system is by inputting work.
Finally, your statement presumes that YC isn't already "funding the best startups". Obviously, that approach -- the status quo -- hasn't been fair to both sexes. For the reasons above.
You can't fund people who don't apply, and people can't apply if they don't decide to start startups. The goal of the Female Founders Conference was to encourage more women to do both, and as Sam points out, there is more YC can do in that department.
I think I have a different perspective on this topic than most here. My wife has founded multiple companies. I also have two daughters (and a son). One of which is very interested in programming. I'm older, but back in college and early professional life I worked with a number of women. Myself and my colleagues treat them the same as the rest of the team. There certainly weren't a lot of women, but we didn't treat them any different.
But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women. All you have to do is read some of the comments on HN whenever a topic in this area arises. From some of the things I read in comments I seriously give pause on whether I should push my daughter in programming/tech. Some women can tolerate this hostility better than others, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I really think the problem is with the attitude of the modern young techy towards females. I don't know where it comes from or how to fix it. But it worries me.
>But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women.
To the extent that this is true, I think it could be backlash in response to pushing for more women in tech.
My youngest brother's high school has a girls only programming club, and a girls only robotics team (with no male equivalents). There was also a program where kids from his engineering class got selected for a summer electrical engineering program, with preferential selection for girls. He really wanted to do it and he definitely had the grades and ability, but all 3 kids who were selected were girls (who had lower GPAs and lower scores in the engineering class.)
He lives in a pretty rural area, so there aren't really a lot of options for him to get involved in something like a robotics team outside of school. I would have probably been upset if something I was really interested in was off limits because of my gender, and I can't really say how something like this would have affected me when when I was 14.
If it makes you feel any better, it seems unlikely to me that attitudes have changed for the worse. I think there were always people who thought these things, and what's changed is that the anonymity of online commenting makes it easier for them to say them.
There are plenty of other categories of people who don't apply as well. What percentage of female applicants implies no prejudice? Where is this even coming from?
I question the assumption that the perceived low female application numbers are due to prejudice. It could be due to differences in the predispositions to excel at different types of work between the sexes. Men and women are different.
Why are so many professional basket ball players black? Racism?
There is an implicit assumption in this and its validity is assumed. It is not being questioned.
The correct default assumption is that any two individuals are similarly capable. The burden of proof is on the person asserting that they're not. The presence of physical differences between men and women is no evidence that they're differently capable in terms of founding a startup. You would need specific data to that effect that accounted for the confounding factor of relatively low female participation in the startup scene.
And look, in the very article you're commenting on, the people best able to to analyze that have decided that women founders are worth pursuing. I'm guessing they know a bit more about it than you do.
There is no evidence that it is due to different predispositions, and even if it was, that would not necessarily mean that it would not give a high ROI to try to coax more into trying. The only realistic way of determining whether or not they can get a good ROI on encouraging more female founders is to try it and measure results.
It might even be that it would be profitable to encourage more female founders even if they as a group under-perform, if encouraging them mean you attract more of the best of them, as well as goodwill and PR effects.
The upshot is that barring evidence that an effort to increase diversity will lower ROI, any sensible VC ought to at least try from the point of view that there's a huge risk of losing out if they perform well and your competitors gain a reputation as more diverse and modern.
If the result of trying is data to support that women are somehow predisposed not to make good tech founders, then there'd be another discussion to have, but your argument above effectively boils down to "it could be they don't apply because they're predisposed against it, so let's not even try"
>" your argument above effectively boils down to "it could be they don't apply because they're predisposed against it, so let's not even try" "
No the assumption is made further up stream than this. The assumption is that a 'low' (defined how exactly, compared to what, applying what rationale?) number of female applicants is evidence of prejudice.
I simply ask how you know. Id like to know what proportion of female applicants would indicate no such prejudice and how that is arrived at.
I also question the assumed 'correct' course of action is to prejudge based on gender in an effort to combat this apparent perceived prejudice based on gender.
This is a nonsense. It is a fashion. The likes of YC should know better.
They are committed to this, he says so multiple times. Much of the piece is him acknowledging that there are systematic barriers in place that are discouraging many of the pool of "potentially best founders" from applying, and they'd like to lower them so more people, from many different backgrounds, apply. Re-read the bit on "greedy in the good kind of way."
>Re-read the bit on "greedy in the good kind of way."
Yeah, that bit was clearly bullshit. The assertion is
"Some percent of good startups are run by women" => "we want more startups run by women [to increase the number of good startups, because we will earn more]"
This line of reasoning is clearly ridiculous. Only if A) startups run by women had a higher chance of success and B) the VCs had no better way of judging startup merit than looking at probabilities tied to the gender of the founder would it make sense to explicitly recruit more women for the sake of increasing profits. It is immediately clear that the only way to get more good startups is to A) recruit more people in general (not just people of some biological characteristic) and/or B) have better selection metrics.
It's not bullshit, you just misunderstood the line of reasoning.
It goes like:
Assumption: There is a population of women out there who would be really capable of running a successful technology startup
Fact: Not many women do, whether this is because of VC bias, or women's own biases from social conditioning or whatever
Opportunity: encourage more women to start companies that we fund, we will have a competitive advantage by being among the first to mine this under-utilized resource while other VCs compete for the best male-run startups
That is a fair line of reasoning, but it's not what I got from the article at all. What I got from the article is "How can we incentivize people who otherwise wouldn't found startups to found startups?", which is distinctly different from lowering barrier to entry.
I think sama is arguing for b.) better selection metrics.
Here's another model of startup success:
1.) Part of your success is due to innate factors in your team: who you are as a person, how well you process information, how much relevant experience you have, how well you get along with teammates, etc.
2.) Part of your success is due to how people react to you, which includes both 2.a) how well they consciously perceive the qualities in #1 and 2.b) how they unconsciously attribute qualities of other people to you, based on categories or groups you may belong to (like woman, black, old, big-company employee, Java programmer, Lisp programmer, Ivy League grad, etc.)
Everybody does #2.b - it's part of our brain's short-circuit judgment wiring, and we couldn't function if we didn't. In psychology, the effect is called "transference". However, sama's saying that they want to investigate ways that #2.b may be conflating the accuracy of #2.a, and the fact that an applicant is a woman may make them inaccurately perceive the innate qualities that she brings to the table.
If you don't believe that unconscious factors may alter how well you process information about how successful a person is, I highly suggest you take an IAT here:
