Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VCs have a Gender Problem
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Obviously, VCs haven't fundamentally changed during the past couple of years, as the decline set in. If they failed to recognize the value of funding female entrepreneurs in the past, and still fail to do this today, then this factor is basically irrelevant to what caused the recent decline.
If, instead, the issue is that VCs, now that they are down, should be alert to broadening the range of investments to others that are clearly good, but that their myopia has prevented them in the past from recognizing, then this factor is not a cause of any decline but really represents a potential missed opportunity for them looking forward.
This, then, is a call for VCs to broaden their outlook as a way of speeding their recovery. That is a valid point as far as it goes. The person harmed by prejudice is not just the direct victim but also the perpetrator, who lives in a shrunken and less vibrant environment and suffers accordingly.
What VCs do in this area, though, will have little or no impact on the number of female entrepreneurs who are drawn to startups. The cause of the dearth of women in this area lies much farther up the chain, having to do with why women might be less drawn to get the particular technical training needed to become a founder and the like. Until that changes, whatever the VCs do will, in my view, have little or no material impact on this issue.
When undergoing testosterone treatment, many of these women say things like "I became more interested in making money and more career-driven" and "I understood math and science better."
Testosterone gives animals drive and aggression.
There are more entrepreneurs and inventors who are men because men have more testosterone. In fact, with hyenas where the females have more testosterone, the females are the more aggressive sex of the group and dominate the males. Women have some testosterone which is why there are still some women entrepreneurs and inventors but much less than men which is also why there are much less of them than men.
http://grok-code.com/37/famous-programmers-from-adleman-to-z...
But there's a massive scientific literature on the effect that testosterone has on both human and animal behavior, so you don't need an anecdote from people who take testosterone to come to a similar conclusion.
Even assuming that we're currently seeing a "decline" of VC, there were even fewer female VCs during VC's rise.
and then a bit further down:
"I’ve heard from the angry men, now I’d like to hear from the women."
Maybe he got angry replies from men because men always come out on the short end of his generalizations.
So basically, VCs are doing their job and asking legitimate questions about the commitment of their prospective CEO. Isn't this exactly what they should be doing?
What should they do, throw a couple of mil at a venture only to discover the CEO vanished into new mommy-land? Or worse, didn't vanish but stayed on at half productivity? I'm sure the people who's money they are managing would love that.
To see why this is a problem, think about the questions in the equally-valid context of a man. Are you planning to have kids? What if your wife has to move for work one day? Will go you with him?
(Incidentally: I know four very skilled people who moved for their wife's career, and zero who moved for their husband).
The notion of "new-mommy-land" is equally revolting, especially given the reality of "new-daddy-land" as I experienced it.
To see why this is a problem, think about the questions in the equally-valid context of a man. Are you planning to have kids? What if your wife has to move for work one day? Will go you with him?
They are perfectly legitimate questions for a man as well. The only reason they aren't asked is because the probability of a negative answer is lower for a man than for a woman.
Similarly, I'm often asked (on job interviews) "do you plan to return to academia?" You are probably not asked this (unless you are a former academic), since the odds of you pursuing an academic career are much lower than mine.
Incidentally, if you were a new stay at home daddy, I probably wouldn't give you VC either.
That's why it's lawful for the employer to ask about your academic proclivities, but flatly unlawful for them to ask women about family planning.
I think you summed your position up nicely with your last sentence ("... if you were a new stay at home daddy, I probably wouldn't give you VC either"), since we're not actually talking about new mothers. We're talking about an entire gender, and the generalizations you're OK with making about them.
P(me vanishing into academia) >> P(you vanishing into academia). That's why they ask me but not you.
P(woman vanishing into mommyland) >> P(man vanishing into daddyland). That's why they ask women but not men.
As for legality of employers, who cares? A) Legality != legitimacy. B) We are talking about VCs doing their due diligence with their client's money (e.g., my pension fund), so the legality of employers asking such questions is irrelevant.
What's great about your logic is you can use it to justify any discriminatory conduct. P(academia)? Hey, then P(black person)! They're much more likely to end up in prison, statistically!
Similarly, people who assume I'll vanish back into academia don't know the probability of this (it's actually quite low, due to the way the academic job market works), but they are making a best guess.
Also, my logic doesn't justify anything unless the estimated probabilities are large enough. Is P(jail | black ) anywhere near as large as P(misses work due to baby | woman)? Somehow I doubt it.
In any case, I'd really like it if you could explain the sexism in my analysis. Specifically, tell me how my conclusions change if you replace gender with other characteristics yielding similar probabilities. Or are we supposed to pay attention to all probabilistically relevant characteristics except for gender?
A potential explanation, then, is that fewer women have the motivations that cause people to create businesses. Given that men trend more towards risk-taking, it's plausible that more men have entrepreneurial tendencies.
The author completely ignores the most obvious reason for this divide: there are fewer women who enjoy programming. It is quite evident at Universities. The gender imbalance in Computer Science programs is completely evident. It makes perfect sense that this would translate into the business world.
Women tend to do the entrepreneurial thing differently from men and one of those differences is scale: Women often start small businesses ("lifestyle business"), with no intent to grow it into a multinational corporation. Women are still saddled with the primary responsibility of (bearing and) raising kids. My ex was career military. Prime soldiering years are age 18 to 40. That also happens to be prime childbearing and childrearing years for a woman. So women are unlikely to ever compete equally with men for military careers. Although I don't have much hard data, it seems to me that founding a large company (the type that seeks VC) is probably also mostly a young person's game. (IIRC, the average age of founders in companies that got Y-Combinator funding was in the low to mid 20's.)