Y combinator, X chromosomes
economist.com
economist.com
That is an ostensible reason. Another is to correct the inequality caused by societal pressures discouraging women from pursuing careers in tech. The other possible reasons are not allowed to be discussed here.
Where's the social movement to correct the inequality caused by societal pressures discouraging women from pursuing careers as coal miners? That's a male dominated field that is surprisingly lucrative.
Did you search? Because it's the first fucking hit on any search engine: https://www.womeninmining.org.uk/
Here's a comment from 2 years ago on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9227796
You put the "If" at the beginning of that sentence. It's a big "If". Imagine if that's just not true. Then just keep imagining that.
Partly because of cultural stereotypes. And partly because there actually are differences between males and females. The part that's because of cultural stereotypes, yes, we should fight. And the part that isn't, we should accept.
Yeah, I know, imagine that reality matches my imagination. But does it?
No, this is about the number of women who would like to be included but who remain excluded. That is what this is about.
And this piece doesn't really do anything about it. It very much misses the mark. But, of course, people like discussing crap like this. It can feel like they are doing something about it when they aren't actually doing anything at all about it. "Let's measure sexism endlessly, instead of putting time and effort into actually moving those numbers that we talk too damn much about."
The piece that everyone seems to fucking miss is that Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham were the original two and he soon brought on his previous cofounders from Via Web. So, really, a woman is about one half of the success story here. And everyone just ignores that while they bitch endlessly about sexism.
I will just leave this here for now:
http://paulgraham.com/jessica.html
Can we talk about something else for a change? I am really tired of this old saw. My mother used to say "When you point fingers, three more are pointing back at you." I would like to know what constructive thing this article, its author and the publication it is in are doing to actually fix this while closing their piece with Silicon Valley is a remarkable place. But it is time for the boy’s club to grow up.
You first, dumb ass.
(So I did go ahead and clean up that draft about Jessica and posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102279)
the economist is probably aware of the existence of female partners/co-founders; from the article:
> 6% of partners at venture-capital firms are women
> 40% of the top 100 venture-capital firms have a female partner charged with investing
Sounds like a great lead in for "Hey, didja know that one half of the original team that actually founded this is really a woman who kind of isn't getting the credit she really deserves while people run around talking overly much about Da Menz."
Furthermore, Y Combinator seems to do a fair amount of stuff in terms of promoting female founder conferences and participating in them, and they have a regular thing here on HN here lately where they do something like "Ask a female engineer." So the title is basically smearing Y Combinator for what all of SV is doing instead of actually recognizing what is going on here.
It is sort of like saying "We are going to hang the only guy in town who is not a member of the KKK because he is white and we need a scapegoat."
That's the title on HN. Where does it appear in the Economist article?