Female Founders Conference Live Stream [video] | Hacker News Reader

Female Founders Conference Live Stream [video]

blog.ycombinator.com

91 pointscraigcannon66 comments

Pretty cool lineup. Even just a few speakers in, it's clear for as much commonality as exist between companies and founders, there are also a lot of differences in how to successfully approach different industries. It's validating(?) to see how different companies' & founders' personalities interpret and make good on otherwise simple aphorisms, "be tenacious", "measure, achieve, repeat", "just start". I like seeing that different interpretations are in themselves successful when applied to the appropriate domain.

I really appreciated the insight by Poppy CEO Avni that pursuing your passion might lead you to think you know what you're doing and not be open to feedback, whereas pursuing a combination of curiosity and frustration is much healthier. Food for thought.

An important nuance between the idea that you should be trying to solve a problem vs your problem. Identifying your problem gets you aimed correctly and can be a significant insight, but if you don't accept feedback by dint of determined (unselfish?) curiosity you're likely to overshoot what is actually marketable.

I had never even heard of NIO before, probably because I don't watch Formula E racing. That EP9 electric supercar looks stunning. I look forward to watching the CEO's talk at some point (I don't have time for the live stream right now and I've probably missed it anyway).

So they seem to have the EV technology down. Their goal is an autonomous EV. I wonder how their autonomous technology stacks up, does anyone know?

More info here: http://www.femalefoundersconference.org

Was this advertised a few days ago somewhere else? It would've been nice to know about it ahead of time.

we'll post the talks on youtube after the event.

There are at least several comments in this thread right now that are some version of "I don't like this because it is segragatory".

Here's why I do like this: because I have young nieces, and I want them to have role models that look like them. I have a 12 year old niece that I try to expose to as much positive encouragement around her ability to create things as I can, and things like this are a HUGE help.

So good. I'm glad this exists, and I hope this continues to exist for years so that when my nieces start getting older, I can show it to them.

I think if you don't have daughters, or don't have young girls in your life, it's really easy to overlook how powerful the zeitgeist is. Music, movies, pop culture, business, everything seems to be wanting to steer these people in a specific direction, and if that direction is something you disagree with, it's REALLY difficult to get around it.

I'd love to live in a world where women were just equally represented at these things as a matter of course without making a big deal about it but until that world actually exists we need things like this.

I like it for exactly the same reasons as you, and I'll recommend some highlights to my young nieces. But at the same time I am struggling to figure out my own feeling that a good speaker is a good speaker regardless of race or gender (although a strong accent can put me off an otherwise good talk) so maybe I'm patronising my nieces.

The comments here have been weird. The moderation intense.

It is a valid question: Why does women organising together create such hostile excitement?

Perhaps it is an illustration of the need for such organising?

I am quite glad for heavy moderation on these topics, look at reddit for example, this kind of talk would quickly go off topic and devolve into mud slinging.

There is certainly an odd dynamic on the "nerdy" websites when it comes to promoting the under-represented gender.

That said, comments like yours (and mine) are only adding to that problem. I guess I'm a hypocrite.

Totally agree about the need for moderation. I am not complaining!

I am not sure how our comments are adding to the problem. We should not act as if there is no problem with prejudice and bigotry in society generally. Sexism and misogyny in technology in particular.

Why are so many so afraid?

Would they be afraid of a "Black Founders Conference"?

What about men tackling issues like work/life balance and getting connections to their families? A "Men as Parents" conference?

I am a long way away from San Francisco so I really have no idea what the ins and outs of the local culture are, but I see this same fear here. Not a nostalgia for old gender roles, but some sort of fear about being left out. It is changing, but has a long way to go.

I haven't yet seen any evidence of fear.

Not taking any sides, but this whole "HN is more mature than reddit on these topics" meme is wrong and out-dated. I mean, goodness, look at this thread (well, if you have showdead on at least).

Explain?

"...look at this thread."

If you go into your profile settings and turn on the [showdead] option, you'll be able to see all of the comments that were flagkilled. That will give you a better picture of just how nasty a lot of them were.

Thanks, I did not know about that.

I am puzzled by some of the decisions. Whatever, up to the moderators how they moderate.

If a comment gets flagged by enough users or downvoted far enough it gets killed, that's what's been happening in a majority of cases on this post.

If the comments are dead, they are not representative, in fact, they are clearly exactly what the community rejects.

And, in my observations, similar toxic conversations and people acting in bad faith are downvoted on reddit.

Who cares? My point was more that "at least we're better than reddit" is tacky. I don't think either of us are likely to objective make an assessment here either way on "toxicity of a topic on HN vs reddit".

>And, in my observations, similar toxic conversations and people acting in bad faith are downvoted on reddit.

I suppose I disagree with you there, as someone who hasn't used this website super much (about a year maybe?)and has been using reddit for about 5 years, HN seems much better to me in providing a longer, more concerted discussion. I didn't realise it was a meme though.

But that's just a personal opinion.

> they are clearly exactly what the community rejects

aka. "HN herd mentality." It feels me with sadness when I see the same trend over and over. People who have different opinions on certain political/social matters are being silenced by this whole "community rejects" bullshit.

Ok, forget "community" then. Point is, there is no agreed "The opinion of HN" in dead comments.

dead comments are not representative in general of HN since the downvotes/flags outnumber the upvotes/vouches.

That presumes all members vote & have down vote privilege: which is not true in either case.

depends on what you consider to be a member. If there wasn't a karma cap, it'd be easy to sock-puppet-fake the votes.

This is an excellent point. Sadly, people who share less popular opinions will (probably) never get to the point when they can start up/down voting. So the only way to get these "superpowers" is to join the HN circle jerk.

That's only True if you constantly make unpopular opinions, such that they outweigh your regular ones. There are all sorts of neutral comments that can be made, a point a piece..

> There is certainly an odd dynamic on the "nerdy" websites when it comes to promoting the under-represented gender.

There have been plenty comments here discussing the "why", and the gist of it is the concept of "under-represented".

The fact that I'm seeing your comment at all suggests they've improved in the last few years. This is the first time I've bothered to comment on HN, as a woman interested in the topic of "Women in Tech" in ages, because it was such a barren hellscape here not long ago.

As always, comments on stories about feminism prove the need for feminism.

> Why does women organising together create such hostile excitement?

I believe the primary reason is that creating similar exclusionary venues for men is considered ethically and legally beyond the pale. It's the kind of thing that tickles the "equality" bone for MRA types.

I had to look up MRA.

It is a shame that men's rights activists cannot spend time advocating for men in areas where men need it.

I would assert that is clearly not in tech! But in areas such as family law, societal expectations (fight, fuck and make money), violence, prisoner's rights... These are all areas that arguably men's rights are a thing.

Instead men's rights activists spend their time pushing back at feminists.

Sad.

Not really. "Exclusionary" venues like this exists for men too.

http://www.aamn.org/events/aamn-2017-annual-conference

https://www.naspa.org/events/2017CCM

http://blackmaledevelopment.com/about-2017-conference/

http://ndeo.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=893257&modul...

https://stopmalesuicide.com/national-conference/

https://directory.sdes.ucf.edu/article/3757

http://www.malepsychology.org.uk/product/male-psychology-con...

http://www.firstmensconf.org/f/Home.html

http://athomedad.org/convention/

https://www.partnershipfordads.org/fathers-conference/

https://www.fatherhood.gov/about-us/events/18th-annual-new-e...

This was interesting. Thank you.

this documentary was made by a female feminist. I found it very interesting:

http://theredpillmovie.com

Why do the topic create such polarized environment where any disagreement is seen as hostile and everything else must be in full favor? Can't we have a moderate disagreement in regard to political events?

Let me present a moderate disagreement. I dislike events like this because it can't be made universal. Let say we had a common rule that said: any industry has this bad gender segregation should have exclusive events for the minority gender. Given a 80/20 ratio, this would result in around 30% of all industries which employs about 40% of all people in my nation. A significant amount of events would turn either exclusive male or female, with the majority being exclusive male, and I personally doubt it would have a positive outcome on society. I am open to be convinced otherwise.

I agree that whenever these political topics arise on HN, you generally get the same situation - a few politically unpopular comments being downvoted to oblivion, even if the comment was well formed and wasn't snarky, unnecessarily cruel, etc. Simply saying "I think that this isn't an event that should be encouraged because X, Y, Z reasons", should not be downvoted if they provided interesting insight, reason, logic objective angles, etc.

And as we've seen in this thread, the usual few HN snobs come in making insubstantial points-seeking comments deriding how toxic all those downvoted comments were. I'm rather tired of how a growing number of HN users like to play "morality-police" on these kind of topics.

If anything I found your comment rather insightful, and it's sad to see it downvoted. It has an interesting links to the ongoing Facebook moderation debacle where their ridiculous "minority-ness" rules have been complicated so much that they can be gamed so that you can hate on a certain group because they don't score enough "minority" points, but another very similar group gains "protection status" from hate.

Come get me downvotes, I'm ready!

First off, if you want to see hostile excitement, go look at what happens when men try to get together to talk about real legal discrimination rather than just low representation. A skeptical internet thread is nothing compared to the protesting, fire alarm pulling, slander and career sabotage that occurs.

Second, people don't like it because it's special pleading, funneling disproportionate attention to a minority in the industry for the sake of the omnipresent boogieman of "cultural pressure". Of course coupled with heavy handed moderation that if you disagree, you're a bad person.

The fact that it is easy to get support for stuff like this is paradoxically used as evidence that it's hard. But coverage does not equal incidence, and equal opportunity has not lead to equal occupations in those countries focusing the most on gender equality. Thus the goal posts get moved again in search of a 50/50 utopia that will never happen.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14667704 and marked it off-topic.

Thank you for proving the point. Criticism must be punished, even when it's directly addressing raised questions. It is exactly these sorts of actions that create the "hostile excitement" OP was complaining about. Cause and effect is a bitch.

All you had to do was not treat the subject as sacred.

That's inaccurate. The problem is that people's passions about the hot generic things are so strong that they blast them into every remotely related context, obliterating the specifics that make a given post interesting. The term 'flamewar' expresses vividly how these dynamics consume everything in sight if allowed to. On HN we're trying not to let that happen.

> I'd love to live in a world where women were just equally represented at these things as a matter of course

serious question: why? what would make it better?

to be clear: i am not opposed (in any way) to equal representation. i do prefer (real, meaningful) equal opportunity, rather that homogeneity.

Because the only way that situation would happen would be if the sexism that's endemic to the industry and the country were no longer a problem.

> serious question: why?

Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14667456 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14667379

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14668250 and marked it off-topic.

if your problem is that the conversation has been had, why not remove/flag/off-topic the baitparent, too?

What if they are biologically different in certain areas, and they do not WANT to be in that area? Do we continue to force them into roles that they don't want to meet a quota?

I am not saying that is the case in EVERY male dominated field, but it could be in some. For the reverse, I have no desire to be a nurse or a nanny or a elementary teacher. I know there are programs to get more males in the first and third of these, but not sure it can be that successful. Because I have 0 desire to do either. Perhaps many other males share my feelings. That could easily explain the imbalance, not discrimination.

I think the end game to equality is to not have a quote for every single thing. Oh the population if 49% female but this job only has 12% females, it needs adjusted. The end game of equality is to be race/sex/religion blind in all hiring decisions. Literally hire the best person for each job.

Nobody is saying anything about quotas or forcing anyone to do things they don't want to do.

From above

> I'd love to live in a world where women were just equally represented at these things as a matter of course

What is that isn't the natural state? What if 50% of the people that want to do X aren't of gender Z?

How do we decide if we should do more to encourage X to do Z, or realize that Z doesn't WANT to do X, and focus on other issues?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14668250 and marked it off-topic.

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