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Comment by aneth | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much sympathy for the shameless use of breasts argument, as that's just American prudery.

Having featured only a few women for actual accomplishments could be a real problem - except that it can probably be at least somewhat explained with a few observations: How many women did you see at Startup School this year? I'd guess the number was under 5%. What percentage of successful tech entrepreneurs you know are women? How many women are in YC? Based on these number, women may be over-represented for their digital accomplishments on Wired covers.

I do hope that changes, I'm always happy to see women entrepreneurs, and Startup School attendance is by no means a valid scientific study, but it does give us some indication as to why so few women are featured.

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> I don't have much sympathy for the shameless use of breasts argument, as that's just American prudery.

Where's the prudery in Cindy's article?

> How many women did you see at Startup School this year? I'd guess the number was under 5% ... How many women are in YC? Based on these number, women may be over-represented for their digital accomplishments on Wired covers.

Actually no. Wired and YC both have < 10% women, far less than the broader tech field -- or society as a whole.

> Where's the prudery in Cindy's article?

"Your covers aren’t all that friendly to women on a regular basis..."

This implies that showing women with a sexual bent is somehow "unfriendly" to women, or that it limits them to being sexual objects, neither of which is true, and both of which are products of our obsessions and shames regarding sexuality.

> Actually no. Wired and YC both have < 10% women, far less than the broader tech field -- or society as a whole.

I have to assume you are trying to contradict me, although your statement doesn't seem to. The proportion of women in tech is higher than the proportion of women among tech leaders, which is what I was referring to. This is likely because women don't seem as likely to play the founder lottery.

>"How many women did you see at Startup School this year? I'd guess the number was under 5%"

[Assuming the author is accurate] If you go back to 1996 for Sherry Turkle you're at ~0.5% of Wired covers...i.e. about an order of magnitude less than the startup school representation if all covers were technology (which of course they are not).

Quick & dirty survey of Ted Talks tagged with "Technology" = 38/294 talks by women (~13%). http://www.ted.com/talks?tagid=1

To be fair not all covers of Wired feature a person. I did a google image search to check though, and ran into this:

http://mrmagazine.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/wired.jpg

...which seemed a bit more of a stretch than putting up breasts for the tissue article (albeit this is a back cover).

I more or less admitted that in my post.

I was curious if the representation of women in Ted talks tagged with "technology" was skewed, so I searched the Ted talks tagged as "business." 25/156 are women by women. Again about 15%.

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