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Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

Why was gender chosen as one of the key attributes that makes you stand out? Why not where you went to school, which country/state you're from? Your family income while growing up? Your college degree? There are plenty of things that make you more unique than your gender.

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Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. This is just going to lead to repetitive and increasingly nasty discussion—as indeed it has, like clockwork, in this subthread.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because unfortunately gender matters when trying to raise money to start a business. Investors factor it in to their investment decisions. Sometimes they do it on purpose (i.e. Are you going to have kids? Will men in ___ industry take you seriously to do deals with or want to join your team? If I give her money, will she sleep with me?) and sometimes they don't do it on purpose (i.e. Misgivings of whether she can "lead", "be tough", manage money, take risks. More doubts than a man with similar or lower credentials).

Last I read something like 97% of venture funding goes to men. 57% of bachelors degrees are earned by women. So it's not like there is a lack of women who can set and accomplish long term goals and manage money.

Do VCs give women less money, or do women convince less VCs to give them money? Does personality play a role in your ability to convince somebody to give you large sums of money? Is there some kind of similarity between men that do not receive funding and women that do not receive funding? Interesting questions that would be worth investigating, instead of just accusing the majority of VCs of (even sub conscious) sexism.

Please consider this recent story on HN, One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks [1] (methodology: searched HN for "man" and took the first story, sorted by date). Count the number of comments that focus on the subject's gender. I couldn't find any. Contrast that to this story -- well over half are about nothing but gender, and almost all mention it. Why is that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27254719

I look on algolia for a thread which is actually equivalent to the one you posted, and I did find one.

Unfortunately it has only one comment, so it doesn't make the point I intended it to.

I can only submit my opinion, which is that "Why one woman stole 47M academic papers – and made them all free to read" would not focus on Alexandra Elbakyan's gender.

There's an actual difference between the headline you chose (and the headline of the article below) and the headline of the OP.

It's the phrase "as a".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125166

"Man" , in traditional usage, refers to any human being. "One man's x" is also a common phrase used to mean any single person struggling or striving towards a particular goal.

This is completely different to what is happening in this post, where the gender is being called out as an attribute of particular interest.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Nothing new will come of this, nor anything interesting—just more nastiness. We're trying for curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I'm not looking to argue for or against either side here, but:

"How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female founder" =/= simply referring to a woman as a woman.

"How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, male founder" would certainly prompt questions about why male is relevant, particularly more so than attributes like low-income, immigrant, dropout, etc.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Nothing new will come of this, nor anything interesting—just more nastiness. We're trying for curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Sure, knowing that OP went to Whatever County in State Foo would be so much more valuable to her target audience... smh

In her case, her gender clearly makes her stand out because men are statistically the overwhelming majority in the field. Someone who came from a trade school or an underrepresented state might choose to bring these points forward instead, to share their insights with fellow working class founders.

Female founders are less likely to be taken seriously and command high valuations by investors, because patriarchy.

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