Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Once again: after establishing bona fides by saying "fuck Vallywag and everything they stand for", I feel like I need to say that Graham wasn't hugely distorted.

He was asked whether YC discriminates against women. The obvious subtext of that question is that there's a large imbalance between men & women among YC founders. He could have said "no, we don't discriminate; I don't know why the imbalance among YC founders exist or exactly how to correct it, but here are some reasons I don't think our process is what creates it". He does not say that.

Instead, he composes a small essay about the roots of gender imbalance in the industry off the top of his head, and that impromptu essay manages to reinforce a lot of young- white- male privilege. "If women were going to be good coders", he seems to a reasonable reader to be saying, "they would have found coding on their own". But that's not true: it conflates affinity and aptitude with opportunity and support. It also conflates "living and breathing technology" with "ability to masterfully execute a role"; the correlation between living the life and ability to execute is dubious at best.

It does not help that Paul Graham has said other things in the past that also reinforce privilege.

"Privilege" is a dirty word on HN (I guess it makes me some kind of "nth wave feminist" to use it), but it isn't an indictment. Nobody is saying privilege needs to be rooted out and eliminated. How could you ever do that, anyways? The point is not to brand young white dudes with the word, but simply to recognize that it exists, and be wary about attitudes that reinforce it and allow it to feed on itself. That's the concern I have with the interview The Information published.

I'm not sure this is a fair assessment. The (admittedly likely butchered at this point) quote:

> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us.

In the very next sentence pg states that the lack of interest in young girls at age 13 is an actual problem. If he had some inherent belief that "girls just don't like computers" thing (ie, the great "male tech misogyny" strawman) he wouldn't cast it as a problem to be solved.

Once again: misogyny is a specific thing. It connotes an overt bias against women. That bias, while definitely present in our industry (and for some reason especially well-represented on HN) is rare. I would be shocked to find out that Paul Graham was a misogynist: it would not fit the rest of the picture that I have of him from what he writes.

But the absence of bias against women is inadequate innoculation against gender imbalance in the industry. It doesn't correct for bias towards men. That bias is pervasive. It's easy to see why: it involves saying nice things about people who do good work, and then simply generalizing it out a bit. The end result is a system of privilege for people who "fit the mold" for successful startup hackers.

It sounded to me like you took pg's quote to mean he felt was blind to the factor opportunity takes towards gaining affinity for a subject. If this were true (and his next sentence seems to invalidate this) it would mean he felt that women were less capable, inherently, of appreciating computers and programming. At the risk of splitting hairs, this would be a misogynistic viewpoint. This is the narrative these clowns want people to believe anyway, that someone like pg is a 1-dimensional cartoon villain who thinks "girls' brains can't code, what am I supposed to do about it?!"

It's easier at this point to just say what I do and don't actually think. I don't think Paul Graham believes women are intrinsically less capable than men. I do think he has a blind spot regarding privilege and specifically the way his reputational energy reinforces privilege, and another related blind spot about how that fortified privilege impedes the progress of women in our field.

Another way to put it would be, if Paul Graham acted personally as the hiring manager for every YC company, I wouldn't be too concerned. But he's not: his thoughts about capability and aptitude are filtered through the brains of hundreds of (mostly young, male) nerds.

fair point and well put.

> I do think he has a blind spot regarding privilege and specifically the way his reputational energy reinforces privilege, and another related blind spot about how that fortified privilege impedes the progress of women in our field.

I don't know whether I agree or disagree with this (mostly, I just don't know what Paul Graham thinks about what he hasn't publicly spoken of), but this is a pretty serious claim to extrapolate from, as you wrote, an "impromptu essay".

I want to see meaningful change in the gender distribution/bias of this industry, but it's a shame that conversations about this frequently seem to contain detailed analyses of a reasonable person's "controversial remarks". It feeds a fire that shouldn't be fed.

> "girls just don't like computers"

I believe* in something very similar – that girls have a lower natural inclination to computers and programming than boys have. Is that considered wrong or politically incorrect?

*believe = about 85% confidence

What does the word "natural" mean there?

That it's in the DNA. It's nature, npt nurture.

Nobody is saying privilege needs to be rooted out and eliminated.

I don't get the sense that you, personally, are saying such a thing, but a lot of the more radical, fringe elements in this conversation (who nevertheless seem to get a lot of air time) do seem to be saying such a thing.

OK, I'll just post what Valleywag excerpted, with the assumption that if any context is left out, it is in favor of the Valleywag author, with interjections of how I interpreted PG's words:

> I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. [...]

OK, nothing bad here, assuming that the implication is that there aren't many female founders for him to discriminate against.

> The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.

No argument here.

> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13.

OK, so this is the statement that reeks of privilege. And I agree, except if you don't consider what immediately follows:

> What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.

So my interpretation of this was that PG implicitly acknowledges that boys have a privilege here, a privilege to explore computing at the formative age necessary to become a great hacker. For whatever reason, girls do not have that privilege in today's current society, and so PG proposes, as an example measure, to overhaul middle school curriculum.

OK, so PG didn't have any great revolutionary ideas on how to fix the problem of privilege, but it doesn't seem that was his expectation for the interview. What he said wasn't full of hope and sunshine too: for women who are at the entrepreneurial age right now, they've missed the optimal time to become a Steve Wozniak or Mark Zuckerberg. OK, that should raise objections of ageism, but it's not sexism, it's a statement of the shitty situation that girls have when it comes to exploring tech at a young age.

And what PG says is of course biased towards the importance of technical prowess, and frankly, I agree. Would Steve Jobs be anywhere if Woz wasn't the batshit-amazing young engineer that he was? Not at all. And so when PG says the problem of few female founders cannot be solved by just encouraging women to create startups -- without the necessary tech acumen...I think what he argues is reasonable from a technical standpoint. In terms of tech startups, it's not just ideas, but technical execution, and Apple is the very best example of that.

So I think PG is right to point out that "encourage more female-led startups" is more of a feel-good band-aid than a solution. We want more female-led startups and we want them to succeed. In PG's opinion, that kind of success -- which is a major longshot for men -- can only come from expanding the early opportunities for girls to get more interested in tech and science.

How is being interested in something a privilege?

It isn't. The problem is, "interest" isn't the only concept he's talking about; he's actually referring to a tuple that includes interest, opportunity, and support.

> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13.

I am by most standards a successful founder. I was not hacking on computers at age 13. Why not? My family could not afford a computer at age 13. I got my first computer at 15-16 by essentially fishing it out of a garbage can.

How long did it take me to write my first C program? About a year. Why? Because I was the only person in my (very, very small) hometown who had any affinity or interest in computers in general, let alone programming in particular.

That is why that statement "reeks of privilege."

There doesn't seem to be a gender component in the situation you described.

No, because he's using an example from his own experience to rebut Paul Graham's (partial) explanation of gender imbalance at startups.

So? I was telling a story from my personal experience to try to demonstrate how that statement (in isolation) reeks of privilege. It does not reek of male privilege, which I'm admittedly less sensitive to than class privilege.

But imagine growing up surrounded by people telling you to "Stop with all that computer stuff. That's nerdy boy stuff. Boys won't like you if you're into that." Or parents who refuse to buy their daughter a computer for similar reasons. That is a story I've heard from plenty female engineers I know.

Does that count? I was trying to make my point more relatable. Sorry.

But if anything your own example seems to reaffirm pg's point. You fished a computer out of a garbage bin and therefore had some coding experience before university age. You found it on your own. PG observes that this is 'invariably' a quality of the most successful founders and therefore (presumably) one which he looks for in prospective founders.

Oh for fuck's sake.

Yeah, I'm not going to play Calvinball with you. Sorry!

I guess it was a privilege arguing with you.

To be honest, I didn't realize we were arguing until it turned into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y&t=1m18s

Before that I thought I was just sharing a personal story with you to illustrate someone else's point.

If you really believe that, would you be neutral on a law that forbade boys under 18 from using a computer? By your hypothesis the ones who are destined to be successful will circumvent it without penalty.

What you mean like an actual privilege and not just an inconvenience?

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