Silicon Valley VCs and the Gender Gap 375
fysdt writes with this excerpt from TechCrunch:
"An analysis of Dunn and Bradstreet data shows that of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms (as in Silicon Valley) were founded by women. Look at the executive teams of any of the Valley's tech firms — minus a couple of exceptions like Padmasree Warrior of Cisco — you won't find any women CTOs. Look at the management teams of companies like Apple — not even one woman. It's the same with the VC firms — male dominated. You'll find some CFOs and HR heads, but women VCs are a rare commodity in venture capital. And with the recent venture bloodbath, the proportion of women in the VC numbers is declining further. It's no coincidence that only one of the 84 VCs on the 2009 TheFunded list of top VCs was a woman. ... Additionally, it is harder for women to obtain funding than for men. ... historically, women-led companies have received less than 9% of venture capital investments; in 2007, the proportion of funded female CEOs dropped to 3%."
Time for.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm continually surprised whenever a gender related topic comes up for discussion on Slashdot. There is an awful lot of bitterness towards women on this site. Where it comes from, I don't know; but it is present across the tech sector. Considering how liberal slashdotters tend to be on most issues, this one really stands out like a sore thumb.
Re:Time for.... (Score:5, Informative)
Stereotypical interaction between proto-slashdotter and female of similar age in junior high and/or high school
PS: "Hi."
FSA: "Eww, get away from me, you little creep."
Understand now?
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the fact that this topic keeps comming up indicates to me that the femminist movement is desperate to stay relivant. they won they equal rights years ago, now in the western world atleast women have the same if not MORE rights in the legal system then men. ever tried to win custody o
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Hell, some women won't even let male OB/Gyns see them in the hospital when they're in labor. If that isn't out-and-out discrimination, I don't know what is.
Does it ever occur to anybody... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that if women aren't highly represented in these endeavors, it might be a sign that women just aren't interested in the same damn things that men are?!
Sheesh!
Re:Does it ever occur to anybody... (Score:5, Funny)
You've highlighted yet another gender gap that needs to be closed. We need to take stronger action to ensure that men and women are interested in all the same things!
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He must be from marketing!
GET `IM!
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You can laugh...but I've read articles on the issue from people who apparently hold exactly this position: that if girls and women aren't interested in tech, then we must find out how to *make* them interested, starting in the preteens.
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I'm still upset at the misrepresented number of pregnant men.
Seriously. 100% of females? I demand the government setup research to right this inequality.
Re:Does it ever occur to anybody... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that if women aren't highly represented in these endeavors, it might be a sign that women just aren't interested in the same damn things that men are?!
Sheesh!
Thank you! Finally, someone said it. I mean seriously, would it come as a complete and utter shock sending Jesse Jackson on some sort of sexist/racist rant if he discovered that there were no men in the R&D department of Tampax? What, no male editors for Womens Fitness?!? Gee, there's only one female master mechanic in the tri-county area near my home?
Some jobs are simply NOT appealing to women, period. It's not that they couldn't do the job. And I really get sick and tired of this kind of comparison being brought up every few months like we SHOULD be seriously worried about what gender sits behind a company instead of worrying about how good a given business plan is. The dot-bomb era was NOT because of gender imbalance in tech, management, or VC.
And don't even think about pulling the racist/sexist card these days. A woman sits in the most powerful seat in Congress and a black man is running the United States. That speaks volumes from where we have come from in just a few decades. Bottom line is if a business plan is sound enough, a 12-year old could get funding.
Re:Does it ever occur to anybody... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that if women aren't highly represented in these endeavors, it might be a sign that women just aren't interested in the same damn things that men are?!
The same argument has been made historically to explain - and justify - the exclusion of women from every profession.
The same argument has been used against those of other races and religions. It has never been far distant when the geek talks about outsourcing his work to India.
Microsoft seems to care about this stuff:
Women at Microsoft [microsoft.com], Women's Leadership Conference [conference-board.org]
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Or the IEEE WIE [ieee.org].
4% women engineers is not normal. I know, I married one, she dropped out of the profession not because of lack of capability or interest, but because of the lack of respect.
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I was going to mention Ada Lovelace. But then I thought of Grace Murray Hopper, and on balance decided against it; I concede your point.
Re:Does it ever occur to anybody... (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is not a problem with race, gender or creed but rather with insular groups of people who favor their friends.
They're not denying you a promotion because you're a woman, or black, or a jew. You're simply not a part of the good ole' boys' club. I, being a white male, would ALSO be denied that position, because I am not a member of their good ole' boys' club. Yet in that same situation, I would be the only one unable to follow up the discrimination with legal action. This is a flaw in our legal system. It is difficult to lay out any sort of law that would be applicable to this situation. What is the 'good ole' boys' club'? Well.. they're all white male WASPs, so.. they have everyone that isn't a white male WASP? No, they just favor those who are within or in some clear way connected to their own social circle. The colors, sky-monsters and dangly bits are completely incidental to their social grouping. You could be a mirror image of them, but if you are not in some way part of "their group" you are still viewed as an outsider and so would be discriminated against. People are upset about the wrong fucking things.
Testosterone (Score:2)
Women and men are certainly mentally as capable as each other, but I wonder if there's a chemically induced motivation difference.
Re:Testosterone (Score:4, Informative)
Google sez: testosterone+finance [google.com]
Conspiracy!! (Score:3, Funny)
>"of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms were founded by women."
Yes, we have discovered a massive conspiracy by society to prevent women from founding new companies. New evidence shows States refuse to give business licenses to women, especially if it is apparent it will be a high-tech company. News at 11....
Women in technology? (Score:2)
So there are few women in technology. Sad. There are few men in primary or secondary education, nursing, or child care. Do we care?
Re:Women in technology? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Women in technology? (Score:4, Funny)
Fat Camp.
Re:Women in technology? (Score:5, Funny)
cute, nerdy, female?
Choose two.
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So there are a bunch of dudes that you find cute and nerdy?
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That's because these days, if a man can't prove for certain that he isn't, he's automatically guilty of being a peadiofiddlder if he even thinks about doing any of those jobs.
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As expected (Score:5, Interesting)
If you believe that sociopaths are more likely to become effective CEOs, as has been claimed, then given that antisocial personality disorder is about 3 times more common among men than women, this is pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
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Oh, statistics, thou art a heartless bitch.
Men and women are different. (Score:3, Insightful)
Film at 11.
Apple (Score:2)
management teams of companies like Apple — not even one woman.
Well, it is Apple ... there's no *women*, but ...
More seriously, it's interesting, but has little bearing on anything. Anyone done any studies on the lack (or excess) of LGBT in tech or venture capital?
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...which is a terrible example because, as your link points out, she heads Avon, which is in an industry that's very well-suited for women.
A view from 50,000 feet (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I guess I should get in here before it gets really bad. I'm a PhD student who studies entrepreneurship, so I've read a bit on the topic of gender discrimination and difference in entrepreneurship. In fact, I'm writing this instead of working on the lit review of my research proposal. There is plenty of evidence that women are discriminated when they look for loans or investments. A good read is Blake 2006 "Gendered Lending: Gender, Context and the Rules of Business Lending" in Venture Capital 8(2) pp. 183-201. Basisiaclly, there are pretty large, statistically signifigant, differences in loan approval rates between men and women, after controling for a host of factors like education, business plan, experience ect. Plenty of women applying for loans for high-tech businesses were told by the banker to instead start more traditionally women-oriented businesses like salons or clothes stores. On the venture capital side, access to venture capital is heavily dependent on social networks, if most venture capialists are men, then women will have a harder time getting into these networks. The old boys network still does exist, and it's hard to break in to.
But why does this matter? The fact is that entrepreneurship is the only way that the American economy is going to grow. This is the best feature of our economy. So sure, I agree that women might not be equally as interested in entering the technical fields as men (though I'd say this is due in large part to implicit and explicit discrimination rather than anything biological). But we need all the entrepreneurs we can get. If women, who as you recall make up half the population, can't get a fair shake at starting high-tech firms poised for fast growth and export-base sales. we're doing the economy a disservice.
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But we need all the entrepreneurs we can get. If women, who as you recall make up half the population, can't get a fair shake at starting high-tech firms poised for fast growth and export-base sales. we're doing the economy a disservice.
Because we are not spending all the money? This is a crap statement, we would not be spending any more money here. The vast majority of companies that seek VC do not get VC. VC's really aren't leaving a ton of money on the table.
It is a VERY hard game to break into, beca
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Not everyone gets VC, and it's not an unlimited supply. The figures I'm looking at now from the Kauffman Foundation say about $230 billion in US in 2008.
But, I don't think there's any reason to think that firms founded by women are any less productive or good targets for investment than those founded by men or by mixed-gender teams. In general, firms founded by women perform worse than by men, but this difference goes away once you look at firms in the same sectors (women are more likely to found firms in l
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I RTFA(bstract) (Score:2)
There is plenty of evidence that women are discriminated when they look for loans or investments. A good read is Blake 2006 "Gendered Lending: Gender, Context and the Rules of Business Lending" in Venture Capital 8(2) pp. 183-201. Basisiaclly, there are pretty large, statistically signifigant, differences in loan approval rates between men and women, after controling for a host of factors like education, business plan, experience ect.
I have looked up that study and I must say that I find the statements h
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Okay. I'm a geographer too, and I like that article, so I brought it up. If you want a more rigorous study, check out Coleman and Robb 2008 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1260980). Right now it's just a working paper, but I think it's been accepted for publication. It's based off the Kauffman Firm Survey, which is a longitudinal survey of 4,928 entrepreneurs. It's get a crazy amount of data on all of them, like over 1,000 questions. It's an amazing resource, and even better, most of the data is publicly availabl
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That's interesting. I just finished a semester on consumer protection law, with a heavy focus on Equal Credit Opportunity Act and similar measures that are designed to eliminate, among other things, gender discrimination in lending.
A statistically significant disparity in loan approval ratings probably indicates that there are significant violations of the ECOA. This is curious, because the ECOA provides for considerable punitive damages for discriminatory lending practices. ($10k for individual actions and
But... (Score:2)
If 3% of "tech firms" and 1% of "high-tech firms" were founded by women, and yet 19% are primarily owned by women, that seems to suggest that women position themselves very well in terms of getting to the top of these companies.
In terms of founding firms, if one gender wants to found more firms --- then maybe they should just found more firms? I don't see how anything but the most abstruse and heavy-handed affirmative action is going to change that. ("Oh, you want a business license? But you're a male and
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Sorry, I misread the "19%" as applying to just tech firms, when it was for all firms. That sort of throws out that part of my post.
it takes time (Score:5, Insightful)
Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. People who get put in positions that they don't deserve, just because of their skin color or their gender might hold the title, but won't hold the respect or the credibility.
I know plenty of females that are competent in terms of technology. But the ones who are in leadership positions right now started out in tech 20+ years ago. They were the first wave. Now, we have more females in the general ranks, and they will filter their way up. But it takes time.
Force-feeding gender equality in a meritocracy won't work. They have to earn it just like everyone else. And when they do, no one will blink an eye or care, because everyone will think they deserve it.
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Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.
I wonder.
Sloan Dean David Schmittlein was interviewing Douglas Leone, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and Sloan alum. Leone was dispensing advice about entrepreneurism when he let slip a remark that made me do a double take.
Leone told the audience that Sequoia focuses on younger entrepreneurs because people over 30 aren't innovative. As a consolation prize, Leone said that the over-30 crowd could still make decent managers.
The tendency of the social me
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VC, company forming etc are off the well beaten path. No won
Crypto-paternalism (Score:2)
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Stop and ask yourself why they wouldn't voluntarily choose to enter the field. Could it be that gender-biased parenting and social norms influenced them not to pursue that path? If so, maybe we should be re-evaluating how we treat our children.
Socialized gender differences aren't harmless. Do you think it's a good thing that most anorexics are female and most rapists are male? If women didn't develop eating disorders and men didn't rape, these horrible things would happen probably 90% less often in our soci
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Carli Fiorina (Score:2)
I'm trying to come up with something witty to say, but the only woman CEO that comes to mind is Carli Fiorina. That worked out well for HP...
Re:Carli Fiorina (Score:4, Interesting)
Carli Fiorina was such a hugely pathetic failure at HP not because she is a woman, but because she zero engineering expertise (degrees in philosophy, medieval history and business if I'm remembering correctly). Apple found out the same thing when they hired John Scully to be CEO. Total fail. When non-engineers try and run tech companies, there seems to be a *much* higher probability of failure.
Carol Bartz. (Score:2)
Carol Bartz. CEO of Autodesk, where she did well, then Yahoo, where she inherited a mess and isn't doing too well so far.
Division of labor (Score:4, Interesting)
Most comments seem to be from the outside looking in, looking from the big picture to the small.
Try a different strategy. Look at the small picture and imagine it replicated a zillion times.
So, the wife and I serve the evil empire at our corporate jobs. Due to gender quotas, etc, she's pretty much untouchable at a big enough corporation in her technical field. The only way it could be better for my wife, is if she were a minority. Me, I'm just another off the shelf white male tech dude. Which of us should stay in the corporate world to haul down some cash and (more importantly) health insurance? The replaceable cog in the machine man, or the quota'd fire-proof woman? Obviously the least risky solution is she keeps her day job, he forms the new company.
Multiply by roughly 10000x and you get the reported numbers. No great surprise, really.
Re:Division of labor (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see: Females being elevated and at the same time protected by a large number of disposable males? Sounds like a recurring pattern in nature.
I'm not that surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
I do some "Angel" investing on occasion (I'm not at VC stage yet), meaning that I invest some of my money in promising startups. As much as it may seem that "the kids" have all the tech-saavy and good ideas, I look for startups that are lead by people with fairly extensive experience in both "tech" and business. That means that I'd be hard pressed to put my hard-earned money into a new company that's being run by a 25-year-old who is probably right out of college and has never run a business before. Now, I know that many of the great companies were started by kids with no business experience and I'm probably missing out on a good thing here. However, when I am presented with two competing proposals of otherwise equal potential where the difference is that one company is lead by a kid with no "real-world" experience and the other is lead by someone who's been in the field for 10-20 years, has run other businesses (even failed ones), I'll probably go for the experience - if all other factors are equal. In fact, I believe the youngest person I've ever funded was around 33 at the time.
So, how does this fit in with the gender issue? I've been in the IT field since 1984 and I can tell you that girls were almost entirely absent from my field. What this means in terms of total experience today is that those in the high-tech field with the most experience tend to be predominately men. It would also follow that those with enough experience in their field who are seriously ready to both run a business that requires funding at the VC-level (i.e. millions of dollars) and have enough of a portfolio and background to attract VC would tend to be predominately men. Think about the ages of people running *most* large, successful companies; they tend to be in their 50's or older. Look back at how many women were in the workforce, getting management and "technical" experience in the 70's and 80's. Keeping in mind that during that time women really didn't have the same opportunities as men in the workplace and they tended toward more "traditional" positions - thus further reducing their potential experience in roles that would lead to high-level executive positions.
Is this *fair* to women? Not really. They've always had to fight harder to be accepted into non-traditional roles in business. Is it *fair* to men for women to get moved into positions of authority simply because there aren't enough women in positions of authority? No. However, as someone who puts my money out there on the line, I'm looking for the best chance of a return that I can find. I don't care about the race, creed, color or gender of who's leading the company. I care about their chances of leading the company to success and my getting a return on my investment. Generally that will tend to lean toward those with experience, and in the technical fields that *tends* to be populated with males.
Now, I'm always on the lookout for the exceptions...
How about we fix the homelessness gap first? (Score:5, Insightful)
Homeless men greatly outnumber homeless women.
Or how about fixing the died-on-the-job-gap, too?
Men die more often on the job.
Focusing on those few men that have been wildly successful is silly when so many other men are used and thrown away.
Which would be better: high-IQ women working or (Score:2)
raising half a dozen children and later helping out with the grandchildren? On average, raising those children will have a bigger impact on society than spending her reproductive years on a career.
If you wanted to cripple Western Civilization you could convince most of the smart women that they had to have careers, weigh down the middle class with taxes to curtail family size there, and give welfare to everyone else. Many people will beat the odds and more than a few trust fund brats will disappoint, but
Men are Riskier (Score:5, Interesting)
Venture capitalists are risktakers. Tech top execs are risktakers. Overall execs are risktakers. Taking risks tends to send people to the extremes of their groups, bigger winners or bigger losers. Men tend to be at the top of professions, but also at the bottom, and in the lowest jobs, and without income at all. Men are much more likely to be injured by their jobs, to have risky jobs, and live shorter lives.
Women tend to take fewer and less extreme risks, and tend to be in the middle of achievement, but more reliably achieve minimum standards of living.
Biologically men are more expendable. Aggression gets more rewards, but it also takes more damage. The limiting factor on human population growth is the number of women, while even one man can produce an entire generation among all the women.
There are social conventions held over from less developed societies that work to hold women back. And the bias towards training men to take risks and be expendable is an unfair gender bias now that the biological value isn't what determines social value.
So long as risktaking is so different between men and women, rewardtaking is going to be similarly different. We could get closer to our inherent value regardless of gender's arbitrary constraints if we stopped ignoring the gender behavior that we are free to change, but don't, that affects success. And if we stopped ignoring the costs to either gender that come with either the achievement or the risktaking that underlies it.
Seems like a goldmine actually ... (Score:2)
So, Dunn & Bradstreet reports that 19% of all companies in all industries are run by women.
And then it tells us 3% of tech firms were founded by women.
And then it tells us that 1% of high-tech firms "as in Silicon Valley" were founded by women.
Finally, it tells us that 9% of Venture Capital investments go to women-led companies (in some nebulous undefined "historical" time period) and for 2007 the figure is 3%.
Let's see here ... 1% women led companies in Silicon Valley. 3% of VC funding.
1%. Hmmm.
3%. Hmm
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I'm a man, I don't have venture capital, so I don't care. If women want more venture capital, its not my issue.
You should care because the only way to make this work (without further using tax dollars and programs [slashdot.org] to forcibly put women in these positions) is to do one thing: should you successfully reproduce and should your progeny have the XX sex chromosomes then it is up to you to ensure that said progeny have equal support from you to pursue desires in sports and technology ... and any other male dominated profession. As lame as this sounds, equality at home from birth produces equality everywhere.
Do not en
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Barbies? Yugh. If I have a daughter and she's not programming by the age of 10, I'm going to disown her.
On a more serious note, I hope that this changes soon. Keep in mind that we're still coming off the tail end of the "Math is hard!" generation. It'll take a while, but I'm confident as the new generation grows up, we'll get there.
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Bit late. Mine was programming at 8 and this was back in 1986 :) Now she's working for a small company as a DBA/support person and getting ready to fly out of the country to help set up a call center for the company.
[John]
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Barbies? Yugh. If I have a daughter and she's not programming by the age of 10, I'm going to disown her.
Translation: "I don't give a fuck what my daughter actually wants. She is, after all, only a FEMALE. She will do what daddy wants her to do."
Thank God you're only dreaming about what you'd do IF you had children. Please, never have any.
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Aluminumy. It's like irony, but lighter.
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I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I'd have a double standard based on gender. If my son isn't programming by the age of 10, I'll disown him, too. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it's good to be the daddy.
In fact, as I sit here typing this, I'm eying my nine-year-old dog and thinking, "You know, he hasn't produced any useful code lately..."
Pah, they are fine at that age (Score:3, Funny)
Girls are fine at that age, it is when they start dating that their IQ drops to room temperature. But I got a cunning plan: I just forbid my daughter to date! That will work right? I mean teengirls do listen to their father right? Right???
Re:Why should I care? (Score:4, Insightful)
Allow them to be interested in what they want, if they are interested in areas that are considered female and not tech or sports etc, let them. Then again getting parenting advice from slashdot is pretty bad :)
Re:Why should I care? (Score:5, Insightful)
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We'll agree there are too many white guys, and it's a good ole boys club.
I'd rather have a CEO that was competent, having watched so many steer a ship into the docks or simply capsize it.
I'd rather have a CTO that had guts (balls, tits, doesn't matter) than one that will simply cave to a PHB because of the mortgage, blah blah blah.
The skills require a lot of talent. The fact that stockholders can't put their fingers around executive management's throats is another problem. People are hunter gatherers and th
Re:Why should I care? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're not part of the old boy network, your gender doesn't really matter.
I mean nepotism is still nepotism.
Re:Why should I care? (Score:4, Insightful)
We must disagree.
You can ignore history if you want, and try to rationalize away the fact that minorities don't make it to the directors and boards of major corporations because they were unqualified.
I believe in choosing the best person for the job. In reality, what happens is that people also choose people that they're comfortable with. For a long time in the boardroom, that meant caucasians and not non-caucasians. Only in the past decade has that changed.
The US elected a president of color. It showed how things have changed. Yet when you travel to conferences, trade shows, conventions, people of color are often absent.
Racism is favoring one race or another to the detriment of another. This is still done today. The holy-of-holies in Silicon Valley are just as contemptuous in this regard as the boneheads in Birmingham Alabama or the stars-and-bars wavers in Columbia SC.
There is no neutrality, no color-blind world as you see it. Instead, people use subtle cultural inclusion and exclusion cues to be around those that they want to be. Integration is tough, and it takes courage, and the simple count of people of color in top management at Fortune 500s will tell you the truth about who wishes to hire whom. Call it racially unbalanced statistics, but the epithet of calling it racism is a lie.
Re:Why should I care? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think that these ridiculously high paying jobs require no skills and nothing other than a buddy from the tennis club downtown, then why aren't you doing that?
Speaking for myself: because I have no desire to. The hours suck, the non-skills are schmoozing and making small-talk with small-minded ignoramuses, and while the financial rewards are considerable the lifestyle is hollow and dull.
I ran my own company for quite a few years, and saw very clearly from my clients and partner companies that on average the higher up the food chain you went the less it mattered what you know and the more it mattered who you know. If "knowing the right people" and "fitting in with an unbelievably dull and ignorant social set" can be considered skills then I'll grant you these jobs require skill: the skills of a self-interested political manipulator, perhaps.
But the fact remains that in my current position I could do everything the company president does (I know this because I was the president of my own company and have worked in senior management at companies larger than my current employer) while he could not do a single aspect of my job.
Ergo, the GP's point is correct: CXO jobs require little to no actual skill, as the term is generally used. Or rather, to do them well does require skill and talent, but the majority of the occupants of these positions today are unskilled and talentless, which explains the dismal state of America's once-great corporations.
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Perhaps because he doesn't have a buddy from the tennis club downtown, isn't a member of the right country club, and didn't go to the right school/fraternity?
F
Be realistic. Society matters (Score:5, Insightful)
No man is an island. These stereotypes exist whether I like it or not. I have an 18 month old son we are about to have a daughter.
I'm not about to teach my son to play with girl oriented toys like dolls etc. or dress him in dresses. Regardless of what I believe, he would be the one to suffer if I did. He would be teased. He would be ostracised. He would be beaten up. I'm not going to change society as a whole just by making my own house rules that do not fit in. Me and mine would just be labelled weird.
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Really?
This is pointless.
Compete on a fair and equal level or stfu and go home.
Nobody gives a damn that women are not ceo's of it companies, if it was a concern to them they'd have built their own firms but it's not so drop it.
My gender plays no role in forming a company, a lot of other real life factors occur, the tree hugging moronic hippies that think "equality" is solved by making unlevel playing fields are completely lost at step 1.
Re:Why should I care? (Score:4, Insightful)
The other solution is that people are installed that might not be the most qualified person but present the equally valuable diverse viewpoint in decisions and products. Not everyone values this as highly as I do and I understand that it upsets people when companies and governments try to make equal opportunity employment quotas.
So you're saying that women are different, think different and behave differently and that that specific diversity is valuable and should be considered when appointing humans to fulfil working responsibilities.
Yet at the same time I sense you are against recruitment discrimination based on gender.
Either it is irrelevant to be a woman and all appointments should be based upon qualification, competance, skills etc or gender is relevant and the appointment process should factor in gender wherever it can be shown that aptitude statistically divides along gender lines.
I don't think you can realistically ask to have it both ways.
For myself I think gender is irrelevant. I have recruited, subsequently trained and long worked with a number of both men and women in IT workplaces. Some were great. Some were not. I never felt it useful to factor in their gender when estimating their abilities, professionalism and usefulness.
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Or gender is relevant but only as a proxy for directly relevant skills, and we should attempt to discriminate according to those skills directly, rather than by the proxy of gender. The problem with that approach, if you would call it a pr
Make it work? Perhaps it is? (Score:5, Insightful)
You should care because the only way to make this work...
What do you mean "make it work"? Perhaps it already is? As far as I can see the ONLY data backed evidence in the article is that more men than women get VC dollars and that the women are equally, if not better, qualified. This is NOT evidence of sexism and could be easily due to the fact that women may find the high pressure and huge work load of starting up a company less appealing than men. This could even be viewed as a sign of superior intelligence!
All I'm saying is that perhaps, for the most part, stereotypes have been greatly relaxed (although there are still some throw-backs out there) and what we are seeing is the result of those relaxed stereotypes. We do know that there are differences between the genders so it should not be surprising that this results in differing levels of interest for different types of job. What we have to care about is ensuring equal opportunity for all and not worrying about differing take-up. While the article does conjecture about that there is no evidence to support those conjectures.
Re:Why should I care? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why should I care? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not necessary to masculinize girls to get them to grow up with a sense of equality. Don't force Barbie dolls on kids, but don't deny them either.
I am a computer scientist/engineer, I'm a woman, and I had Barbies, Kens, Skippers, Barbie's van, airplane, car, plus a giant disembodied Barbie head hair styling thing... I also had legos, lincoln logs, rubick's cubes, Lone Ranger toys, and Gumby toys. More importantly, I had books - Pippi Longstocking, Ayn Rand, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and Isaac Asimov. Most importantly, I was never told I couldn't do something because I'm a girl (or for any other reason). I was allowed to explore any (feasible) pursuit my heart desired - horseback riding, little league cheer leading, art, hiking, science, math, electronics, gymnastics, carpentry, riflery, linguistics, and computing.
I wasn't raised to be a girl.
I wasn't raised to be a boy.
I wasn't raised to be a androgynous political statement.
I was raised to be a person. As a result, I can put on heels and a miniskirt and go out for a romantic night on the town, and get up the next day, toss on a backpack and go explore the wilderness for a week without a shower, makeup, or cell phone.
I agree: Equality starts at home. It's the whole package - what you give your kids, what you tell your kids, what you teach your kids, and, most importantly, what you show your kids. You are the most important role model in their lives.
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As lame as this sounds, equality at home from birth produces equality everywhere.
Childless, eh? My mom grew up in a log cabin, got the hell out of the poverty, went to college, and ended up being responsible for the communications network of a major railroad. My wife's a surgeon. My sisters have positions of responsibility in their fields. Frankly, the idea of women as somehow inferior is just foreign to me.
I have two daughters. One plays softball on a year-round team, spends her free time drawing and animating cartoons with Scratch [mit.edu] (without me suggesting it - I just showed it to her on
Re:America is already screwed up (Score:5, Insightful)
You and I will have to agree to disagree and instead I'll address the people reading this thread: this person is who you and your children have to deal with. They're not always men and sometimes they're as innocuous as writers for sitcoms and television showing that women should play the subservient role in any relationship or else it will fall apart. Your wife might make more than you, deal with it.
If you have a daughter, she's going to interface with daughters of the above attitude and it's going to be very trying for your child not to strive to make the cheer leading squad. I'ts going to be hard if she wants to sit at a computer and code up her ideas with her peers expressing this gold standard of high school politics. It's going to be hard like it was hard for me to shirk off sports and instead embrace music and computers. My friends were few but they're still my friends and, hey, we're all lucratively employed. I don't know about the football team and frankly could care less. Sports are great and staying in shape is crucial to your health and well being but the second you step off that field the real parts that matter in your life begin. In the classroom. You're entertainment when you're on the field. It might get you laid in high school but it won't get you employed later in life.
Teach your children to poke holes through arguments that rely on name calling like "gayboys" and try to enforce alpha male hierarchy. These are values and ideals that are, in my humble opinion, vital to success and acceptance. It's your choice to instill them firmly in your children.
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Bottom line is, you have no sense of respect for ages old cultural values, and you want to experiment. You don't like anything about the "status quo", and you think a different status would be better. All of this, despite the fact that you have NO EVIDENCE to support your new status.
What do you envision, precisely? That the population is divided evenly, with 50% males, and 50% females, and both sexes equally represented in ALL professions, hobbies, avocations?
While you are engaged in your social engineer
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At the moment, there is heavy social pressure to conform to the ideal, and deviations are often treated as horrible aberrations rather than honest differences. I think it is a good parent's job to try and discern whether their daughters really want to play with Barbies or are being made to want it, and whether their sons really want to play with their GI Joes. What is essential is not any proporti
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Oh, don't fear "talking down" to me. Just try talking sense.
As I stated - society has worked reasonably well for millenia, with the males out taking risks, and women generally occupying their CHOSEN niches, in relative safety.
A relatively small percentage of today's population is unhappy with this arrangement, and they work hard to change society.
Do you have the least shred of evidence that society will be stronger, or that either males or females will be happier if you succeed?
Are today's women who work f
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How so, exactly? You will note that I do NOT advocate that women should be kept barefoot and pregnant, and kept out of any field of work. I am arguing against some vapid revolutionary concept that the world should be forced to push women into a field that many women find uninteresting.
Go ahead - read all those previous posts again. The basic premise is, there are few women who own or manage a particular type of company. There are few women in senior positions in the field. Hence, something is wrong wit
Pick & Choose (Score:5, Insightful)
The professions are programmer, CEO, the financial field, doctor, or some other high paying white-collar job. I'm pretty sure that women are underrepresented in coal mines, off shore oil rigs, Alaskan crab boats, and the like. All of those jobs are also high paying, but they're just not...ya know...glamorous or easy to do while still have long fingernails.
What a crock.
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That's my point. They don't truly want an equal representation in the workforce. They want an "equal" representation in the fields that they choose.
But who does?
Which, in case you're not paying attention, is not the same thing or quite as noble as the advocacy groups would have you believe.
It never has been equal. Advocacy groups, in particular NOW, basically just advocate for their groups with the expectation that because they are not the ones in power, they can rationalize pushing to any extreme, knowing
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Re:America is already screwed up (Score:5, Informative)
Women are just not that keen on taking risks, they prefer long-term stability - that is probably why they are not numerous in risky businesses like being a VC. And I do agree, that's natural: males are nature's way to experiment while female's role is to pick the most successful one among them and reproduce his genes. Somehow it is akin to VC's role in business, though.
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Mmmmm. You *might have* phrased your second sentence differently. I got kind of hung up on "prefer horizontal relations". It took a small effort to understand what your point was. ;^)
But, your point is valid. I seldom take much notice of the competition between women, but, yes, it is there. And, you're right - it is the risk taking that separates the genders, more than any level of competition.
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You're cool - my hang up on that phrase was my hang up, really. I completely overlooked your name - and I forgot for a moment that we aren't all Americans speaking the same dialect of English as our mother tongues. Had I bothered to absorb the name "Dmitry" I would have been reminded of that fact. :)
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You're right, there aren't enough male nurses. Gender discrimination goes both ways. We need a lot more nurses in this country, and one way to reach that is to get over this stupid idea that it's emasculating to be a male nurse.
But, I'd also point out that a hell of a lot of nurses work 60+ hours a week in a much higher stress work place than a coder at a startup does.
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I don't think its just the idea that it's emasculating to be a male nurse but also the legal liability. Remember, every man is a rapist and pedophile and women and children *never* lie.
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Gender isn't important if there are enough people in the sector or occupation. Well, I mean, I would still be concerned if there's discrimination that favors or disfavors one gender over another, but it's not a critical issue.
It becomes an issue when there aren't enough people in it, and you need to get more. If there aren't enough women who want to become nurses, what's easier, trying to convince more women, who are essentially all tapped out, or try to encourage more men to join up?
It's the same thing wit
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Oh I agree with you. It's an intractable problem. There's a poster down below who says that as an angel investor, he finds it hard to invest in women-run firms because they don't often have prior business experience. They don't have prior business experience because women have only entered technical fields in great numbers later than men.
The VCs aren't discriminating because they hate women. They are making decisions that are entirely rational based on their point of view. They meet less women entrepreneurs
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soldiers (Score:2)
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