[crassus]

Google is reportedly over 30% women, too. I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure. The startup world compares well to the original California gold rush - a risk for a small shot at a high reward - and that was mostly male, too.

Also, keep in mind that it's a zero-sum game. If Google and IBM each hire 1,000 female engineers from top schools, that means that startups get less diverse.

[jfarmer]

> I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure.

This is explained equally well by inexperienced managers hiring people similar to themselves culturally, racially, and socioeconomically. Likewise, if I were a woman, I wouldn't want to work on a team with five dudes oblivious to their dude-dom.

[tonecluster]

Who in their right mind would want to work on a team of highly-intelligent, socially-challenged, culturally-homogeneous young men whose experience to date is primarily steeped in the casual misogyny, homophobia, and racism of MMORPG chat-channels; dorm-room bike-shedding; and adolescent dude-bro jokes?

[3pt14159]

The irony of being sexist in this HN thread is breaking my mind man.

[lmm]

If they're good coders, sure. I can ignore work-unrelated stupidity, but if I have to work with someone incompetent at their job that becomes very unpleasant very quickly.

[webmaven]

I'll just note that coding is actually more a collaborative activity than a solitary one, so the 'socially challenged' are not very likely to be 'good coders'.

[tonecluster]

It becomes unpleasant very quickly regardless of the quality of the skills of the programmers.

[hacker789]

Across all cultures (perhaps across all of history), women are more risk averse.

In fact, feminist activists didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor.

Only then did it become scandalous that young women were choosing different career paths (but interestingly, the fact that young women are earning more than young men and graduating from college in far greater rates than young men isn't scandalous).

[001sky]

women are more risk averse

I think this is misleading. Men and women face different risks, and heterodox strategies are not indicative of very much. First, you need to be careful how you infer "risk taking" from "not taking the same bets", because the actual riks taken is a portfolio riks calculation which is blind. Second, you don't have any data to infer anyrthing about the quality of the risk taking they are in fact taking; that is in terms of actual/realize and even provability weighted expected returns. To give one crass example, a women could take a strategy of legal ownership of "high risk realized assets" through marriage. This is a "high-risk strategy", but it is also empirically true that many rich men are married.[1] Of course, the odds of success in this strategy are also not evenly distributed amongst women as a group, either. Another person could look at that and say that marriage to a rich person is a "risk avoidance" strategy...and again, this may or may not be true. Because wealth and genetic fitness need not correlate, and so your frame of reference on the purpose of strategy quickly turns into quite a bit more complex calculation.

[1] Marriage as a legal contract has a financial value; a derivative, with contingent claims on of the underlying (asset) value of couple's cumulative/aggregate incomes.

[jfarmer]

You and your complexifyin' aren't welcome around here, friend! All that nuance just makes our arguments much harder to make. You'd best take it elsewhere.

[alexmat]

I agree, "he talks like a fag and all his shit is retarded."

[jmagoon]

Do you have any evidence to back up your broad-brushed claims?

And who are these "feminist activist" strawmen(straw-women?) you have set up?

[newnewnew]

5 minutes of googling:

"MEN, WOMEN AND RISK AVERSION:EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE" - http://aysps.gsu.edu/isp/files/ISP_Ind_3.pdf

"Sex Differences in Everyday Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans" - http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep062942.pdf

Reality fits egalitarian beliefs quite poorly.

[jfarmer]

You've obviously made a serious study of this and that's why you have such justifiably strong opinions on the matter. Can you do 10 minutes of googling next time and share more? Or maybe 20?! Think of how informed you'd be after 20 minutes!

[mistermann]

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.

It's pretty difficult to have a serious conversation if you have to fully define and prove every single piece of content in a comment.

Common sense is getting to be pretty rare around here.

[mistermann]

I think part of the reason these discussions never get anywhere is because of blatant dishonesty in discussions. You actually think there is no "feminist activist" movement?

[jmagoon]

I don't, and I never made that claim because it's insane. I object to the idea that "feminist activists" "didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor."

There's a claim "women are more risk averse", and another claim "feminist activists exist", both of which are feasibly true, that do not lead to general conclusion that "feminist activists did not push to get more women into tech until it was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor". Which is a broad, unsupported argument, for which the data directly contradicts:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-comput...

[mistermann]

I must be confused or misinterpreted you.

"And who are these "feminist activist" strawmen(straw-women?) you have set up?"

I took that to mean (generally) that the idea that there is such a thing as a legitimate feminist activist is nonsense - that in reality any reference to one is as part of a straw man argument. Not what you were saying?

[rodgerd]

> women are more risk averse.

When was the last time you did something as risky as get pregnant?

[x0x0]

google may be 30% women overall but I would be shocked if that where true of engineering; Rachel of rachel by the bay definitely didn't have that experience

[judk]

30% is probably including sales org, it is high for engineering. Anyway, consider the difference between 2-3 women of 12 people in an startup, vs 200 of 1000 in a big company, where women may cluster on some teams, or have "dotted line" relationships outside their official hierarchy.