I think it's more that most men here aren't into the same sorts of things women are into, so they self-segregate by sex.
If you're going to work 70-80 hours on a startup, basically no sane woman is going to join you (I know a couple women that'll do startups, but most seem to want some semblance of a life too.) If you're going to read TechCrunch and Reddit and Digg all day, same thing.
If you go to a yoga/pilates/yogalates class, or a Harry Potter fan convention, it will be practically all women. And even big tech companies have pretty even gender ratios, at least out of my sample size of one. My cube is 3 women and 4 men; so was my last project. Back when I had roommates, it was 2 girls and me.
I think people find the Bay Area so dating-hostile because the people who move here are often hostile to dating. A lot of guys come to Silicon Valley to seek their fame and fortune with this wild-eyed technology vision, where they'll put their nose to the grindstone and concentrate on their code for 5 years. That's not a very good way to meet women; most of them don't exactly care for that lifestyle.
Then again, I've been here for 6 months and am still single. Then again again, I haven't exactly been looking very hard. I'm one of the dating hostile (well, apathetic) folks. ;-)
> If you're going to work 70-80 hours on a startup, basically no sane woman is going to join you (I know a couple women that'll do startups, but most seem to want some semblance of a life too.)
Not true at all! Really driven, busy women usually choose choose driven, busy men. I worked full time, ran my own company, and had a full classload studying for a business degree for two years. My working breakdown was: 30-50 hours at my job, 20-40 hours at the startup, and 9-20 hours doing classes and schoolwork.
The rest of the last five years haven't been much less busy. In that time, I had a girlfriend who was a fashion editor and had her own talk show, dated an award-winning genius hyper-athletic architect, and had a really cute girl in medicine. All busy girls. I also had a couple other girls who led more casual lives, but came from driven families. My main girlfriend for a while had parents supporting her, and she picked me up and dropped me off from many of my classes, she cooked for me while I was doing my work, and when I got a bit of time off, we'd rent movies or go to a casino or something.
Normal, regular people don't understand busy, driven people. That's both regular men and women. It's hard to have "normal" friends when 70-100 hours of your schedule are blocked out each week with craziness. But busy people understand - so I went skiing and diving and got into trouble with my busy, driven friends when we had some vacation time, and the girls were always happy. Start looking for girls who are hyper-driven themselves: Lawyers, architects, executives, media, etc. And look at girls who have a super-driven father, which is just generally good advice for a driven man anyways.
Regular people don't understand busy people, and get offended, and want a "work-life balance" instead of building an empire. And that's fine, if they're happy. But there's plenty of woman who want, love, embrace, and support a driven man. Get one of those girls and you're cruising. I wouldn't recommend trying to date a "civilian" if you're living a crazy life though, they don't understand, won't understand, can't understand. No big deal - the driven, busy girls are awesome anyways.
Yeah, I threw in the "sane" to cover cases like that. I know of women that'll readily work 70-80 hour weeks for a startup. But I wouldn't exactly call them sane. ;-)
Incidentally, I'm kinda curious whether there's any correlation between insane hours and success at the fuck-you-money level. (I know there's one as you go from high-school education to professional degree, but I think the causation is backwards: people work longer hours and get paid more because their jobs are more engaging, they don't get paid more because they work longer hours.) From what I see - and this seems backed up by Outliers and Fooled by Randomness - massive success seems more proportional to how many risks you to take and how much randomness you expose yourself to than how hard you work. Curious if there's any data on this...
> Yeah, I threw in the "sane" to cover cases like that. I know of women that'll readily work 70-80 hour weeks for a startup. But I wouldn't exactly call them sane. ;-)
I dunno man. A normal girl who likes "shopping and hanging out with her friends", who sleepwalks through a boring shitty low-paying job, who doesn't exercise and doesn't take of herself... that's sane? My girlfriend in London: Family was high in the Communist Party before the Iron Curtain fell, got in the ground floor as entrepreneurs, sent her to study architecture in London and Tokyo, won some design awards, went swimming 4x week and did yoga 3x week. Had great, brilliant friends. When not studying, working, exercising, she'd go to eclectic cafes near Old Street or we'd go to the National Gallery or British Museum or some various gardens or have tea.
She's not sane? Girls who "hang out and shop", follow American Idol really really carefully, and sleepwalk through life are sane? I guess sanity is in the eye of the beholder.
> Incidentally, I'm kinda curious whether there's any correlation between insane hours and success at the fuck-you-money level.
I think there is for a few reasons. First, a job might require 20-50 hours of "firefighting and admin" per week, where every hour over that is actually productive work. Going from a 40 hour workweek to a 50 hour workweek might actually double your productive output. Second, the more you work, actually the more you live and get done. Expression, "If you want something done, give it to a busy person." When I was hyper busy, I'd get little trivial tasks done super fast. Now that I've got more free time, it takes me way longer to do minor bullshit like get car insurance or respond to some letter or something else. When I was hyper busy, I'd only "touch stuff" once. Which cut down time and stress from tasks by a lot. Third, when you're busy working all the time, you actually spend a lot less money, because you're working all the time.
> (I know there's one as you go from high-school education to professional degree, but I think the causation is backwards: people work longer hours and get paid more because their jobs are more engaging, they don't get paid more because they work longer hours.)
That's a good point, sounds true too. I think it's more cyclical than a causation/correlation thing. Longer hours, more skills, more engagement, ability to put in longer hours, more skills, more engagement, and so on. That's my guess anyways. Good comments.
> A normal girl who likes "shopping and hanging out with her friends", who sleepwalks through a boring shitty low-paying job, who doesn't exercise and doesn't take of herself... that's sane?
...why does this have to be the alternative to women who work 70-80 hour weeks for a startup? I'm sure that's not what you're saying, as your girlfriend anecdote is neither, but that's how it reads.
True, I've had a girlfriend stand by me now through two startups. Why? Because she has her own career and her own life. And despite being a Buddhist, thinks more about the future than the present, as do I.
I work in one of these companies and Im surprised to see this. But then again Im an engineer. These numbers are bloated by the HR/customer service/sales people I guess. If you are a tech in tech company,the split is like 90-10.
I also work in one of these and I'm not terribly surprised, but my own observations are that it's a bit less lopsided than that. I already mentioned that both my team and my cube are split 3-4, so 42% female. The other team I work with is 6 females and 9 males, so 40% female. That's in engineering - UI design and UX research seem to be even more balanced, and HR of course is virtually all female. At a rough guess, the numbers I see in the cafes are maybe 60-40 male/female.
Agreed. A company is a miniature snapshot of the city it's in. If the girls in marketing in HR aren't into engineers in general (or vice versa) it doesn't matter that they work in the same building.
You can search for companies profile in linked in. (I actually I friends that work there, and they complain the same, no women).
Linkedin.
Median Age 33 years
Gender
Male 70%
Female 30%
Ps. While that counts only people that have a linkedIn profile, I would remind you Facebook has more women that guys, so I would assume that women are very familiar with social networks, and not afraid of them.
I'd think women would be way over represented in that, at least, when I was at Google, it was the recruiters and HR people flocking to LinkedIn, not the engineers. FWIW, I was on four teams at Google. I was the only woman on all of them except for Orkut, which was about half women.
As a personal anecdote, the m/f ratio in a company (one of the biggest ISPs in my country) a friend worked was supposed to be 67-33, according to LinkedIn. When I told him that, he said that certainly it wasn't the case. He worked in their HQs, along with as much as 90% of their employees, and one of the first things that made an impression on him was that women were so much more than men. By the way, there are profiles of 183 employees of that company in LinkedIn, with the error margin not sufficient to explain the discrepancy.
I think it's pretty silly, but it might just be my demographic -- the guys I know who are under thirty seem to complain a lot more. The Mission, in particular, seems to be a nightmare of young guys on the prowl on weekend evenings.
Here's the thing, though: the guys I know who are single and under 30 also tend to be pretty isolated and nerdy. The ones who have other interests do fine for themselves. So, a protip for young nerdy guys everywhere: if you want to meet a girl, you've got to pull your nose out of the computer screen once in a while.
I've lived in SF for about 10 months, and it isn't as hopeless as the article states. I've met quite a few girls and went on plenty of dates, but you may have to be a little more aggressive than other places.
For instance, it's common for bars to have a higher ratio of guys; I know a lot of 'nice' guys who will give up in this situation. You might have to step out of your comfort zone to interact with girls, but it's doable.
SF is a massive, dynamic city and it can't be modeled in such a simple way.
1. If you're into Asian women(and may be they are into you), you'll feel like you've won the lottery by moving to SF.
2. If you're not, well, you'll learn to:)
You know, what somewhat amused me is that lot of the people who complain about lack of women in Bay Area, generally completely ignore non-American women (Russian, Persian, Asian). I've heard lot of there are no women in {this company, this CS department}" when there clearly are.
Otoh, it's also interesting why the gender gap is non-existant or is <b>the other direction</b> in former USSR and China/Taiwan/Korea (you could argue it's Communist legacy for USSR and China, but what about South Korea and Taiwan?).
(Disclaimer: I'm an immigrant from the USSR and the person who has been introduced into was my mother. I remember visiting her work place and many of her coworkers were women too-- and this wasn't considered unusual in any form).
True. I'm sure it's majority Asian-American but I found the cutest ones to be straight Asian. Of course, they were also the hardest to make things work out given the severe language issues.
Interestingly almost all straight Asians in SF are there to learn English.
I think it is unfair to group Chinese English with Japanese English ability. The English ability of mainland Chinese people is terrible (even though they are enthusiastic). Talking to them, even those who are well educated (grad students/professors) is like a game of charades. The problem with China is that most young people (20-30) started learning English at age 13 at school and their parents learnt Russian as a second language.
Rebuttal: I am a social retard, typical geek, and it was only in San Francisco that I found some success meeting women. There are lots and lots of really interesting, amazing, beautiful women in San Francisco. I dated a bunch of them.
A year ago, I returned to the Midwest, and haven't gotten a date since.
"lots of really interesting, amazing, beautiful women in San Francisco"
That was true when I was there. And they tended to like independent rockers with somewhat long hair, day-old beard, who were smart and literate but never let that get in the way of being physically active most of the time.
How many geeks does that describe? (That described many of the people who got Silicon Valley started .... then)
If you're looking for a wife, it's no more difficult here than anywhere else. If you're looking for a dating scene, you will be disappointed if you're coming from the Midwest or South.
I heard a lot of this before spending some time in SF. If you don't have problems meeting women elsewhere you won't in SF either. If you do, at least here you'll be able to join the throng of socially awkward folks that blame it on the city.
This isn't something I've experienced in my 7 years of living in San Francisco. It sounds like a sour grapes, or as a commentator on the blog stated, "external attribution error".
If you're going to work 70-80 hours on a startup, basically no sane woman is going to join you (I know a couple women that'll do startups, but most seem to want some semblance of a life too.) If you're going to read TechCrunch and Reddit and Digg all day, same thing.
If you go to a yoga/pilates/yogalates class, or a Harry Potter fan convention, it will be practically all women. And even big tech companies have pretty even gender ratios, at least out of my sample size of one. My cube is 3 women and 4 men; so was my last project. Back when I had roommates, it was 2 girls and me.
I think people find the Bay Area so dating-hostile because the people who move here are often hostile to dating. A lot of guys come to Silicon Valley to seek their fame and fortune with this wild-eyed technology vision, where they'll put their nose to the grindstone and concentrate on their code for 5 years. That's not a very good way to meet women; most of them don't exactly care for that lifestyle.
Then again, I've been here for 6 months and am still single. Then again again, I haven't exactly been looking very hard. I'm one of the dating hostile (well, apathetic) folks. ;-)