[madamepsychosis]

I think the reason NYTimes columnists sound so stupid is this: to become a NYTimes columnist, you need to impress a whole string of gatekeepers, professors, editors etc. The biggest problem in their world caused by gender bias is these gatekeepers not letting women through. Much of the world works in a similar way, but tech does not, and journalists have not seemed to realize this.

So when critiquing the valley, they look for the gatekeepers, which is why they think - "aha! there must be no female founders because VCs aren't letting them in!"

This baffles SV insiders, who can better understand the relative importance of a VC's opinion. Being rejected? Why that happened to Google 63 times! Unfortunately, this is the point where they conclude that gender bias is a nonsense problem invented by poorly informed arts graduates.

The same thing is happening when journalists complain tech firms don't hire enough women. It would be a very serious problem for women in journalism if their employers were institutionally sexist institution (which I'm sure it is not, of course) but for women in tech, less so. We have far greater "exit rights", due to the liquidity of the market and the relative ease of starting our own companies.

This isn't to say gender bias doesn't exist, or that it isn't a problem, merely that it manifests itself in wildly different ways than a journalist may expect.