As far as I know, I am the highest ranked openly female member of Hacker News. As such, I sometimes give my two cents worth on women's issues just to be helpful and a contributor.
I have a track record of being fairly even-handed, which some people have expressed their respect and appreciation for, and I fit in well enough that I am sometimes assumed to be male in part because it is HN and "everyone knows" it skews strongly male. Anecdotally, I think that is less true than it used to be, though I don't have hard data and don't care to try to back up that statement cuz REASONS.
So I read some article about "cofounder dating" and I thought about talking about the fact that I can't really relate to the "non technical people want tech cofounders to write their code" because I'm like "I still want to learn to code so I can do my projects myself" and I was like "Eh, that seems like it would go weird places, let's not."
Instead I decided to focus on the detail that the author indicated there were few women in the batch and he seemingly felt this was a problem. I thought he might appreciate a woman's feedback on that since he seemed to think it's a problem and was seemingly sincere.
So I said a thing about that, just trying to give a female point of view, and someone was very dimissive and told me he has female founder friends and there ARE women out there with BACKBONE.
Unlike ME, I guess.
So I asked him to please kindly invite his female founder friends to participate in the discussion and THIS is how he replied to that:
I did contemplate forwarding the email to the mod, as I have done on at least one or two occasions in the past when someone did something amazingly shitty to me but went "Eh, not worth bothering the mod with this crap. I don't care that much. BUT I shall blog about this."
The author of the piece did not bother to engage me. Instead, he was supportive of the guy who was being dismissive of me. My opinion of the author's sincerity about the gender gap being a problem was downgraded to "Maybe not so much."
So far, none of andrew_'s female founder friends have bothered to show up and speak for themselves. That's a real shame but not exactly surprising to me.
I have a track record of being fairly even-handed, which some people have expressed their respect and appreciation for, and I fit in well enough that I am sometimes assumed to be male in part because it is HN and "everyone knows" it skews strongly male. Anecdotally, I think that is less true than it used to be, though I don't have hard data and don't care to try to back up that statement cuz REASONS.
So I read some article about "cofounder dating" and I thought about talking about the fact that I can't really relate to the "non technical people want tech cofounders to write their code" because I'm like "I still want to learn to code so I can do my projects myself" and I was like "Eh, that seems like it would go weird places, let's not."
Instead I decided to focus on the detail that the author indicated there were few women in the batch and he seemingly felt this was a problem. I thought he might appreciate a woman's feedback on that since he seemed to think it's a problem and was seemingly sincere.
So I said a thing about that, just trying to give a female point of view, and someone was very dimissive and told me he has female founder friends and there ARE women out there with BACKBONE.
Unlike ME, I guess.
So I asked him to please kindly invite his female founder friends to participate in the discussion and THIS is how he replied to that:
Jesus, that was a bitter, snippy reply. I didn't get the feeling from your choice of words that you were responding at all in earnest, which is very unfortunate, but I did text each of them to let them know there was an invite for them to reply here.He promptly deleted it, perhaps because this kind of ugly personal attack is against the rules on HN. I have notify HN emails so I still have the text available in my email, which is how I am able to quote it.
You tossed an anecdotal generality that supposed to speak for women in general:
> As a guess, women are uncomfortable
I provided a reasonable and supportive counter based on my first-hand experience with a few female founders that are good friends. If you don't want to believe the anecdotal evidence I presented, that's perfectly fine. But pump the brake. I think it's pretty important for people to support their friends and speak well of them, especially when someone is recklessly lumping them into a group they don't identify with. In this case the helpless, hapless, vulnerable woman tripe. Just please be aware that there are a TON of women out there that don't take shit, and don't fall into the "uncomfortable" group you described.
I did contemplate forwarding the email to the mod, as I have done on at least one or two occasions in the past when someone did something amazingly shitty to me but went "Eh, not worth bothering the mod with this crap. I don't care that much. BUT I shall blog about this."
The author of the piece did not bother to engage me. Instead, he was supportive of the guy who was being dismissive of me. My opinion of the author's sincerity about the gender gap being a problem was downgraded to "Maybe not so much."
So far, none of andrew_'s female founder friends have bothered to show up and speak for themselves. That's a real shame but not exactly surprising to me.