I've been coding since I was ~13. I can understand why people who haven't might have valid reasons to wish they'd started earlier. I'd just say: beware self-fulfilling prophecies and selection bias. Lots of really excellent software people I've worked with got late starts. Lots of people who started early coasted or are still coasting. In the 25 years I've been coding, only a few years worth of that time really grew me as a developer, so <i>what</i> you work on has just as much impact as how long you've been working on it.<p>Work with a bunch of different enterprise L.O.B. developers to get a sense of what I'm saying here. The average age of a backoffice developer is higher, meaning they have more experience. Hiring in enterprises is regimented, meaning that they tend to come from CS backgrounds. Are they uniformly high quality developers? No. In fact: there's a stigma attached to coming from a long stint in enterprise development.<p>As a lever for getting more women engaged with startups, the idea that an early start is important makes even less sense. Much of the day-to-day work that happens even at companies with difficult problem domains is rote and uncomplicated. A few years experience is more than enough to lead a typical web project, and, more importantly, to have a sense for whether a dev team is firing on all cylinders and to authoritatively manage it.<p>Obvious subtext/bias here: I do not believe that starting women in software development earlier is going to resolve the gender gap. By all means, start early; there's nothing wrong with that. It's just probably not the root of the problem.
This is a great story and project.<p>An apology (in the original sense) of Jessica's work for those who think that the experiences of these individuals don't matter: What I think people don't get about Jessica's interviews is that they're part of a scientific process of understanding what makes great founders and great companies. Many discredit qualitative, observational scientific data. But for new, rare, or poorly understood phenomena, observation is the only way to make scientific progress. In engineering the phenomena are often well understood, common, and within the discipline, familiar. In this case deductive logic, reasoning from known principles, is quite fruitful; but its success biases engineers against inductive reasoning. But for other subjects, such as what makes a great startup founder, or what makes a great <i>female</i> startup founder, the inductive method is much more fruitful.<p>This is not some anomaly: all sciences started with observation and the inductive method. These are the beginnings of insight, generating hypotheses to be tested. We're still quite early in our understanding of startups, and even more so in our understanding of female-founded startups, that this approach is not just warranted, it's the only way to make true progress.<p>Jessica is like the Jane Goodall of startup science. Even though she's studying individual founders she's ultimately helping us understand more about ourselves.
I am from India and on H1B visa in United States. I still don't understand why there is more hustling in recent years about women participation ? Be it playing games, developing games, women in tech or women in NFL or women in ______ ( fill in blank here).<p>I studied engineering in India from one of the premier university and 30 % of my class were girls. Toppers of the class for all 4 years were girls. I know at least 50-80 girls from India and China in my linkedin contacts who are actively engaged int tech.<p>Keeping aside social problems faced by women in India for a bit ( and excluding poor people) , still there is very high participation from girls / women in India.
Throughout my education of 1st to 12th grade there were more girls than more boys in my class.<p>So my question is ----<p>1. Why is US only facing this problem of women in ..... ?<p>2. Is this some political gimmick being played for 2016 preparation ( and I ask with all seriousness without affiliation to any party )<p>I have always considered people in US are more vocal about their rights, responsibilities and more aware of problems in general. Lately though, I see lots of thought policing happening, view manipulation going on at large.<p>My last and most important question is ,<p>3. Since you folks are now actively advertising and creating social conditions for women's participation in tech are you not depriving them of their freedom to choose whichever path women in US prefer ? In an ideal scenario, women would have tech as one of choice for career and not necessarily manipulative information representing tech is only best choice career.
The importance of learning to program at an earlier age conflates two patterns in my opinion. I benefitted immensely from teaching myself how to program at a young age but that is not why I have the computer science and software skills I do today per se. It is an artifact, not a requirement.<p>Computer science skills roughly follow a sigmoidal curve over time with long tails at the top and bottom. You really do not become useful as a programmer until you hit the hockey stick part of that curve. <i>There is no substitute for time in the field to get to the hockey stick part.</i> The primary advantage of learning programming when you are much younger is that you essentially burn down some of that initial time investment before you are really paying attention to how long it actually takes to be an effective programmer. You do not hit the hockey stick faster, it just seems like it to other people because you started down the path to get there earlier.<p>This is discouraging to people that start in college or later because there really is no shortcut to time spent doing it. The people that become good programmers faster usually just started earlier, it isn't necessarily that they are naturally more skilled. Nonetheless, the time required to become a good programmer is not that onerous in the big picture. The key is sticking with it even when the payoff seems distant.<p>As an added comment, people that do well at the top of the hockey stick, where there return on additional investment is diminished, do tend to be the people that started much earlier. Again, this is not due to talent per se but the same people sufficiently obsessed with computer science to teach themselves at a young age also have the obsession to learn and master the more esoteric parts after they've become excellent programmers even though the practical utility is much less in practice.
My experience raising three daughters is that they were always very aware of what others were doing. Their male peers were pretty uninformed (as I expect I was as a teen). I observed that the men were much more inclined to pursue an "unusual" activity (ie not what other people are doing)than the women were. It seemed motivated not by feeling "weird" rather it appeared to be motivated to not do something that their friends were not interested in participating with them. From a sense of inclusion they didn't spend group time on activities that other members of the group were not interested in.<p>I worked with my middle daughter to build a knitting pattern illustrator in Perl[1]. She and her friends could talk for hours about knitting, which is essentially programming as Jacquard proved, because they all were interested in the ways to produce interesting weaves. My friends were interested in talking about computers when I was a teen because we were interested in machines that could 'compute'.<p>The question I wonder about is if the disparity goes away when women develop group activities around programming.<p>[1] I liked the pun of using Perl for a knitting application.
> One of the most consistent patterns is how many founders wished they'd learned to program when they were younger.<p>I wonder what some of the reasons would lead them to have this wish. Is it a matter of having a missing skillset that slowed down growth of their startups or they later found that the really liked to write software and regret not finding out until later in life. Or possibly other reasons?
"In the most recent batch (W15), we asked about gender on the application form for the first time. The percentage of startups we accepted with female founders was identical to the percentage who applied."<p>There are application videos and have been for a while. And each founder has names listed on the application. With <a href="https://gender-api.com/" rel="nofollow">https://gender-api.com/</a> you could probably figure out gender without asking explicitly and could have done so acceptably well with previous classes. I would be curious what the stats look like back tested against each class over time.
I wish my parents had let me take more shop classes, because right now I'm interested in home renovation.<p>The thing is, you don't know where your future interests will take you. Even if you are exposed to stuff when you are younger, you may hate it regardless of how great the presentation may be.<p>I personally think encouraging women, or anyone for that matter, to be programmers/scientists/mechanics is missing the point. You have to encourage people to find passions, be proactive, enjoy learning, and make these a habit. Life isn't static.<p>I also think the "gender gap" is a fallacy. It's true that all professions could be more welcoming to people of different persuasions, but it would be more interesting to know the gap between "people who want to do X but feel excluded" and the "people who are already doing X".
For women who also want to have children at the same time as co-founding a startup, I think it's important not to underestimate how difficult this is.<p>When my wife was first breastfeeding I timed how long she spent breastfeeding and changing nappies and bathing the young baby. It was LITERALLY over 9 hours per day (timed to the minute). To think that it's possible to ALSO run a startup at the same time is in my opinion crazy. With older children it's a lot easier but still difficult.<p>I have several female friends who are also successful entrepreneurs. Some seem to make it work with their family life, but my experience is with most that they have a very hard time and that it often devastates their family life and relationships.<p>So yes there examples of women who run a company and also have young children, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.<p>For women who do not want to have children, or who are not going to have children for many years in the future, no issue.
This is probably impossible to do, but it would be very interesting to contrast these anecdotes with anecdotes from women who <i>could</i> have become technology startup founders, but didn't for some reason.<p>YC's stories are awesome and these entrepreneurs will serve as important role models for young women. They unfortunately contain a "survivor bias" though, and there may be many other hidden factors preventing other potential female entrepreneurs from following in their footsteps.<p>I don't mean this as a criticism at all though. This effort by YC is a tremendous first step and for the sake of my daughter and young girls everywhere, I hope they continue.<p>EDIT: I'd love to hear the sentiment behind the downvotes. Hopefully I didn't come across critical of YC's effort here; that wasn't my intention at all. This is an important issue and I suspect the stories of those who were deterred are just as informative as those who have gotten this far.
I think this is a great project. But one quote stood out:<p>> Interestingly, many said it got them attention for being unusual, and that they'd used this to their advantage.<p>This is what I have experienced as well. But do I want to be `unusual`?<p>Instead, let's strive for making it a norm that female developers are just as common and just as good as their male counterparts. Stop looking at me like I'm some freak for being a competent woman developer.
"Not surprisingly, most of the women were domain experts solving a problem they themselves had. That's something that tends to be true of successful founders regardless of gender."<p>How much domain experience is necessary to solve the problems you have. isn't that something you learn/pick up once you start solving em?
Interesting stuff. One detail I'd like to respond to. Jessica writes:<p><pre><code> And as YC has grown, so has the number of female
partners. Now there are four of us and we are not
tokens, or a female minority in a male-dominated
firm. At the risk of offending my male colleagues,
who will nevertheless understand what I mean, some
would claim it's closer to the truth to say that
that we run the place.
</code></pre>
Many times women find themselves in the situation where they are the more responsible employees, working harder than the men, taking care of the details many men overlook for far longer, and too often earning far less money and respect. So I just hope that Jessica and the other female partners are being compensated consummate to their contribution to the success of YC.
Computer science is the language of the future.<p>It bothers me that I spent so many years learning latin/french/italian when their real world applications are very limited relative to say C/Java/Python which are much more important foreign languages to be learning in school.
As a woman in software development (and a former founder) what I appreciate most about this collection of stories is that rather than men sitting around hypothesizing about why someone else whose experience probably doesn't match their own made different choices than they did, it tells actual women's stories. The ongoing discussion of gender in computing needs more of this.<p>Next, I would love to see (for contrast) the stories of some women who did drop out or who considered STEM majors/careers but ultimately chose other directions. Any takers?
Generally, I think the value of programming at an early age is that you have the time and context to develop an earnest interest in programming. You're doing it for fun. And then when you proceed to take courses on it, you're genuinely excited to learn, and you're not just struggling for a passing grade.<p>Most of this is just the broken nature of schooling.
Not to be callous, but I'm not really interested in any of these founders as people. I would be much more interested in an aggregated feedback discussion about how (or if) startups with female founders are different, what YC did right for them, what it didn't, etc.
I'm interested in reading more findings from the 40 stories in addition to the ones Jessica describes, but I'm too lazy to read all 40. If you've read them, what did you find interesting?
Even as a male entrepreneur, this collection is pure gold. So much to learn. Thank you for doing this.<p>Any chance this series could be made as videos? I would like my daughter to see them as she grows up.
Also the link to the female founders conference has last years dates.<p><a href="http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/</a>
If they wanted to back up this claim "...from the start I've made sure YC had an environment that is supportive of women," they would provide affordable childcare.
The first paragraph, and the implicit message that females were in unusual need of help and support, struck me as belittling and patronizing... which is probably not the desired PR outcome. :-|<p>It seems to me though that a much better way to convey the right message would be to compile a "what we learned from 100 VC founders" and ensure that diversity is absolutely all over the sample: females, muslims, african americans, non-US natives, gays and lesbians, whatever. Doing so would convey the implicit message that diversity is normal.