For Stanford Class of '94, a Gender Gap More Powerful Than the Internet

Discussion from yesterday: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8784926" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8784926</a>.

Very good article. I must admit, the more I read about Thiel, the less I like him.<p>It&#x27;s unclear to me why they think that SV is more meritocratic than anything else. Sports still seems much more meritocratic than SV. Any industry that depends so much on getting funding hardly seems like it would be especially meritocratic -- at least at first blush.

That title is a bit misleading.<p>I read this yesterday; it&#x27;s pretty jumbled. It&#x27;s an article that jumps around a bit describing how a couple of the people from the Stanford Class of &#x27;94, specifically David Sacks and Jessica DiLullo Herrin, made a lot of money using the internet.<p>It doesn&#x27;t really get into the reasons there are fewer female than male entrepreneurs from that class, at least not with any depth, and then it concludes by saying that people from that class are getting into internet startups now.

How exactly are they measuring this &quot;gender gap&quot;? At one point it seemed their argument was that female graduates didn&#x27;t found as many companies as male graduates. (Though it seems like there could be a lot of different explanations for that.) The quote about how women &quot;played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses&quot; comes from the founder of a web site for female writers, which made me wonder if it was more advocacy than analysis.<p>I am concerned about the role of women in Silicon Valley, so it was nice to see that the Times&#x27; reporter notes that few women &quot;described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley.&quot; It would&#x27;ve been nice if this article had more statistics about what specifically happened to the class of &#x27;94

Why do articles like this always divide it by gender and never combine gender and race? There are more Asian women featured in this article and probably included in the class than black (and potentially hispanic) men, despite the fact that the population of black men is and was in 1994 larger than Asian women.

I always find it quite indicative of American attitudes that this article took &quot;number of companies founded&quot; as a metric of success, and ham-fistedly conclude that the men are &quot;ruling&quot;.<p>Why not take &quot;happiness with current quality of life&quot; as one? Incorporate that into your survey, and see how many men and women report back as being satisfied and happy with their lives.

It couldn&#x27;t possibly have anything to do with more men than women being into computing? They cite examples of women who were in computing dropping out. But surely lots of men dropped out, too. But the women made more news. And since there were more men, more remained to go on and get rich on the internet. It&#x27;s just bad, bad science. Please apply some proper statistics instead of stirring up emotions with anecdotes.

Heard her talking about this piece on NPR. Unimpressive.

Too much hype. What this article does not mention is that all of these people are now in the sunset of their careers. Even the ones that achieved a lot are already declining from their peaks. I&#x27;m much more interested in what the class of 2015 is going to do.

Front page of NYT? Must be a slow news day... Interesting collection of stories, though.