You may not think there's sufficient evidence that there's something broken. In which case, you aren't obliged to help fix it. But unless you have strong evidence that things are working perfectly, then by your own standard you should stop interfering with people trying to fix the problems they see.
You just illustrated the entire point of the TC article. The "problem" you see (not enough women in startups) is only a problem in your mind. Maybe this is caused by generations of gender role programming, maybe this is caused by biological differences, maybe it's caused by the divine will of the flying spaghetti monster. What right do you have to "fix" other people's voluntary decisions?
What I don't hear is the argument that "women want to run startups and they are being blocked from the field". That would bother me. But a skewed outcome, by itself, is not a problem that needs to be fixed... and why shouldn't there be some scientific rigor applied to social meddling?
It is actually a problem in quite a number of people's minds. And by the way, all problems occur only in people's minds.
I am of course not trying to fix other people's voluntary decisions. But I would like to fix a system that unfairly limits the options that people have. So if you're arguing for more freedom of choice, we're on the same side.
If you would like to apply scientific rigor to your political choices, go to it. If you would like to fund me sufficiently so that I can bring my level of rigor up from "best I can do" to "finding the Higgs boson" then I will happily cash your checks. Until then, I'll press on with what I've got.
Arguing that all action should stop until the data is perfect ignores that we are talking about real people's lives here. Around the time of the Civil War, people didn't say "Hey, let's wait a few hundred years until we can determine for sure whether or not, as the slaveholders claim, negroes are inherently inferior." Some people decided slavery was wrong, and worked to put an end to it. The same goes for women's suffrage, which isn't even 100 years old in this country. There is no particular reason we should default to the status quo if we lack data: it has been wrong before, and there's no reason to think it's perfect now.
There is a clear and obvious difference between "not enough women found startups" and slavery/women's suffrage:
* If you asked a slave what prevents him from being free, he/she can point at the specific individuals and institutions restricting his freedom. The slave owner, the laws.
* If you asked an American woman in 1919 what is holding back her right to vote in federal elections, she can clearly point at the US constitution.
In both cases, these situations were (rightly) fixed. On the other hand, not even the gurus of HN can come up with a coherent explanation why there aren't more women in tech startups. It's not like women are marching in the street demanding that we repeal the ban on female CEOs. The current outcome is a result of voluntary decisions. I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect a higher standard of evidence before we start telling people "you think wrong".
FWIW, I also find it lamentable that the tech industry is a sausage-fest. But that's my problem. If you told my partner that she's broken because she doesn't want to work in technology, she'd tell you to f*ck off and go meddle in someone else's life.
You're cherry-picking. The problem for women's suffrage to solve may have been obvious in 1919, but that was the last problem of a long series of them. It was no less wrong that women couldn't vote in 1783, but it was a lot less obvious then. You're also pretty breezy about the clarity of slavery, but I think it's much more obvious from 2011 than it was at the time. See, e.g., the Cornerstone Speech or the Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession, where leaders of the day explain slavery as a beneficial system rooted in the natural differences of the negro and the white man. The same argument, I note, being used today on HN to justify startups remaining a boys-only clubhouse.
You shouldn't stuff your partner's clothes full of straw like that. Nobody is saying that she in particular is broken. But plenty of women are willing to talk about how they've been discouraged or treated unfairly. See., e.g., http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/why.html.
You are welcome to see your feelings about the gender imbalance as only your problem. I see it as a collective problem, one where the data is sufficient to warrant action, and I aim to do something about it.
Cherrypicking? I'm just using the examples you cited. Both of which required legal enforcement to maintain inequality.
Whether or not you like the current outcome (and I don't proclaim to support it or even believe that it will be the same in 50 years), you cannot credibly argue that today, in the western world, women do not have legal parity with men. It's been a rough history but here we are (finally). Further policy changes are no longer the realm of gaining legal equality but pure social engineering based on your esthetic preferences for what you (possibly fancifully) believe gender participation ratios in various activities should be. Like the poster that kicked off this particular subthread, I believe this goal requires quite a lot more scrutiny than the first-wave feminist goal of legal equality.
You are cherry-picking the tiny portion of the historical problem that was obvious and then declaring the whole problem as obvious. It mostly wasn't, which means we can't take the current lack of obvious solutions as a sign we should just throw our hands up.
My aesthetic preferences aren't for equal outcomes. They're for people to have equal opportunities. They don't right now. I aim to change that. I am, however, sometimes willing to use outcomes as one proxy for opportunities until we have significant proof that we have solved all the problems of opportunity.
I'm all for scrutiny. However, I think it should be equally applied. If one only scrutinizes challenges to the status quo, then it's not honest intellectual inquiry. And it's especially suspicious when it comes from somebody who benefits from that status quo. Like the poster that kicked off this particular subthread.
My aesthetic preferences aren't for equal outcomes. They're for people to have equal opportunities.
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. How will you know when we arrive at equal opportunities? How do you know that they don't have equal opportunities already?
Legal equality is straightforward and very easy to measure. "Opportunity" is highly subjective. There's a bunch of college kids at OWS protests complaining about their self-inflicted lack of opportunity because they can't get a job in Social Studies. Clearly measuring by outcome is inadequate, yet it's the concrete measurement we as a society keep coming back to.
This is why I think it's quite reasonable and necessary to apply scientific rigor to social engineering projects. And to accept that some of these issues will be things that we simply cannot change in the short term; culture changes because old people eventually die.
Apply your standard of proof for action to your own behavior here. Do you have definitive proof that opportunities are equal? No, I'm sure. Well, then you should stop trying to influence people's opinions and behaviors until you do.
Of course, that's ridiculous. But for the same reason that your suggestion is. You're applying an impossibly high standard to an approach you disagree with, while giving the status quo a pass.
That you don't see a problem isn't proof that there's no problem. That you don't know how to change something is not proof that change is impossible. That you don't want to fix something isn't a reason to tell other people not to try.
