"This dominant tech archetype doesn’t just affect funders’ decisions. It affects women themselves. All of the stories about start-up culture being defined by twentysomething men who enjoy beer pong don’t make many women want to jump in and join them. “I’ve had a lot of women come up to me and say, ‘Gosh, I considered applying to Y-Combinator, but I didn’t because I don’t think we’re the type of people you tend to fund,’” says Jessica Livingston, another co-founder of the famed accelerator program, who is married to Graham. “That’s where I think we’ve done a poor job. Over the past nine years we’ve always been so focused on helping our own start-ups that we’ve done a very poor job of sharing what we do with the world. We fund tons of different types of founders, not just young male programmers, which it was when we first started.”
Even if they know they can land the job or the funding, many women don’t want to sign up to be an outlier. To be the first or the only woman in the room is to be noticed for your gender as much as for your work — a fact that simply isn’t true on a more gender-balanced staff. “What the management blogs wittering on about leadership don’t tell you is that being the first is a burden,” wrote Ciara Byrne, a former software developer. “You carry the responsibility of representing not only yourself but the entire experience of working with that semi-mythical creature, the female techie...
“The men who come into our organization who are excited about the fact that we have diversity as a goal are generally the people who are better at listening, they’re better at group learning, they’re better at collaboration, they’re better at communication, they’re particularly the people you want to be your engineering managers and your technical leads,” saidKellan Elliott-McCrea, chief technology officer at Etsy, in a talk to venture capitalists about Etsy’s hiring success. “These people are hard to find, and when you can find them, they’re awesome.”"
FB: "Here’s the other thing about that young, male, and awkward archetype: The more socially oblivious technologists don’t even think to try and understand people who aren’t like them, and often fail to notice that they don’t work well with people who aren’t exactly like them. “I have a high emotional IQ. Most people in tech do not,” says Adria Richards, a developer and consultant. “I learned how to have empathy and act on it. The root of the problem in tech is lack of awareness.”"
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