There’s been quite a bit of cyber-ink flowing on the question of why so few women are in the software industry, especially at the top, and especially in VC-funded startups. Paul Graham’s comments on the matter, being taken out of context by The Information, made him a lightning rod. There’s a lot of anger and passion around this topic, and I’m not going to do all of that justice. Why are there almost no venture capitalists, few women being funded, and not many women rising in technology companies? It’s almost certainly not a lack of ability. Philip Greenspun argues that women avoid academia because it’s a crappy career. He makes a lot of strong points, and that essay is very much worth reading, even if I think a major factor (discussed here) is underexplored.
Why wouldn’t this fact (of academia being a crap career) also make men avoid it? If it’s shitty, isn’t it going to be avoided by everyone? Often cited is a gendered proclivity toward risk. People who take unhealthy and outlandish risks (such as by becoming drug dealers) tend to be men. So do overconfident people who assume they’ll end up on top of a vicious winner-take-all game. The outliers on both ends of society tend to be male. As a career with subjective upsides (prestige in addition to a middle-class salary) and severe, objective downsides it appeals to a certain type of quixotic, clueless male. Yet making bad decisions is hardly a trait of one gender. Also, we don’t see 1.5 or 2 times as many high-power (IQ 140+) men making bad career decisions. We probably see 10 times as many doing so; Silicon Valley is full of quixotic young men wasting their talents to make venture capitalists rich, and almost no women, and I don’t think that difference can be explained by biology alone.
I’m going to argue that a major component of this is not a biological trait of men or women, but an emergent property from the tendency, in heterosexual relationships, for the men to be older. I call this the “Look-Ahead Effect”. Heterosexual women, through the men they date, see doctors buying houses at 30 and software engineers living paycheck-to-paycheck at the same age. Women face a number of disadvantages in the career game, but they have access to a kind of high-quality information that prevents them from making bad career decisions. Men, on the other hand, tend to date younger women covering territory they’ve already seen.
When I was in a PhD program (for one year) I noticed that (a) women dropped out at higher rates than men, and (b) dropping out (for men and women) had no visible correlation with ability. One more interesting fact pertained to the women who stayed in graduate school: they tended either to date (and marry) younger men, or same-age men within the department. Academic graduate school is special in this analysis. When women don’t have as much access to later-in-age data (because they’re in college, and not meeting many men older than 22) a larger number of them choose the first career step: a PhD program. But the first year of graduate school opens their dating pool up again to include men 3-5 years older than them (through graduate school and increasing contact with “the real world”). Once women start seeing first-hand what the academic career does to the men they date– how it destroys the confidence even of the highly intelligent ones who are supposed to find a natural home there– most of them get the hell out.
Men figure this stuff out, but a lot later, and usually at a time when they’ve lost a lot of choices due to age. The most prestigious full-time graduate programs won’t accept someone near or past 30, and the rest don’t do enough for one’s career to offset the opportunity cost. Women, on the other hand, get to see (through the guys they date) a longitudinal survey of the career landscape when they can still make changes.
I think it’s obvious how this applies to all the goofy, VC-funded startups in the Valley. Having a 5-year look ahead, women tend to realize that it’s a losing game for most people who play, and avoid it like the plague. I can’t blame them in the least. If I’d had the benefit of 5-year look-ahead, I wouldn’t have spent the time I did in VC-istan startups either. I did most of that stuff because I had no foresight, no ability to look into the future and see that the promise was false and the road led nowhere. If I had retained any interest in VC-istan at that age (and, really, I don’t at this point) I would have become a VC while I was young enough that I still could. That’s the only job in VC-istan that makes sense.
