Where Sexism Comes From

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I was reading Heidi Roizen’s blog post about trying to raise a series B round on Sand Hill while five months pregnant [1]. The firm that was going to lead the deal backed down, citing concerns about her role as an expectant CEO.

Maybe that was sexist, but I kind of empathize with them. In fact, they were probably thinking exactly what I was thinking: How is this woman going to run a company between morning sickness and cravings and contractions? Is she gonna have mood swings? What if her water breaks during a board meeting?

I have never been pregnant, nor have my friends, so the entirety of my relevant knowledge derives from TV and cartoons. Shows how little I know, because Roizen did a fine job as co-founder and CEO of T/Maker as a new mother.

My uninformed perspective is much the same as that of males in the tech industry. Is it possible for a girl to code while crippled with menstrual cramps? Can their delicate minds comprehend abstract concepts like thread synchronization?

How would guys know without firsthand experience?

fainting couch

During the Victorian era, it was widely believed that women were fragile maidenferns, and homes were built with fainting rooms to accommodate their frequent dizzy spells.

At the time, knowledge was propagated via literature primarily authored by men, who depicted female histrionic displays as attractive and feminine. Real-life women were not particularly disposed to fainting but did so anyway, because their literary heroines did.

It wasn’t until the post-Victorian age that the Brontë sisters began writing (under male pen names) a new era of propaganda. They preached not just to men but to their own sex, exposing that ladies are in fact strong creatures with the ability to control her own sensibilities.

Man, as man always will do, taking woman at her own valuation, had held upon the whole that these soft emotions proved irrefragably a kind of kinship with the angels… And so the interesting creatures swooned, and screamed, and wept, and sobbed from generation to generation, harrowing the hearts of their lovers and reducing their husbands to despair. It was only when women herself took up the pen, and began basely to open men’s eyes to a sense of the ludicrous in this particular situation, that man began to revise his position. [2]

Current biases against the technical and leadership abilities of women largely stem from a lack of knowledge. How can the tech industry appreciate our talents if they don’t know that we can be talented? The men of Silicon Valley we accuse of sexism likely have not spent much time around women, and that makes me very sad for them.

References:
1. It’s Different for Girls –Heidi Roizen
2. Stephen Gwynn. The Decay of Sensibility, 1899.
Yes, it was written 115 years ago, but it’s still relevant today.

Ignorance Drives Science

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Half a century ago, the Jetsons predicted a future with flying cars and robot maids and a uniform Aryan race. Hanna-Barbera was envisioning the future based on what they knew, so everything was derived from what existed in the 60s.

They didn’t predict the Internet or smartphones or Ebola, because those were unfathomable back then.

Rooting around existing knowledge produces permutations of that knowledge; rarely does it produce a major breakthrough. Academic research is frequently dismissed for having no practical applications. Original research does have practical applications, it might just be that those applications have yet to be envisioned.

Of what use is a newborn baby? -–Faraday, upon being asked what electromagnetic fields would be used for after his discovery.

Scientific breakthroughs usually originate from outside of existing knowledge. Einstein conceptualized a world beyond classical mechanics to develop his special theory of relativity. Robert Koch discovered bacteria when the world still thought tuberculosis was caused by “spiritual purity”.

The next billion-dollar company isn’t going to be Uber for X or a Blockchain for Y. It’ll be something we haven’t even fathomed. We don’t get to the unfathomable by lingering on what we know. We get there by exploring what we don’t know.

See Also:
ignorance firestein

We Can’t Steal Anything Anymore Either

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A friend’s brother showed me how to unlock my dad’s 1992 Toyota Previa with a coat hanger. Then he showed me how to reach under the dash and hotwire it. Neither of us even knew how to drive yet. That kid went on to pursue a lucrative career in grand theft auto before settling down with a wife and two kids.

New cars can’t be slim-jimmed (although you can still throw a rock through the window), and engines require the microchipped ignition key to mobilize. The only cars that still get stolen are old ones. Mostly Honda Accords and Civics, because Hondas last forever. The old Chevys and Dodges took themselves out of contention years ago.

Stolen Accords

Honda introduced their engine immobilizer in 1998. Old Hondas don’t fetch much at the chop shop  — Far less than a stolen iPhone on ebay. So career criminals turned to stealing phones [2].

Then yesterday California passed a law mandating kill switches for cell phones to deter theft. It’s tough being a professional outlaw these days.

We don’t have much sympathy for thieves, but the people engaging in petty theft are almost always the underprivileged. Throughout much of American history, organized crime was the only way for poor immigrants to climb the social ladder:

Irish gangsters dominated organized crime in the urban Northeast in the mid to late nineteenth century, followed by the Jewish gangsters—Meyer Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, and Dutch Schultz, among others. Then it was the Italians’ turn. They were among the poorest and the least skilled of the immigrants of that era. Crime was one of the few options available for advancement. [3]

After a few generations of crime, these demographics became established, law-abiding members of society.

The early settlers and founding fathers, as well as those who “won the West” and built up cattle, mining and other fortunes, often did so by shady speculations and a not inconsiderable amount of violence. They ignored, circumvented, or stretched the law when it stood in the way of America’s destiny and their own—or were themselves the law when it served their purposes. This has not prevented them and their descendants from feeling proper moral outrage when, under the changed circumstances of the crowded urban environments, latecomers pursued equally ruthless tactics. [4]

References:
1. Here’s Why Stealing Cars Went Out of Fashion –NY Times
2. Stealing iPhones is more profitable than crack for San Francisco’s pro thieves –iDownload
3. The Crooked Ladder –NewYorker
4. 9780226136714

We Can’t Fix Anything Anymore

game boy

Many years ago, my retarded baby brother took his Game Boy into the bathtub to play Pokemon during bathtime. When the Game Boy drowned, my dad took the device, popped the batteries, unscrewed the back cover, and pulled the circuit board. A few hours by the fan and a trip to Radio Shack to replace a blown fuse, and the Game Boy was resuscitated.

Fast forward to last night, as I innocently knocked a water bottle onto my MacBook Air. The screen went black. Ready to perform a heroic rescue, I flipped the laptop and grabbed a screwdriver set.

But no, the screws on the underside of the Mac were no ordinary screws. They were star-shaped. Not standard torx-Stars-of-David, but pentagrams. Apple seals its products with proprietary pentagram screws. And so I helplessly stood by and watched as my only means of livelihood died a horrible drowning death. This is why I can’t have nice things 🙁

pentalobe

We can’t fix consumer products anymore. My dad used to commute on an old-school 2-stroke Yamaha. He regularly rebuilt the motor with the pocket tool kit that came with the bike. Now I can’t even replace my Ford Escape battery without a trip to the dealership (well it’s a hybrid).

If we don’t buy things that we can fix, we forget how to fix things. Maybe I can fix my laptop. But a replacement motherboard is only $144 less than a brand-new MacBook. Who would bother with the repair?

Stores don’t sell Game Boys or 2-strokes anymore. Adjusted for inflation, cars and computers are dirt cheap. Everything is disposable except for time. Who cares if we can’t fix anything anymore? We don’t want to fix anything anymore.

Success is a Process, not a Destination

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Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. —Winston Churchill

Some parents claim that their greatest achievement in life is their kids. I can’t help but feel sorry for them. If your greatest achievement is something that over 80% of humans have been doing since the beginning of time, you probably don’t have a lot going for you.

By evolutionary standards, these humans would be deemed successful, especially the ones who manage to not kill their kids.

According to a financial yardstick, these people suck at life. Don’t you know that children offer terrible ROI*?

We all have different definitions of success. There is one very wrong definition: Equating success to goal achievement. Someone who defines success as goal conquest will spend most of her time, by definition, as a failure. Then if she does achieve her goal, she’ll feel great for about a day before she realizes she just lost her purpose and motivation. The solution is to either set a new goal and go back to feeling like an underachiever, or give up on life.

Success doesn’t need to mean victory. Success does need to mean pride in knowing you did your best to achieve your max potential. As far as I’m concerned, I am a super successful motorcycle racer, bush pilot, and entrepreneur, even though by most metrics I suck pretty hard at all of the above.

A person can work to the best of their capabilities and still fail at building a billion dollar company. But the lessons learned through that process will certainly help in the next attempt. If nothing else, that person was a successful student. People pay a lot of money for that kind of education.


*I could be wrong here. My friend Andy calculated that a dual-income family with net income of over $200k could profit from tax deductions if they raise a child for less than $3000 per year. Kids don’t eat that much so it’s probably doable.

See Also:
How-to-Fail-at-Almost-Everything-Book-198x300