I didn't realize it till I was writing this, but that may help explain why there are so few female startup founders. I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that only 1.7% of VC-backed startups are founded by women. The percentage of female hackers is small, but not that small. So why the discrepancy?
When you realize that successful startups tend to have multiple founders who were already friends, a possible explanation emerges. People's best friends are likely to be of the same sex, and if one group is a minority in some population, pairs of them will be a minority squared.
I find it hard to believe that our community (hackers) is 96.6 % male.
I don't find this hard to believe.
I've been working as a startup hacker for 10 years and can count the number of female programmers I've worked with on one hand. The population IS skewed.
The population probably is that skewed. Males gain a far larger evolutionary advantage from excellence than females, due to their lower direct reproductive investment; consequently, there are strong evolutionary incentives for males to adopt high-risk behaviours.
While that obviously happens, I personally very much doubt that explains the difference. Evolutionary rationales are far more compelling to me. Even childhood conditioning/environment is more compelling.
To the extent it is true, or at least that the behavior exaggerated in that comic is true, I'm always curious what we're supposed to take from it. Being a guy, I don't have a knee-jerk hatred of myself just because I relate to sex in a different way from women. I don't find myself morally repugnant because I can be attracted to women before I've found a deep, meaningful connection with them. I don't hate myself because a woman showing up on IRC suddenly becomes powerfully interesting to me.
Guys aren't evil. They're different from women. If you don't know this, try reversing the situation. Imagine if a guy showed up in an IRC peopled entirely by girls, and they started paying all kinds of attention to him, and making sexual comments about him. Would he be traumatized? Aside from the usual contrarians, most honest guys would say no. In fact, most guys would LOVE it. This would hold even if they showed up in a typically "female" domain, such as a class on midwifery or home economics.
Society feels that it needs to enforce the notion that the way men relate to sex is wrong and the way women relate to it is right. I think the arguments for that are reasonable, but I personally opt out.
Sure, ellyagg, there are other reasons. And to be honest any female with half a brain doesn't go into a tech community proclaiming her gender. But there are definitely attitudes and comments that you get when people know you're female that don't really encourage you to stick around and become a member of the community.
Assuming a woman overcomes whatever other social/educational/evolutionary factors enough to start participating in the first place, it really doesn't help the balance that she's driven off due to the behaviour of apes with keyboards.
Of course, as I allude, most of us have learnt to let the gender thing stay under wraps and, when it does come out, are used to the general comments caused by JGGIFT. But there are plenty who get really upset by such things and won't hang around.
However, I'm not sure if keeping the 'gender thing under wraps' is the best approach. It yields this mentality of 'well, I never see women on the internet being intelligent and competent, therefore, there must not be intelligent and competent women on the internet.'
Edit: OK, actually 85 in 19 :)