female

I used to feel similarly -- that being a girl sometimes gives you special privileges -- but then I concluded it's probably not true, and voicing those feelings is an old tradition, best left in the past. How would you feel if you got a job somewhere and all your coworkers suspected you didn't deserve it? Same thing.

It gets tricky when there's a grain of truth to the feeling, since it's confusing trying to figure out whether you're censoring your own thoughts to the exclusion of reality just to conform to social norms, or whether you're actually being regressive. But FWIW all evidence thus far in my own life seems to point to "being a girl may have mattered once, but if anything it tends to work against them rather than in their favor." E.g. you have to worry about shit like an investor coming onto you: if you say no, what will happen? Or if I dress a certain way, will it affect how I'm treated at work? We take it for granted that we don't even have to think about any of that, ever, but those are real concerns.

This is a sensitive topic, so we should try to keep the conversation neutral and substantive. But I did want to open the door for talking about some of this.

(Traditionally, the two options are to ignore the "female" putdown, or ask you to stop. Any time anyone even tries to ask "Why do you feel that way?" the conversation immediately devolves into a catastrophe. I'm trying to see if there's a productive third option, which is to frame the conversation in a certain way where people are inclined to learn and relate experiences, rather than to be combative or dig in their heels. I'm going out on a limb here, so please don't make me regret doing this.)

The truth is probably closer to "she was a rich kid with connections that we could only dream of."

This has been on my mind, so I may as well talk: When we see things like female-only conferences or events, it's really tempting to feel jealous, and to feel like girls do get special treatment. Or even if it's not really special treatment, it's still "special" because no one goes out of their way to try and recruit you to some event just because you happen to be a dude.

I think this is a symptom of feeling isolated in general. Church attendance is declining, and -- setting aside the question of religion -- church was the primary social activity for a long time. It was a weekly thing, and you'd feel special and included. When you're not religious, you lack this facet of your life, and it manifests itself even though we'd really like to believe otherwise.

You can go out and attend React meetups or whatever, but it's different than (a) you're expected to attend, because (b) you're [a girl, religious, a harvard grad, etc]. When you have nothing like that in your own life, it's extremely tempting to feel like the world is against you and you've had to work for every single thing you've ever had, so this special treatment is unfair.

But here's a concrete example. A female webdev friend of mine works at a startup, and they made it to YC's interview stage last week. She was employee #1. The moment they received that email, the founder started treating her differently. She and I were both mystified about why. Why would the prospect of transitioning to YC's pipeline possibly matter? She was an effective employee, and built their whole stack. Her work was identical to any male.

Then we had a very uncomfortable realization: one of the founders joked that if they got into YC, they'd all have to bunk together like it was college. You tend to live in the same apartment at first.

She asked me "do you think if I was a boy, I'd be invited to the boys club?" and it was heartbreaking to realize that it was very possible that this employee #1 may have had to worry about not being invited along to California solely because she was a girl. We still don't know. (They didn't get accepted, so it was a moot concern.)

This is an extremely complicated topic, but I wanted to share some of that in case it's a positive thing.