it's condescending because as a guy, and someone who has worked very very hard, sometimes you ask yourself: but what about me? I deserve some kudos as well.
It's also condescending towards the women. It's really hard to shake the internal feeling that perhaps you only got featured because of your gender, and not your brilliant idea, as well as the external perception that that may be the case. I don't think posts like this benefit either audience, in fact.
A hard working guy with a world-changing idea shouldn't be overlooked in favour of a mediocre woman who is remarkable because she is a woman.
@jlees That is why I have not written a "women in tech" article in six years. But I think the benefit of showing that there are women doing interesting things at Y Combinator to other prospective women founders outweighs the downside that you mentioned.
Yes, but Techcrunch choosing to explicitly feature the women from YC, not the interesting ideas from YC, creates the effect -- that's what I'm referring to. Mind you, being in YC may minimise the impostor syndrome.
TC has written a dedicated post to virtually every single YC startup from every batch for the last several years. We did about a dozen posts on Demo Day alone this week. So writing one article that points out that YC is more diverse than it used to be out of the 100 or so we will probably ultimately write about companies from this class seems reasonable to me.
I think the fear is that the bar is lower if you have a certain set of chromosomes, but in this case that's not true as anyone who makes it into Y Combinator is probably deserving of some sort of write-up as they've been vetted & are getting backing by a big name.
