Transcript: TechCrunch Disrupt “Women In Tech” Panel [From The Archives]

RACHEL: All right, well, I just don’t want people telling me what little slot I’m supposed to fit into. Because I read the Arrington description of what his day is like and the first thing I noticed is that he gets out of bed and goes to his computer. Like, mine’s on the floor next to my bed. I pick it up. That’s not healthy, I’m not endorsing that. All I’m saying is that I can compete on the workaholic front—but the point is that I think this is so counterproductive. We’re trying to say women do this and women do this, and 23-year-olds do this and 37-year-olds do this. Like, no. It’s half the population with a wide range of—

SARAH: Well, do you want to talk about the causes or not? If you want to talk about awareness, you have to talk about the causes. But then every time someone’s bringing up the causes, you’re getting mad and saying—

I don’t understand what you want to talk about. I don’t understand what the dialogue you want to have is.

RACHEL: The dialogue I want to have is about recognizing that—

SARAH: We’ve recognized. We got that over with at the beginning.

RACHEL: All right. Going forward the fact that there’s a benefit to including women, there’s a benefit to considering women, there’s a benefit to writing about women, and there’s a benefit to having women included in everything. And I think it’s ridiculous that this is a situation I have to be defensive about.
[applause]

SARAH: I think it is too. I think it’s ridiculous that you think we look at an awesome startup that comes in and we go, “Oh, but it’s a woman CEO, we’re not writing about that one!” Cyan, you’ve started companies—you fund companies, you’re an angel investor. Do you really think that people go into VC offices that have a great idea and they’re women and VCs say, “We’re not funding a woman.” Do you think TechCrunch, do you think other blogs, don’t write about women when we find great women?

CYAN: Absolutely not. In fact I’ve seen nothing but red carpets for most women in our industry.

SARAH CHIPPS: I agree. And I think the problem is, it’s not the desire. What we do—we’re Girl Develop IT not Girl Developer IT. So, in New York we have low-cost classes for women that teach them development. You know, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails. And we also teach founders. We have founders classes coming up. And some of the feedback we’ve gotten from VCs is that many of the women that they meet don’t have the foundations that a lot of the guys do. So I think it’s providing these outlets for women to come and learn from other founders, learn from developers—there’s no lack of desire. Our classes fill up immediately.

SARAH: And I’m totally for that. I privately mentor tons of women. Any women who reach out to me and want a career in Silicon Valley or a career in media and want to talk to me about—you know I think there’s absolutely sexism. I’ve gotten loads of sexism. But guess what? It made me work a lot harder. I think every entrepreneur, I think every successful human being, is successful because they’ve overcome adversity. So it’s not something that I’ve—

RACHEL: But you don’t want to see adversity built into the system—

SARAH: Ok, I just want to finish my point, Rachel.

NEXT: What’s her point, and does she finish it?

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.