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The Middle East Beats the West In Female Tech Founders
PolygamousRanchKid writes with this except from the Economist: "Only 10% of internet entrepreneurs across the world are women, according to Startup Compass, a firm that tracks such things. Except in Amman and other Middle Eastern cities, it seems. There, the share of women entrepreneurs is said to average 35% — an estimate seemingly confirmed by the mix of the sexes at 'Mix'n'Mentor,' a recent gathering in the Jordanian capital organised by Wamda, an online publication for start-ups. Reasons abound, and they are not always positive, says Nina Curley, Wamda's editor. Although more than half of university graduates in many Middle Eastern countries (51% in Jordan) are women, the workforce is dominated by men (women provide only 21% of it overall, and a paltry 16% in Jordan). The internet, however, is a new space that is more meritocratic and not as heavily male. The technology also lets entrepreneurs work from home, making it easier to raise children."
France beats the UAE in implementation of Sharia Law. Take that, Islam!
à_à
captcha: brutally
Seems that the cultural contribution of the West that Middle Eastern women should wear less hijabs and more bikinis has not, surprisingly, been a primary vector for women to reach equality in high-status tech roles.
Perhaps the secular plan should be filled-out a little better in implementation, before being forwarded as an essential requirement to leave behind their primitive religion, with all the benefits that seems to be failing to entail.
Well the middle east also beats the WORLD in blowing themselves up to kill people.
Maybe thats why they need women in tech.
One good thing can't undo all the flat out evil they have done either way.
Fuck the middle east. Wall it off until they get civilized. Could take awhile... We're on 2000+ years and counting waitin on that...
They live longer than men ... yet more is spent on women's-specific illnesses.
When underage boys are raped the woman can successfully sue them for custody and child support
Violence against men in the media is rampant. Remember Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones? He was tied down and sexually assaulted by two women. He then had his penis cut off. Imagine if something similar was done to a woman.
Remember when Catherine Kieu castrated her husband because he wanted a divorce? This is how this women's daytime talk show covered it.
Need more info: Man Woman and Myth
Usual feminist nonsense. The countries that adhere least to feminist philosophy have the most female tech entrepreneurs.
Remember how feminism works:
Some tech jobs are male dominated = men and women are equals.
Jobs such as working with young children are female dominated = female brains are different!
Any argument that could be made in favour of affirmative action for women in tech could also be made for affirmative action for men in nursing or working with kids. This could be extended to non occupational roles such as being a homemaker.
I remember reading a quote along the lines of "Apartheid cannot be reformed, it must be abolished.". Feminism can't be tweaked to make it male inclusive, it has to be either replaced with a new, gender-neutral philosophy or attacked by a male orientated one.
I wonder what the gender composition of most the penal system in that country is? Oh hang on, that's because female brains are different, right?
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
It's mostly an optimistic delusion that the Internet is a meritocracy.
Sure, pockets of meritocracy exist, especially in open source development communities with lots of eyeballs to weed out the bad contributors. But outside of those, the Internet is mostly ruled by the clueless, and they gang up against the occasional visitor who tries to fix things and upset their status quo.
It's simply a matter of numbers. The clueless are so many that unless you are one of them, you are overwhelmed regardless of your input --- good or bad, because the clueless can't distinguish good from bad. They CAN distinguish that you're not one of them and are rocking their boat, and they will defend their clueless status quo with every means at their disposal.
Meritocracies are sustainable only when the majority is clueful and there is an effective negative feedback mechanism operating, such as code review. Elsewhere, it's rare.
Up to about the years 1200-1400 the Arab world was pretty cool. While we Europeans were living in an age appropriately designated the Dark Ages much of the Arab world was doing cool math, Cool science, Exploration, trade, arts, and medicine. They were fairly tolerant of other religions and were one of the few bright spots on this planet. Then around 800 years ago it all seems to have gone wrong. "Trouble in the Middle East" has been a newspaper headline since the invention of the newspaper. Personally I would love to know what changed 800 years ago as it might give a clue as to how to make it right again. Maybe lots of female internet entrepreneurs is a step in that direction. I wonder if there were more female entrepreneurs in the middle east 1000 years ago?
So all I can say is good luck!
All the men are busy planning suicide bombing.
Women are going into tech jobs because it's one of the only places they can find work. It doesn't represent gender equality, but gender inequality.
IOW, who gives a %@^&.
What's the percentage of Middle Eastern tech successes, regardless of gender, as compared to Western or far Eastern tech successes. Or is ot more important for us to focus on a particular subset? Is MORE affirmative action on the agenda?
I'm an American working in the Middle East. Some of my friends work for men's universities; others work for women's universities. While it is nice that there is a women make up a higher percentage of people involved in tech startups, we need to examine the percentage of all people in tech w/r/t to the overall population. I'm making up numbers here, but if the F:M ratio in the western tech sector is 1:9 and 10% of the total population is involved in the tech sector, then women in the field have 1% of total employment; if the F:M ratio here in the Middle East is 1:2, and the sector only makes up 2% of the total population, then women in the field have 0.65% of total employment. While we're seeing some innovation from privileged upper classes (who, as often as not, are hiring Indian developers and still claimig ownership for the project), this does not seem to be the case in grassroots society.
There is also the statistical problem of comparing an entire country in one georegion with isolated cities in another; urban populations have different demographics than national/regional populations.
All things being equal, this is true of the west too, so I'd suggest caution until the data is better analyzed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1te01rfEF0g
In particular the part you are interested in starts at 23:45, though the overall segment starts at around 19:20.
The short version? Religious fundamentalism.
Well wooby doo!
Pakistan, a fairly radical islamic country had a female head of state before the vast majority of western democracies... Just sayin'.
This is interesting. It may be the harsher conditions that limit options, and part of it is likely class. Part of it may be the acceptance of over-the-top misogynistic behavior in some Western tech communities is constrained by tighter constraints on speech overall. The US is doing terribly at inclusion of women in cs and engineering. The percentage of women in engineering and in CS peaked in the eighties and continues to decrease. Microsoft being cool with a rape joke for Xbox One and the widespread acceptance of rape not only as a trope for every female character in gaming but also as a trivializing verb is part of the problem. Gender hate speech in tech culture is a problem in the West, I do not know if it is a problem in tech forums in other languages. The same sexual repression that harms women may have a minor positive secondary effect in the prohibition of the explicitly sexually violent language. In India, for decades nearly half the engineering classes have been female. So there is a significant pipeline issue. If women are 50% of the graduates and 35% of start-ups, well that is better than the numbers here. (About 14% in EE last year, about 3% of start-ups.) Another possible explanation is that these are places where rape is more endemic and there are more women is start-ups. The happy idea that the internet is a gender-free meritocracy is funny to anyone with access to a search engine. However, if some people are actually prevented from traveling alone outdoors, either by law in Saudi or by threat of rape, then doing your own start-up is one of fewer employment options. So women may be driven to this. Constraints on women working with men in some cultures may mean that there can be no situations where one woman gets a team of men. A college education is much more of a luxury good in these countries. A much much smaller percentage of the population has a college degree. Thus, those with those degrees are more likely to have access to capital to have a start-up; even if it is as simple as having housing, health insurance and subsidized Internet. This is interesting. There are many possible explanations. Perhaps we could learn something applicable locally.
Many people of all religions still "pay a tax" today. That being a weaker grasp of science limits their success in the modern world. Be it getting a tech job or just getting duped by bad food and medicine.
Personally I would love to know what changed 800 years ago as it might give a clue as to how to make it right again.
Part one of your question: What could have possibly caused change 800 years ago in the Arab world?
Pulled off Wikipedia
Reconquista (718-1492)
People's Crusade (1195–1196)
First (1095–1099) and Immediate Aftermath
Second (1147–1149)
Wendish (1147–1162)
Third (1187–1192)
Northern crusades (1193–1290)
German (1195–1198)
Fourth (1202–1204)
Albigensian Crusade (1208–1241)
Fifth (1217–1221)
Sixth (1228–1229)
Seventh (1248–1254)
Eighth (1270)
Ninth (1271–1272) and aftermath in the Middle East and North Africa
Nicropolis (1396)
Hussite (1420–1431)
Varna (1444)
Seige of Belgrade (1456)
Arguably many more 'secular crusades' right up to the present day.
Part two of your question: How to make it right again?
I hope the answer is now self evident. :)
Except, of course, that the name is somewhat of a misnomer; since they actually come from India, and are known as "Hindu numbers" in the middle east.
Except of course we lifted it directly from the Arabs (who use a system developed from Hindu numerals) as evidenced by the fact that we still write our numbers backward. (Ie. from small to large in Arabic right to left direction.) Which is the opposite of how we [used] to speak our numbers, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen ... four'n'twenty
I've just been highlighting this fact in teaching why *nix, r, w, x run 4, 2, 1 instead of the other way round (the first 8 binary numbers thus forming a truth table).
Breastpounding of this being a western influence aside, if the times for women to be tech founders in the ME is now, then as a result it will be more popular and more will do it (and this is all good) but that does not mean it is a lasting effect, it could level out much lower than in the west or it could level out much higher, only time will tell - but for now we should be happy for the people who now have one more choice of path to make their life better.
Large percentages of the ME men, (yes, even in fairly tame countries like Jordan) have been shunted off to jihadism or the armies that attempt to control it. So they have had a decade of war (or closer to two decades), with disproportionate male losses.
Meanwhile the women start "companies", although the story says "Many firms run by women entrepreneurs deal with what are labelled female issues (weddings, parenting advice, recipes, and web businesses)". So other than keeping other women entertained, these are hardly the same thing as running industry, developing resources or running banks.
If you count these empty-afternoon enterprises as business you have to realize that this kind of stuff doesn't even get counted in the west. (And in the US you can't even tell except by inspecting first names if businesses are owned by men or women, gender tagging business licenses just isn't done).
It seems likely, when when the ME men settle down and stop trying to force Islam on the world, they will start forcing it on their families, and this "trend" of female entrepreneurship will disappear.
When you can look at a news photo of an Arab street and see 50/50 ratio of men to women (instead of 100males to 1), call me. Because until then, all the filling of afternoons while the children are at school with pretend companies means nothing.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I wonder is this could be one factor:
In societies where male and female normally interact with each other at all ages, males with poor social skills in general might gravitate towards fields that are dominated by interactions with machines or technology rather than people. Therefore women perceive the male community in these fields as hostile.
In societies with gender segregation, everyone has poor skills interacting the the opposite sex, so technology is the same as every other occupation.
... it is the males of the Middle East who are totally useless.
In the West, most of the men work.
In Middle East, most of the men just sit there, doing nothing.
In fact, some got so bored they decide to become human bombers.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Another thing the west does is force black people to play in professional sports. Today a black man is not allowed to do anything but play mother fuckin basketball. Do you have any idea how demeaning it is for a proud black man to be forced to play what is essentially a children's game day after day. 'No negro you are not allowed to program computers, your moneky ass has to play basket ball day in and day out.' I really hate the west and our racism. Make some cracker play some bball once in a while. Black men are sick of it. We also don't allow women to start 'high tech' computer companies. The only people who are allowed to take math and science classes are East Asians. I really think there aught to b a law saying that only black people can study math. All east asian should b forced to make a living playing professional sports. All Whites and arabs should be killewd. Wites bcause they are all racists, and arabs bcause they are anit-semitic.
No, but seriously we should have a commision to determine exactly how many people of every possible race / demographic are doing one pathicular thing, and then coorelate it to the world population as a whole. If these numbers don't exactly match up there neeeds to be an uproar on NPR. Personally I have found that there is a disturbing lack of female transgendered caucasian thirld world banana republic dictators. I can therefore only logically conlude that the 'third world' is systematically undermining the efforts of white transgendered females to take over and rule their countries.
Many people of all religions still "pay a tax" today.
The non-religious still pay a tax too. At least where I live Churches (and their businesses) enjoy a tax exemption. So my taxes, in effect, are subsidising someone else's religion.
I have a friend from Korea, he told me, "My grandpa always forced my mom to eat at a separate table from the men, until she started making the money. Then she didn't give him any until she could eat at the normal table." Now that tradition has disappeared from Korea.
Making money is one potential road towards equality.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I live in a third-world country where there is a similar phenomenon.
We have a huge number of female entrepreneurs here - many of them are extremely successful even by Western standards, and many more earn a Western wage in a poor country, which gives them an extremely comfortable standard of living.
What is the secret? It's largely down to motivation. The concept of family is extremely important here - much more so for women than for men. If a woman gets pregnant and has a child, the husband/boyfriend can leave without any financial consequences, and few social consequences.
Women in general (in this country) are much more driven to help their parents, sibilings, children and extended family than their male equivalents (on average, of course). Men are still generally the biggest wage earners, and hold the top positions in most big companies, but women rule the world of small and family businesses.
I am not saying it is fair or correct, but the absence of sexual equality and a benefits system here has had some interesting consequences. I'm not trying to give my opinion about sexual politics, just commenting on how things work here from my day-to-day personal experience. Counter-intuitively, inequality here has led to a large group of middle class female entrepreneurs. Perhaps a similar effect is in action in the Middle East.
Middle eastern countries are a somewhat diverse bunch in terms of overall attitudes. I can imagine quite a large difference in how well women do overall in say somewhere like Lebanon vs Saudi Arabia.
I didn't notice any links in the TFA, but they only really mentioned (vaguely) stuff from Jordan. I don't think Jordan is at the Saudi end of the scale here.
Your assertion on Islam versus Christianity might be true on a certain level. I am a Chrisitan from India. The Hindu beliefs I carry - which were not imposed by anyone - are far more stronger than whatever Christianity has tried to impose. India and the polytheist Hindu philosophy with its 33 1/3 million gods always found space for new religions. We absorbed any new god, compared to other Abrahamic and monotheist religions who felt a "new god" stole the thunder and the adherents had to be blocked/killed/raped/pillaged. This is the reason Hindu philosophy shines over others when it comes to tolerance and acceptance. Even the most rabid Hindu nationalists are tame compared to the Islamic and far right Christian counterparts. They are angry pussy cats rather than feral dogs. But if I follow your assertion fully, I have no answer why the science and technological development starting with European renaissance escaped India and China. May be everything is cyclical, a paradigm shift might be underway, India's young population - 65% is under age of 30, bodes well for the future unless we pick a dumb war with China or Pakistan.
Tat Tvam Asi
100?
come on
In NSW Australia the NSW Crimes Act ...
You are wildly wrong here. The amendments to the Crimes Act which abolished rape and introduced sexual assault made it possible for the first time in NSW for a man to be "raped" and for a woman to "rape."
Under the common law 'rape' required the penetration by a penis of a vagina. By definition rape was something done by a man to a woman. The replacement by the gender neutral sexual assault provision now made it possible to "rape" either a man or woman, by either a man or a woman.
So if the man-hating lesbians of your fantasy tie you down and violate your anus with a broom handle, they can now be charged with an equivalent crime, which they could not before.
So if someone fingers a drunk women and then gives a handjob to a drunk man ...
I can play this game too. So if someone (male or female) drunk gropes a woman's breast, or sticks their pinky up a man's butthole ...
- violating the woman (Section 61L) = punishable by only 5 years prison
- violating the man (Section 61I) = punishable by 14 years prison
ZOMG women are being discriminated against even today in NSW!!! Sheeeesh!
I understand that life has been a disappointment for you. But your failure stems from your inability to compete with either men or women of greater competency (or maybe simply fewer personality defects). Mate, you really need to stop blaming feminism for your personal inadequacies and have a good look in the mirror.
Because most of these "IT companies" are not very serious!
"The Middle East Beats the West In Female Tech Founders" I did not expect that.
I always cringe when I only see percentages and no absolute numbers. Perhaps there are only 7 female entrepreneurs on a total of 20? Or maybe it's 7000 on a total of 20000? This would lead to a totally different conclusion.
It seems likely, when when the ME men settle down and stop trying to force Islam on the world, they will start forcing it on their families, and this "trend" of female entrepreneurship will disappear.
ME men have been like that for 1000 years. The change seems to be technology allowing women to step out from under the oppression and rubble. I think it's more likely that the women will provide means and entertainment to pacify their husbands than that the men will "settle down."
It's a lot riskier to beat your wife into disability if her income is paying all the bills.
There is a higher percentage of female CEOs in the "third world" also. Cheap domestic help may be the biggest contributor.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Seems to me all that happened before Islam. Islam seems to have put the brakes on mid-east progress.
This is some of the most sexist bullshit I've ever seen on Slashdot, and that is saying something. Why don't we equally discount businesses having to do with sports, car enthusiasts, video games, power tools and tech gadgets? A business is a business, and if they are making money then it counts. Just because it is a traditionally "female issue" doesn't make it any less useful to society. Guess what? Half of consumers are female, and they vote with their wallets what is important to them.
That is where the US was just over 50 years ago. We had a male labor shortage during the world wars and when the men came home and the fighting stopped, the women didn't go home. They started attending college for home economics so they could get jobs as teachers, decorators, party planners, institution management, and other "soft" jobs.
Once the fighting stops and the men go home, you won't see things go back to the way they were. Societies do not change overnight. You do not wake up one morning and redefine an entire social structure. It took us the better part of a century and we can expect it to take them just as long.
BTW, there are plenty of people in the U.S. "filing afternoons while the children are at school" and the money those companies make is not pretend. You can knock things like wedding planning all you want, but the reality is that brides are willing to pay people thousands of dollars to show up for an afternoon's work. You and I may think the work is stupid and silly, but the money is real. A friend of mine's wife is a wedding planner and it is insane how much money she gets paid just for in-law wrangling.
Why don't we equally discount businesses having to do with sports, car enthusiasts, video games, power tools and tech gadgets?
We do. If guys were only involved in those businesses, and women ran the banks, hospitals, factories, research labs, etc. then I would be very sad as a guy.
"The Middle East Beats Female Tech Founders"?
in the US you can't even tell except by inspecting first names if businesses are owned by men or women, gender tagging business licenses just isn't done
Really? I could have sworn that the Small Business Administration (SBA) and many states as well issue special certifications to women-owned businesses. (The reason being, some government contracts are "set aside" for businesses that are certified as women-owned. The SBA provides advice as to how women-owned businesses can win "their share" of government business. I have two problems with this. 1) Having the SBA handle this belittles female entrepreneurs, sending the message that small business is their bailiwick, not large business. 2) Shouldn't a company's "share" of government contracts be determined by whether it delivers good value to taxpayers, not the topography of the owner's crotch? It's a classic case of Orwellian doublespeak that "the Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) Federal Contract Program provides a level playing field." Any time contracts are "set aside" for one group or another, there is by definition an unlevel playing field.)
Having said that, some event-planning companies are "pretend companies," while others are operated on a serious scale. I know I wrote a very large check to one of these companies when I got married.
It's telling that the post that blames Christianity is modded +5, and yours is modded +3. Bashing Christianity is oh so fashionable.
One need only look at Mohammed's wife to be unsurprised that even today, Muslim businesswomen aren't exactly unheard of. Sure, there are oppressive countries, but that's government, not a core facet of Islam.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
You wrote:: "Meanwhile the women start "companies", although the story says "Many firms run by women entrepreneurs deal with what are labelled female issues (weddings, parenting advice, recipes, and web businesses)". So other than keeping other women entertained, these are hardly the same thing as running industry, developing resources or running banks.......all the filling of afternoons while the children are at school with pretend companies means nothing."
So.... tell that to Sarah Blakely, who is laughing all the way to the banks with her billions of dollars...
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57393137/spanx-founder-sara-blakely-now-a-billionaire/
That you can toll the internet and find the odd exception, merely proves the rule.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
when you lock your women in the basement.
Pakistan beats the US in number of female heads of state.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You got to be kidding... Travel to the ME and see for yourself if this rattling about men going to war and whatnot is true.... Why can't you think of another explanation as to why women outnumber men in this field, a more plausible one that is based on numbers.... You have a region that is comprised of very young population compared to the rest of the world, so logically, they are more tech-savvy than the older populations say in the west...
I live in the west myself and I am from the Middle East and I tell you that internet literacy by comparison is a lot higher where I come from than where I currently am in this univresity. Just by taking a random sample, we have a lot more reliance on smart technologies in big parts of the ME...
So be rational and don't waddle in your own little pool of Islam-is-good-for-nothingness for it is not the identity, it is the people... the people man....