As cofounders of an all-female startup that is starting Y Combinator in a week, here are a few thoughts in response to Paul Graham’s comments on women in tech:

First, Paul Graham is right in that there is a huge problem 10 years upstream of us. Real societal and educational changes need to be made before Y Combinator is going to have any chance of having a truly diversified class.

But that doesn’t give us free rein to ignore the problems that exist in universities, accelerators, tech companies and venture capital. These pieces of the funnel need to be thoroughly analyzed and optimized for inclusion - be it for gender, race, age, or other markers, so that we’re able to produce the best sustainable and profitable companies and organizations possible.

While a lot of Paul Graham’s comments seem to have been taken out of context and distorted, we think he would agree that there are changes that could be made in the here and now to address the diversity problems in the tech world.

So, what can we do?

1. We can adopt a stronger stance against misogyny and sexual harassment in the tech world.

This isn’t news, but as with many fields dominated by men, there is a general ‘acceptable’ level of misogyny that keeps overly adequate female hackers - and male hackers as well - from wanting to participate in a culture that accepts and propagates sexism, racism, classism and general people-hatingism.

Misogyny is alive and well, from Hacker News devolving into a disgusting sea of victim blaming after a female poster discussed being sexually assaulted at a tech conference, to the HR-free world of venture capital (ask any female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, she has encountered at least one investor who has used his power to sexually harass her). And while Hacker News doesn’t make or break a YC application, Paul Graham does mention that being a regular poster can help your application.

Or there’s the case of another California accelerator we applied to and never heard back from - only to hear a few weeks later from a current member of that accelerator that the program has a silent policy of not accepting women because they prove to be distractions. The program currently has only one female founder, but only because she’s married to her male co-founder - and therefore a necessity and also not as much of a distraction.

2. We can work harder to identify and fix silent biases.

Rather than accept the status quo, there should be more of a discussion around the silent biases that prevent a disproportionate amount of women from entering into or continuing on as hackers.

A lot can be learned from the recent Harvard Business School business school case study, that identified and changed certain silent factors - from class participation to how students dressed on Halloween - that created the huge achievement gap between male and female students while at Harvard and after graduation.

Unlocking the Clubhouse examines a similar performance gap between female and male CS students at Carnegie Mellon and points to a few key fundamental reasons why adult women - fully interested in and capable of succeeding - don’t pursue, or continue on with computer science - ranging from insufficient personal support from professors, to emphasis on overblown confidence versus actual performance, to the general misogyny that seems to have outlasted other industries.

3. ‘Not discouraging’ women isn’t enough - actively encourage them.

We’re not by any means saying there’s a need for affirmative action in the tech space - just that YC and other industry leaders should do everything in their power to not discourage perfectly adequate founders from applying, and should take a closer look at the process when it comes to the application questions, interview style, and evaluation process.

Just as the Carnegie Mellon researchers realized that encouragement does leaps and bounds to get perfectly qualified female students from dropping out of computer science courses, so too could organizations with the influence of Y Combinator go that extra step in encouraging female applicants to apply. Remember, I’m not saying they should go out of their way to accept more women - but that it couldn’t hurt to give some form of encouragement or application assistance, seeing as there are only a handful of posts about former female founders or female partners at YC. I spent weeks obsessively reading everything online that past YC founders had written and only grew more and more discouraged. Our application looked nothing like the applications featured online and so we didn’t feel qualified to reach out to past founders to review it; we only wrote one version and we almost didn’t submit at all. This is the case for many founders regardless of gender, but as has been documented time and time again, disproportionately affects women.

To end on a slightly positive note - Y Combinator may be more ahead of the curve than the general public realizes. I’m not allowed to mention numbers, but there are more female founders in this batch than you would think.

Our company is combining tech and real life human interaction to solve a problem in a field currently dominated by men. And call me sexist, but our approach (a mix of matchmaker meetings, Gilmore Girls jokes, and actually giving a shit about each and every one of our users) is slightly colored by the fact that we’re currently an all-female team. We think Paul Graham was able to see this in us, and even though none of us really resemble Mark Zuckerberg, we still managed to get in.

The current “white male/bro” tech culture is missing out on a lot of great companies - not just from female founders, but from founders of any demographic who are not encouraged to join this often negative, dog eat dog world. Yes, we need large, structural changes, but there are clear changes that can be made at all levels. Although taken out of context, I’m glad that Paul Graham’s quote didn’t go ignored, and is opening up a wider discussion around these issues.

-Lauren Kay and Katie Bambino