Look, I do agree that women need to be better at self promotion. I don’t feel this issue as strongly given that the people that grew me up didn’t allow for much shrinking violet behavior, but I can concede that I’m not the norm, and that society and general will benefit from reduction with this behavior. But if you look at what I’m actually taking an issue with – the suggestion that women don’t start companies because it’s hard – I just don’t think that encompasses the whole problem. And I think the choices women -that I – am/are making are getting bucketed under the shrinking violet theory, when in fact there’s a lot more to do with it than that, and they’re not so dissimilar from the choices men are making, and not much change can be affected if you ignore that.

-Women’s anatomy? Nope.
-Women’s desire to have kids? Maybe, but really really really hard and probably not worth doing.
-Women’s self-confidence + attitude toward risk taking and self-promotion? Still hard, but something worth doing that could potentially have a big positive impact on broader society.

You’re positing a couple different things here that don’t seem to add up.

1) Women are underrepresented in the technology industry. This is a bad, unnatural thing that needs to be fixed.

2) Women have great reasons for not joining startups that have nothing to do with culture and everything to do with childbearing and the nature of human reproduction.

Soo…it seems that if supposition #2 is correct, then assumption #1 is wrong, and there really is no “problem” and the imbalance is an unfortunate by naturally occurring non-evil phenomenon OR there’s some other factor contributing to the lack of women in tech startups. Señor Shirky’s “shrinking violet” argument regarding the tendency of the female psyche seems as good an argument as any on this front. Do you have a better one?