Why is Birthdate a required field on the User Profile required for YC founder-matching?
(Gender is optional.)
Also, once you get past that User Profile, to the founder-matching Profile, the very top of the first form says "Your profile will get much more attention if you add a picture." Why implicitly endorse that, which has undesirable historic baggage of prejudice and unfairness?
In hindsight, I realize that the prominence of schools on the profiles (and the text field using the example of Stanford) didn't jump out at me, maybe because it's common on a US resume (unlike gender, birthdate, or photo).
Maybe other people will have additional "what?" reactions to other things in the forms.
Edit: On the matching profile form, it won't let you submit the form and proceed until you add a photo. ("Please fix the errors below before continuing.") I was able to get past that by uploading a blank image, but I'm not going to proceed further if it seems like current YC thinking isn't a match for me.
(Gender is optional.)
Also, once you get past that User Profile, to the founder-matching Profile, the very top of the first form says "Your profile will get much more attention if you add a picture." Why implicitly endorse that, which has undesirable historic baggage of prejudice and unfairness?
In hindsight, I realize that the prominence of schools on the profiles (and the text field using the example of Stanford) didn't jump out at me, maybe because it's common on a US resume (unlike gender, birthdate, or photo).
Maybe other people will have additional "what?" reactions to other things in the forms.
Edit: On the matching profile form, it won't let you submit the form and proceed until you add a photo. ("Please fix the errors below before continuing.") I was able to get past that by uploading a blank image, but I'm not going to proceed further if it seems like current YC thinking isn't a match for me.