81–90 of 261 posts
Most of the comments are trying to disprove the racism that this black female founder is facing. Microsoft has put out a great unconscious bias course that this mostly cismale dominated forum can benefit from. https://www.mslearning.microsoft.com/course/72169/launch Why downvote this comment?
What is a "cismale", and what makes you think they dominate this forum?
> Black women are the most educated group when you look at the number of associate and bachelor’s degrees earned within each demographic. Can anyone confirm this? When I follow the links, I get to this source: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72 That bar chart doesn't say anything to me about inter-demographic data. It looks confined to each demographic; i.e. women earn more degrees than men within each d…
e.g. we see that for academic year 2015-2016, whites earned 65% of bachelor's degrees and blacks earned 11%. The estimate of the US population for 2019 [note, 2019 is not 2015] currently visible in Wikipedia says that whites are 60.4% of the population and blacks are 13.4%.
Throwing in another assumption, we'll just say that of whites and blacks, each group is exactly half male and half female.
Thus, in our population of 60400 whites and 13400 blacks, with 20,000 degrees earned between them:
- The whites earned 17,105 degrees.
- The blacks earned 2,895 degrees.
- Of the black degrees, 1,853 went to black women, and 1,042 went to black men.
- Of the white degrees, 9,579 went to white women, and 7,526 went to white men.
- There are 30200 white men, 30200 white women, 6700 black men, and 6700 black women.
- The rate of earning a bachelor's degree is 31.7% [note: we made this number up. It is useful only for comparing to the other three groups] for white women, 24.9% for white men, 27.7% for black women, and 15.6% for black men. White women are noticeably more educated than black women are.
The original claim lumped in associate degrees along with bachelor's degrees. This might make that claim true. However, it would be hard to blame someone for viewing an associate degree as a negative rather than a positive signal.
(Final note: population share of the United States is not the same thing as population share of those of college age in the United States.)
I'm so glad she wrote this, and that she named names! As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least…
VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash. What's your track record? Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
> VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash.
> Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
Who knew, thanks for enlightening me. Let's just say that I have VCs emailing me now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if there are hurdles to black women getting hired at places like Google, isn’t your explanation just passing the buck? What is the evidence that there are hurdles for black women getting hired at Google? For example, does their representation differ significantly from, say, the rate at which they graduate with CS degrees?
How much evidence would ever convince you? How much evidence of racism do you need? How about red lining that continued until the 90s which locked black families out of home ownership? There is so much evidence available that demanding evidence at this point is more a sign of willful blindness than intellectual rigor.
You seem irritated by a simple request to support a claim with evidence, which is strange.
It seems like the author could search and replace “racism” with “sexism” and put out an otherwise similar article based on her experience having to use her husband’s LinkedIn rolodex to reach these people. I think it’s shameful that VCs make empty promises to support black founders - but it’s also not surprising. Most of the people paying lip service to racial equity now didn’t give a shit six weeks ago before it was…
> the VCs just weren’t interested in her pitch Why not? Not even 5-10 minutes of their day? I guess all the noise coming out of VCs the last few weeks is all just virtue signaling and hot air.
I'm so glad she wrote this, and that she named names! As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least…
VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash. What's your track record? Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman. She is asking for a fair chance. And we need to give folks from under-represented communities a more than fair chance to combat inherent selection bias.
Most of the comments are trying to disprove the racism that this black female founder is facing. Microsoft has put out a great unconscious bias course that this mostly cismale dominated forum can benefit from. https://www.mslearning.microsoft.com/course/72169/launch Why downvote this comment?
What is a "cismale", and what makes you think they dominate this forum?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash. What's your track record? Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
Ah, the classic condescending first response. > VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash. > Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone. Who knew, thanks for enlightening me. Let's just say that I ha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash. What's your track record? Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder? She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman. She is asking for a fair chance. And we need to give folks from under-represented communities a more than fair chance to combat inherent selection bias.
This is a very insightful paper exploring the subject, written by a Google engineer: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash. What's your track record? Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder? She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman. She is asking for a fair chance. And we need to give folks from under-represented communities a more than fair chance to combat inherent selection bias.
That's why I asked to see the track record. You won't get anywhere in this business without a track record. Moreover, if you do have a track record being a woman is an advantage these days, not a disadvantage. There are a lot of VCs chomping at the bit to invest into women- and minority-led startups. But they won't give you money if they don't have some degree of certainty that you can do what you're promising to do.