Racism and Meritocracy
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Racism and Meritocracy
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Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#2He claims that the difference between men's and women's interest in tech startups is not skewed enough to explain the skewed male/female ratio in the tech startup world. ("...all of the research I am aware of suggests that these differences are extremely small – not nearly big enough to explain what we’re observing in places like Y Combinator.")
It would have been nice if he'd cited the reseach which supports this claim.
Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#3Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#4http://www.google.com/search?q=railsconf+audience&hl=en&...
lol I think this one seas it all http://www.flickr.com/photos/x180/2545980399/
Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#5http://www.google.com/search?q=railsconf+audience&hl=en&...
Ok, forgive me but I'm not sure what this link is supposed to demonstrate. I see mostly pictures of white men here punctuated with a few asians. I know the article mentioned a Ruby conference getting a larger female audience but these aren't pictures of that conference.
Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#6The main problem with this article that meritocracies are a mythological construct and not something that empirically exist. This probably shouldn't be much of a surprise, considering that merit is literally a religious concept.
Try replacing every instance of the word merit with the word Jesus, and you'll see there is essentially no loss of meaning.
Figuring out how to reduce bias in startup funding is important, but really it's only a small part of the larger problem of identifying talent in general.
Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#7One of the problems with racism in particular is that it has effects on people from birth. Past racism may have hurt their parents' socioeconomic prospects, forcing them to be born in an economically depressed ghetto with poor schools and gang violence. Even if there's no racism past that point, if their parents were prevented from ascending to the middle class, they won't pass on middle-class virtues emphasizing the importance of education. No matter how good the schools are, they don't really work the same without positive parental involvement.
And there's obstacles to how good the schools are, too--good teachers will be scared away by the violence and gang activity that's common in those environments, and district-based taxing, funding, and student allocation procedures mean that kids in those areas are trapped in bad schools. If the school system is racist on top of that, that's even another barrier.
If you don't fix something that's that bad when the kid is five years old, by the time they're eighteen and getting out of high school, let's suppose they go to college. Okay, the colleges do everything they can not to be racist, but it's genuinely harder to meet academic standards for admission if you went to shitty schools your whole life. And even if you get in, you have to compete with the students who went to better schools and got a better start. That's a barrier against even getting into difficult academic tracks like STEM. And if the university system is racist, that's even another barrier.
Okay, the job market for developers is pretty good right now even in startups. It probably isn't even racist. But even at this point, all the forces I've already described have thinned out the numbers to the point where a disproportionately small minority of the genuinely qualified population of entry-level developers are, well, minorities. But let's say the job market is racist, too.
Once you're ready to found a startup, it's absolutely true that the pool of candidates coming to YC and others for funding is genuinely unbalanced. Even if investors do everything they can to be perfectly non-racist, racism in any or all of the levels previous to this in the person's life is going to take them out of the population of qualified startup founders. And no matter what you do to fix investment, it's not going to restore the proportion of minority startup founders to the proportion of minorities in the population. You have to fix these problems at the root, not all the way out here when it's too late to make any difference.
Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#8In the article: "When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process"
In my chess club have the same kind of female/male ratio: 12 females on 220 members. Leaving out the youth members it is 8 out of 180 or about 4% ;-) Something must be wrong with our non-existent selection process.
Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#9there might be an inherent gender imbalance simply because men can afford to settle down and start a family much later in life than women. founding and managing a startup takes an incredible amount of time and dedication solely to work, which can easily turn into a multi-year workaholic wormhole that leads nowhere. perhaps the majority of women would rather put 5-10 years into a guaranteed, fulfilling family than uncertain stress and a large paycheck. if i was a woman and wanted to have children before i was 30, it would definitely change my outlook for embarking on the entrepreneurial path.
Re: Racism and Meritocracy
#10I really fail to see how anyone can see racism in this. The current people trying to make it big in silicon valley now did not start the process now, they started 10 or 15 years ago when they started fiddling around with computers or learning to code or reading business books. And it's at that stage that the current audience was created, and not right now. The people applying and the selection is just a result of that process.
And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them.
And in any case, there is this theory: if you pick any group of people at all, there are going to be a few people who are simply more able to do many things. Let's say these people are more talented and more intelligent. These people tend to work on what is currently 'intellectually trendy'. For example, a while back they would have been painters, another while back, they would have been writers, another while they would have been physicists, now they are technologists. These people search out a trendy intellectual effort and then spend their time developing their abilities there. This 'trend' is different for different groups, depending on the media that they are exposed to, and what the people around them are talking about.
Groups in America are pretty segregated, and there is a form of intellectual segregation betwen men and women. It leads to gender specific roles. It also leads to the effect observed above: Smart black guys did not start fiddling with computers 15 years ago, so they are not currently active in the tech industry.