Some thoughts and questions here. Should we in the tech industry feel obligated to spend energy on these social movements? Are we wrong and selfish to not? Honestly, I'd rather not. I'd rather get technical things done, and let policy makers and influencers focus on those issues. If you're in on something with me, great AWESOME, I honestly don't care who you are. Things like race and gender don't matter to me as long…
It's your choice to ignore it. More precisely, it's your privilege to ignore it. "...how do we as a technical industry even change that when we need to focus..." The point of startups is not blindly attacking the biggest pile of work at hand. It's to find blindspots and exploit them. If every single one of your competitors is systematically undervaluing entire classes of potential workers, dontcha think that just may…
This is a common line of thought that I find myself having. I suspect it's a common fallacy, although I've never heard a name for it.
I call it "being too clever again by half". The idea that when others zig, I should zag. Or that any status quo structure has inefficiencies.
My reality is that zig/zag concept only works in certain situations. It'd be interesting to think more about the conditions for those situations, because then I could readily identify them.
In this situation, it's possible that your competitors are undervaluing an entire class of workers simply because that class of workers does not have value to them. If there are no technical, talented, black female engineers in the Valley, maybe the market isn't intentionally ignoring them -- it's just unable to find them.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes the status quo is an efficiency shortcut as well as being efficient.