71–80 of 188 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
well the point specifically said white men. not men, white men. i was reacting to the content - what does it matter who wrote it? aren't we discussing ideas here?
The article was written by a woman, so why would you assume it was written by a man? We're discussing ideas, yes, and those ideas have a lot to do with gender.
Not sure when it became ok to call something a myth without emperical evidence.
> But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men? a jewish guy and a half arab guy aren't exactly the best examples of the point this guy's trying to make. there's also no shortage of asian and indian "key players" so ... i think this guy is trying to make one point, but accidentally making another point altogether, and then failing at…
She might be referring to the 36M African-Americans & 50M Hispanich-Americans in this country. So American still has a White majority at around 60% of the population. In the year 2010, only 36 million African-Americans in the US, is that right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat... Anyway, these groups are under-represented in the Technology field. I heard one response that maybe these group…
I'm not sure about Hispanics, but this is definitely a problem in many African-American communities. It's considered 'white' or essentially bending over for the system if you go to school and actually try.
The article, like most following this formula, assume that because rewards are not distributed among a sufficiently racially/sexually diverse group, meritocracy must therefore be absent. They fail to account for the possibility that merit might not be distributed in the manner that they think.
tl;dr silicon valley isn't the liberal utopia and therefore not a meritocracy.
This article is largely garbage. Sure, Silicon Valley isn't a "perfect" meritocracy, but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world, at least that I've been in. In Japan, and presumably other places in Asia, women are still supposed to include a photograph with their resume, and employers are reluctant to hire married women past a certain age because they feel they will get pregnant and stop working…
>$100,000 bonus - Haha what? What department/branch of the bank? No way is it IT. Investment? I work at a bank and the most I've gotten was $10k and that's extremely rare for anyone. Hell, making $100k salaries you need to be here for like 15 years. I'm in the wrong fucking field.
The war on the word "meritocracy" is just weird. You can just watch it bubble up through twitter to large blogs, to wired. The weird thing about it is the people who hate the word are arguing not against the actual usage -- "people who demonstrate their merit get ahead" -- but against the illiberal definition they've assigned to it: "people who have inherent merit get ahead". Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the val…
> if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection That's exactly what happens. You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley. Now, you can hand-wave about c…
The war on the word "meritocracy" is just weird. You can just watch it bubble up through twitter to large blogs, to wired. The weird thing about it is the people who hate the word are arguing not against the actual usage -- "people who demonstrate their merit get ahead" -- but against the illiberal definition they've assigned to it: "people who have inherent merit get ahead". Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the val…
> if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection That's exactly what happens. You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley. Now, you can hand-wave about c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of your sex, you're going to have a tough time as a startup founder if you can't embody those qualities. As of yet, there is no affirmative action in startups, so it's put up or get an easier job.
That's the point, no? "male or female, you will only succeed if you can act in these typically male ways, regardless of how good your idea and execution are." Therefore, the tech scene is clearly not judging you solely on your idea and execution as they believe they are.
Nobody has a magic wand they can wave to give startup success to timid, easily defeated people. If it is your nature to make excuses, I suggest you go get a government job. No amount of feminist cultural revolution is going to convince VCs to throw away their money in order to be politically correct.