> Specifically, we’d like the community to help by downvoting comments that make HN an unwelcoming place to anyone.
That's only a solution for half of the problem on Hacker News. The other half is that most submissions about gender/diversity get flagged to death very consistently, which make it difficult to have any meaningful discussion about these topics.
We have no way to tell if they're being flagged by users or setting off the automated system for detecting flamewars.
One of the problems with the topic is that essentially every Hacker News reader feels as though they're qualified to comment on the topic. This translates into massive nested threads that blow up with people arguing the same points.
I'm not convinced that discussion of these issues on Hacker News does anything to push the ball forward. I have yet to meet the person who changed their position on the subject due to an internet argument.
About a year ago, a friend wrote a good post about diversity in hackathons which was submitted to HN and hit #2 quickly, then dropped down to the second page in an instant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495950
Not many people commented on it. I believe the flame-war detector only takes significant effect when # comments > # points, which is a pretty good heuristic for a flame war that has gone out of control.
Haha it's funny that you've cited that post as I'm complaining that it's getting flagged in the comments... I guess the point is that HN is a black box to us regular users and it's tough to speculate on how and why threads move as they do.
Any chance of getting some transparency of what automated or manual processes have affected a particular story (ie, on the story comment page itself), possibly delayed by some period to prevent bad actors from realising their voting rings or whatever were discovered?
> We have no way to tell if they're being flagged by users or setting off the automated system for detecting flamewars.
This is the fundamental problem. No matter how a story gets made invisible, once it gets in that state nobody knows how it got there and whether or not it was justified. Not to mention that no matter how those stories vanish, HN (by community or systems) is not facilitating discussion on diversity, sexism, racism, etc. in tech.
I have never seen an interesting discussion on that subject where I came away being smarter or having learned something new.
On the other hand I have had such discussions suck many hours away. I understand that this is a topic very dear to many peoples hearts, but it seems like one of those things that are just not a good fit for HN.
> The other half is that most submissions about gender/diversity get flagged to death very consistently, which make it difficult to have any meaningful discussion about these topics.
It isn't user flagging that makes meaningful discussion difficult. It's the discussers, unfortunately, who are doing that. I wonder if you may have cause and effect reversed here.
Also, it isn't true that most of these submissions get flagged to death. Some do, but most don't, so in most cases the discussions continue. Moderators also sometimes unkill stories that were flag-killed, precisely so discussions can continue. (An example from last night is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8083596).
We don't really revoke flagging privileges much anymore; mostly just for obvious abuse.
Are you wondering whether revoking selected users' flagging privileges would change the balance on these stories? I doubt it would. We're talking about a larger-scale response than measures like that can really address. The community is divided in at least two ways: on the issues themselves, and also on the HN discussions about them.
{That link returns a "no such item" for me. EDIT: Thanks Minmaxir; not sure why I missed something so obvious}
I used to flag a lot of these stories as soon as I saw them. I stopped doing that and now I wait until the discussion turns toxic - which it almost always does - before I flag them.
I'm not sure that waiting for the conversations to turn awful is a useful tactic.
Also, it would be great to know if there was vote-ring style detection on some of these threads. It feels pretty clear that there is infiltration from RedPill like posters who vote and post in groups, but I am aware that this is strongly playing to my biases and perhaps it's just people who happen to agree with each other.
I would just like to say that I agree that this issue is much less a problem today than it use to be. Before it was such a problem that I started maintaining a list of comments/articles that kept being wrecked by ridiculous comments anytime a discussion around ethnicity or racism. I use to post the growing list in every thread that it occurred and I was generally upvoted so I guess most people agreed.
I have no idea how you folks did it, but you've somehow gotten rid of all those people. I've scanned all the comments here and, though I don't agree with all of them, none of them appear to contain ridiculously specious arguments.
Do you really want a meaningful discussion, or a discussion where PC opinions are upvoted and critical voices are downvoted/banned by dang?
There are a lot of us who think that the code you write matters more than the gonads you carry or the color of your skin. We're quickly becoming pariahs as our workplaces become more politicized.
I don't know why more people don't understand that equality of opportunity is perfectly compatible with inequality of outcomes. Does nobody read Harrison Bergeron anymore?
> Do you really want a meaningful discussion, or a discussion where PC opinions are upvoted and critical voices are downvoted/banned by dang?
I find it funny. Some controversial or just plain stupid opinion gets posted, dang responds to it with basically "I disapprove of this post soooo much, and I'm glad that HN does too, judging by the downvotes. Pats HN on the head". Then a whole bunch of regular users reply with how awesome his reply was for telling the poster that he was an idiot/bigot.
I mean, they can of course moderate or whatever in whatever way they want to. I just don't understand why so many are fascinated by it.
Maybe they are flagged precisely because those topics don't lead to meaningful debates? Take any slightly controversial (or can be spun to be controversial) gender-and-tech issue, submit it to HN: if it gains traction, it will consist of hundreds of posts with two kinds of people who have so little common ground and set of mutual opinions/world-views that they can not do anything but shout past each other. Meaningful discussion? Hardly.
it's really hard to address everything in one post, and i think the issues around gender and race in tech are pretty different. (we did include a stat on international founders, many of which are not white.)
i don't think we're playing this on "easy mode", but i'm sorry you feel that way.
Many people deal with both gender and race issues simultaneously. Non-white women in the U.S. are 18%+ of the population (over 1/3 of the U.S. female population). It's easy to think of gender/race as an either or, but for many of us it's a both/and.
I've written a book on the subject (diverse women/women of color), and have done a good bit of research in this area which is why I am familiar with the numbers and the issues.
Feel free to reach out if you'd like additional information.
Edit: This isn't meant to discourage; the post is a good start. Just wanted to provide some information for next time.
it's really hard to address everything in one post, and i think the issues around gender and race in tech are pretty different.
Sure, but you clearly didn't call the piece "Gender and Startups" or "Sexism and Startups." Presumably the broader title was chosen deliberately.
For instance, I'd push back on an essay called "YC and Startups" if it only mentioned one company in one batch, but with a quick token sentence about other batches.
i don't think we're playing this on "easy mode", but i'm sorry you feel that way.
What can I say? It's a piece that scores points for "addressing diversity" but only substantively discusses the less controversial, more tractable subtopic of sexism.
Excited to read the upcoming, more inclusive posts though.
we shared the stats on founders born outside the US. it's not a perfect map to race, but it's not a bad one either--there are people of all colors in this YC batch.
do you really think we are trying to "score points for 'addressing diversity'"?
i had an early draft titled "sexism and startups", but many people pointed out the last 7 paragraphs apply to racial minorities just as much as women.
do you really think we are trying to "score points for 'addressing diversity'"?
That's the net effect; it's not my place to impute a motive.
All I'm saying is that you wrote a piece about sexism and titled it as if it were about a broader topic. And I know that you're usually a sharp, precise writer.
I do recognize that none of this is easy and I think it's admirable that you've addressed this (very thorny) topic. You've said that you plan to address the other aspects of diversity as it relates to YC and I'm looking forward to reading about it.
>"we shared the stats on founders born outside the US. it's not a perfect map to race, but it's not a bad one either."
It's pretty well established that there are lots of people who were born outside the US in tech in general [1] and among founders specifically [2].
Simply noting the same isn't necessarily saying anything.
>"there are people of all colors in this YC batch."
That's great.
Seeing numbers broken out by ethnicity would be a lot more interesting as it would facilitate a more direct comparison to the rest of the recent releases on diversity.
I'm not sure what you're hinting at with your remark about racial disparities with regard to education, IQ and culture. Right now your comment looks pretty racist.
The average American man and the average American woman have the same IQ, were raised in fairly similar cultural environments, and received fairly similar educations.
But compare the average black man and the average white man. The average black man has a lower IQ (Google it, many citations), somewhat different culture (more likely to have grown up in poverty, more likely to speak in AAVE, more likely to have come from a broken home, etc), and worse education (likely went to worse schools as a kid, less likely to have gone to college, etc).
Maybe I am racist for writing that, but I think it would be more racist to ignore those facts, because that would lead to ignoring the problems and not trying to help disadvantaged groups.
Because of racist laws, policies and practices Black people have fewer opportunities from literally before they're born. Studies indicate that poor nutrition and other environmental factors explain the "IQ gap" nearly completely. The remaining points are most likely an issue of bias in the tests themselves. Most white people wouldn't do well in an AAVE based IQ test.
Black people (and other minorities) are being actively discriminated against. In terms of the neighborhoods they live in (white flight), law enforcement (stop and frisk, minimum sentences, racial profiling), employment, housing (mortgage applications) and so on. This active discrimination is an ongoing and constant problem that goes all the way back to apartheid. Black people will do better when white people stop holding them back.
Conflating black culture and active discrimination has racist connotations. For instance appalling Wall Street behavior is not condemned as a failing of white culture, but street crime is erroneously attributed as a failing of black culture. There are a thousand other examples. Black culture: music, food, dance, art, speech are not to blame. No more than white culture is to blame for WW2.
It's part of the racist discourse where environmental factors are described as if they're innate failings of people who are genetically no different from anybody else.
Now I don't believe you're a racist person (you probably don't think group X is inferior to group Y), but the arguments you make have racist connotations for the reasons I gave above.
Individual people/families (regardless of race) are not to blame for the effect they have on the housing market, even though the consequences are predictable and well documented.
The effects of gentrification and white flight demonstrate how ingrained the bias against black people and other minorities still is.
I don't disagree with you. In fact, everything you wrote is in agreement with my original post. All of those challenges you describe are just some of the factors that make the racial disparity a more difficult problem to solve than the gender disparity.
And yet, my original post is now deleted, so we can go along pretending these problems don't exist.
That you'd rather ignore things than try to solve problems? It's very easy to ignore the IQ gap and other differences between groups. It's harder to try to solve it with things like improved education, reduced poverty, etc. This is exactly the problem. Pretend the problem doesn't exist, and you don't even have to worry about attempting to solve it!
Rushton & Jensen (2005) write that, in the United States, self-identified blacks and whites have been the subjects of the greatest number of studies. They state that the black-white IQ difference is about 15 to 18 points or 1 to 1.1 standard deviations (SDs), which implies that between 11 and 16 percent of the black population have an IQ above 100 (the general population median). ... Roth et al. (2001), in a review of the results of a total of 6,246,729 participants on other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, found a difference in mean IQ scores between blacks and whites of 1.1 SD. Consistent results were found for college and university application tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (N = 2.4 million) and Graduate Record Examination (N = 2.3 million), as well as for tests of job applicants in corporate sections (N = 0.5 million) and in the military (N = 0.4 million).
That settles it, everything googled on the internet must be true, especially when they comport with your bigoted view of the world. I mean, I read on the internet that black people were 2/3 human somewhere, must be true.
You can Google for academic literature. I provided some pretty comprehensive citations in my last post.
Or you can just ignore the world around you and not be troubled by the problems minorities are facing.
Hey, did you know that the unemployment rate is higher for blacks than whites? Does citing that statistic also make me a bigot? Does it make you feel better to ignore that problem too?
It doesn't make sense to do research on race and IQ. Except for people who are looking for scientific sounding reasons to legitimize their age-old racist prejudices.
So to be clear: there is no serious debate about race and IQ to be had. There are no insights to be gained from Race-IQ research.
I don't believe -- not for a second -- that a discussion about race and IQ helps minorities. The idea that we have to engage in a discussion on race and IQ which is based on racist premises otherwise "we are not troubled by the problems minorities are facing" is ludicrous.
I don't see why it makes sense to ignore certain areas of racial disparity. If the racial IQ gap can be closed by various means, we should try to do it. Refusing to acknowledge that a disparity exists (not referring to you, but to people like the other guy who replied to me) doesn't help solve anything.
I could replace "IQ" with various other metrics like "SAT scores" or "high school graduation rates" or whatever, since they all correlate to some degree. Do you think that would do a better job of getting my point across? People seem to really dislike IQ tests.
The idea that people who look different are inferior is a racist hypothesis -- now scientifically discredited -- that has been repeated for the past 300 years. People who bring up IQ today use the exact same language people used back in the day and that has racist implications. But when they get called on it they backtrack and claim they never meant to say something racist -- they're just talking about neutral scientific findings! Even though historically IQ tests were used to "prove" the supremacy and inferiority of different races.
The entire reason why racism is bad is because it affects the opportunities and quality of life of minorities. If racism had no measurable effect on anything it wouldn't be a real thing. So any thinking person would expect racism to have an effect on SAT scores and high school graduation rates.
Talking about race and IQ as if it has no history is like talking about a sauwastika as if it were just a symbol that represents balance. Talking about "SAT scores" or "high school graduation rates" would absolutely help, simply because of historical context.
There are many more things to be aware of in order to talk sensibly about race though. First of which is that the concepts of "black" and "white" are cultural inventions, and have no biological meaning. So the very idea of trying to measure the IQs of black/white people is unscientific silliness.
Point taken on most of that. I still believe that the racial disparity in tech is a much more difficult problem than the gender disparity, because that argument doesn't change if you swap "IQ" with "SAT scores". Definitely do not want to imply racial superiority.
However,
the concepts of "black" and "white" are cultural inventions, and have no biological meaning
This kind of argument never seemed very convincing to me. It's the same you see with any kind of fuzzy data. Like what is a "species", when exactly do two groups of animals become different "species"? There's no perfect answer, and attempts at making strict biological definitions often run contrary to popular opinion. Similar to "Is Pluto a planet?", "Is a tomato a fruit?", "Is this blueish-green or greenish-blue?", etc.
The answer isn't to just completely discard the concepts of races, species, planets, fruits, colors, and many other things. It's to understand that all of those things are real scientific concepts, but their precise definitions depend on the context of use.
People get persecuted based on their (perceived) race/ethnicity. The classification of tomatoes or planetary bodies is not a life or death matter.
Additionally, the difference is that race is a product of racism, not of science. This is a historical fact. The concept of race has no scientific value. It has historical and sociological importance, though, and we should seek to understand that.
In a perfectly rational world researchers could research anything and the world would only pay attention based on the merit of the research itself. We don't live in that world. Research on race and IQ today has predictable consequences: it legitimizes racist prejudices.
If you want to stop scientists from using the word "race", at least propose an alternative. Like people who don't like that male pronouns are used for gender-neutral cases in English at least propose alternatives such the singular "they", "he/she", etc. If you think scientists need a new word for "race" because other people have poisoned it so much, your cause would probably be more successful if you actually tried to propose and promote that new word. Because scientists aren't going to just stop all research related to "race", that would be ridiculous.
"Broad cluster of people with fairly similar genes relative to other broad clusters of people" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
Scientists already know that they have to tread very carefully if they don't want to get accused of racism. In public discourse political correctness has also made discussions about race much better. Some of the statements you've made in this thread you would never make on TV, knowing what the repercussions would be.
So from my perspective we're making good progress already, although you may not see it as such.
What makes a person a bigot in people's eyes in these cases is to bring up IQ, a measurement that has a lot of connotations to innate ability. Bringing up lack of innate ability in the context of race will quickly get one labeled a racist. Now, that might be unfair and rash, and people may have a misconception of what IQ is. But the rules are pretty simple: don't allude to things that have connotations to innate ability, and you will at least have dodged the biggest bullet.
If you had not brought up IQ, and instead educational opportunities and such, there would have been no controversy. Yes, black people are in worse position than white people when it comes to education - this is very uncontroversial. No need to bring up things like IQ in order to make that point.
If someone doesn't want to consider women for a job, it probably means that they think women have some inherent unsuitableness for that particular job. They aren't aggressive enough for sales, or don't have the upper body strength for landscaping, or some such. They don't mind hiring women for jobs that they think women can do (secretary). They probably have women friends, date or marry women, and so on.
If someone doesn't want to consider blacks for a job, it probably means they don't like black people, and they don't care if a particular black person can do the particular job. They don't want black people around for any job.
The former is more tractable because it involves changing someone's attitude about specific objections about people that they have no general objection to. The latter requires changing a general objection.
Counterpoint: in the Jim Crow South and in Apartheid South Africa black people were often employed by white people, but only for the most menial jobs (like cleaning and house keeping).
> "They don't want black people around for any job."
This is observably false. In American culture there are many jobs are perceived to be "for" blacks, and jobs that are perceived to be "for" hispanics.
Racism and sexism isn't as different as you seem to think it is. In the modern context (i.e., not guys in hoods hanging you from a tree) it is all about perception and opposing when races/genders stray from their "place" in society.
This is even observable in Asians, who are disproportionately highly employed in tech, but represents but a tiny proportion of leadership positions. Clearly someone thinks they're good for grunt work, but not suited to lead.
This is why people object against even positive stereotyping of races, because ultimately the bulk of the racism we deal with today isn't the foaming-at-the-mouth homicidal-rage type of racism, it's more casual and has everything to do with perceptions of what a race should, and shouldn't, be doing in society. Positive and negative stereotypes both contribute to pigeonholing people into their races.
Try talking to an Asian artist about this. "Positive" stereotypes of being mathematical, analytical, and traditionalist are actively harming people who don't fit the description and are trying to work jobs outside of their racial stereotypes.
>Clearly someone thinks they're good for grunt work, but not suited to lead.
This.
Who sets policy? Who makes the decisions? What value system do they use to do it?
And most of all - who benefits from their decisions?
The debate isn't really about diversity, it's about values. And you won't get 'diversity' until those values change and become less dysfunctionally self-serving.
In the short term (meaning a few generations) even very sexist people tend to have kids of the opposite sex, while racists seldom have kids of another race.
Let me first say, as someone with two children, both girls, I really appreciate the efforts that are going into making CS careers an accessible option for them, and that includes your post and the sentiment behind it. Kudos to you! What continues to irk me is the almost a disregard for black males when discussing diversity. There isn't a single group less represented in CS than AA males and there isn't a single group that has been more disparately affected by the recession.
I believe that gender and sexual identification is a pretty easy thing to agree on when discussing diversity, because only a cave man would oppose a more welcoming environment, and balanced representation of women and LGBT.
What irks me, is that I know only a hand full of AA males working on silicon valley and they are all friends of mine, and yet they are addressed indirectly in diversity reports as (non whites) as a way of covering up the abysmal rates of black males represented.
My cynical side says that some of this is the result of a culture that currently does not take black males specifically seriously, due to the representation of them in popular culture, but my more rational side tells me that we as black males bear alot of the responsibility ourselves for understanding where the world is going, and to prepare our careers for tomorrows jobs (technology) and to help advance those that need mentoring to get into CS career paths both technical and non technical. Even so, and taking self responsibility, black males will need to be addressed specifically by the same organizations that are addressing diversity and there needs to be a more forthright and brutally honest admission of what is happening. Black men are being left out of another generation of wealth creation and we need to stem (excuse the pun) the tide of that now.
Again, I appreciate the dialog, and I do appreciate the efforts to open up silicon valley to all.
Just my humble take (engage in rotten tomato throwing now)
It can start by not brushing it under the rug. By using "diversity" as a catch all for feel goodiness, is a little bit self serving and even selfish in the grand scheme of things. If we are going to do the work then do it, don't do a bunch of marketing. If we want to look at CS and look at the harshest affected group it specifically black males (which no one is doing in all of these reports they are releasing) - it irks me because it seems that the world has moved on from black males needing help and it is more en vogue in 2014 to focus efforts on women and LGBT entirely and exclusively. A more well rounded approach is needed and that can't begin until we are comfortable with admitting that the job isn't done in regards to young black males, and yet the sentiment seems to be "we've done enough for that underrepresented group"
Solutions? tech companies and incubators need to be targeting young black males for immersion and mentoring programs as early as 5th grade. The myth that silicon valley is closed to non CS types needs to be exposed for exactly that, a myth, so that we can start to recruit talented non SC students into silicon valley in areas of marketing, sales, general management and finance. Areas where they are currently.
waiting ten years until the CS rates increase is not an option, because the ship will have already sailed by then on this generation of wealth being created
the whole debate around diversity in silicon valley right now is pretty much marketing and seems pretty cynical and disingenuous from my POV
> tech companies and incubators need to be targeting young black males for immersion and mentoring programs as early as 5th grade.
Unfortunately I have no power in SV. People who do are reading this, and I hope they notice how on-point you are. I'll do what I can in the regions I can effect most greatly.
> A more well rounded approach is needed and that can't begin until we are comfortable with admitting that the job isn't done in regards to young black males
I have a bit more power here, albeit not much. Honestly -- and I'm very ashamed of this -- I've been reluctant to call out the elephant in the room (publicly, using my real identity) for exactly the reason you identify (it's not "sexy" and seems "political" somehow).
Anyways, thanks for contributing. I'm now resolved to finally do the right thing.
edit:
> Areas where they are currently.
I hadn't thought about it like this before, and mostly focused on how to increase AA representation in CS programs. Great idea.
>tech companies and incubators need to be targeting young black males for immersion and mentoring programs as early as 5th grade
This right here, If it wasn't for my uncle getting me into computers I don't I would ever had thought to see a career in computers let alone development. If we want to be frank I know when I was growing up (only 28), playing around with computers as a black child was something that "blacks didn't do". It was hard to find any blacks computer teachers, mentors or owners that you could access easily in the tech area and the stigma of being a "nerd" was something the culture was about to accept. Of course my parents made sure if it was something I wanted to do that they would make sure I had the best education I could to make it happen.
What we lack in the community is for children to see other blacks in a position and think "Hey I can do that". This was something that we didn't have much back then. I still only know a handful of black developers and it may be wrong to say it but sometime when going to conventions and what not I know I sorta feel like a unicorn, after a while you just go with it but its still in the back of your mind.
I didn't want to reply to this after just reading it but because there are so few of us out here I almost feel as I have no choice. I'm of the mindset that these organizations, specifically VC organizations are lost to the future quite frankly. They are simply obsolete, some of the largest growing populations and users of technology are not white males and while black males (myself included) are a group that are neglected it's one of MANY different facets affecting black males as a group. I'm not sure what combination of answers will solve the problem but I'm sure it's a combination of rudimentary pushes towards equality. Which I summarily don't expect a VC organization is able to provide in any manner.
I don't think you're playing "easy mode" by any means. It's admirable that you are writing blogs posts about gender diversity in tech & at YC. It would be even more admirable if you wrote about class and race diversity in tech & at YC. Right now it feels like you are avoiding talk of other types diversity in the industry. Though I do agree the issues are different.
You can't tackle, or even really talk about, all diversity problems in tech startups at once. The reality is that it's currently a "whitelist" (no pun intended) problem, not targeted exclusion.
Attractive, white, young, well connected males who can afford to live in the Bay Area get a disproportionate amount of startup funding. Diversity is an enormous problem on many different axes.
You use "easy mode" as a pejorative, but YC should be tackling an enormous problem narrowly. There's no other way to make much progress.
This was a well written post and I think it shows that sama gets it. A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept, as a post argued a few days ago. This is also the case here. If we all push for a more equitable Silicon Valley then we can make loads of progress in a short time. The rate of progress is more important than how much behind we are.
Many of us here are idealists. We don't want to work on any product, we want to make a great product. We want to do the right things. We want to use best practices and we want to hold ourselves and others to high moral standards. To make Silicon Valley a place of equal opportunity (regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc) we have to fight prejudices where they exist and we have to hold each other to this high standard too.
This may come at a cost in the short term. Hiring your college buddies is easy. Building a qualified diversified team is hard. But making this extra effort is worth it. It's worth it because there is an unbelievable amount of talent out there that is excluded from SV as it exists today. It's unjust and a tremendous waste of human capital.
>Debating how to fix it is important, but debating whether or not sexism actually exists trivializes the problem in a toxic way
You are walking into an extremely dangerous territory here. If reasonable people can disagree with you on the points you are not willing to debate (such as the widespread existence of sexism in tech[1]) or (worse) that you find morally wrong to debate then those reasonable people will not consider you reasonable - not only do you then lose any chance of changing their perspective, you will also create a schism in the community. This is what has happened in the US over guns, to the point where there is now no hope of reconciliation.
For example I could counter the few well published incident by pointing out that the media cherrypick a few stories and them run with them - what you see in the media is not an unbiased sample. A few stories from a large enough group does not mean that the group is especially sexist, it just means that it has a few assholes in it. We don't know whether the asshole procentage is higher or lower than in the general population and we don't know that if it is higher, whether there is some third-party variable (such as a general disregard for rules) common to both tech people and sexist assholes or whether the causality runs the other way (ie assholes are more likely to be tech guys because they don't work well with people).
Before we bring out the big guns and tear this community (which I highly value) apart, can we please have some independent, unbiased, studies - both as to the extend and effect of sexism and what causes it? Armed with this knowledge, we will be in a much better position to find out how, if at all, we should address this issue.
[1]: There is sexism in any sufficiently large group of people, independent of the field you gather the group from. What is more interesting is how large a percentage of the group is sexist.
One of the ways that people slow down progress, in startups or in society, is by resisting unreasonably at every step in a series of steps in an argument.
If you want to debate that, that's fine, just do it somewhere else. It appears that Y Combinator has accepted the ample evidence of the presence of sexism in tech, and is focusing discussion away from existence, and towards the next necessary steps. Rehashing the evidence of the previous step may be an OK exercise, but it's not the most fruitful step right now.
HN doesn't have to be everything to everybody, it gets to be what it wants to be.
>One of the ways that people slow down progress, in startups or in society, is by resisting unreasonably at every step in a series of steps in an argument.
They key here is _unreasonable_. I do not believe it unreasonable to demand evidence to the extend and nature of sexism in tech (as I have seen no formal study on it at all).
Frankly all I am seeing here are the very methods described in What you can't say being used to silence a debate, because some groups use it to run their own agenda.
>I do not believe it unreasonable to demand evidence to the extend and nature of sexism in tech (as I have seen no formal study on it at all).
I'm trying to not be rude here, but my inclination is to tell you to just go look for such studies or run such a study yourself. Nobody owes you a spoon-fed version of reality on your terms when they make their own decisions.
What is unreasonable is saying that normal business decision practices are not adequate to make this particular decision, and instead a formal, "unbiased" study must be conducted.
The numbers are so extreme that they speak for themselves. Several years of 0% women founders, and now 10%.
There's a double standard for evidence when it comes to sexism (and other cultural issues). Maybe it's because some people take it as a personal affront, as if they're accepting responsibility for the actions of others, and it switches into "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" mode rather than "what's the most likely reality here."
Recently there was a string of articles on Language Log about gender disparities in meetings between men interrupting women and women interrupting men during discussion. A surprisingly large number of comments consisted of men denying the evidence. This type of response is endemic wherever science touches cultural issues. An unbiased scientific study of gender disparity may be useful as a tool for finding where to make corrective steps, but it will convince nearly no one. On issues like this, people stick to their cultural inclinations more than the evidence.
HN has decided to move the conversation forward, and I give them kudos for that.
> I do not believe it unreasonable to demand evidence to the extend and nature of sexism in tech (as I have seen no formal study on it at all).
There have been so many studies, blog posts, and anecdotes about sexism in tech. Basic searching for this stuff will get you all the relevant info you need, nobody is obligated to walk you through it if you aren't aware.
>There have been so many studies, blog posts, and anecdotes about sexism in tech
I am not aware of any studies, otherwise I would have read them. Blog posts and anecdotes - are useful for acting on individual cases of sexism, but because they are, by definition, limited to one or two cases, taken out of the whole, using them as arguments for widespread sexism is wrong (in the sense of incorrect).
I know it's hard to believe, but relative to their proportion in the workforce white males are slightly underrepresented in tech. Additionally, people of color are dramatically overrepresented. It's easy to march under the banner of "men in tech shouldn't act like sexist jerks"—what kind of sexist jerk could object to that?—but the more accurate slogan "we need many fewer Asian males in tech" doesn't sound quite so nice. In fact, it sounds rather nasty. And yet, it's the inevitable implication of increasing diversity.
Do you have any figures on tech as a whole?
The thing that I'm never sure about in these discussions (on any on HN really) is whether people are talking about "tech" to include people working 9-5 in IT at a bank somewhere or whether it really means "venture capital backed startups operating out of California".
That's because we're the master race. I'm kidding. It's because we're immigrants from a populous country that overwhelmingly work in a few occupations in America.
Just hi-hacking this comment to talk about the same line.
Everybody needs to stop with this "white-male" nonsense, which is inherently racist. There is much cultural diversity among what is considered "white" and that is painfully obvious. The "black" American guy and "white" American gal might have more in common with each other than the "white" Italian working in the cubicle next door. This also applies to the vast spectrum of "Asians" whose cultures differ significantly.
And just a personal opinion on something else Sam said
"Realizing that it’s hard to speak with much authority here as a white guy"
Completely unnecessary and I think it would be healthier if people stop this self persecution. (Using the same logic, maybe I can say this with authority because I am an indigenous Australian =D)
He labeled the submission itself a "troll" (and locked it) because it generated what he called "high-indignation, low-information" responses. Read the responses and decide for yourself. It's pretty clear that "high-indignation, low-information" just means "doesn't support my ideology".
> it would be healthier if people stop this self persecution
If only it were self-persecution.
It's actually persecuting other (infinitely less powerful) white men and boys by implying "You—as a member of the group who will be most negatively affected by the policies we are discussing—are not allowed to object."
I have to say that I've lost some respect for HN today. While there are many times I've missed the quality of the community from the early days of 2007, it's only been recently where I've wondered if the front page might be as censored as Digg was around the time I first discovered HN.
Not sure what you're referring to? I can tell you, though, that HN has never been a purely vote-driven site, not in 2007 or any time since. It has always been a blend of user votes and moderator curation. What has changed is that (because users asked us to) we've been more transparent over the last few months about how the site works. It's a mistake to misinterpret this change in reporting as a change in HN itself.
I've been aware of the hiring ads on which no comments were allowed, of course. Have moderators been doing things like un-flagging and keeping specific stories they disagree with off the page for so long?
It is entirely possible I was mistaken, but I was under the belief that HN was mostly hands-off when it started. I.e., things other than clear attempts to spam, etc were off the page. Also, I think the focus of the site was narrower and clearer. It was dominated by technology and business with political pieces specifically discouraged. Now, political posts are pretty common. This broadening and blurring of the borders of what's "hacker news" can leave more room for mods to simply boost those they agree with and silence those they disagree with.
The particular article above is disturbing to see suppressed since it's clearly factual, isn't spam or similar and it's about the bay area tech scene, but apparently it's politically inconvenient.
This is merely a theory to explain your observations. I think a more plausible alternative explanation is that the moderators' beliefs about what makes up worthwhile discussion is different from yours.
>I think a more plausible alternative explanation is that the moderators' beliefs about what makes up worthwhile discussion is different from yours.
I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't. Interfering to suppress spam or a flamewar is reasonable but interfering to suppress things which contain ideas you personally disagree with is not.
Similarly I don't have a lot of respect for you downvoting all my comments in this thread and on the previous one we were both on. It's the same principle, just on a lesser scale. I made a valid point in the GP post and was answering Dang's question.
> Interfering to suppress spam or a flamewar is reasonable but interfering to suppress things which contain ideas you personally disagree with is not.
By "what makes up worthwhile discussion" I was referring to a content-neutral or viewpoint-neutral notion of the idea. (The general category of "Not written for the reader's sake" encompasses most of the badness.)
> I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't.
If HN were decided purely by votes, the front page would consist of outrage, gossip, and fashion, and the site would be unrecognizable. HN has never been decided purely by votes. It has always been a blend of community and moderation—and I do mean always, from day one. If you believed otherwise, you were mistaken; if you thought HN was good, consider why. All that has changed in this area is that we're being more transparent.
You've repeated several times the false claim that we buried that article because we "personally disagree" with it. Obviously, we don't "personally disagree" with a factual article. That would make zero sense unless the facts reported are wrong, and I have no idea whether they were in that case.
The article was two years old. It was posted by a serial political troll whose sole interest (to judge by the account history) is in using HN for ideological provocation. Predictably, that worked. The thread brought us such jewels as "Oh, do fuck off and take your strawman with you". Is that the civil, substantive discussion that HN calls for?
Weighting that thread off the front page was an obvious call. What we did not do was kill the story—the discussion could and did continue [1]. Such is the balance we try to strike. This has exactly nothing to do with our personal politics, though that of course is the first thing, and the cheapest, that we're accused of. Not to penalize such stories would put HN at the mercy of arsonists. You seem to imply that online communities, or at least this one, are robust enough not to be damaged by such provocation. That, sadly, is wrong.
The user in question has a bunch of accounts. One they are careful to use for legitimate purposes; the others just push an agenda. Many have been banned. Of course, when we ban them, they make new ones and accuse us of censorship [2].
Many if not most of the ideological throwaway accounts you see on HN are the work of the same few users. I don't think it's unfair to call them trolls. They've shown up in this thread, too, of course, even posting the same link. I wonder why it's necessary to repeatedly push a two-year-old article. It must be quite a classic.
1. But that didn't stop a second serial political troll from accusing us of doing exactly that, presumably because what we actually did wasn't spicy enough to justify cries of repression.
2. The irony is left as an exercise to the reader.
Thanks. I had no idea the other poster was a troll with multiple sock-puppet accounts.
I really appreciate the amount of detail in your reply. In all honesty, I severely underestimated the level of top-down editorial control on HN from the early days. I had thought that it was basically just PG, that he was too busy to deal with this kind of thing and that the type of discussion was due to the user base having come mostly from his essays. I have been lucky with the much smaller communities on my own websites over the years in that there were relatively few bad apples and only one sock puppet that I knew of.
I must admit, it is very difficult for me not to dislike "softer" forms of suppression even more so than outright removal of posts. This may be due to how I have seen media manipulation manifested living abroad for most my adult life. I sincerely apologize if I've mistaken comments by the OP to mean something other than they did. Once again thanks for the transparency.
> Everybody needs to stop with this "white-male" nonsense, which is inherently racist. There is much cultural diversity among what is considered "white" and that is painfully obvious. The "black" American guy and "white" American gal might have more in common with each other than the "white" Italian working in the cubicle next door. This also applies to the vast spectrum of "Asians" whose cultures differ significantly.
Talking about white people or even generalizing about white people is not racist. There is no institutional and systemic power backing discrimination against white people based on their skin color. On the basis of being white, you do not suffer increased chances of incarceration, lack of access to education, worse job opportunities, and so on.
White identity is not the same as Asian identity and the issues facing Asian people do relate to racism. It is a false equivalence to compare whiteness to being Asian.
> Completely unnecessary and I think it would be healthier if people stop this self persecution. (Using the same logic, maybe I can say this with authority because I am an indigenous Australian =D)
There is nothing wrong with a little self awareness of being a member of the dominant social group in tech.
It's extremely sad that this very well reasoned response stating widely accepted theories about racism has been down-voted. Now they're not widely as in UNIVERSALLY accepted, but the race-studies community at the very least would agree with the concepts behind this post, and that at the very least merits its inclusion in the discussion.
I was just adding a point that is left out of these discussions more often than not. The point is that "white" people aren't unified because of their skin pigment. Europe is a major example and of course the never ending protestant and catholic wars around the globe.
> Talking about white people or even generalizing about white people is not racist. There is no institutional and systemic power backing discrimination against white people based on their skin color.
Unfortunately generalizing about white people is racist. And saying that it isn't, is a "systemic power backing discrimination" based on their skin color.
> On the basis of being white, you do not suffer increased chances of incarceration, lack of access to education, worse job opportunities, and so on.
This supports my original post, I think we should move away from skin pigment based judgements. Also I don't have any references at hand but I recall these statistics being heavily influenced by your socio-economic status. You could replace "white" with "middle to upper class".
> White identity is not the same as Asian identity and the issues facing Asian people do relate to racism. It is a false equivalence to compare whiteness to being Asian
I'm not sure what you meant by this point. But what I meant is that Italian's, Greek's, Irish, American' and Australian's don't fit neatly under the "white" banner and nor do Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian's and Korean's fit neatly under the "asian" banner.
> There is nothing wrong with a little self awareness of being a member of the dominant social group in tech.
"white" is not the master social group of tech nor do people walk around consciously identifying with the "white" group. The Tabs vs Spaces debate does not give a shit if your black or white, extend this to TDD debates, functional vs OOP etc.
I want to start by prefacing I'm from the US, so my knowledge is mostly based what racism is like in the US.
> I was just adding a point that is left out of these discussions more often than not. The point is that "white" people aren't unified because of their skin pigment. Europe is a major example and of course the never ending protestant and catholic wars around the globe.
The point here isn't that there are different kinds of people who are white, but rather there is a continuum of treatment, both from individuals and institutions, that white people share. In the US it doesn't matter if I'm from one part of the country or another, having white skin still benefits me in all the ways it would anywhere else. This esp. applies to institutional and systemic things: rates of incarceration, job opportunity, access to education, rates of poverty, etc. are all correlated in my favor. Not only that, but compared to other groups of people I am far less likely to be affected directly by violence based on skin color.
> Unfortunately generalizing about white people is racist. And saying that it isn't, is a "systemic power backing discrimination" based on their skin color.
You'll have to explain a little more, why would a single person's opinion create systemic and institutional difficulties for white people when they currently don't experience that?
Generalizing is not necessarily racist. There is a difference between stereotypes and something like talking about shared experience as a member of a group.
> This supports my original post, I think we should move away from skin pigment based judgements.
People of different races have problems that affect them uniquely compared to races, to not talk about that is to ignore the effect of existing racism on those people. That is not a judgement, that is fact. We have evidence, first hand and statistical, that shows this is true and we should not discard that.
> Also I don't have any references at hand but I recall these statistics being heavily influenced by your socio-economic status. You could replace "white" with "middle to upper class".
Race and socio-economic status are heavily correlated and racism and class are indeed related. However, racism confers benefits and damage that goes beyond class boundaries. Being of a high class may not, for example, protect you from racism at the hands of the police. Being of a low class, for example, doesn't mean you still don't have some kind of privilege or benefit. Moreover, there are many cases in which being white and low class still confers benefits over being not white.
> But what I meant is that Italian's, Greek's, Irish, American' and Australian's don't fit neatly under the "white" banner and nor do Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian's and Korean's fit neatly under the "asian" banner.
Obviously each of these cultures and ethnicities are different. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't shared experiences for both white and asian people and racism plays into that: white people experience less discrimination than asian people as a whole, regardless of ethnicity within those categories. Indeed, for asian people ethnicity erasure and representation is a big deal as their ethnicity is often erased via stereotyping.
> "white" is not the master social group of tech nor do people walk around consciously identifying with the "white" group.
White people are absolutely the dominant race in tech in the US today. Also, people do both consciously and subconsciously identify with and look for white culture signifier in others. Indeed, one of the biggest deals about interviews and hiring in tech today in the US is about culture fit being used as an excuse to look for traits that are most commonly associated with white middle class men. Model View Culture had a whole issue related to mythology in US tech that I highly recommend for more about this. [1]
I think the disconnect comes from having a minority group strongly over-represented, and the disagreement over what causes representation differences. It's the inconvenient factor that doesn't get discussed a lot. Benefactors see diversity initiatives purely as eliminating discrimination on the part of privileged groups, whereas detractors see it as unfairly lobbing claims of wrongdoing on white men, calling for soft quotas - which in this case, imply fewer Asian males in tech.
Fundamentally, people disagree to WHY certain groups are over-represented - is it mostly discrimination, mostly cultural, mostly self-selection? Discrimination is bad, but how bad - or not - are cultural factors and self-selection? Asians are strongly over-represented - but no one says this is because admissions officers prefer them - there is strong evidence to the contrary - and most agree it is a combination of selective immigration policy and cultural factors on the part of frequently college-educated, first-generation parents. However efforts to take race into account in college admissions no doubt will tend to work against members of this still minority group (in fact - only 5% in the US).
Finally, the attacking white males is basically a motte-and-bailey tactic [1] in which something very obviously wrong, and not defended by a majority of any group e.g. racial discrimination, is then used, strawman-like, to strike down countervailing discussion as "derailing" (no one is saying racism is good). Do white men need to make counter-adjustments in order to correct for previous sins (or sins by others in the same group - see sexual harassment by another unrelated man in the same industry)?
Is that fair to those white men to take steps - perhaps even extending privileges to other groups at their own cost, or is it fair because the discriminated-against groups have experienced injustice? This is the fundamental disagreement in the social justice debate. What makes sense on an individual level can look wrong on a collective level, and vice versa. It just depends on your sense of fairness. The voices on the collective side of this debate are the strongest in Silicon Valley, but a greater amounts of people - and Americans overall - frequently disagree on what needs to be done to address racial disparities e.g. affirmative action or no affirmative action.
On some level, the tech world isn't living up to its own principles, as it relates to diversity and inclusion (D&I). Many seem to view D&I as being somewhat external to the tech space--it's an issue that other industries have been discussing and is becoming more prominent in tech.
I would posit that the underlying principles of the tech world share a number of core values with D&I.
Think about the open source software movement (OSS). One crucial perspective that the OSS shares with D&I is that both view discrimination as an impediment to progress. OSS licenses include several non-discrimination clauses (economic, field of endeavor, other restrictions). The licenses go to great lengths to ensure the technology is available to everyone.
When you think about the "Cathedral and Bazaar" models of software development, which one is naturally more diverse? The hierarchical, exclusive cathedral, with its rigid structure, serious gatekeepers, and highly-credentialed leadership? Or is it the open air bazaar, with all kinds of people talking (softly or loudly) in a place known for public discourse. A place where anyone can walk by and join in and become part of what's going on?
My point is that the underlying precepts of D&I are similar to principles that already exist in the tech world.
So this isn't really about embracing D&I. Instead, the tech community needs to start living up to its own rhetoric--it's own values. This isn't about adopting an external issue, it's about a community fully aligning with its own values.
I wholeheartedly agree, yet certain people continually attach open source as somehow being the worst of our industry. Just because it requires people be passionate enough about development to do it in their free time.
I don't think I've ever met anyone who thinks open source shouldn't exist. I know quite a few people who don't want to open source everything they make.
> Think about the open source software movement (OSS). One crucial perspective that the OSS shares with D&I is that both view discrimination as an impediment to progress. OSS licenses include several non-discrimination clauses (economic, field of endeavor, other restrictions). The licenses go to great lengths to ensure the technology is available to everyone.
While licenses may have clauses that deal with some kinds of discrimination, OSS communities are not inclusive and may actually be outright hostile to groups of people. The last Model View Culture had an article about this [1]. Suffice it to say that there is no common community behavior that appears in all OSS groups and what is exceptable in one group vs. another varies quite a bit.
> Or is it the open air bazaar, with all kinds of people talking (softly or loudly) in a place known for public discourse. A place where anyone can walk by and join in and become part of what's going on?
Well this come back to the very common myth of meritocracy in tech, that tech only looks at merit and thus avoids discrimination, personal and institutional. However, meritocracy in tech often simply functions as a way for people to avoid talking about bias or pretending like bias doesn't exist. Moreover, what it means to look for merit is often defined as those statuses and symbols that are comfortable to the dominant group of people in tech, white men of middle or higher class backgrounds.
> So this isn't really about embracing D&I. Instead, the tech community needs to start living up to its own rhetoric--it's own values. This isn't about adopting an external issue, it's about a community fully aligning with its own values.
Again, there is no consensus on values and often people actively advocate that there should be little criticism or reflection on what people and groups in tech value. Without that kind of introspection and discussion, little will change.
All great points. You have highlighted exactly what I was getting at: the tech world has some of these D&I principles in place already, but is failing to live up to, or--as you aptly point out--even critically reflect on them.
Community or inclusion aspect is a red herring imho. I use opensource software all day every day and barely ever even communicate with its authors.
I'm willing to bet that majority of open source code is just some dude banging it out in his free time with maybe an occasional question or a patch if he's really lucky. No community at all, just a repo, a package, and a few stars on GitHub.
I don't get this idea that the tech world, or even just SV startups embrace FOSS as a core values, even in software itself. Since when have most startups released all their software under a free license? Most embrace it if and when it suits them - libraries, frameworks, etc. Everything else is proprietary, and usually follows a cathedral model. When was the last time someone submitted a patch for Dropbox, or most SaaS services out there?
Three are a few brave ones out there, but they're the exception.
as a half-asian female founder with a diverse team (mexican, german), this is a intimate issue for me. i'm really glad to see the topic being discussed, but it really is the first small step.
sexism & racism isn't something that people do consciously. that's why there's such a backlash against it because most of us can honestly say that we're not consciously sexist or racist.
these prejudices are systemic biases that flow through all of us. it takes hard introspection and compensatory mechanisms from each person to address the structural underpinnings that create the biases. it's really hard. as sama notes, the discussion needs to move towards these underlying mechanisms, rather than getting mired in the stale discussion of whether prejudices exist or not (they do).
Let's say I have a magic wand which will make all -isms go away in one waving. I waved, -isms went away and now what? Where do I hire skilled black female CoffeeScript developers? How many of them do actually exist?
I'm insider/outsider - I live in the US now, in Bay Area, but I went to school in the country which doesn't even exist anymore, while my daughter goes to the one of the best middle schools around here. And I see her genuine interest in math, she's among a group of 'popular' girls in the school, where the popularity is judged not (only) by the looks or clothes, but to what "Math Honor", "Advanced Geometry", etc class the student was admitted to. So it's not just her, there's a solid group of (mostly white though) girls interested in math and other similar topics. Where these girls disappear later? I understand that I'll learn this in a hard way later, but if there're valid theories out there, may be I'd be able to prevent her from losing interest in math, special video effects, photography, optics, etc.
Something tells me it's not just our (white tech male population) sexism, it's a problem rooted deeper.
> Let's say I have a magic wand which will make all -isms go away in one waving. I waved, -isms went away and now what? Where do I hire skilled black female CoffeeScript developers?
This is a bit strange to say. If there were less barriers for people in tech, there would be more of different kinds of people in tech. Indeed, combating sexism and racism in tech should, in time, lead to more participation from people who currently are not in or leave tech quickly.
> So it's not just her, there's a solid group of (mostly white though) girls interested in math and other similar topics. Where these girls disappear later?
There are a variety of reasons why women do not pursue STEM that may happen at various times of their lives. If you want to know why that happens, you'd best look for the written experiences of woman and the reasons why they left. There's been quite a lot of blogging by some of those women on the subject.
> I understand that I'll learn this in a hard way later, but if there're valid theories out there, may be I'd be able to prevent her from losing interest in math, special video effects, photography, optics, etc.
Being supportive is great, but keep in mind you won't have the same experience as your child, esp. considering they are living in a different time and with a different gender. There ultimately may be, in fact, nothing you can do. But in this case your best bet is to read about the experience women have faced in STEM and share those resources.
> Something tells me it's not just our (white tech male population) sexism, it's a problem rooted deeper.
Sexism is both interpersonal and institutional, the deeper roots of the problem is still sexism and misogyny, among other things.
I was that girl. You were my mother in a lot of ways (my mom is a programmer) the problem becomes more endemic in high school and then college where you have to start becoming a woman.
Programming in a startup is not a great choice for peak fertility (where I am at...thankfully I consciously only want one kid, so I have time to delay)
I'm dad, not mom (though mom shares my concern) :-)
You're saying "start becoming a woman" as it contradicts being an "IT person", whatever that means, programmer, sysadmin, etc. Why? I want my daughter to become a woman (as much as my wife is a woman, and oh boy, she is. While being a an executive director of a science foundation). But I also want her to become whoever she wants to become professionally, programmer, designer, digital artist, VFX guru, whatever.
I can understand fertility and startup, but statistically, majority of "IT people" work for established companies, not startups. Enjoying all these extended maternity leaves, good health benefits plans, etc.
Ivy League Parents -> Private School -> SAT tutoring -> Ivy League College -> Investment by Ivy League VC -> Acquired by Ivy League Tech Company
vs
Poor parents -> Shitty Public School -> High School Drop Out -> Programmer at Ivy League Tech Company (maybe)
There's a reason most of the big tech companies are from Ivy League graduates.
And you can't ignore how many successful startups only happened because parental financial support. Someone working paycheck to paycheck to pay for college isn't going to have a reading week to hack with. Or can't borrow $40k from their parents. Or live at home for free.
The game is ultimately fair - even a dog could get funded with traction. But there really is a class system in the U.S. and it is probably the biggest bias in the system.
Minor nit, which is that all the top CS (and engineering, for that matter) schools are not Ivy League schools: MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU. And I've never heard of top tech companies being referred to as Ivy League tech companies. But your point is still valid when you talk about "top schools."
Ah, the irony of making sure we're careful to make subtle distinctions about the top fraction of a percent of the population... in response to a comment about massive class imbalance.
My actual intention was to get the OP to move away from an emphasis on the "Ivy League" brand, which I think people need to stop putting up on a pedestal.
I understand, and I don't mean to be argumentative or even trite but my intention was to express disinterest in what words we use to describe elite schools that close-enough-to-no-one can go to.
There's likely to be big correlations between class and race. Gender is obviously a much more complicated one.
I think aspirations are likely to play a big role here, after all people tend to judge their successes relative to their family and close friends. So for a kid from a poor neighbourhood (who's more likely to be black), getting a good job with a decent salary and benefits is a great success already and running a startup is too risky so there's less incentive.
If you come from an upper middle class family and all of your siblings are training to be lawyers or doctors then that ups the ante a lot in what your "floor" to success is, and like you say risk is reduced because of family so starting "the next facebook" looks like a more attractive option.
The problem is that as the gap widens that poor kid might have no actual chance at a decent stable job with benefits. Odds are he will be stuck in part-time land with no benefits and doing odd jobs on the side, so for him going with a startup must seem like a better choice.
Also since we are talking about aspirations you have to consider the "all or nothing" attitude that's so common these days, and I see a lot of people particularly in the lower classes who are far more motivated about the tiniest possibility of a quick jackpot than a slow but steady improvement in their lives.
But then again that way of thinking might have more to do with the way the middle class (the "steady option") is disappearing than with a social fad.
Someone sufficiently poor probably doesn't have the funds to start a startup period.
You might strike lucky and get funding from YC but how likely is that to cover everything? Including getting to the stage of securing the funding (like travel expenses, time to build a prototype etc). Also amongst poorer families there is a greater expectation that children will contribute back to the family pot at an earlier age.
I agree that it sucks to be poor, but I don't know how much startup funding can fix that.
So for a kid from a poor neighbourhood (who's more likely to be black), getting a good job with a decent salary and benefits is a great success already and running a startup is too risky so there's less incentive.
For starting and running a startup, maybe, but those forces are much less in effect when the upper classes are doing the hiring. As we see at a lot of these companies, they aren't really reaching very far outside of their cohort. Cue the culture-fit debate.
Using race as a proxy for class is a great way to generate oppression along some margin (i.e., for some poor bastard(s) unlucky enough to be both poor and not a member of a protected racial/ethnic group). If you want to talk about class and poverty, talk about class and poverty. There's enough misery in the world.
Ivy League is an athletic conference, or at best a collection of prestigious schools from the north east:
The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.
I think the colloquialism of "Ivy League" as a psuedo pedigree or class distinction has superseded the actual athletic conference definition.
I knew exactly what the OP was driving at even if the details were off, and only after you point out that Ivy League is an athletic conference did it occur to me that that would be where the current colloquialism came from.
even without it being related to the athletic conference, and refering only to those schools, that is for the most part a completely different set of schools than the ones whose alumni are involved in the startup/VC game.
I'm not sure how this is releveant; how can YCombinator influence this? The disparity in education has already taken full effect by the time people apply to YC.
It's great that YC has taken steps towards gender equality, but I don't think they have much of a say when it comes to inequality in education.
The selection problems that make Stanford grads have a leg up on startups isn't education related, really, it's network related. YC helps get more people into the circles required for fundraising. There's no other way I, for instance, would have had any credibility with the people who fund companies.
This argument dodges the thrust of Sam's essay, which centered on gender disparities. Your argument doesn't work for gender disparities.
For example, MIT is ~46% female. Stanford is 47% female. (I won't be pedantic about the Ivy League thing.) These numbers look absolutely nothing like the small end of the VC funnel.
The issue of "class" doesn't have nearly enough political clout in this context in order to get a mention from any important person. Gender does, though, for obvious slightly related historical reasons. The only hope that class itself can get a mention is by piggy-backing on the issue of gender.[0]
The topic of Diversity in Tech shows that 1) hacker types aren't as unsuspectible to being political as they historically may have thought, when their career and businesses start to be influenced by their own reputations. 2) Diversity seems to largely just inspire sympathy for whatever issue which has enough political influence to actually be kind of threatening, which seems to be very convenient.
My point is; assuming that there was never any movement or awareness of inequity in tech, what would have been the prevailing attitude? Well, it seems that "meritocracy" is big in tech culture. What is the attitude now? Meritocracy, with the stipulation that your gender can cramp your style. Has the attitude changed all that much, really? Or has it perhaps stayed the same, with some lip service in the general direction of gender issues for good measure?
"Tech" in this context refers to tech in America. That makes for an industry (at least a subset of which) that is known for having the belief in a meritocracy, which exists in a country that historically has had a strong collective belief in meritocracy. The archetypical hacker is someone who at a very young age felt the calling of the computer[1] and learned himself (or herself!) to program with some cruddy manual. I am not exaggerating by calling it a calling: if you didn't feel that calling to program your calculator in the second grade of elementary school, then tech was probably not for you, whether you're a boy or a girl. Now? All of the sudden environmental factors like culture, opportunity, other kids who tinker with computers, matter. Wow, all of a sudden tech types are starting to talk in sociological terms rather than black and white simplifications.
Old-school hackers (those who have the experience and connections to be political) haven't struck me as being very "sociological". To them, there are four kinds of people: hackers, java developers (snorts), managers, and everyone else (mostly tech-illiterates). Hackers are self-made, passionate people. Java developers and managers are sell-outs. Tech-illiterates just don't care. Hell, they probably don't even have a job they like, passionless peasants. But wait, now you're saying that passionate developers can come from all walks of life, that there isn't some universal Calling of The Computer that happens around ages 5-8, that passionate people can be scared away/demotivated by things incidental to tech and not just power through it, that not everyone has had access to a computer since a young age, that a professional work culture can discourage the people who are working in it enough to quit, even though the deficiets are not really law breaking but discouraging in a subtle, insidious way?
Wow. These hacker types sure get more reflected when their careers and reputations depend on how they look to the outside world, as opposed to when the only people they would risk offending were users of some inferior editor or programming language.
[0] User NaitJones also mentions black men, a class of people who in his experience doesn't get nearly as much air time when it comes to diversity in tech as the usual classes of people.
[1] preferably sometime in the 80s or earlier, to get some creds with the millenials for having hacked on "low spec PCs".
I have to say I found it disappointing to see Sama call out Hacker School and Google's explicitly discriminatory policies in a positive way. I'm all for helping people in need. As someone whose earnings were at less than half the poverty level just two short years ago, I can definitely empathize with people struggling at the margins, whether social or economic.
However, I believe making the decision solely based on a person's anatomy is wrong.
Would expanding the geographic sourcing of startups help with diversity? Cities like Miami, which is 75% hispanic, our startups are as diverse as our city. However I only recall a couple ever getting into YC (note, I have no idea of the merits of any others who applied).
So could sourcing from more diverse cities help YC ?
The post title would be less offensive if you read the article more carefully, since it explicitly addresses ethnicity. And of course, calling foul when an article about diversity prioritizes gender issues is a way to trivialize gender issues. Was that your intent? Surely not, but the toxic subtext is there nonetheless.
One objection I have is with hackathons. From my observations most hackathons aren't particularly inclusive environments - they may do more harm than good.
Examples include the intense focus on competition and prizes (I didn't think it was a good idea for YC Hacks to explicitly advertise the prize of getting an interview), the fact that many hackathons now have applications processes where more applicants are rejected than accepted (so that the net effect is more exclusion than inclusion), and the general vibe of having to power through the night with redbull while cranking out code.
Most hackathons I've attended I've usually gotten this exclusive, rather than inclusive vibe. From my own experiences, the most exclusive hackathons have been the larger, more monied, more applied-to ones that have more applicants than attendees. The most inclusive hackathons have been smaller, intimate hackathons where the problem has been not having enough attendees!
EDIT (reply to below): I'm referring to the general feeling of inclusion vs. exclusion (of newcomers, people not sure if they fit the mold of <quote>hardcore<unquote> coders, etc.). The next step is to argue that exclusion discourages minorities from pursuing the field.
Why is competition a diversity problem? To me, the idea that aggressive competition selects for a specific age, gender, or ethnicity is itself problematic. Not to mention that I think that's not true.
Broadly speaking, competition definitely creates sex-based selection-bias. Men self-select into competitions more than women, and are more motivated by them.
I am not saying men are more capable, just more likely to self-select into the competition. Read up on what professional coaches of womens vs mens teams say.
We work in a deeply, irretrievably competitive industry. The ability to thrive in a competitive environment is a requirement at many, perhaps most, startups. Women perform in the industry just fine, but are victimized by the perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive.
Your question was, "Why is competition a diversity problem?" The answer is "science indicates that competition motivates genders differently". The fact that our industry is deeply, irretrievably competitive is (imho) part of why it's deeply, irretrievably gender-skewed.
(Caveats: you're right that women perform in the industry just fine. Also, many women are motivated and successful in competitive environments, and those women are negatively affected by perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive.)
No. The industry must be competitive. Companies compete in the market. People must stop promoting the fiction that women are poor competitors. That's a stereotype that just happens to be awfully convenient for male entrepreneurs.
While companies must compete to exist, I don't think that requires work environment or culture to be competitive in nature. Interactions between coworkers should be fundamentally cooperative and cooperation between companies (such as contribution to open source projects) can also benefit all involved. The tech industry is not a zero sum game.
If you're reading "competition" as a license to be an asshole to team members, then we agree, but think that point is banal.
Otherwise, I reject this argument. I see it as mostly waving off gender concerns. "Let's not address our broken perceptions about the capabilities of women, but instead think about how we can rework the entire fabric of the industry." I'm sure everyone's going to get right on that.
According to Google, compete means: strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others who are trying to do the same. I'm reading "competition" as a zero (or negative) sum game such as stack ranking for career advancement. In a competition you seek for others to fail.
I think that we already have a primarily cooperative industry culture and that stack ranking is a bad idea in general, not because of gender concerns. I disagree with your statement that this is "a deeply, irretrievably competitive industry" though perhaps we mean different things by "competitive". Seeking capital is, to a degree inherently competitive, but even early stage enraptures are more often than not willing to help each other succeed.
Considering the trail of idiocy and failure in tech, especially at C-Suite level, 'The industry must be competitive' is perhaps not a statement that overlaps with reality.
Competition is not a fetish. It's not a de facto solution that showers the world with good things. Quite often it makes people do unintelligent things for silly reasons.
It's actually a mythology. And it's perfectly fine to criticise blind adherence to it.
As for women in tech - I'm always fascinated that the pressure is one way. Why don't the fashion or beauty industries - which are hardly small or financially irrelevant - complain that so few men work in them?
I suppose there's a presumption that tech is very serious and important, and fashion and beauty are trivial, silly, and vapid.
Problem is, tech is often trivial, silly, and vapid too - as is a lot of business culture. How many products have been released that fundamentally fail to work? How many projects have veered off in surreal directions because innovation[tm]? How many episodes of Dilbert have there been now?
Perhaps it's the perception of seriousness and importance that's the real problem.
As a side note, fashion contributes around £26bn to UK GDP. It's very difficult to get hard facts how software compares, because the definition can include anyone selling anything from a website. But web design and app development on their own are much, much smaller.
There's no question that women and men face different barriers in startups and tech. The null hypothesis is thus
(a) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially due to differences in how women and men are treated.
There's also no question that women and men differ biologically. The null hypothesis is thus
(b) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially biological in origin.
We thus have joint null hypotheses. Most commentators focus on a for obvious political reasons. Most contrarians focus on b, partially because a receives most of the attention, thus perhaps discounting a unfairly. But both a and b deserve consideration, and the burden of proof is on those asserting either ¬a or ¬b.
By stating that women are "victimized by the perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive", you've implicitly asserted that women are not in fact less competitive because of their gender, but rather are merely perceived to be so. You have thus placed the burden of proof on those who claim otherwise. In other words, by asserting a while discounting b, you have implicitly asserted ¬b as the null hypothesis.
You're in good company, of course: virtually the entire mainstream treats ¬b as the null hypothesis. Indeed, publicly supporting anything other than ¬b in the workplace is not only socially unacceptable, it is probably illegal. Unfortunately, it is also fallacious. The burden of proof is on those who assert that women's biology doesn't make them less competitive in startups and tech.
So, what evidence is there that women and men are equally well-suited to highly competitive environments? Bear in mind that nearly every highly competitive field (not just startups and tech) is now, and has historically been, dominated by men—including in far-flung locations without significant cultural contact. Contra the mainstream, ¬b is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.
It's interesting that it's only during discussions of race and gender that male nerds suddenly become receptive to social science. But in any other discussion, it's their rhetorical whipping boy. How convenient for them.
I'm receptive to social science in all relevant areas, but I don't particularly trust it, especially on politically sensitive subjects. (After all, even ultra-precise, mostly apolitical subjects like physics and chemistry often have trouble with replication.) The untrustworthiness of empirical evidence in social science makes deduction especially important.
In the case of sex differences, we need only one empirical result to determine the null hypothesis: male and female members of H. sapiens have different reproductive incentives. The null hypothesis then follows from an application of simple logic. That I do find convenient.
This doesn't mean the null hypothesis is always correct, of course. For example, there is strong evidence that mean IQ for men and women is virtually the same, which suggests the null hypothesis in this case is wrong. Neither need the null hypothesis conform to a "sexist" narrative; e.g., credible studies in cognitive neuroscience show that women are better on average at multitasking and verbal fluency. But the entire mainstream is committed to marginalizing the null hypothesis whenever it contradicts the politically correct narrative, logic be damned.
You are evidently a supporter of the mainstream, which is why you deride my [use of mathematical notation](https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/493116213803757568) instead of addressing the content of my comment. My respect for your technical work is high, though, and I know you're smart and thoughtful. I suggest grappling with the strongest arguments of those you disagree with rather than resorting to such puerile snark.
I suspect there is just a semantic difference. Women are certainly competitive. The framing of the competition matters, though. Broadly speaking, based on the tactics of professional coaches of women and psychological studies, competing for your teammates vs competing against your enemies motivates women more than men, respectively.
Since I seem to have ignited a huge sub-thread on competition, I'd like to clarify my intent. There are varying degrees and kinds of "competition." The competition I had in mind is the kind of competition associated with people pulling all-nighters for the entire weekend, loading up on Red-Bulls, and worrying about the best ways to pitch judges (and manipulate those pitches).
That kind of competition is generally unrepresentative of the "cooperative competition" of the tech industry.
Most but not all hackathons. I founded a hackathon and we made it a priority in our first planning meeting that women would be made to feel welcome.
I got up on stage at the event and said specifically what was acceptable and not acceptable behavior. I think if more hackathons did that there wouldn't be all the atrocities that I read about in Techcrunch.
This is really great. Obviously, we can't prevent every bad outcome, but I think sometimes people don't realize how little efforts like this actually go a really long way.
This year, our theme for MHacks (http://mhacks.org) is that "Hackathons are for everone."
We've changed our advertising to focus on the first time hacker experience rather than competition, lowered the prize amounts, and have adapted our application to be as blind to experience as possible.
In my experience, smaller hackathons are actually much more exclusive because they tend to be much more homogenous due to the self-selection bias; whereas, at a larger hackathon with thousands of applications, we have the opportunity to focus our outreach to welcome a much more diverse audience.
1) I suspect that the bias against girls is "I don't think she'll be effective" rather than "I am sexist and don't want girls to succeed".
2) The bias doesn't seem to be that strong to me. This is a simplification, but I'd guess that girls start with about a 10% handicap. Meaning that in close cases, girls lose out. But in the cases of girls who clearly have ability, I don't see the bias against them as something that will prevent them from being successful.
3) A more important question is "what can we do about it?". I agree with the idea to showcase successful women. I think it'll help a little. But obviously it isn't anything close to a solution by itself.
Option 1: If people were less biassed in the general sense, the bias against girls would be reduced. I think that making people less biased in the general sense is an important goal, but ultimately unlikely to happen for some time.
Option 2: As there are more and more instances of girls having success, people will start to view girls as more competent, and the bias will be reduced. I think the fastest way to reduce the bias against girls is to increase the amount of successful girls.
The question then becomes, "how do you do that?". This is getting long so I won't go into this too much... but I think it needs to be active rather than passive. Don't just sit there and wait for them to come to you asking for help. Go out there and inspire and persuade them.
The belief that African Americans were literally inferior to European Americans animated most of 20th century racism, so this observation is probably less helpful than your otherwise clear writing makes it sound.
"Girls" is probably not the word you want to be using, by the way.
> The belief that African Americans were literally inferior to European Americans animated most of 20th century racism, so this observation is probably less helpful than your otherwise clear writing makes it sound.
I'm afraid I may have implied something I didn't mean to imply.
I'm not sure what you mean by "this observation". I didn't mean to imply that people see girls as "literally inferior". Just that people probably think they're less likely to be competent.
> "Girls" is probably not the word you want to be using, by the way.
I'm saying girls to be all encompassing. "Women" just includes adults. And "females" sounds weird, like dehumanizing.
I understand your point that "girls" might have a connotation of disrespect. As if they're young and immature. But I think it's a slight connotation.
Given the context, of me pointing out that girls are being mistreated and that I think we should treat them better, I think the connotation is negligible. In other contexts I could see "girls" being disrespectful, but I don't think it is in this one.
With that said, maybe I'm being too stubborn. I often protest trivial things like this. For the record, if the case were reversed, I would absolutely be using the term "boys".
Edit: Also, I think the big thing is that I don't think of people in their mid-twenties as "adults" (men/women). I'm 21 and I'd refer to a friend of mine as "a guy I know" or "a girl I know".
Note that the male version of 'girl'is not 'guy', it's boy. Do you use 'boy' regularly to refer to adult men? If not, perhaps not using 'girl' either is appropriate.
You realize that you don't get to determine what feels disrespectful and diminutive to other people? That is sort of what it means for them to be other people.
If using the term "girl" is genuinely offensive, I'll happily stop. You're right, it isn't my place to hurt people who I think are misinterpreting a word.
However, I suspect that most people wouldn't be offended. If I used "women", I think the implication is "age > twenty something". I think the context makes it clear that I'm just using "girl" to be all encompassing, and thus, most people wouldn't be offended.
In the first place you should just go with what women actually say they prefer instead of trying to rationalize your own choice.
That said, if you want another reason, how about that it's quite all right to use the term woman to refer to a woman who is participating in a startup even if she has not reached legal majority. It is preferable to call a girl a woman than the other way around.
What percentage of applicants are his age or older? Probably very, very small for obvious reasons. Most founders PG's age and older have more financial resources (and network, etc) making YC's terms less appealing than for younger founders without any experience. In terms of diversity, age doesn't quite fit in here.
19% female applicants were accepted, and 24% applicants were female.
39% accepted applicants were from outside the US.
0% of founders were anywhere near pg's age. Are all Entrepreneurs under 40? Not remotely.
But more astounding: You would never get tech industry leaders saying "men are just smarter" or "whites are just smarter" yet Zuckerberg makes exactly that statement for agism.
And he made that statement at a Y Combinator Startup event.
So re your "obvious reasons", it is not that every one over 40 is rich, it is that few intelligent people over say 40 would be fool enough to go near those organizations given that very public attitude.
I appreciate that this post takes the time to acknowledge a few specific problems along with suggestions for actions.
I haven't seen much of the former in diversity releases - just 'diversity' on its own as if the word alone represents both every possible problem and validates the proposed solutions.
It's hard to put into few words, but as I think of it, diversity is neutral - it's just a measure and the goal shouldn't be dragging it one way or another just reducing friction.
EDIT: To be clear, when I refer to friction I mean any barriers beyond individual control which prevent people, whoever, wherever from entering and/or excelling in the field.
Let me get this straight: YCombinator is pledging to snub investors who conduct sexist and racist abuses toward founders? I know we'll face adversity, and I want our team to be able to stand up for our beliefs without getting fucked by the tight-night nature of the community.
> We’re encouraging our startups to get HR infrastructure in place earlier.
If there's one thing that a fast and nimble startup DOES NOT NEED, it's HR drones trying to assert themselves into the startup. This is great news for us that compete with YC companies because it means that you're going to be handcuffing yourselves and bogging yourselves down employees who are literally a negative to the bottom line.
> Specifically, we’d like the community to help by downvoting comments that make HN an unwelcoming place to anyone.
In other words, you want to address diversity by stamping out any ideas that are contrary to the modern politically correct BS that most people here are dulled into believing.
HR for startups wouldn't and shouldn't be like HR for big companies. It doesn't have to slow a company down at all, and it's definitely a function that can enhance a company culture in really positive ways without dampening it.
However, if you think sexual harassment doesn't happen in small startups, you're not paying attention. At the end of the day, HR is a mediator for the company to protect it from lawsuits. HR can stop a little issue from turning into a big, expensive issue, which is positive for both the company and employees.
> In other words, you want to address diversity by stamping out any ideas that are contrary to the modern politically correct BS that most people here are dulled into believing.
My natural reaction to this comment is Plonk.
But I realize that is only perpetuating the problem. I have the luxury of ignoring you. I have the luxury of ignoring whoever I want to. Many people don't.
And maybe that is exactly what you are trying to point out: if we try to solve this by using group consensus to ignore/block/killfile idiots/fools/bigots, what happens 1-on-1.
So in response:
I also have experienced situations where HR doesn't really add anything, but maybe someone can come up with a way to do HR.
What you fail to recognize is that YC is funding a disproportionately large number of founders who have little to no work experience. this leads to situations where the founders have no idea how to protect their company(including their investors) from harassment and discrimination lawsuits, or the attendant PR nightmare that hurts all their fellow batchmates.
I happen to think this is not enough but at a minimum I've always found it rather surprising that the money invested in these companies didn't want to protect it from the stupidity that is inherent in most young people. To be clear, I mean this as stupidity of youth, ignorance, naivete.
At bare minimum YC needs to require its founders to be trained in some basic legal 101 stuff since they haven't yet had to learn it on the job in a corporation.
(and hey, If I'm going to make a wishlist, add some leadership training to this, too. If you want to make young people into CEOs you need to teach them how to do it. Building a great product is absolutely NOT synonymous with building a great company. If experience has no value to them in hiring, they're learning that somewhere, and it needs to be corrected by the investors--if not for the morality of responsibility to young people looking to them for guidance, but to vouchsafe their own investment.)
Could someone convince me why I should care about the gonads and skin color of the people writing code for me? Does anybody really think YC's performance would be better if their founder classes looked like a diversity picture from a college recruiting brochure?
Could you point out for me where Sam talks about diversity of perspectives? All I see him talking about is what the OP mentions - gonads and skin color.
Gonads and skin color are correlated with a diversity of perspectives. All you have to do is look at the perspectives r/TwoX versus r/all, for instance, or Twitter vs. HN.
For instance, just see the period panties thread. Men don't have the perspective necessary to even comprehend the idea of period panties, let alone build one.
Not everything in tech is that obvious, of course. But it's worth thinking about non-obvious ways in which it might.
YC is starting to take a lot of the right steps. I know for me personally, as a female founder, my attitude has changed a lot in the past 6-8 months (from "I guess I'll keep reading HN & essays because I don't want to miss out on interesting content... but I don't feel good about it, and I'd definitely never apply" -- to now being able to be an unequivocal fan, attending Startup School, etc.).
Honestly, any effort at all is appreciated, although some efforts count for more than others. For instance, the Female Founders conference is fine, but I (and I think a lot of people) probably assign more credibility to efforts that really demonstrate a depth of thought on the issue. Here's a tiny example of what I mean, just from this essay, in fact: I always see VCs and journalists citing to the percent of portfolio companies that have a female founder, and every time I see this, it makes me think they're not really serious about analyzing the dimensions and complexity of the issue ("Out of how many founders TOTAL, not how many companies??"), so the fact that SA at least pointed this out puts this piece above not only other investor posts but also posts by tech journalists -- people whose very job it is to, you know, point this stuff out. That's a tiny example, but to me it counts for a lot more than just boilerplate "we support women blah blah blah." [1]
The same principle probably applies for what kinds of events/projects you sponsor. "Women in tech" conferences are great and all, but the more innovative (and tangibly helpful) the initiative is, the better. I'm not sure what your suggestion/feedback mechanism for this is besides HN and talking to your own portfolio, but it may be worth setting up another channel to get ideas from current non-YC technical women/female founders (maybe anonymously, or at least in a more conducive forum than the HN comment section).
Anyway, just my thoughts. I second the other comments about the importance of race/class diversity, too, but I don't have as much to add on that. (Not that race needed to be tackled in this particular post but the title maybe shouldn't have used the term "diversity" if it's mainly going to be about gender.)
[1] It also affords YC/SA a bit more benefit of the doubt when the post also asserts some, uh, less-well-thought-through things, e.g., that other industries are doing worse than tech on gender issues. (Like who? Who's doing worse, specifically? I literally can't think of a single industry in 2014 America that's doing worse than the startup/tech community [both statistically and anecdotally, as well as based on my own personal experience]. Not even investment banking -- and certainly not medicine, law, academia, or traditional business. It's not helpful to sugarcoat it.)
> "e.g., that other industries are doing worse than tech on gender issues. (Like who? Who's doing worse, specifically?"
Probably no one, or at least no industry of comparable size.
But knowing HN, if Sam made an absolute statement like "we are the worst in diversity", the HN crew will spend the entire ensuing commentary self-importantly arguing whether or not we are literally the worst.
That's a conversation best avoided, as it is entirely irrelevant to the point being made, but this community is fucking pedantic like that when their egos are being challenged.
I think any reasonably sized group of people can reasonably be expected to defend themselves when accused of being literally the worst in some way that matters if they don't think they are, regardless of their level of pedantry. In general, if you're trying to make some other major point in an article, it's best to equivocate on things that you think would be inflammatory and irrelevant.
First off, I applaud YC's efforts in this sphere to give all groups more opportunity to participate in startups and tech in general. I do not mean to disparage efforts or "derail" a conversation, but to bring up the fundamental question once the low-hanging fruit - discrimination, etc. is gone - self-selection and equality of result as a goal.
Any diversity discussion will eventually reach the awkward points of over-represented minorities and self-selection, which negatively impact numerical diversity: There are some elements of the industry that will inherently self-select for groups. Asian males are currently the most over-represented group - racially due to US immigration policy and cultural factors encouraging many recent immigrants to go into technical fields and not humanities.
Men tend to self-select into higher risk and highly competitive environments - e.g. startups, hackathons [1] but also ones with negative outcomes - crime, gambling addiction - see the 9-to-1 ratio of incarcerated men to women. (Denying the evidence for risk-taking and self-selection is to me, similar to denying evidence that sexism exists -- on the face of not wanting to confront it).
At what point do these become issues to address? It seems like the desired result is not the strawman, Harrison Bergeron, 100% representative (of what? the US? the world?) demographic, so what is the desired outcome? I'm for eliminating discrimination and bias, but I don't think this will leave us with a 50-50 perfectly balanced startup scene, but it's the most fair. You would either have to change humans' own free-will preferences for risk, or the nature of the industry (with other side effects). If you have ideas on this, I'm open to hearing them.
This is a legitimate question - shutting down discussion here in the name of being "against progress" or trivializing the issue is highly reminiscent of Paul Graham's warnings in "What You Can't Say [2]. The demographic balance of any industry or field is always in constant flux, and heavily influenced by self-selection and non-discriminatory factors. We need to remove discrimination, but also know that a fair outcome in the absence of discrimination - with equal opportunity does not necessarily lead to perfectly equal outcomes.
"Broadly speaking, competition definitely creates sex-based selection-bias. Men self-select into competitions more than women, and are more motivated by them.
As mentioned in some other comments, the post focuses more on gender than ethnicity. As a 31 year old African American male in tech, some of the challenges for black males and females that I've witnessed range from cultural mismatches to being under-valued and therefore underutilized. There's also a lot of stress and pressure associated with often being the only black person in the room throughout most of your STEM education and career. For startups specifically, I've often heard of "pattern matching" as a manifestation of bias for white and asian males. If we're looking for a cause of the lack of ethnic diversity, we can't ignore the socially uninviting nature of the environment.
Many of the solutions that have helped counter these challenges for me and a lot of my peers have been programs, organizations, and networks that focus on creating a culturally targeted atmosphere. Professional organizations like the National Society of Black Engineers really go a long way in encouraging minorities to pursue careers in technology. And within the startup community, I think programs like the NewMe accelerator meet a very specific and important need. Instead of just corralling minorities into tech companies or startups where they will still be underrepresented, there is a benefit in encouraging them to create their own companies where they can foster a cultural climate that naturally appeals to their ethnic peers.
That's only a solution for half of the problem on Hacker News. The other half is that most submissions about gender/diversity get flagged to death very consistently, which make it difficult to have any meaningful discussion about these topics.
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