6 ms·

We want to fund more women because it's the right thing to do, but we're not doing this for diversity's sake alone. We want to fund more women because we are g

by jmduke 13y ago

We want to fund more women because it's the right thing to do, but we're not doing this for diversity's sake alone. We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women. This is a huge thing that people seem to ignore when arguing "against diversity" (I put that in quotes because I don't think anyone actually argues against diversity -- they couch it in terms of meritocracy and egalitarianism, saying that the best people should succeed regardless of race and gender, it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.) I think Sam does a great job of presenting this as a thing of 'greed' -- or, more charitably, economic rationality. In my mind, there are only two real possibilities (or, perhaps more realistically, two ends of a spectrum): 1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that. 2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
colmvp 13y ago
"...it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male." So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?
- malanj 13y ago
  Perhaps because woman are the fastest "big" gain they can do? There are lots of woman in the world (far more than any minority group), yet very few doing startups. It's the biggest market inefficiency. edit: You could also argue that the diversity in thinking and approach you'll get from woman could be very high. So perhaps they'll be more likely to start new kinds of companies in untapped markets.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    There are more women in the world than pacific islanders, but if we only address the women aspect, are we not going to end up recruiting primarily white women? If the field is currently friendly to white men, and we make it more friendly to women, we wind up with white men & white women, not white men & all races of women. Right?
    - jt2190 13y ago
      > ... but if we only address the women aspect... Who's arguing for this?
    - vacri 13y ago
      Do something about it then. The author of this article is seeing a way to help change the status for women. You could do something to help change the status for pacific islanders.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        I'm not Sam. I haven't anywhere near his clout, nor am I even in that field. Nor are there more than even a tiny, tiny handful of pacific islanders in my town. I may have met two?
        tesseractive 13y ago
        Sam didn't start this in a vacuum. He started it after women in the tech community laid a lot of groundwork educating the community about gender diversity problems. Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way. But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.
- cheez 13y ago
  I suspect you'll get a two-fer: Asian, Hispanic and Black female founders.
  - colmvp 13y ago
    FWIW, living in SF, I've met more Asian female founders (including those who went through YC) than male black founders (one maybe?).
    - munificent 13y ago
      That probably just reflects the racial demographics of SF independent of gender: 390,387 Whites (48.1%) 267,915 Asians (33.3%) 48,870 African Americans (6.1%)
      - 001sky 13y ago
        No, zip codes are irrelevant. Whites and Asians dominate elite schools because they are wealthier and/or more focused on money. Black in general are not seen as "attractive" socially (if you look at the data from dating sites, for example), whereas whites and asians are disporportionately so (at least for the females). So, if you combine the social dis-advantages and the educational disparity, you get a very strong anti-black bias. Pretty simple to understand, but hard to fix.
- larrys 13y ago
  "So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?" Honestly I think because the women's issue has been more front and center in attention as well as blog posts. So it's more "de la journée".
- j2kun 13y ago
  There should be. A related question: is it easier to fix systemic biases against women than for racial minorities?
- angersock 13y ago
  "What is your unfair advantage in the marketplace for .gov-funded work?" "We're a female minority-owned small business, so we get preferential treatment in bidding."
- rimantas 13y ago
  Actually… http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1430465/tiger-mums-triple-formula-success http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1430465/tiger-mums...
- AnimalMuppet 13y ago
  Is there any evidence that Asian men are under-represented as founders?
  - 001sky 13y ago
    They are more likely to have foreign accents, surely
    - tptacek 13y ago
      I know that this is just a lame dig at Paul Graham's advice that it's helpful for pitching founders to be intelligible to customers and investors, but I'm also not sure it's true. There's this place called "continental Europe". Also a pretty big strip of Asia called "Russia".
      - 001sky 13y ago
        There is a massive bias for white founders (~87%), to the detriment of minorities (~13%). This is masked slightly by the fact that Asians dominate minority founders (12% to 1%). These numbers are "under-representations" in relation to university populations, even for asians. [1,2] [1] http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capital-demographics-87-percent-vc-backed-founders-white-asian-teams-raise-largest-funding http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/how-americas-top-colleges-reflect-and-massively-distort-the-countrys-racial-evolution/267415/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/how-amer...
        tptacek 13y ago
        None of this has anything to do with my comment.
        001sky 13y ago
        Maybe that says your comment is off base.
- tesseractive 13y ago
  These goals aren't in opposition. But they aren't the same thing. Women don't launch startups as often as men, and black people don't launch startups as often as white people, but these aren't necessarily for the same reasons, and there's no reason to think that the same advisors and mentors that can help achieve a goal of attracting more female founders would also be effective at attracting more African-American founders. So it stands to reason that both of these things would be good things to do, but not necessarily as part of the same initiative. And it may be impractical for the same person or institution to launch multiple diversity initiatives at the same time and maintain institutional focus. So I think the answer isn't to use this as a reason to critique initiatives aimed at attracting female founders. There's no reason the onus for other diversity initiatives should be placed on the people who are already devoting resources to recruiting female founders. Rather, I would suggest that you get involved yourself -- and also encourage others in the startup scene to get involved -- to devote equivalent energy to launching initiatives to recruit founders who are members of traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. The more the merrier.
- nahname 13y ago
  Why not judge everyone on a per person basis rather than generalizing in the first place. That is the real problem.
twiceaday 13y ago
"We want to fund more women" because "we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women." How is this statement supposed to be read? Probably not like this "We are going to fund people we otherwise wouldn't because they happen to be women and many successful startups are going to be funded by women." Also, probably not like this "We want to have 'more than a thousand dollars' because we want to have 'more than a million dollars' and many times 'more than a thousand' is 'more than a million.'" If that's the case then it would be much better to simply say "We want to fund the most successful startups and it would not be in our best interest to differentiate founders based on gender."
- Varcht 13y ago
  I read it as , hmmph, you know... the market for men's ideas is probably getting close to being played out and there is probably an untapped market for products made by women... Diversity? Bonus!
- AnimalMuppet 13y ago
  I read this as "There are women who would make good founders. If we can find them and nurture them, even if it's more work for us, we're still going to make a lot of money by doing so." In fact, you could almost look at this as a startup-ish idea - finding an under-served niche, and making money from doing what nobody else is doing.
hnnewguy 13y ago
>it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male. No, I don't believe that is the argument. The argument is "Let's not over-compensate for historical institutional racism/sexism, and, going forward, select the best candidates based on merit, regardless of gender or colour." You can't eliminate these issues overnight, with a rule or two.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  I think the counter argument to that argument was always "can we actually do that as humans?" The push towards diversity is a straight forward reaction in an attempt to prove "yes we can" by moving the numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible. I'd guess that eventually the pendulum will swing back again. The reason the diversity tactic is used so much is because it's the only tactic that seems to actually produce results, artificial or not.
  - hnnewguy 13y ago
    >"yes we can" by moving the numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible. (This is a touchy subject. I'm not implying this initiative takes it "too far" or anything of the like...) I agree, the problem is that over-compensation (pendulum swinging too far) inevitably leads to another party being alienated. Sometimes the people at the margins most affected are relatively powerful and aren't happy with the results. An example being anti-affirmative-action sentiment among white blue-collar workers. This can diminish the effectiveness of the diversity push. I'm not saying the sentiment is justified; I'm saying it inevitably happens. It's a tough balance. We know that SV and the tech scene is a very male oriented culture. What happens with as that changes? There are bound to be losers.
- LordHumungous 13y ago
  The problem is it is very difficult to ensure that your selection criteria is totally unbiased when investing is such an emotional, gut based decision. If most founders in the past have been white males, then investors are going to continue to give that group preferential treatment if only because they look like the type that has succeeded before.
mathattack 13y ago
One challenge is that there are some rational things working against diversity. One heuristic is "Aim for as diverse a group of entrepreneurs because we don't want to miss any opportunities" Another is "Fund people I've worked with, or come recommended by people I work with, because word of mouth is a better predictor that resume" The first encourages diversity. The second discourages it, but is rational. It takes being very proactive to push for the first to win over the second, because you have to actively find something as strong as "Word of mouth from my network" to predict success. Bravo for YC pushing this agenda.
ryanobjc 13y ago
> 1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that. So I'm a little confused here, since no one who has participated would ever think this is even remotely close to true, I guess it's a rhetorical element. But I can't quite figure out to what end. Maybe you could explain to me like I'm 5?
jiggy2011 13y ago
But even in a meritocracy you can only select the "best" from those who are available. There are certainly plenty of people who could have been successful in technology but went into different fields entirely.
nawitus 13y ago
"it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male" Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male. (Not sure about race, but it's probably true in Western countries). The majority of people interested in founding technology startups are probably white and male, and therefore the best people for starting a technology startup are white and male. You comment implies that it's wrong to state that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male, if you don't imply that, please make it clear. If women are as skilled as men in, say, programming, then majority of best programmers are male. >2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities. There's a third possibility: women and non-whites in Western countries are less interested in applying for venture capital. If that is the case, then in an equal world venture capitalists should invest less in startups founded by non-white women, because the majority of startups seeking venture capital are founded by white males. The overall point is that you need to fix the root cause, not the effects of the cause. As long as women and non-whites are minorities in groups of people such as tech students, you should see less women and non-whites in tech student related phenomenon, such as technology startups. This reminds me of all these communities like "AngularJS women", who try to get more women into AngularJS. I think that's pointless. Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men, you'll find that 50% of AngularJS developers will be female.
- Crito 13y ago
  > "Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male." Understanding of this point is perhaps facilitated by also mentioning that the worst programmers are also overwhelmingly white and male, for the same reason.
  - general_failure 13y ago
    You haven't seen bad programmers have you? Trust me they are not white :)
belorn 13y ago
I have a novel suggestion to fix this diversity problem. Women tend to outperform men in the general desirability of occupations[1]. In jobs like veterinary and psychologists, the competition is fierce and highly gender imbalanced in favor of women. So in order to get more women into other fields like programming, lets favor men for occupations that has high general desirability. This will move men into occupations normally occupied by highly skilled and educated women, and move women into occupations with lower general desirability by which is otherwise male dominated. Do not be against diversity, support this move today! [1]: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-society/women-stem-occupations-retention-rates http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-societ...

by jmduke 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

colmvp 13y ago

"...it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male." So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?

malanj 13y ago
Perhaps because woman are the fastest "big" gain they can do? There are lots of woman in the world (far more than any minority group), yet very few doing startups. It's the biggest market inefficiency. edit: You could also argue that the diversity in thinking and approach you'll get from woman could be very high. So perhaps they'll be more likely to start new kinds of companies in untapped markets.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  There are more women in the world than pacific islanders, but if we only address the women aspect, are we not going to end up recruiting primarily white women? If the field is currently friendly to white men, and we make it more friendly to women, we wind up with white men & white women, not white men & all races of women. Right?
  - jt2190 13y ago
    > ... but if we only address the women aspect... Who's arguing for this?
  - vacri 13y ago
    Do something about it then. The author of this article is seeing a way to help change the status for women. You could do something to help change the status for pacific islanders.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      I'm not Sam. I haven't anywhere near his clout, nor am I even in that field. Nor are there more than even a tiny, tiny handful of pacific islanders in my town. I may have met two?
      - tesseractive 13y ago
        Sam didn't start this in a vacuum. He started it after women in the tech community laid a lot of groundwork educating the community about gender diversity problems. Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way. But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.
cheez 13y ago
I suspect you'll get a two-fer: Asian, Hispanic and Black female founders.
- colmvp 13y ago
  FWIW, living in SF, I've met more Asian female founders (including those who went through YC) than male black founders (one maybe?).
  - munificent 13y ago
    That probably just reflects the racial demographics of SF independent of gender: 390,387 Whites (48.1%) 267,915 Asians (33.3%) 48,870 African Americans (6.1%)
    - 001sky 13y ago
      No, zip codes are irrelevant. Whites and Asians dominate elite schools because they are wealthier and/or more focused on money. Black in general are not seen as "attractive" socially (if you look at the data from dating sites, for example), whereas whites and asians are disporportionately so (at least for the females). So, if you combine the social dis-advantages and the educational disparity, you get a very strong anti-black bias. Pretty simple to understand, but hard to fix.
larrys 13y ago
"So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?" Honestly I think because the women's issue has been more front and center in attention as well as blog posts. So it's more "de la journée".
j2kun 13y ago
There should be. A related question: is it easier to fix systemic biases against women than for racial minorities?
angersock 13y ago
"What is your unfair advantage in the marketplace for .gov-funded work?" "We're a female minority-owned small business, so we get preferential treatment in bidding."
rimantas 13y ago
Actually… http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1430465/tiger-mums-triple-formula-success http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1430465/tiger-mums...
AnimalMuppet 13y ago
Is there any evidence that Asian men are under-represented as founders?
- 001sky 13y ago
  They are more likely to have foreign accents, surely
  - tptacek 13y ago
    I know that this is just a lame dig at Paul Graham's advice that it's helpful for pitching founders to be intelligible to customers and investors, but I'm also not sure it's true. There's this place called "continental Europe". Also a pretty big strip of Asia called "Russia".
    - 001sky 13y ago
      There is a massive bias for white founders (~87%), to the detriment of minorities (~13%). This is masked slightly by the fact that Asians dominate minority founders (12% to 1%). These numbers are "under-representations" in relation to university populations, even for asians. [1,2] [1] http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capital-demographics-87-percent-vc-backed-founders-white-asian-teams-raise-largest-funding http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/how-americas-top-colleges-reflect-and-massively-distort-the-countrys-racial-evolution/267415/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/how-amer...
      - tptacek 13y ago
        None of this has anything to do with my comment.
        001sky 13y ago
        Maybe that says your comment is off base.
tesseractive 13y ago
These goals aren't in opposition. But they aren't the same thing. Women don't launch startups as often as men, and black people don't launch startups as often as white people, but these aren't necessarily for the same reasons, and there's no reason to think that the same advisors and mentors that can help achieve a goal of attracting more female founders would also be effective at attracting more African-American founders. So it stands to reason that both of these things would be good things to do, but not necessarily as part of the same initiative. And it may be impractical for the same person or institution to launch multiple diversity initiatives at the same time and maintain institutional focus. So I think the answer isn't to use this as a reason to critique initiatives aimed at attracting female founders. There's no reason the onus for other diversity initiatives should be placed on the people who are already devoting resources to recruiting female founders. Rather, I would suggest that you get involved yourself -- and also encourage others in the startup scene to get involved -- to devote equivalent energy to launching initiatives to recruit founders who are members of traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. The more the merrier.
nahname 13y ago
Why not judge everyone on a per person basis rather than generalizing in the first place. That is the real problem.

twiceaday 13y ago

"We want to fund more women" because "we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women." How is this statement supposed to be read? Probably not like this "We are going to fund people we otherwise wouldn't because they happen to be women and many successful startups are going to be funded by women." Also, probably not like this "We want to have 'more than a thousand dollars' because we want to have 'more than a million dollars' and many times 'more than a thousand' is 'more than a million.'" If that's the case then it would be much better to simply say "We want to fund the most successful startups and it would not be in our best interest to differentiate founders based on gender."

Varcht 13y ago
I read it as , hmmph, you know... the market for men's ideas is probably getting close to being played out and there is probably an untapped market for products made by women... Diversity? Bonus!
AnimalMuppet 13y ago
I read this as "There are women who would make good founders. If we can find them and nurture them, even if it's more work for us, we're still going to make a lot of money by doing so." In fact, you could almost look at this as a startup-ish idea - finding an under-served niche, and making money from doing what nobody else is doing.

hnnewguy 13y ago

>it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male. No, I don't believe that is the argument. The argument is "Let's not over-compensate for historical institutional racism/sexism, and, going forward, select the best candidates based on merit, regardless of gender or colour." You can't eliminate these issues overnight, with a rule or two.

RyanZAG 13y ago
I think the counter argument to that argument was always "can we actually do that as humans?" The push towards diversity is a straight forward reaction in an attempt to prove "yes we can" by moving the numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible. I'd guess that eventually the pendulum will swing back again. The reason the diversity tactic is used so much is because it's the only tactic that seems to actually produce results, artificial or not.
- hnnewguy 13y ago
  >"yes we can" by moving the numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible. (This is a touchy subject. I'm not implying this initiative takes it "too far" or anything of the like...) I agree, the problem is that over-compensation (pendulum swinging too far) inevitably leads to another party being alienated. Sometimes the people at the margins most affected are relatively powerful and aren't happy with the results. An example being anti-affirmative-action sentiment among white blue-collar workers. This can diminish the effectiveness of the diversity push. I'm not saying the sentiment is justified; I'm saying it inevitably happens. It's a tough balance. We know that SV and the tech scene is a very male oriented culture. What happens with as that changes? There are bound to be losers.
LordHumungous 13y ago
The problem is it is very difficult to ensure that your selection criteria is totally unbiased when investing is such an emotional, gut based decision. If most founders in the past have been white males, then investors are going to continue to give that group preferential treatment if only because they look like the type that has succeeded before.

mathattack 13y ago

One challenge is that there are some rational things working against diversity. One heuristic is "Aim for as diverse a group of entrepreneurs because we don't want to miss any opportunities" Another is "Fund people I've worked with, or come recommended by people I work with, because word of mouth is a better predictor that resume" The first encourages diversity. The second discourages it, but is rational. It takes being very proactive to push for the first to win over the second, because you have to actively find something as strong as "Word of mouth from my network" to predict success. Bravo for YC pushing this agenda.

ryanobjc 13y ago

> 1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that. So I'm a little confused here, since no one who has participated would ever think this is even remotely close to true, I guess it's a rhetorical element. But I can't quite figure out to what end. Maybe you could explain to me like I'm 5?

jiggy2011 13y ago

But even in a meritocracy you can only select the "best" from those who are available. There are certainly plenty of people who could have been successful in technology but went into different fields entirely.

nawitus 13y ago

"it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male" Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male. (Not sure about race, but it's probably true in Western countries). The majority of people interested in founding technology startups are probably white and male, and therefore the best people for starting a technology startup are white and male. You comment implies that it's wrong to state that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male, if you don't imply that, please make it clear. If women are as skilled as men in, say, programming, then majority of best programmers are male. >2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities. There's a third possibility: women and non-whites in Western countries are less interested in applying for venture capital. If that is the case, then in an equal world venture capitalists should invest less in startups founded by non-white women, because the majority of startups seeking venture capital are founded by white males. The overall point is that you need to fix the root cause, not the effects of the cause. As long as women and non-whites are minorities in groups of people such as tech students, you should see less women and non-whites in tech student related phenomenon, such as technology startups. This reminds me of all these communities like "AngularJS women", who try to get more women into AngularJS. I think that's pointless. Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men, you'll find that 50% of AngularJS developers will be female.

Crito 13y ago
> "Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male." Understanding of this point is perhaps facilitated by also mentioning that the worst programmers are also overwhelmingly white and male, for the same reason.
- general_failure 13y ago
  You haven't seen bad programmers have you? Trust me they are not white :)

belorn 13y ago

I have a novel suggestion to fix this diversity problem. Women tend to outperform men in the general desirability of occupations[1]. In jobs like veterinary and psychologists, the competition is fierce and highly gender imbalanced in favor of women. So in order to get more women into other fields like programming, lets favor men for occupations that has high general desirability. This will move men into occupations normally occupied by highly skilled and educated women, and move women into occupations with lower general desirability by which is otherwise male dominated. Do not be against diversity, support this move today! [1]: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-society/women-stem-occupations-retention-rates http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-societ...