Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Interesting stats. I don't get this section though:

    UNDERREPRESENTED FOUNDERS
    S17 Female founders: 35 (12% of all S17 founders)
    S17 Applicants who were female: 14%
    S17 Companies with a female founder: 27 (21% of the batch)
    S17 Applications with a female founder: 22%
    
    S17 Black founders: 14 (4.76% of S17 founders)
    S17 Companies with a Black/Af-Am founder: 8 (6.25% of the batch)
    
    S17 Hispanic/Latinx founders: 13 (4.42% of S17 founders)
    S17 Companies with a Hispanic/Latinx founder: 7 (5.47% of the batch)

For females the percentage that were accepted is pretty close to the percentage that applied (21% vs 22%). So it seems like it would represent the applicant set.

Couple questions come to mind:

* For the black and hispanic stats, what were the percentage of the total applicants?

* Does the acceptance rate align with the application rate?

* Are the "% Applications with a ..." based on those that arrived at the office for an interview or total number of submissions?

* Are the stats self reported and if so optional or mandatory, or does someone at YC look at people to bucketize them?

* We ask for gender on our applications, but we haven't asked for race/ethnicity, which is why we don't have the answer to your first question.

* We see that it does for female founders.

* Total number of submissions

* Gender is reported in the applications. We asked founders in the batch to self-report for race/ethnicity.

Why ask for gender but not race/ethnicity?

This is an excellent question. If I were running the applications I might have done the same (ask gender but not race/ethnicity), because gender just feels more generally okay to ask. But if the purpose of asking is for nothing more than stats recording, then why not ask ethnicity as well?

I think it lies in that people fear being biased against for reporting their ethnicity, either via affirmative action (white/asian) or racism (everyone else).

> I think it lies in that people fear being biased against for reporting their ethnicity, either via affirmative action (white/asian) or racism (everyone else).

Hm, two flaws about that dichotomy:

1) Many people that aren't white or asian also feel that affirmative action is a bias against their actual ability to contribute to society. For example, not everyone would see getting into YC as a monumental achievement, but even if they did the idea that it would be belittled because of a perception that their skin tone filled a quote is the same being biased against.

2) Many people call this racism as well. In this context, it would primarily be a reference to an institutionalized circumstance.

That seems like a miss if the goal is to report on proportional representation (as it does for genders) and not just the raw data.

Just curious, how many applications did you receive for Summer 2017?

>* We see that it does for female founders.

...for this specific batch. Is parent questioning if this is historically the case or suggesting this is a move by YC at gender diversity? Just curious.

Underrepresented might not mean underpresented in YC, but underpresented in the industry. In which case there is more to consider than just the applicant set.

Which industry?

It seems to me that question has a trivial answer - and so I wonder, are you trying to obliquely say something? And if so, what?

What's the trivial answer? All these startups are in vastly different spaces and industries. Not sure which industry you're talking about.

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