Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

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> The details are stunning. Nearly 20% of responders reported sexual coercion or quid-pro-quo.

Doesn't surprise me. A couple years ago my co-founder and I were at a startup event, and an investor came up to another founder next to us and made a comment like, "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"

It's a tricky problem to really make sense of though just because investors are so diverse. You've got things like:

- People who got an MBA and for whom investing is their actual career.

- Founders who exited their own startup and now it's their hobby or second career.

- People who made a couple million dollars as doctors or lawyers and are now taking it up as a hobby in their 50s.

- People who made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto or whatever in their early 20s and have now lost all touch with reality.

- People who quietly manage family offices who occasionally add a startup to their portfolio.

Not that it necessarily matters from the founder's perspective. But it's just a very different problem than addressing sexual harassment in tech companies, because you have a mix of people doing it as a career and people doing it for completely different reasons.

>It's a tricky problem to really make sense of though just because investors are so diverse.

Are they? I think it could be argued that investors are one of the least diverse groups.

Analysis of 1,500 investors:

==70% are white

==40% of venture investors have attended Stanford or Harvard

==One percent of venture capitalists are Latinx and only three percent are black.

-https://blog.usejournal.com/where-did-you-go-to-school-bde54...

For what it's worth, something like 75% of the US is phenotypically white (including white Americans with Hispanic or Latin heritage), so perhaps that one metric is tracking more favorably than you're giving it credit for.

70% are white

Assuming these are American numbers, wouldn't you expect it? Wikipedia says 60% of Americans are White, and the number is higher if you include Hispanic people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Americans

So it would make sense for white people to be the majority in any group, isn't it? Maybe there are exceptions, like certain sports.

Just to be clear, I am not white. I am only wondering about the numbers, not about any group's behavior.

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted; it's entirely relevant. Sexual harassment is abuse of power. Power is disproportionately in the hands of certain historically favored groups, so a) people in those groups will be able to get away with more, and b) people growing up in those groups will be used to getting away with more.

It's getting downvoted because people don't like it when other people point out that the groups they belong to contain abusive people. It's typical tribal behavior.

Please don't break the guidelines by going on about downvoting. Instead, if you see an unfairly downvoted comment, simply give it a corrective upvote and move on. Other users will typically do so too, leaving comments like this one orphaned and inaccurate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Or maybe it's getting downvoted because it's trying to counter an argument about diversity of past life experiences with an argument about diversity of class membership, which is quite reductionist.

Class membership can be useful as a proxy for e.g. power structures, but if you're already looking at investors, the most important factor influencing power structures is that they have a lot of money. Maybe there are differences in the ways white and black people with lots of money abuse their power, but that'd surprise me.

Nobody made an argument about class membership. I simply presented some demographic data of VC investors.

Meanwhile, you completely ignore the data about investors being heavily skewed towards two specific universities. Isn’t that a past life experience? Isn’t VC investor a “class” in itself?

I doubt many VC angels are reading and voting on HN.

Many people include aspirational targets (wildly successful tech folks who went on to be VCs/angels) in their mental notion of "tribe".

See also the quote about the American poor viewing themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and voting to support the interest of actual millionaires.

Did you really need to bring race into the topic? The word 'diversity' has an actual meaning, you know.

The comment you're replying to was very clear in that they were talking about career and background diversity -- as in, VCs have their money for diverse reasons.

There were like 5 bullet points about it, making it crystal clear what kind of diversity was being discussed.

One person's diverse group is another's monoculture.

I also brought educational background into the argument (40% from Harvard or Stanford). Why didn’t you comment on that data point and instead focus on the race data?

It’s understandable that you want to focus on the diversity of outcomes, just know that others might be interested in the inputs that led to those outcomes.

The only people who don’t like race bring “brought into” a topic are white.

For the rest of us, race is already here.

Bullshit. My large extended family is mostly "the rest of us" and doesn't like race being brought into a topic.

> The only people

There is at least one exception in me.

The way I see it, your metrics and your parent's metrics for diversity are different. I guess your point is that the 70% white investors think as a block and can be generalized?

==I guess your point is that the 70% white investors think as a block and can be generalized?==

I’m not sure how you arrived at that assumption. The point is that this is the data (as pulled by one person), you have chosen to take the giant leap that somehow those people “think as a block and can be generalized.” Why no mention of the other data points and focus solely on this one?

Don't forget ==82% are male

And, apparently, women are in a position to change that if they want to.

https://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-women-control-th...

I guarantee if you follow the links they cite as 'sources', they will just cite other infographics or news articles.

It's not that, they're just not explaining the reasons.

For example, women control a majority of assets in large part because they statistically live longer than men. This makes them a higher percentage of the population in general, but a much higher percentage of the population of retirees with retirement savings. And they do most consumer spending because they're typically the ones who do the shopping for the family, even if on average half or more of the money is from the husband. The numbers are largely accurate.

Though it's not clear how many 80 year old widows are inclined to invest their nest egg in a startup.

> "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"

People who are having trouble understanding why this kind of thing is harassment should try changing gender to something else. For example, imagine if you heard:

"Whoa, listen to that Southern accent! Surprised to hear that here."

"You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..."

"Sure you want to start a startup? You look like you need to lose some weight and sitting in a chair all day coding's not going to help..."

... and so on.

I actually heard a version of the Southern accent example once. Classism and place-ism are things too. It wasn't long ago that students in some universities were advised to lose their Southern accent if they wanted to get work as engineers.

In regards to southern accents, there's a reason that southerners make-up the largest percentage (can't remember where I saw this, though) of students in accent reduction classes.

And there's some studies on this form of discrimination.

http://sites.middlebury.edu/lngt101fall2015/files/2015/11/ar...

https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-...

I specifically lost my southern accent to work in tech. Started work in 2010.

It takes a lot of effort to unlearn an accent, but it's not terribly hard to learn a fake one to speak in different contexts. My mom does this. Her work accent is usually not very southern, unless she's exclusively around other southerners with accents, but even then her "public southern" accent is nothing like her accent with our family in appalachia. I'm glad my resting accent is relatively neutral. Even in the south, having a thick accent can make you a bully magnet.

> "You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..."

My wife works in biotech (has been in both ag and pharma, with the same experience) and seems to get exactly this (often verbatim except that “engineering” is replaced with “science”) almost as much as gender-based harassment and microaggressions.

I'm not sure Christians are unusual amongst engineers - graduates of engineering degrees (other than chemical engineering) are more likely to hold creationist beliefs than graduates of any other degree programme. Engineers and priests both like a well-designed system after all.

> "You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..."

Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam. It makes no rational sense at all for anyone with even the most superficial understanding of religion or history.

With race I can see the logic of "well, people that looked like your ancestors were really good at empire-building a while ago, so we're going to favour everyone else instead of you to try to make up for that" and gender "well, women in the workplace is a relatively new phenomena and they're 50% of the population, so we're going to favour them in order to hasten their representation in the workplace and make up for recent transgressions". But the religious one is truly baffling.

> Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam

It's only mistaken for this by people who both confuse Christianity (and often particularly Evangelical/Fundamentalist Protestantism, and often strains of those traditions that are particularly anti-Semitic) for some broader Judeo-Christian whole and confuse being prevented from imposing adherence to their system of ritual and values on others with discrimination against them, and who further confuse not actively discriminating against the Muslim community with “embrace of Islam”.

>Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam. It makes no rational sense at all for anyone with even the most superficial understanding of religion or history.

This is absolute nonsense. What you characterize as a wholesale embracing of a religion is actually the recognition that there is systematic discrimination against a religious minority in this country and an attempt to fix it. Islamic traditions are rejected just as much as Judeo-Christian ones.

And you know what- religion is worth of rejection - any kind of in the public plaza.

You shall keep thy relgion tho thy self.

That minority stones people to death if it has the majority. Female people. So what does the PC-Catalog suggest, when one minority wants to end tolerance and other minoritys, once it is the majority?

>So what does the PC-Catalog suggest, when one minority wants to end tolerance and other minoritys, once it is the majority?

Is that an honest question? Because it sounds like trolling.

In what way does protecting a minority promote them to a majority? In what way does it condone their belief systems? Why do people have such a ridiculously hard time not conflating the adherents of t religion with the religion itself?

Religion, dogmatic, and enforced, self-encapsulating is actually capable to survive the onslaught of a liberal society. Take the amish, there self-contained believe system, has allowed them to expand, peacefully and all, but they definatly have outgrown - within local communities any liberal alternative.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/08/exploding-amish-popul...

Now take a dogmatic religion, that is not peacefull- and watch wherever it comes to power- minorities beeing routed and pluralism and democracy falter.

As examples may i cite the Arab spring countries, turkey, syrias sunnites, indonesia - http://sp2010.bps.go.id/index.php/site/tabel?tid=321&wid=0

Im pretty sure, i can take your standardized reply from here. First of all its not one religion, its many variants - so nobody is responsible by the virtues of distribution of failure into the privat sector of the individual choice. To which i reply:

Yes, and no. Its one species of humans, planetwide, and religions are particular lousy to limit those human emotions in times of crisis. While christianity is tamed, well behaved or even in decline in the west- one religion-group then, has a track record for not working with democracy. There are not many islamic democratic countries, which are not sliding into toletarian directions.

Having to flee from ones self created social catastrophe, does not make one a virtue-angel by the grace of weakness.

If evangelicals would try to escape a trump ruled Gilead- does theire religion and culture warrant a special treatment?

No compromises, no colonialization of the public mind sphere, with illegtime power structures and moral concepts. Keep religion private.

I'm not sure what point you expect these examples to make. The second two are straightforward insults - which describing someone as "hot" is not - and the first one would be seen as completely harmless by many (perhaps most) people.

Describing someone as 'hot' or generally commenting on their appearance when it isn't relevant is a form of objectification. A woman (or man) is at an event to discuss ideas or their company and the first thing someone says to them is about their physical appearance. This is very discouraging to people who have it happen to them very frequently.

Assuming you are a man, imagine being at an event and someone coming up and saying something like, "Woah get a load of Fabio over here". Being compared to Fabio might be a compliment in an objective physical sense, but I'm sure that isn't what you want to talk about when you are trying to get funding or make connections.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with my comment that you're replying to. Nothing in it defends commenting on people's appearance or implies that I disagree with anything you've said here.

> The second two are straightforward insults

That's exactly the point: if you can switch some group labels around and make an insult, then don't use the version involving gender.

The difference between the "hot" example and the "fat" example is not just switching some group labels around! The "hot" example is complimenting the recipient's appearance and expressing (presumably pleasant) surprise at their presence. The "fat" example is insulting the recipient and explicitly advising them against being there.

We can imagine examples of weird and uncomfortable compliments that are in some way related to the demographics of the recipient - like someone attempting to flirt by telling a French man "Your voice is way too sexy for you to be a founder" or a well-built black man "You look way too athletic to be a founder". These seem about as socially inept as the "way too hot" example and strike me as reasonable analogues. But the examples in the post I replied to higher in this chain are nothing like this.

You're missing some important context then. "Hot" is not a compliment when an investor says this about you, because that's not a trait that matters as a startup founder, and because of the boys club atmosphere that pervades some parts of the VC world, it carries the strong implication that an irrelevant trait is getting in the way of your purpose for being there.

If you look at the example the parent poster gave, that's exactly the implication. "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"

If you consider the difference between your two examples, the French man and the black man, I think you may see how one would be more put off than the other by the uncomfortable compliment. Specifically, within the United States (and other countries as well) the black man has been historically disenfrachised and therefore any comment/compliment that they do not belong there will not be well received.

The 'too xyz to be here' comment is typically made by people that aren't in a position to judge, possibly for a number of reasons.

It's not actually a complement though. They're basically saying "I value your presence here because of your appearance, not because of your ideas".

Let's give another example of a complement that really isn't:

"Wow, it's nice to see some black people at this event for once". It's a positive statement, sure, but it's not an appropriate comment to make.

Can you understand how this belittles people?

Or when the CEO (petite woman) and co-founder (old man) go to VC meetings and everyone thinks the the co-founder is in charge and the CEO is his secretary. Shit like this is rampant.

Well without even knowing or looking at the person, I can say he sounds too dumb to be an investor, what was he doing there?

Ah, the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Smart people can be assholes. Indeed, their smarts can make them much more effective abusers, as they're better able to escape notice and/or talk their way out of trouble when caught.

lol, seems like you missed the point, just like how hot women can be founders too, dumb people can also be investors. I was merely making a counter comment to his comment.

> It's a tricky problem to really make sense of though just because investors are so diverse

Are you suggesting that traditional VCs and traditional tech leaders are less rapey than the list above? That seems like wishful thinking!

Meta: these downvotes are wild. -4 at present. Someone makes a bullshit, hand wringing, concern trolling comment about how this is a "tricky problem" and that it cannot be pinned on VCs and tech leaders because of schlocky retired doctors and bitcoin barons. The statistics don't back that up as cited by a sibling commenter. What's funny about downvotes like this is that it's not even a social deterrent. I can get +4 for a one word comment as long as it's funny, but if I callout someone for getting the vapors and saying "not all men" I get wild downvotes

I think they might mean nailing specific people down to a tech company specifically. I could be wrong, though.

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