Diversity Should Be #1 for Good Reason | Hacker News Reader

Diversity Should Be #1 for Good Reason

gothamgal.com

24 pointsohjeez9 comments

"If every investor would make it a non-negotiable term that the companies they invest in must make diversity a priority, the results would be huge. It might not be easy to do, but it can be done."

That's pretty brutal. Don't investors have enough power in the relationship that they need to start dictating stuff like this and further filtering down who they will give money to?

"This is what I tell every woman founder I know who is in a relationship or married and who wants to have children: just do it and do it now."

She is very wealthy and so is her husband (Fred Wilson). I think it's a bit tone deaf for her to just give such stark life advice as if it's that easy for 99% of the population.

> > "If every investor..."

This is already a thing, and it is starting to look like an incredibly bad idea. Well over a year ago I had lunch with my financial advisor and he tried to sell me on a portfolio balanced on some kind of social responsibility metric (female board member ratio, carbon credits, etc). At the time I thought it was just a new way to separate morons from their money, but now I'm starting to think that the US markets are setting themselves up for a fungibility attack. I remember, many years ago, the debate on bitcoin tainting - keeping a register of illegally obtained coins (and leaf transactions) and refusing to accept them. That is obviously an attack on the utility of the currency - a unit of value.

So what is the metric here, what is the new unit of value? The best case outcome is a Tower of Babel pandemonium, worst case is an irreversible further consolidation of kingmaking power.

If diversity results in such a benefit, if it "financially works", then why is there a need for this artificial injection of diversity? And where's the data to support this?

If you created a renewable fuel source that cost half of what traditional fuel does, you'd own the market in a heartbeat. You wouldn't need campaigns to convince people to save 100 a month. So why do we need to convince people that diversity is a good idea? You can only blame the big bad white man for so much.

The diversity efforts of business is all about the ego. To me it looks like insecurity. A fear that women are or appear inferior necessitates action to prove that isn't the case, even to the point of giving them an unusual benefit of the doubt to help increase their representation. No doubt, if 0 women are participating entrepreneurs, there is probably a lot of untapped potential. The idea should be to unblock women and not to throw them into the fire in order to get a metric up.

Any smart business will ignore diversity in an effort to maximize the bottom line, because skin color and genitals of the CEO do nothing for an ad agency or a customer trying to purchase a smart phone app.

"We shouldn’t be looking at changing the ratio of women entrepreneurs because it is a buzzword of this moment, or because it looks good—but because financially, it works." source needed

I think judging peeps by their gender, skin colour, and sexual orientation is immoral and inefficient to boot. Should I send myself to the gulags now?

You're racist.

Another woman who only invest with other women, this is not diversity but #genderwars.

I thought people were enlightened enough to understand that discriminating against others is bad no matter how you do it, as in this case discriminating against men.

Idk what it is but the NYU ITP program just cranks out some great technology thinkers. And lots of them are women.

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