Traction etc don't matter to the point she's making.
Her husband sent the same info as her and got response. She got radio silence.
That's the point. Not whether or not the content was good.
Her husband sent the same info as her and got response. She got radio silence.
That's the point. Not whether or not the content was good.
(To be clear, I personally believe that race & gender do have an impact in the response from VCs, I just don't think her experience proves it.)
People aren’t happy with the status quo, where one of our most important and creative industries is nearly devoid of people who make up more than 1 in 10 Americans. In view of that, I don’t think it passes muster to say that “we don’t discriminate against black women, we just look for Founders in places that are nearly exclusively white/Asian.” Pipelines need to be reformed.
That being said, over the course of ~50 on-site interviews I conducted there, only 2 were Black, and they were both from Africa, not the United States. The reality is, African Americans are woefully under represented in computer science well upstream of companies that would love to hire them. Even if you assume all corporations are evil, hiring more POCs would be in their best interest at this point just to avoid lawsuits and to have better optics.
Because it's an extremely hard problem, and it's easier to be abstractly mad and hope someone else solves it, than to come up with concrete practical effective solutions?
What worries me is that we have a coordination problem, and if you snipe at efforts to make employers retain more URMs, you're damaging the case for the pipeline to supply more URMs.
All we had to do was remove the barriers.
Software is harder. I see three places we are losing women. First is women who never even consider the field, the second is women who drop out of car in college, and the third is women who switch fields from cs.
We're losing the most women in the first step in the pipeline and I've tried to convince so many of my girl friends to join software because I work half as much and make twice as much as them. But despite this they all had absolutely no interest in joining. They mostly had two fears. One was they wouldn't be good at it, but overwhelmingly the fear was they wouldn't like it.
The second was women who switch in college. I only know 2 women who started off cs and switched. One switched because she didn't like it. The other switched because she felt intimidated because she was put in a class with people like myself who had years of coding experience in a classroom, summer camps, and as a hobby before our first class in CS.
For the third leak in the pipeline all the women I know who left, left because they didn't enjoy the work. Some because they wanted to feel more connected to their work and people, moving from software to roles like therapist and teacher.
I think it's incredibly important we try to get women into tech. Women those women who would enjoy it lives would be better, consumers would enjoy better software, and our industry would be healthier.
But I think to do that it's important we use identify the right root causes.
I one of which is treating devs like rockstars aka children with specialized skills that need to be managed instead of professionals similar to engineers.
But I don't think sexism plays a big part. It exists,and it should be eliminated, every female dev I've talked to has experienced it. But none of them mentioned it as a reason they were thinking of leaving software.(at the professional level, I think it's more impactful at the college level where you have a bunch of kids who have no idea how to talk to women, and peer groups are more influential). But all my friends who are doctors and lawyers also experienced sexism, and in most cases far worse than the devs.
Radical affirmative action. Not radical in the rioting / revolution understanding of the word, but in its application.
So, if the issue with systematic racism is such that it endangers the foundational core of American society, it's time to take a big risk: literally pull random people to sit on VC and companies boards, in skilled jobs, etc. (a bit like the Diversity Visa Lottery the US already does for immigration). And train them on the job.
Sure, there will be issues here and there, but it would definitely solve the issue once and for all. It wouldn't even have to be explicitly racial. If it's truly random, you would end up with an accurate representation of the population.
It would also desegregate schools and neighborhoods, too, because with such a disruption people would have to move to match their new jobs.
Now, an exception should be made of course for professions where an error would mean life or death (or injury): doctors, airline pilots, etc. But I suspect 95% of careers at least could be desegregated in this way.
And perhaps an exception for jobs that truly require special abilities: professor of physics, professional athlete, etc.
What is the evidence that there are hurdles for black women getting hired at Google?
For example, does their representation differ significantly from, say, the rate at which they graduate with CS degrees?
Why do fewer black people graduate with CS degrees relative to the population than Indian or Asian people? That's a topic to understand better if you consider this a problem that you'd like to fix. Have you heard of the stereotype of "Asian parents", that drive their kids very hard to succeed academically? From many personal acquaintances, that effect is real, especially for immigrant parents. Meanwhile in some areas, in black culture, trying to succeed academically is "acting white" and is frowned upon.
It's a hard problem to solve and it may require changing the culture of populations gradually over time. You could start by looking what percent of families are single-parent grouped by race:
https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...
According to that data set, 65% of black families were single-parent in 2018, by far the grouping with the highest percentage in that data set, compared to 15% for Asian and Pacific Islanders, or 24% for non-hispanic whites. If you want to fix education and the success that comes after it, then you probably need to start by fixing the families in which children are raised.
It's difficult to succeed academically, and pay for and succeed in college, without two parents to support you.
Now why is that, the difference in single-parent families? I don't know the answer. We can keep popping the stack, looking for solutions in each layer like that, and finding problems at the next layer. Solutions won't be easy.
Then we get VCs pledging to take deliberate steps to address the problem and they turn out to be vaporware.
However you didn't claim that no actor was being racist regardless, you claimed that the redliners were being racist, which is true. So go after them and their children, not Google.
Last I checked, age 18-24 college enrollment rates are 45% of white women, 41% of black women, 39% of white men, and 33% of black men. How much parental financial resources do these students need in order to sign up for Computer Science 101 -- which has basic high school algebra as a prerequisite -- and find out they like it?
I've certainly seen intellectually rigorous studies of discrimination against Black people, mostly involving sending out resumes where there is no notable difference other than the implied ethnicity of the applicant. This post on the other hand claiming that discrimination in the mortgage industry in the 90s means that google must be practising racial discrimination today IS willful blindness in the place of intellectual rigor.
You seem irritated by a simple request to support a claim with evidence, which is strange.
There were no black people in my neighborhood. I don’t recall any in my elementary school classes. Thanks to housing segregation—the legacy of redlining—they were elsewhere, in neighborhoods where there were few if any people with Caltech and Stanford degrees. You don’t think that makes a difference?
While you're correct that it's a question of class — class is unfortunately downstream of racial policies the long term effects of which we've never quite fixed.
Why do I need to google and Wikipedia link for you?
For some, equality may appear to be a fat baby banging on a highchair at times (when displeased usually).
If we had an unadulterated version of equality, do you think we would have found our natural stride by 2020 on the issue?
Racial neutral is a tough line to walk, but the talk on the other hand....
Just saying the training-wheels should come off instead of the gloves.
You can't say "well we're not going to fund you without a good track record, even though it's damn near impossible for you to build a track record because we won't fund or hire you. Good luck".
You can't say "we're going to fund more black founders, but only those who've already been proven a safe, reliable commodity."
Also, don't forget that it was the husband who had the LinkedIn connections to the pitch deck recipients. Race, gender and experience aside, you're obviously more likely to get a response from recipients who already know you (or are friends of friends) than from recipients who are total strangers to you.
If the author was also an ex-engineer of a highly respected software firm and had the same LinkedIn connections, then you would have a much stronger anecdotal case that racism or bias was the cause of being ignored.
In fact, she said she sent out the deck from her own e-mail and linked-in account. So, that means it was probably easy to get her husband's linked-in when he sent it out.
You could make the case that people claiming to want to help minorities, should at least spend time reading the deck, but that doesn't mean that anyone was racist/sexist in this particular instance. It seems like even after sending it out by the husband, nobody was very interested.