Hacker News Reader

Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> 26% of founders are underrepresented (which we define as Black, Latinx, or Women), and 36% of the companies have one or more underrepresented founder

Does being in one of those groups give you an advantage when applying, a la affirmative action?

Does anyone of Hispanic ancestry actually use the term “LatinX”? The Spanish language is explicitly gendered and there’s no such thing.

View on HN

> Does being in one of those groups give you an advantage when applying, a la affirmative action?

Probably not. What's really weird about it is that YC is international and they are applying US ethnic labels (and representation levels) to international companies. i.e. 54% of Latinx founded companies are in Latin America and 60% of Black-founded companies are in Africa. (per directory: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=w2020&batch=W22)

Which means the underrepresented/overrepresented doesn't even make sense (except for US-facing political reasons). If you use the world population as your benchmark:

* Latino founders are if anything slightly overrepresented (10% of world; 12% of founders)

* South Asian founders should be considered underrepresented (22% of world; 15% of founders)

* Assuming "Asian" means East or southeast Asia, such founders are also underrepresented (28% of world; 18% of founders)

Alternatively, YC should do what universities do and only report ethnic data for American companies.

>Does anyone of Hispanic ancestry actually use the term “LatinX”? The Spanish language is explicitly gendered and there’s no such thing.

i'm latino and i (along with all my friends) absolutely hate the term latinx. it's american colonization.

not only that but there's already a gender-neutral term for latinos in english: latin.

Ya it’s pretty obvious whenever I see LatinX that they have zero Latino/Latina representation inside the company.

I would be intrigued though has YC ever formally come out and said they are looking to increase diversity and thereby decrease the amount of Asian and White male founders they accept each batch?

Also why does YC not report on LGBTQ stats for their founders then? Surely they are also underrepresented in the Startup world as well.

Also missing the disabled.

100% correct. I would love to see more detailed breakdowns of each founding team. % of elite vs non elite college, public vs private, how many founders are first gen immigrants, etc.

And the elderly.

Yeah why not just say Latin? In Spanish only the very few most extreme people say words like "latinx" (but never "latinX") mainstream people say "latinos y latinas" or "latinas y latinos" or "latin@s." Some people still just say "latinos" always. But English is not a gendered language, so just drop the X. But then, if you do that, the game is over, you're not signaling how obedient you are to the machine, you're actually thinking for yourself. And you're not allowing it to tell you how to talk, which means you're not allowing it to tell you how to talk in your mind, ie think. Literal thought control. For every 10 times you use a word in your inner monologue, you'll use it in real life. But if you get fired from your sustenance of your life and dignity, literally no matter how much job security you had, you can't use that word in real life ever. So then you have to stop using that word in your mind. And that changes how you think, you start feeling pain when other people use that word, for when people who are entitled to say that word say it, or when they spell the letters out forcing you to create it in your head, pain pain pain.

And I find it wrong that I can't remove slurs from my music. It's basic--if I can get cancelled for using a word, I can't sing it, I don't want to listen to absolutely any music which includes it. So for instance there's a song by an African musician, I think he's from West Africa, his name is Akon. Quite famous I believe. He created a song that was played frequently at dance halls and has a lot of musical merit. The song's name is "Sexy Bitch." I hate that word though, I can't stare at that word, it's so disgusting on so many different levels, for so many different people, in particular in this case because it's talking about women. And the chorus is like...I just can't write it. Instead, I found a sanitized version that is not disgusting and has all the same musical merit, called "Sexy Chick."

Damn, she's a sexy chick, sexy chick, Damn, she's a sexy chick, damn girl!

But it's incredibly hard to find, only on iTunes, not on my Apple Music, not on my Youtube, super censored. Because Akon apparently has the right and obligation, because he's African, to be misogynistic, like that has more victim points than being a woman, and these media are so mysogynistic in actuality--regardless of their donations to nonprofits and shit--that they don't want people to have even an alternative to listening to this man calling every woman on the dancefloor a bitch. I have trouble figuring out to what degree his being African plays a role, I want to ignore it but the machine is pulling all the stops to make it blatant, but for sure it does, "Blurred Lines" was much milder and got into so much trouble. The song repeats the word "bitch" like thirty times, that word "bitch" is the payload of the beat, if you want to listen to the beat you are under strict orders from the machine to accept women being called bitches. It's disgusting.

I emailed YCombinator about tokenism I think ten years ago, maybe 12, that they needed to throw the machine a bone in a couple of ways--this was before they ever talked about over- or under-representation, percentages of each type of founder, all of that--because the machine is like a bulldozer with a wrecking ball and you can't face it directly, only get it to hit at an angle. And if you do that, it'll cross by you, saying, "you best watch yourself."

Asians: 18%. South Asians: 15%. A bit weird breakdown. Why not just say Asians are 33% ? Or does that not fit the narrative ?

That's a standard clustering within America. (The bigger problem is that they are applying US definitions/etc. to international companies)

The total for racial-demographics adds up to 90.25%. Rounding wouldn't seem to be enough to explain the disparity.

It's a term that mostly white people (and John Leguizamo, for some reason) use.

Same with folx.

John Leguizamo used it at the Oscars the other night

The Oscars isn’t a great cultural barometer.

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

> However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com