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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

    "When you allow a power vacuum to emerge someone will fill 
    it, and it’s usually the people who have traditionally 
    held power (rich white men)."

Why? If there is a power vacuum, exactly what forces support rich white men filling those roles? Why can't woman or person of a different race fill the role?

Near as I can tell, the only thing I can see that supports this likelihood is base rates. A greater percentage of the participants in a tech holocracy are likely to be white men (because they are well represented in tech), so when you have 70-80 white male marbles in a bag of 100 marbles, the probably of picking a white male marble is 70-80%. Is there some other force other than simple statistics that increases the probability of a white man taking over power in excess of their representation in the population in question?

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Yes, but all such questions can lead to un-PC conclusions, therefore you may want to keep quiet.

Like what?

Just game out possible trails of thought. The most 'offensive' one may be true. That's all I'll say.

Internalized racism and sexism.

How do you begin to open a discussion on these topics with people who not only lack the necessary education to talk about them accurately, but already have a disdain for words like "feminism" and "privilege"?

You don't. You leave that discussion and have it elsewhere. I don't know about you, but the most feminist response to the alleged Github debacle would be for a woman to go out and start her own company with the culture she wants to see in the world.

There are a lack of women engineers out there, but if the issues we're discussing here are so widespread and destructive, why do we not see more female engineers leaving these misogynistic cultures in droves to start companies together?

Early on in my career I worked at one of the largest banks in the world and sought to promote changes for the better within the bank. After 6 months, I succeeded in getting that behemoth of an organization to move maybe a hundredth of a degree. For all intents and purposes, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. The amount of effort for so little payoff led me to the conclusion that if you want to see the changes you want, then you need to leave that system and head elsewhere, where you can actually have an impact.

Once you've built an organization where you are at the top, you then have the experience to determine how much of what you experienced in prior organizations was actually discrimination and how much was the result of a manager/subordinate relationships. I would genuinely love to hear the opinions of women who have already gone down this route since their voice is conspicuously absent in this discussion.

except that women starting companies also have an uphill struggle when it comes to interacting with the larger ecosystem.

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