Hacker News Reader

Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

"...it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male."

So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?

These goals aren't in opposition. But they aren't the same thing.

Women don't launch startups as often as men, and black people don't launch startups as often as white people, but these aren't necessarily for the same reasons, and there's no reason to think that the same advisors and mentors that can help achieve a goal of attracting more female founders would also be effective at attracting more African-American founders.

So it stands to reason that both of these things would be good things to do, but not necessarily as part of the same initiative. And it may be impractical for the same person or institution to launch multiple diversity initiatives at the same time and maintain institutional focus.

So I think the answer isn't to use this as a reason to critique initiatives aimed at attracting female founders. There's no reason the onus for other diversity initiatives should be placed on the people who are already devoting resources to recruiting female founders. Rather, I would suggest that you get involved yourself -- and also encourage others in the startup scene to get involved -- to devote equivalent energy to launching initiatives to recruit founders who are members of traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. The more the merrier.

Perhaps because woman are the fastest "big" gain they can do? There are lots of woman in the world (far more than any minority group), yet very few doing startups.

It's the biggest market inefficiency.

edit: You could also argue that the diversity in thinking and approach you'll get from woman could be very high. So perhaps they'll be more likely to start new kinds of companies in untapped markets.

There are more women in the world than pacific islanders, but if we only address the women aspect, are we not going to end up recruiting primarily white women? If the field is currently friendly to white men, and we make it more friendly to women, we wind up with white men & white women, not white men & all races of women. Right?

  > ... but if we only address the women aspect...

Who's arguing for this?

Do something about it then. The author of this article is seeing a way to help change the status for women. You could do something to help change the status for pacific islanders.

I'm not Sam. I haven't anywhere near his clout, nor am I even in that field. Nor are there more than even a tiny, tiny handful of pacific islanders in my town. I may have met two?

Sam didn't start this in a vacuum. He started it after women in the tech community laid a lot of groundwork educating the community about gender diversity problems.

Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way.

But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.

There are groups that cater to teaching women and girls how to code, with the strict exclusion of men despite women continuing to outpace men in college enrollment (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/08/2011-gender-hig...). I have no problem increasing diversity but I take exception to ignoring other race/gender makeups that are clearly under-represented in tech/startups especially those who have little post-secondary education (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/08/2011-gender-hig...).

As one of those 'privileged' minority males, I shake my head.

"What is your unfair advantage in the marketplace for .gov-funded work?"

"We're a female minority-owned small business, so we get preferential treatment in bidding."

Why not judge everyone on a per person basis rather than generalizing in the first place. That is the real problem.

There should be. A related question: is it easier to fix systemic biases against women than for racial minorities?

"So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?"

Honestly I think because the women's issue has been more front and center in attention as well as blog posts. So it's more "de la journée".

Is there any evidence that Asian men are under-represented as founders?

They are more likely to have foreign accents, surely

I know that this is just a lame dig at Paul Graham's advice that it's helpful for pitching founders to be intelligible to customers and investors, but I'm also not sure it's true. There's this place called "continental Europe". Also a pretty big strip of Asia called "Russia".

There is a massive bias for white founders (~87%), to the detriment of minorities (~13%). This is masked slightly by the fact that Asians dominate minority founders (12% to 1%). These numbers are "under-representations" in relation to university populations, even for asians. [1,2]

[1] http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/how-amer...

None of this has anything to do with my comment.

Maybe that says your comment is off base.

Actually… http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1430465/tiger-mums...

I suspect you'll get a two-fer: Asian, Hispanic and Black female founders.

FWIW, living in SF, I've met more Asian female founders (including those who went through YC) than male black founders (one maybe?).

That probably just reflects the racial demographics of SF independent of gender:

    390,387 Whites (48.1%)
    267,915 Asians (33.3%)
     48,870 African Americans (6.1%)

No, zip codes are irrelevant. Whites and Asians dominate elite schools because they are wealthier and/or more focused on money. Black in general are not seen as "attractive" socially (if you look at the data from dating sites, for example), whereas whites and asians are disporportionately so (at least for the females). So, if you combine the social dis-advantages and the educational disparity, you get a very strong anti-black bias. Pretty simple to understand, but hard to fix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com