First off, I applaud YC's efforts in this sphere to give all groups more opportunity to participate in startups and tech in general. I do not mean to disparage efforts or "derail" a conversation, but to bring up the fundamental question once the low-hanging fruit - discrimination, etc. is gone - self-selection and equality of result as a goal.

Any diversity discussion will eventually reach the awkward points of over-represented minorities and self-selection, which negatively impact numerical diversity: There are some elements of the industry that will inherently self-select for groups. Asian males are currently the most over-represented group - racially due to US immigration policy and cultural factors encouraging many recent immigrants to go into technical fields and not humanities.

Men tend to self-select into higher risk and highly competitive environments - e.g. startups, hackathons [1] but also ones with negative outcomes - crime, gambling addiction - see the 9-to-1 ratio of incarcerated men to women. (Denying the evidence for risk-taking and self-selection is to me, similar to denying evidence that sexism exists -- on the face of not wanting to confront it).

At what point do these become issues to address? It seems like the desired result is not the strawman, Harrison Bergeron, 100% representative (of what? the US? the world?) demographic, so what is the desired outcome? I'm for eliminating discrimination and bias, but I don't think this will leave us with a 50-50 perfectly balanced startup scene, but it's the most fair. You would either have to change humans' own free-will preferences for risk, or the nature of the industry (with other side effects). If you have ideas on this, I'm open to hearing them.

This is a legitimate question - shutting down discussion here in the name of being "against progress" or trivializing the issue is highly reminiscent of Paul Graham's warnings in "What You Can't Say [2]. The demographic balance of any industry or field is always in constant flux, and heavily influenced by self-selection and non-discriminatory factors. We need to remove discrimination, but also know that a fair outcome in the absence of discrimination - with equal opportunity does not necessarily lead to perfectly equal outcomes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8087536

"Broadly speaking, competition definitely creates sex-based selection-bias. Men self-select into competitions more than women, and are more motivated by them.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201210/when-c...

https://www3.nd.edu/~wevans1/fresh_honor_seminar/vesterland.... "

[2] http://paulgraham.com/say.html