I do hope you will do so with subtlety and insight. Favoring the most easily recognized and most politically significant demographic groups is a reasonable first step, but if it's the only step you take it may simply increase the tension of identity politics.

We've already seen, elsewhere in these comments, people you've left out asking for you to include them as well. For every one who speaks I'm sure there are many more who remain silent.

I imagine these downvotes were because your comment gave what has become the #1 stock response to any such story without showing any awareness thereof or adding anything new; because the edge in it made it sound polemical rather than a sincere request for information; and because polemical stock responses turn into flamewars, which most of us aren't interested in and which break the HN guidelines. To downvote such comments is to be a good citizen, the way putting out small fires would be.

Note that one can make all of the above observations without disagreeing with the position you're implicitly advocating (that resources should target disadvantaged individuals rather than categories like race and gender). It's generally better to assume that downvotes are procedural rather than ideological. It yields better feedback about how your comments could be improved.

There may be very good reasons for the racial and gender bias in this program. Political, economic, marketing, correction for past bias by YC, or bias in other VCs, or who knows.

But asking for justification should be the stock response to such unabashed racism and sexism.

It's interesting how intolerant some people are about even the most reasonable criticisms of racial preference policies. Instead of offering a reasonable response to these criticisms, they often resort to attempts to silence critics.

It's not reasonable. It's the same tedious concern trolling that appears in every single similar thread.

This discussion has gone on for a while, and included dozens of downvotes and a few rational distractions, but not one response to the original questions.

"April - Female Founders, June - General, July - Black and Latino Founders"

I find it somewhat unusual that the open office hours are segregated. Why not just reach out to those groups but have general open office hours?

I'm guessing that this is a serious question, so I'm going to give it a serious answer. This is a classic economic signalling behaviour, akin to getting a college degree in order to signal your intelligence or giving gifts in order to signal your wealth.

Consider two possible YCs: YC(a) is serious about having female and minority founders at office hours, while YC(b) is just trying to be politically correct. Advertising "we encourage female and minority founders to apply" wouldn't cost anything. Advertising "we will only accept female / minority founders in these months" in contrast has a cost -- they lose the opportunity to meet truly awesome founders who do not belong to the appropriate group -- but for YC(a) that cost is partially balanced by the fact that they're spending time talking to members of groups which they would like to help out. Thus the net cost for YC(a) is lower than the net cost for YC(b) -- just like getting a college degree takes less effort for someone who is highly intelligent than it does for someone who is less intelligent -- and so YC communicates to founders that they are more likely to be YC(a) than YC(b).

(Whether anyone thought it through to this extent, I don't know. But people routinely engage in signalling behaviours without being aware that they are doing so.)

YC(a) is serious about being politically correct, while YC(b) merely cares about appearing to be politically correct.

Political correctness is common to the two cases for the simple reason that YC(a) would inevitably help wealthy, well-connected female and black/Latino founders to the exclusion of, say, poor, less-privileged Asian founders. It's hard to explain this behavior in humanitarian terms, but it's easy to explain in political terms. Nobody gets in trouble these days for expressing the sentiment that we need more women, blacks, and Latinos in tech, no matter how rich and well-connected they may be.

The only other possibility I can think of is that YC(a) genuinely wants to help especially deserving founders, and such founders are so overrepresented among women and blacks/Latinos that specifically targeting those groups achieves the goal well enough for YC's purposes. In other words, the cost of reaching such founders may be so much lower when targeting specific self-identified groups that it's worth the minor cost of helping the occasional privileged member of one of those groups. Still, it's hard to avoid the observation that this policy is generally aligned with political correctness, which would appear to justify some skepticism.

(My guess is that YC's policy isn't Machiavellian in the least, but it works adaptively because of a political environment in which explicitly helping women and blacks/Latinos is strongly favored both by custom and by law.)

I think that's true in California, but politically correct favoritism that ignores class helps fuel right-wing extremism.

Perhaps I see that more clearly because I don't live in the SV bubble.