Are they? I think it could be argued that investors are one of the least diverse groups.
Analysis of 1,500 investors:
==70% are white
==40% of venture investors have attended Stanford or Harvard
==One percent of venture capitalists are Latinx and only three percent are black.
-https://blog.usejournal.com/where-did-you-go-to-school-bde54...
Assuming these are American numbers, wouldn't you expect it? Wikipedia says 60% of Americans are White, and the number is higher if you include Hispanic people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Americans
So it would make sense for white people to be the majority in any group, isn't it? Maybe there are exceptions, like certain sports.
Just to be clear, I am not white. I am only wondering about the numbers, not about any group's behavior.
Class membership can be useful as a proxy for e.g. power structures, but if you're already looking at investors, the most important factor influencing power structures is that they have a lot of money. Maybe there are differences in the ways white and black people with lots of money abuse their power, but that'd surprise me.
Meanwhile, you completely ignore the data about investors being heavily skewed towards two specific universities. Isn’t that a past life experience? Isn’t VC investor a “class” in itself?
See also the quote about the American poor viewing themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and voting to support the interest of actual millionaires.
The comment you're replying to was very clear in that they were talking about career and background diversity -- as in, VCs have their money for diverse reasons.
There were like 5 bullet points about it, making it crystal clear what kind of diversity was being discussed.
It’s understandable that you want to focus on the diversity of outcomes, just know that others might be interested in the inputs that led to those outcomes.
For the rest of us, race is already here.
There is at least one exception in me.
I’m not sure how you arrived at that assumption. The point is that this is the data (as pulled by one person), you have chosen to take the giant leap that somehow those people “think as a block and can be generalized.” Why no mention of the other data points and focus solely on this one?
https://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-women-control-th...
For example, women control a majority of assets in large part because they statistically live longer than men. This makes them a higher percentage of the population in general, but a much higher percentage of the population of retirees with retirement savings. And they do most consumer spending because they're typically the ones who do the shopping for the family, even if on average half or more of the money is from the husband. The numbers are largely accurate.
Though it's not clear how many 80 year old widows are inclined to invest their nest egg in a startup.
People who are having trouble understanding why this kind of thing is harassment should try changing gender to something else. For example, imagine if you heard:
"Whoa, listen to that Southern accent! Surprised to hear that here."
"You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..."
"Sure you want to start a startup? You look like you need to lose some weight and sitting in a chair all day coding's not going to help..."
... and so on.
I actually heard a version of the Southern accent example once. Classism and place-ism are things too. It wasn't long ago that students in some universities were advised to lose their Southern accent if they wanted to get work as engineers.
And there's some studies on this form of discrimination.
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lngt101fall2015/files/2015/11/ar...
https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-...
My wife works in biotech (has been in both ag and pharma, with the same experience) and seems to get exactly this (often verbatim except that “engineering” is replaced with “science”) almost as much as gender-based harassment and microaggressions.
Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam. It makes no rational sense at all for anyone with even the most superficial understanding of religion or history.
With race I can see the logic of "well, people that looked like your ancestors were really good at empire-building a while ago, so we're going to favour everyone else instead of you to try to make up for that" and gender "well, women in the workplace is a relatively new phenomena and they're 50% of the population, so we're going to favour them in order to hasten their representation in the workplace and make up for recent transgressions". But the religious one is truly baffling.
It's only mistaken for this by people who both confuse Christianity (and often particularly Evangelical/Fundamentalist Protestantism, and often strains of those traditions that are particularly anti-Semitic) for some broader Judeo-Christian whole and confuse being prevented from imposing adherence to their system of ritual and values on others with discrimination against them, and who further confuse not actively discriminating against the Muslim community with “embrace of Islam”.
This is absolute nonsense. What you characterize as a wholesale embracing of a religion is actually the recognition that there is systematic discrimination against a religious minority in this country and an attempt to fix it. Islamic traditions are rejected just as much as Judeo-Christian ones.
You shall keep thy relgion tho thy self.
That minority stones people to death if it has the majority. Female people. So what does the PC-Catalog suggest, when one minority wants to end tolerance and other minoritys, once it is the majority?
Is that an honest question? Because it sounds like trolling.
In what way does protecting a minority promote them to a majority? In what way does it condone their belief systems? Why do people have such a ridiculously hard time not conflating the adherents of t religion with the religion itself?
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/08/exploding-amish-popul...
Now take a dogmatic religion, that is not peacefull- and watch wherever it comes to power- minorities beeing routed and pluralism and democracy falter.
As examples may i cite the Arab spring countries, turkey, syrias sunnites, indonesia - http://sp2010.bps.go.id/index.php/site/tabel?tid=321&wid=0
Im pretty sure, i can take your standardized reply from here. First of all its not one religion, its many variants - so nobody is responsible by the virtues of distribution of failure into the privat sector of the individual choice. To which i reply:
Yes, and no. Its one species of humans, planetwide, and religions are particular lousy to limit those human emotions in times of crisis. While christianity is tamed, well behaved or even in decline in the west- one religion-group then, has a track record for not working with democracy. There are not many islamic democratic countries, which are not sliding into toletarian directions.
Having to flee from ones self created social catastrophe, does not make one a virtue-angel by the grace of weakness.
If evangelicals would try to escape a trump ruled Gilead- does theire religion and culture warrant a special treatment?
No compromises, no colonialization of the public mind sphere, with illegtime power structures and moral concepts. Keep religion private.
Assuming you are a man, imagine being at an event and someone coming up and saying something like, "Woah get a load of Fabio over here". Being compared to Fabio might be a compliment in an objective physical sense, but I'm sure that isn't what you want to talk about when you are trying to get funding or make connections.
That's exactly the point: if you can switch some group labels around and make an insult, then don't use the version involving gender.
We can imagine examples of weird and uncomfortable compliments that are in some way related to the demographics of the recipient - like someone attempting to flirt by telling a French man "Your voice is way too sexy for you to be a founder" or a well-built black man "You look way too athletic to be a founder". These seem about as socially inept as the "way too hot" example and strike me as reasonable analogues. But the examples in the post I replied to higher in this chain are nothing like this.
If you look at the example the parent poster gave, that's exactly the implication. "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"
The 'too xyz to be here' comment is typically made by people that aren't in a position to judge, possibly for a number of reasons.
Let's give another example of a complement that really isn't:
"Wow, it's nice to see some black people at this event for once". It's a positive statement, sure, but it's not an appropriate comment to make.
Can you understand how this belittles people?
Are you suggesting that traditional VCs and traditional tech leaders are less rapey than the list above? That seems like wishful thinking!
Meta: these downvotes are wild. -4 at present. Someone makes a bullshit, hand wringing, concern trolling comment about how this is a "tricky problem" and that it cannot be pinned on VCs and tech leaders because of schlocky retired doctors and bitcoin barons. The statistics don't back that up as cited by a sibling commenter. What's funny about downvotes like this is that it's not even a social deterrent. I can get +4 for a one word comment as long as it's funny, but if I callout someone for getting the vapors and saying "not all men" I get wild downvotes
Doesn't surprise me. A couple years ago my co-founder and I were at a startup event, and an investor came up to another founder next to us and made a comment like, "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"
It's a tricky problem to really make sense of though just because investors are so diverse. You've got things like:
- People who got an MBA and for whom investing is their actual career.
- Founders who exited their own startup and now it's their hobby or second career.
- People who made a couple million dollars as doctors or lawyers and are now taking it up as a hobby in their 50s.
- People who made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto or whatever in their early 20s and have now lost all touch with reality.
- People who quietly manage family offices who occasionally add a startup to their portfolio.
Not that it necessarily matters from the founder's perspective. But it's just a very different problem than addressing sexual harassment in tech companies, because you have a mix of people doing it as a career and people doing it for completely different reasons.