No, or at least, not exclusively. There's tons of social science research in which, for example, two identical fabricated resumes were submitted for a battery of jobs, differing only by, say, a headshot of a black vs. white person, or a stereotypically-African-American name vs. a stereotypically white (or not-obviously-race-signaling) one. In these studies there are huge differences in response rates and callbacks, even when everything else about the resumes (educational attainment, experience, etc.). is identical.
It's true that many black people suffer structural disadvantages because of systemic lack of access to resources, etc. But they also suffer disadvantages because they're black.
I've seen a bunch of studies on things like "stereotypically-african-american-name" vs "stereotypically-white-name", which are good evidence as to why a good hiring process should remove personally-identifying details from resumes.
Not just the name of the applicant, either -- school names and locations can also introduce unfair biases. Company names are unavoidable, I think: there are only so many companies that fit the description of "Social Network, Global, >10k employees, uses lots of Javascript" or "Privatized Intelligence Service, Global, >100k employees, uses lots of Go".
Buuuuuuut... is there research on what happens when you expand the number of dimensions?
E.g., add in a mix of broad cultural backgrounds (Pan-European, Latin, Arab, Chinese, African, etc.), test different raraties ("Smith" is common, "Chaucer" is rare, both are Anglo)
Does "Victoria Henderson" garner a statistically different response to "Vitalija Herrera" (Anglo vs Lithuanian)? What about "Nyala Aregawi" vs "Nadya Ahane" (Mixed Russian-Japanese)?
What happens when we mix in popular fictional names?
Solid bet there are boys out there named "Thor" and "Bilbo" by parents that are fans of Star Wars.
No idea what actual outcomes might be, the data could yield interesting results on hiring biases.
But primarily, right? Bias plays a role, so everything else being equal, a black applicant will receive fewer callbacks than a white or asian one, but (and that's a big but) the primary issue is that usually not all other things are equal.
The average black person comes from a different socioeconomic background than the average white or asian person, so they'll usually not have the same level of education, but less so because of being discriminated against because of their race, but because of their class. More single-parent households, lower household income, their parents can't simply afford to hire tutors and put them through college etc etc.
That's what makes these things somewhat weird. Yeah, sure, a black guy from a rich family that attended MIT will have a harder time finding funding than his white or asian friends from the same background ... but he'll have a much easier time than some white kid from a broken home.
I believe two things to be true: class is the primary factor, not race. And it's more convenient to focus on race because it's much easier and feels less threatening to the (usually upper middle class and beyond) proponents. "We (as white people) need to share more" puts them in a group with (for the US) 60% of the population and is pretty abstract. Great for virtue signalling, terrible for concrete actions. "We (as rich people) need to share more" puts them in a much, much smaller group and suggests they could actually do something besides yelling at people to check their privilege: share some of the money they inherit. Great for doing something, terrible for virtue signalling because "well, put your money where your mouth is" is so obvious.
Even if your claims are supported by evidence, why is it a bad thing to want to correct that disparity? The fact that there also exist other disparities in the world doesn’t seem like a good reason to oppose correcting one particular disparity.
It's not "bad" as in "omg don't do that", it's just focusing on a less significant problem instead of the large problem, which it conveniently shifts focus from.
I don't think that it's intentional, but I'm absolutely sure that addressing the lacking social mobility in the US would benefit minorities much more than racism, because they are much, much more affected by it.
In your imaginary world we should stop considering race all together. Logically that'd be "fair" right? But what about the million of POC who have been denied jobs, education, houses, etc who exist NOW today and have been set back from centuries of disenfranchisement. Is it fair to them? We don't get to turn back time, so initiatives like this at least attempt to help a group of people who've sorely been needed from the evolution of startups. This is a GOOD thing. More diverse folks means change. If you feel like it's "taking away" from your opportunity, maybe you should examine that a bit.
> While not a majority, many POC work for FAANG companies. Are they eligible for this money purely because of their skin color, but disadvantaged people of any color are not?
oh no, you found an edge case - better throw in the towel. If it can't be simplified into a single test then the whole thing shouldn't exist right? /s
Consider how hard you have to work to justify your line of thinking. Maybe the simplest answer is that you're wrong.
They should have policies that address every fund they manage, not some 100m, which is peanuts for them.
I really like how YC does it. Yes, there are problems with YC, but their main program is really good at taking people from different economic/social/racial backgrounds.
Have tonnes of friends from disadvantaged backgrounds and developing countries that got in. I don't understand why every fund can't do it.
So much of the policies from the left on race are examples of the shirky principle in action:
https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky
This is a great article from Shelby Steele, an African-American senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute on the issue:
Just because it would be ideal to have programs for all disadvantaged backgrounds doesn't make one specifically for POC bad imo.
And what happens when a black-founder VC fund underperforms an Asian-founder VC fund?
Will we need another level of VC funds to fix that?
Systematic racism is very much real in the United States, putting minorities at a disadvantage exactly because of the color of their skin - socioeconomic background and upbringing aside. Affirmative action, and presumably this effort by SoftBank, is intended to address that.
Bluntly: there's probably a lot that you can't see.
When the James Damore essay swept google, I briefly asked my female friends if they could simply tell me what discrimination they experience. But they were too worn out from every male colleague asking them the same thing to explain it all to each one.
What I realized I needed to do was start listening to women's stories more, and start believing things even when they don't make sense to me. I needed to be curious and look for problems that I had previously been blissfully unaware of. And with that change in mindset I started to see them.
We have to do the same with people of color. We need to listen to their stories and believe them. It's hard to give you a bulleted list which would clearly explain discrimination just as it was hard (and tiring) for women to explain their discrimination to me. But if you take "there are things you are not seeing about racism at the workplace" to be true, you can begin to cultivate a mindset that allows you to learn what is happening.
Great read, there is several chapters explaining the parents comment
So perhaps you do not see racism because you've assumed its not happening, and because it's not happening to you? From what I know about racism (as a white person), it must be impossible that the tech world is simply free of racism. It's just hard to see when you are not the victim. The answer I've found is to listen to people of color when they say they experience racism. Don't challenge each assertion, take it to be true and then look further for corroborating stories. You will find them.
Regardless if they get in the pipeline an issue a disadvantaged minority will have will be getting railroaded by say, an engineer who doesn't like said minority regardless of his competence level.
I think that your making assumption based on a lifestyle you don't live. You in the response a being flippant in saying well its not that bad. The fact is I doubt you have any idea. The fact is no is plenty of evidence that say with the same financial/education level a minority is disadvantaged and even with a greater financial/education level they are more disadvantaged.
I think your living in a reality of how you think the world should be instead of the one that exists.
For founders dealing with VC, it's a different equation, so your intuition about "the tech world" doesn't exactly apply. Still, I agree with you. There isn't some untapped vein of black and latino American founders that other VC's are currently missing out on.
But is the solution “we will only consider people of specific racial backgrounds. We will reject you on the sole basis of your race”? Affirmative action has been firmly grounded in policies for decades. At what point do we do away with it, or decide that it needs to be rebalanced for groups that had potential reduced because of the results of affirmative actions good intentions? It’s made getting into college and many positions as an Asian American pure hell, despite being minorities and many coming from poverty.
The fund isn't pointing out that "Only Black Founders Matter", it's saying that that group of people require attention at this point in time, and we're going to focus on them now and correct the systemic problems that have given them a disadvantage until this point in time.
We'll get to everyone else next. The principle of using the water wagon to save the house that's currently burning applies. The people starting this fund have decided that focusing on this group is a good start, other groups will come later after the problem is clear enough.
Rest of the causes need to be looked upon at various stages of life and via various support measures, this particular caters to racial bias.
Not when it comes to raising VC money, no. Typically people who manage to raise a round come from good backgrounds, middle-class families and have a high level of education. There are exceptions but that's a good general heuristic for a founder who has successfully raised money. If you're from a broken home, didn't finish school, or you were abused as a child you're much less likely to be raising money from a VC fund for a litany of reasons that all need to be addressed by society as a whole.
However, even though practically all the people who pitch to VCs are well-educated, relatively wealthy, middle-class people regardless of what color they are, it's still the case that more than 3/4 of deals go to white men[1]. It's extremely hard to raise, and even harder if you're in a minority group. VCs are systemically averse of doing deals outside of their comfort zone.
For Softbank to ring fence the equivalent of 0.1% of their Vision Fund as "this money is only for minorities" that's fine. To be honest it's not really enough.
I don't look at this news as a VC company going 'positive discrimination' but more as a VC company realising that it has a problem turning down deals that could make them money, eg minority-led startups, and doing something to fix that.
[1] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/untapped-opportunity-minori...
I think you'll get a lot of flak for this sentiment. But I used to feel the same way as you. What helped me change my mind was to realize that no one is taking away opportunities from me by giving them to someone else. "Opportunity" isn't a fixed pie. If we believe that wealth isn't a fixed pie, why not apply that same logic to opportunities and initiatives like this? It's worth thinking about, and deeply reflecting on.
And, you know, if someone was giving out special opportunities to certain people while denying them to us, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Parents have been doing that for their own children since people were people. It's their money; they can put it toward whatever causes they want.
I think this was the stance of the segregationists in the Jim Crow South. They called it “separate but equal”
“So what if someone is getting to drink from a certain water fountain based on their skin color, or their gender? There are plenty of water fountains to go around for all of us.”
I find both statements morally reprehensible.
Because it’s racist.
e.g. https://www.gaucherdisease.org/blog/5-common-ashkenazi-genet...
A black man and an Asian man rob a bank together. They are caught, charged, and found guilty of the same crime.
The black man is set free because his race is over-represented at the local jail, but the Asian man serves 8 years in prison.
Because nobody is saying someone is superior to another person here, the above example is not racist and totally fine, in your definition of racism. Even though it is obviously deeply unethical and unfair.
By definition this isn't true.
It’s a bit like criticizing SpaceX for spending so much money going into space when that money could be used here at home, to solve real problems.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like the root cause of the frustration here is what you pointed out: Right now you can create a girls-only club, but not a boys-only club. But the truth seems to be that you can create a boys-only club, and people do. They just don’t call it that.
If the objection is that you can’t openly do that without being criticized, then that’s valid too. But that’s how people feel right now. It’s not possible to say “Well, you should feel differently.” Or at least not effective.
If an initiative is helpful, why not let them? After all, we don’t know if this will help.
I would expect that what this helps to do is encourage participation from ethnic minorities in the US.
And to your point on white people from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Sure it is good to lift all people up in society, but they certainly don’t have to face racial discrimination in the workplace or admissions pipeline. Failing to acknowledge that race is a factor in many people’s lives experiences is a failure to acknowledge systemic racism. This is an attempt to recognize that and correct that. And as other commentators have said, this by no means implies that other initiatives have to be mutually exclusive l.
White families have ten times the average wealth versus black families. Putting aside the significant mountain of evidence racial bias in hiring, in tech, in basically every facet of life, that single statistic should be evidence enough that more funding is necessary for minorities.
And what hypocrisy? You can say that black people are not inherently different but face different circumstances due to societal problems. That's not hypocrisy. That's simply acknowledging that race plays a factor in nurture but maybe not nature.
But I also understand what you mean about people ignoring socioeconomic status or other issues when they are not at the center of the spotlight. I think it's quite clear most companies doing this just for PR. BLM movement has been going on for years, yet these companies never care to actively support it, until now that they've seen "oh shit, people actually care - better get on it now." Let's see whether this is truly a wake-up call for people to address injustices of all kind, starting with racial problem, or simply a 'trend'.
No. This comment is similar to responding to “black lives matter” with “all lives matter”.
Helping a subset of those who need help is acceptable too.
Put aside your hardwired, human-as-social-animal unfairness alert criticism, and recognize that this is a good thing, and it is better that this exists than the case where it does not.
Affirmative action isn’t fair either, but it is still a good thing that it exists.
Once everyone in society is treated equally and has equal opportunities, then and only then can we start criticizing equality improvement efforts on fairness.
There is no requirement that helping people who need help be done so fairly or evenly. Abandon that concept.
I think we all know that all lives matter, but the point is that black lives are in danger thats why were saying black lives matter
Ignoring specific subsets of systematic issues are synonymous with tone deafness
If you discount a subset of a systematic issue and paint it in a broader light, it doesn't portray an accurate picture.
I'm sick of the hypocrisy of people saying "Black people aren't more likely/less likely to x, it's their education/family/etc. that affects them" ... and then immediately turning around and giving help to people based on their skin color, rather than these other traits.
EDIT: What about somebody who is black, and comes from (yes, one of the rare unfortunately) a rich family or well off family? While not a majority, many POC work for FAANG companies. Are they eligible for this money purely because of their skin color, but disadvantaged people of any color are not?