My actual intention was to get the OP to move away from an emphasis on the "Ivy League" brand, which I think people need to stop putting up on a pedestal.

I think aspirations are likely to play a big role here, after all people tend to judge their successes relative to their family and close friends. So for a kid from a poor neighbourhood (who's more likely to be black), getting a good job with a decent salary and benefits is a great success already and running a startup is too risky so there's less incentive.

If you come from an upper middle class family and all of your siblings are training to be lawyers or doctors then that ups the ante a lot in what your "floor" to success is, and like you say risk is reduced because of family so starting "the next facebook" looks like a more attractive option.

Also since we are talking about aspirations you have to consider the "all or nothing" attitude that's so common these days, and I see a lot of people particularly in the lower classes who are far more motivated about the tiniest possibility of a quick jackpot than a slow but steady improvement in their lives.

But then again that way of thinking might have more to do with the way the middle class (the "steady option") is disappearing than with a social fad.

I agree that it sucks to be poor, but I don't know how much startup funding can fix that.

For starting and running a startup, maybe, but those forces are much less in effect when the upper classes are doing the hiring. As we see at a lot of these companies, they aren't really reaching very far outside of their cohort. Cue the culture-fit debate.

For example, MIT is ~46% female. Stanford is 47% female. (I won't be pedantic about the Ivy League thing.) These numbers look absolutely nothing like the small end of the VC funnel.

(That doesn't really affect your chance of startup success, but surely it affects your inclination to go into one.)

However, I believe making the decision solely based on a person's anatomy is wrong.

Context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879598

The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.

I don't think this is what you mean.

I knew exactly what the OP was driving at even if the details were off, and only after you point out that Ivy League is an athletic conference did it occur to me that that would be where the current colloquialism came from.

Words mean things.

It's great that YC has taken steps towards gender equality, but I don't think they have much of a say when it comes to inequality in education.

The issue of "class" doesn't have nearly enough political clout in this context in order to get a mention from any important person. Gender does, though, for obvious slightly related historical reasons. The only hope that class itself can get a mention is by piggy-backing on the issue of gender.[0]

The topic of Diversity in Tech shows that 1) hacker types aren't as unsuspectible to being political as they historically may have thought, when their career and businesses start to be influenced by their own reputations. 2) Diversity seems to largely just inspire sympathy for whatever issue which has enough political influence to actually be kind of threatening, which seems to be very convenient.

My point is; assuming that there was never any movement or awareness of inequity in tech, what would have been the prevailing attitude? Well, it seems that "meritocracy" is big in tech culture. What is the attitude now? Meritocracy, with the stipulation that your gender can cramp your style. Has the attitude changed all that much, really? Or has it perhaps stayed the same, with some lip service in the general direction of gender issues for good measure?

"Tech" in this context refers to tech in America. That makes for an industry (at least a subset of which) that is known for having the belief in a meritocracy, which exists in a country that historically has had a strong collective belief in meritocracy. The archetypical hacker is someone who at a very young age felt the calling of the computer[1] and learned himself (or herself!) to program with some cruddy manual. I am not exaggerating by calling it a calling: if you didn't feel that calling to program your calculator in the second grade of elementary school, then tech was probably not for you, whether you're a boy or a girl. Now? All of the sudden environmental factors like culture, opportunity, other kids who tinker with computers, matter. Wow, all of a sudden tech types are starting to talk in sociological terms rather than black and white simplifications.

Old-school hackers (those who have the experience and connections to be political) haven't struck me as being very "sociological". To them, there are four kinds of people: hackers, java developers (snorts), managers, and everyone else (mostly tech-illiterates). Hackers are self-made, passionate people. Java developers and managers are sell-outs. Tech-illiterates just don't care. Hell, they probably don't even have a job they like, passionless peasants. But wait, now you're saying that passionate developers can come from all walks of life, that there isn't some universal Calling of The Computer that happens around ages 5-8, that passionate people can be scared away/demotivated by things incidental to tech and not just power through it, that not everyone has had access to a computer since a young age, that a professional work culture can discourage the people who are working in it enough to quit, even though the deficiets are not really law breaking but discouraging in a subtle, insidious way?

Wow. These hacker types sure get more reflected when their careers and reputations depend on how they look to the outside world, as opposed to when the only people they would risk offending were users of some inferior editor or programming language.

[0] User NaitJones also mentions black men, a class of people who in his experience doesn't get nearly as much air time when it comes to diversity in tech as the usual classes of people.

[1] preferably sometime in the 80s or earlier, to get some creds with the millenials for having hacked on "low spec PCs".