tesseractive
It is currently against any kind of recommended practice to perform genital surgery on children. It is not approved nor is it practiced. This kind of intentionally hyperbolic language is the sort of thing that is the stuff of tabloid headlines, not reasoned discussion.
All of these things seem to counsel against conversion therapy being an accepted practice.
But this is going into New York City. And the flipside is that you can't put a Wal-Mart in the middle of NYC -- it's cost prohibitive. So it's not clear that this initiative even competes with Wal-Mart really. And brick and mortar stores in the middle of an expensive city have huge real estate costs, so it's difficult (though not necessarily impossible) for them to compete on cost the way Wal-Mart does.
I shop at Amazon Fresh in Seattle sometimes, and the selection is significantly trimmed relative to pretty much any local grocery store I can walk into. The tradeoff is the convenience of not having to go to the store and spend my time traversing the aisles.
First off, no one is going to believe you, and everyone will seek to explain it away and inpugn your credibility. But even if you somehow have audiovisual evidence that proves your claims conclusively and you have a slam dunk court case, there's zero chance that you're going to make enough money from it to cancel out the income you will lose from making yourself effectively unemployable to anyone who runs a background check on you. If you're on record as a troublemaker that sues their employer, no one will hire you.
If it made the interviewee feel unwelcome at the company, there is no possible explanation that would make this ok -- the simple fact that they feel excluded is what makes it not ok.
Making people feel excluded, or even doing or saying things behind closed doors that would make people feel excluded if they knew about them, is part of the problem that makes people who are not part of the majority feel unwelcome in a company's culture, and in the industry as a whole.
Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way.
But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.
Women don't launch startups as often as men, and black people don't launch startups as often as white people, but these aren't necessarily for the same reasons, and there's no reason to think that the same advisors and mentors that can help achieve a goal of attracting more female founders would also be effective at attracting more African-American founders.
So it stands to reason that both of these things would be good things to do, but not necessarily as part of the same initiative. And it may be impractical for the same person or institution to launch multiple diversity initiatives at the same time and maintain institutional focus.
So I think the answer isn't to use this as a reason to critique initiatives aimed at attracting female founders. There's no reason the onus for other diversity initiatives should be placed on the people who are already devoting resources to recruiting female founders. Rather, I would suggest that you get involved yourself -- and also encourage others in the startup scene to get involved -- to devote equivalent energy to launching initiatives to recruit founders who are members of traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups. The more the merrier.
What point are you trying to make?
If I'm in an unfamiliar city and someone I don't know says "Hey, watch out for that alley, several people have been attacked there recently," I wouldn't know whether it was true. But it would be pretty stupid to decline to take any precautions until I could perform my own plot of crime statistic data by location to assess the truth value, don't you think?
2. Actually, they have a history of problems with women that they were trying to repair. Which is why she was trying to turn the company around on the issue and evangelize it in the first place. Did you read the article?
Edited to add: the process of deciding the best action to take given uncertain information is fundamentally different from the process of trying to decide what is most likely to be true when there is nothing in particular at stake personally.
A. There are only two impossibly simplistic solutions to the problem.
B. Neither of them are workable in practice, so clearly the problem is intractable.
There are people out there who have spent more than 10 minutes considering the problem. Many of them have conducted research and published on the topic. You might consider reading some of them before concluding that it's hopeless.
All it would take for me personally to reverse my stance on an employer being a good place for women is a single case in which I reported being sexually harassed and management then took the side of the harasser over me. Because one case is not acceptable, and it's all it takes to turn a workplace into a hostile and unpleasant environment.
That's not to say "oh, if she says something, she must be telling the truth", but the possibility that she is telling the truth is a huge red flag.
Their claim may in fact be false. But starting from the assumption that it is false doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
When I use a product, whether it's a blender or a website, the producer's business goals aren't really my problem. If I communicate to them at all as a customer, my only relevant area of expertise is how I use their product. (And possibly how I would like to use their product, if it were improved in some way I would prefer.)
Yes. Y Combinator could very well decide that their current process is offputting to women, but that it is so successful that they don't care, and that they're perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing even if it effectively excludes women.
But if this is the case, then their only two options are to lie about it or to stand up in public and say that they don't care about including women. The former has significant risk as a long-term strategy, and the latter is a PR debacle that could negatively impact their ability to attract a significant percentage of male founders -- which is to say, anyone who cares about gender equality.
The shift to digital absolutely did reverse growth in the music industry (part of the entertainment industry) for about a decade. Exactly how much of that can be attributed to "piracy" in particular is a question that's difficult to answer, because it was a combination of not being able to easily buy music in the way people wanted combined with piracy that created a situation in which it was considerably easier to pirate/share music than to buy it.