Posting anonymous for obvious reasons. I'm not black, but I am a minority. The racism in tech is so obvious, my eyes bleed sometimes. At my workplace, they will consistently take an average white worker (no special degrees, no special schools) and promote them over and over until they are multiple levels higher than others.
Its all BLM woo haa on slack but what really matters is promotions, raises, projects, opportunities, and nothing shows up there. Pretty soon, you have a 24 or 25yo director of VP presiding over a PoC (some of whom are black) who has two or more decades of experience and who is obviously doing all the real work.
The entire c-suite has a single person of color. The board has none.
Then, you hear people grumbling in management meetings that some of the "diversity hires" are not motivated. Think -- why would they be motivated given what goes on?
Addendum: Not saying this doesnt happen outside of tech, but I know it happens in tech because I see it company after company, and especially at my current venture-backed employer. So consider that when you hear empty talk about tech being a meritocracy. Now granted, tech does have good numbers of Asians, but I think that is sheer funnel input volume driving that.
We can do better than anecdote. 74% of the largest tech firms executives are white [1]. This perfectly reflects 1990 demographics, when the US was 76% white [2]. A 30 year lag between arriving to a country, and becoming an executive, seems more than reasonable.
> At my workplace, they will consistently take an average white worker (no special degrees, no special schools) and promote them over and over until they are multiple levels higher than others.
Are you saying that they also discriminate against above-average white workers in favor of average white workers?
> The entire c-suite has a single person of color.
How many people are in the C-suite, and what's the ratio of PoC to total number of employees in your company? I'm not trying to disprove you, it's just that a single number (1 PoC in the C-suite) doesn't provide any insight into your situation.
Out of curiosity - the 25-year-old white VP seems very specific, so I assume it’s based on a personal experience.
When were you able to enter the field, compared to them? Do they have more experience at an earlier age?
To be clear, I am in no way arguing or trying to minimize your experiences. I’m looking for holes in my own view of the problem, which I stated in a top-level comment. Based on that I would expect that the VP probably had a lot of starting advantages over you. That doesn’t make it right, but it may highlight effective strategies for changing the dynamic for your children.
While bias in hiring is certainly an issue, I don’t believe that its the primary factor.
Most of this disparity is due to differences in opportunity. Blacks in the US are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field. They are less likely to have two parents at home, to be able to afford college on their own, to have the familial financial and emotional support system necessary to have the required risk tolerance to attempt their own venture, and most of all - less likely to have escaped the pressures of devoting all of their energy to financial survival in the first place.
Assuming the above statement is true, the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs.
> the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs.
That first one seems much more difficult than the others. How do you go from pervasive single-parent households to consistent two parent households? You can't simply throw money at the problem and expect the next generation to bootstrap itself into stable marriages. A lot of these single parent families start in middle/high school.
And you can't just say "teach it in school" either, because truancy is rampant among black impoverished youth. So even if you have the best school in the world, it does no good if the kids aren't attending.
Like mentioned in the article, only 13% of Americans are black[0].
Secondly, nearly 30% of that 13% are living in poverty[1].
So really you only have ~8% of Americans who are both black and not in poverty. From there it gets whittled down further for cultural reasons. You could similarly ask "where are there so few white rappers?" or "why are there so few male nurses?" and find cultural reasons and pressures involved for that.
“Cultural reasons” is often a “dog whistle” term. I don’t believe that’s the case here, and am responding in that spirit.
Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”?
I believe it’s because their experiences differ. Blacks in the US are disproportionately poor, urban, and from unstable home environments. While I don’t have facts to back this up, I expect that if we compared groups segmented by these factors we would find the racial/ethnic disparities to be much less pronounced. That difference could be reasonably attributed to culture.
What shaped those cultures? That’s the important piece of information, and the root cause here. Looking back over American history, I’m aware of no point in which Whites and Blacks had even roughly equivalent conditions as a whole. At best, I would expect that the Black experience today is somewhere close to first-generation Irish or Italian immigrants in during their initial surges. Perhaps a closer fit would be Chinese immigrants during the railroad boom of westward expansion. It took generations for those groups to be fully integrated into our society.
I fully expect it to take generations to solve this problem. There’s much to do that can speed it up - like ensuring legislation does not discriminate either explicitly or implicitly - but it’s going to take time.
Changing hiring practices alone will not solve this.
Generational wealth. Ask yourself why there are so few entrepreneurs—of any race—who can take big risks without a family safety net to fall back on.
Now realize that slavery was only two generations ago, Jim Crow / legal segregation ended with this generation, and mass incarceration and systemic racism are ongoing.
And not just generational material wealth, but generational intellectual wealth as well. What % of black people have parents they can go to ask complex financial questions about investing, mortgages, loans, retirement, etc. vs white people? Or even just basic cooking/diet/physical health questions? People vastly underestimate the value of intellectual wealth passed from successful, educated parents to their offspring.
It seems to me that (non-black) Americans commonly overestimate the amount of time that’s passed since the end of slavery - there are still living children of slaves! [1]
In the US, when I was a teenager, blacks kids who were into computers were doing the same things the other people going to computer clubs and whatnot did. Some knew more than a lot of the white kids. As people graduated high school, went to college, got internships and jobs, somewhere along that route a lot of them fell off.
Also, I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason, making life more difficult for them etc.
I have been in the IT business for thirty years in Silicon Valley and have interviewed hundreds of candidates, not one of them was black. I can count on one hand the number of blacks I have worked with in that period of time.
Black college students are over represented in low earning majors. Blacks that focus on high paying majors go into law, medicine, or business. If black leaders want more black IT executives, they need to push black kids into IT related careers.
>I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason
That mentality can be seen in anybody. When I did consulting in the late 1990s, I had a client company where an Indian manager refused to promote or hire non-Indians. Same company, an engineer from Taiwan gave bad marks on interviews if the candidate was of Korean descent. He told me, "I won't work with gooks."
Also consider that having an arrest record (or worse) (which I think we can finally agree happens to black people -- being arrested for no reason) precludes you from many jobs
I didn't think about it before but just thinking now - I know more Indian origin tech founders in the US than Black tech founders in the US.
I find that a bit surprising suddenly. I'm an Indian who has never been to the US so I can not imagine the ground reality. But it's odd when I think of this. And I follow a good chunk of tech stuff online from various founders.
Well ask your self are the Indians founders from the upper castes or lower castes in India? I read an article which states that Dalit's make up only like 2-5% of all the Indians who come to America. African Americans are like the dalits of india in that they have faced systematic discrimination which has probably effected every part of their existence for a long time, it is not something that can easily change with the waving of a magic wand.
There are 3 million Indians in the US and 50million Blacks.
But the Indians passed through a strong selection filter from the billion Indians in India, which is both restrictive toward people with low economic potential and permissive to people with high economic potential.
Blacks in the US are like the so-called "backwards" castes in India, with much less opportunity and who aren't coming to the US for grad school and careers.
There are ~1.4 billion people in India. The subset of those who are able to afford to immigrate to the US is a small fraction of that - a fraction that by definition has either the financial means to do so or extreme motivation and persistence.
In light of that, it’s not at all surprising to me that people of Indian descent in America are disproportionately successful.
I don't know if it's a general cultural trait, but my feeling is that Indians in Western countries tend to invest massively in education and point their children towards 'practical subjects: tech, medicine, law, business.
I think that they are over-represented in all these subjects compared to their demographic weight in the general population.
On top of that, there is a significant migration of Indian engineers to the US/UK/etc.
This article seems to solely focus on venture-backed startups. It would be interesting to understand how the venture world does in terms of inclusivity versus more traditional entrepreneurship like starting a restaurant or other small local business.
According to surveys from US Census data in 2017 (1), it seems pretty similar. This points to not VCs as the source of the problem but more to the general racism that exists. Starting a business in any sense is perhaps the largest financial risk any individual can take. Being able to afford that risk is a huge privilege accessible to only a few. I'm glad there's a focus on creating more opportunities for minorities in the VC but ultimately this reflective of the structural racism that seeps through every part of American society.
Interesting note that with sufficient discrimination, even non-discriminating agents will have the discrimination propagate to them. If I know that a black woman is going to have a hard time raising loans, hiring, finding a business partner and a white guy is going to have an easy time doing all that, even a non-discriminating VC will just go for the latter. After all, you're just blindly chasing outcomes. And there's no edge to be had by choosing someone who is holistically less likely to succeed because the environment doesn't favour them.
Isn't there just an infinite series of questions that you can ask? How come there are so few paraplegic entrepreneurs? How come there are so few Eskimo entrepreneurs? I don't think that equality of opportunity will necessarily lead to homogeneity and equal representation in every single field of commerce. People are all wired differently with different inclinations/desires/ambitions/goals/skills.
Unless races are all wired differently, I think it's safe to assume that there should probably be equal representation in every single field. Is that your argument?
For whatever reasons, it seems to me that relatively few black people study for engineering and science degrees. At least that's my feeling in Europe.
Then it's simply a trickle down effect, like for women in tech: Few choose this path so even fewer end up being tech entrepreneurs or at Google/Facebook, etc (since the article mentions the workforce of these companies).
So, once again, education from primary/secondary school is key and needs a long term investment. After that, all these talks about "increasing diversity" in tech by 'tweaking' hiring practices or what not is just PR fluff or virtue signalling because this tries to fix a consequence while ignoring the cause. Silicon Valley's giants should instead reach out to help on education if they wanted to do actual good long term.
I've pointed this out for the women in tech debate. Probably 3 of the 30 or so CS students were women here.
So the question becomes why do blacks and women want tech jobs without becoming qualified for said tech jobs? or do they even want tech jobs in the first place? is it just someone else who wants them to have tech jobs?
There are many, many non-technical founders. Most jobs at Google and Facebook are not in engineering. A lack of blacks in computer science might explain why the engineering department has only two black employees but how do we explain the sales team?
founderofcolour|5 years ago
Its all BLM woo haa on slack but what really matters is promotions, raises, projects, opportunities, and nothing shows up there. Pretty soon, you have a 24 or 25yo director of VP presiding over a PoC (some of whom are black) who has two or more decades of experience and who is obviously doing all the real work.
The entire c-suite has a single person of color. The board has none.
Then, you hear people grumbling in management meetings that some of the "diversity hires" are not motivated. Think -- why would they be motivated given what goes on?
Addendum: Not saying this doesnt happen outside of tech, but I know it happens in tech because I see it company after company, and especially at my current venture-backed employer. So consider that when you hear empty talk about tech being a meritocracy. Now granted, tech does have good numbers of Asians, but I think that is sheer funnel input volume driving that.
rbecker|5 years ago
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-06-diversity-silicon-valley-tech-... - using weighted average of the histogram.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
adwn|5 years ago
Are you saying that they also discriminate against above-average white workers in favor of average white workers?
> The entire c-suite has a single person of color.
How many people are in the C-suite, and what's the ratio of PoC to total number of employees in your company? I'm not trying to disprove you, it's just that a single number (1 PoC in the C-suite) doesn't provide any insight into your situation.
Ancapistani|5 years ago
When were you able to enter the field, compared to them? Do they have more experience at an earlier age?
To be clear, I am in no way arguing or trying to minimize your experiences. I’m looking for holes in my own view of the problem, which I stated in a top-level comment. Based on that I would expect that the VP probably had a lot of starting advantages over you. That doesn’t make it right, but it may highlight effective strategies for changing the dynamic for your children.
srtjstjsj|5 years ago
Not counting "CTO" of a 10 person startup where the title is obviously bogus.
Ancapistani|5 years ago
Most of this disparity is due to differences in opportunity. Blacks in the US are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field. They are less likely to have two parents at home, to be able to afford college on their own, to have the familial financial and emotional support system necessary to have the required risk tolerance to attempt their own venture, and most of all - less likely to have escaped the pressures of devoting all of their energy to financial survival in the first place.
Assuming the above statement is true, the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs.
umvi|5 years ago
That first one seems much more difficult than the others. How do you go from pervasive single-parent households to consistent two parent households? You can't simply throw money at the problem and expect the next generation to bootstrap itself into stable marriages. A lot of these single parent families start in middle/high school.
And you can't just say "teach it in school" either, because truancy is rampant among black impoverished youth. So even if you have the best school in the world, it does no good if the kids aren't attending.
athms|5 years ago
What is "our" field? Food service? Car repair? Carpet cleaning?
>to be able to afford college on their own
No college is needed to be an entrepreneur.
threatofrain|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
umvi|5 years ago
Secondly, nearly 30% of that 13% are living in poverty[1].
So really you only have ~8% of Americans who are both black and not in poverty. From there it gets whittled down further for cultural reasons. You could similarly ask "where are there so few white rappers?" or "why are there so few male nurses?" and find cultural reasons and pressures involved for that.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
[1] http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.htm...
Ancapistani|5 years ago
Why does “Black culture” in the US differ from “White culture”?
I believe it’s because their experiences differ. Blacks in the US are disproportionately poor, urban, and from unstable home environments. While I don’t have facts to back this up, I expect that if we compared groups segmented by these factors we would find the racial/ethnic disparities to be much less pronounced. That difference could be reasonably attributed to culture.
What shaped those cultures? That’s the important piece of information, and the root cause here. Looking back over American history, I’m aware of no point in which Whites and Blacks had even roughly equivalent conditions as a whole. At best, I would expect that the Black experience today is somewhere close to first-generation Irish or Italian immigrants in during their initial surges. Perhaps a closer fit would be Chinese immigrants during the railroad boom of westward expansion. It took generations for those groups to be fully integrated into our society.
I fully expect it to take generations to solve this problem. There’s much to do that can speed it up - like ensuring legislation does not discriminate either explicitly or implicitly - but it’s going to take time.
Changing hiring practices alone will not solve this.
shakezula|5 years ago
This is literally all the evidence one needs to see the problem here. Their poverty is the result of decades of discrimination.
> "why are there so few white rappers"
False assumption. White people have pretty good representation in the rap game now, unlike black people in board rooms.
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
danhak|5 years ago
Now realize that slavery was only two generations ago, Jim Crow / legal segregation ended with this generation, and mass incarceration and systemic racism are ongoing.
umvi|5 years ago
anemoiac|5 years ago
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/27/slave-son-...
Mc91|5 years ago
In the US, when I was a teenager, blacks kids who were into computers were doing the same things the other people going to computer clubs and whatnot did. Some knew more than a lot of the white kids. As people graduated high school, went to college, got internships and jobs, somewhere along that route a lot of them fell off.
Also, I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason, making life more difficult for them etc.
athms|5 years ago
Black college students are over represented in low earning majors. Blacks that focus on high paying majors go into law, medicine, or business. If black leaders want more black IT executives, they need to push black kids into IT related careers.
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/african-american-majo...
>I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason
That mentality can be seen in anybody. When I did consulting in the late 1990s, I had a client company where an Indian manager refused to promote or hire non-Indians. Same company, an engineer from Taiwan gave bad marks on interviews if the candidate was of Korean descent. He told me, "I won't work with gooks."
founderofcolour|5 years ago
brainless|5 years ago
I find that a bit surprising suddenly. I'm an Indian who has never been to the US so I can not imagine the ground reality. But it's odd when I think of this. And I follow a good chunk of tech stuff online from various founders.
strikelaserclaw|5 years ago
srtjstjsj|5 years ago
But the Indians passed through a strong selection filter from the billion Indians in India, which is both restrictive toward people with low economic potential and permissive to people with high economic potential.
Blacks in the US are like the so-called "backwards" castes in India, with much less opportunity and who aren't coming to the US for grad school and careers.
Ancapistani|5 years ago
In light of that, it’s not at all surprising to me that people of Indian descent in America are disproportionately successful.
mytailorisrich|5 years ago
I think that they are over-represented in all these subjects compared to their demographic weight in the general population.
On top of that, there is a significant migration of Indian engineers to the US/UK/etc.
dumbfoundded|5 years ago
According to surveys from US Census data in 2017 (1), it seems pretty similar. This points to not VCs as the source of the problem but more to the general racism that exists. Starting a business in any sense is perhaps the largest financial risk any individual can take. Being able to afford that risk is a huge privilege accessible to only a few. I'm glad there's a focus on creating more opportunities for minorities in the VC but ultimately this reflective of the structural racism that seeps through every part of American society.
(1) https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-business...
renewiltord|5 years ago
ksk|5 years ago
charlesu|5 years ago
bberenberg|5 years ago
morceauxdebois|5 years ago
tootahe45|5 years ago
And student loans have no accessability requirements in the US.
bsanr2|5 years ago
cvhashim|5 years ago
burfog|5 years ago
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has this to say on that trouble:
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
You can't have an honest discussion when not everybody can speak their mind.
sillpunt|5 years ago
[deleted]
mytailorisrich|5 years ago
Then it's simply a trickle down effect, like for women in tech: Few choose this path so even fewer end up being tech entrepreneurs or at Google/Facebook, etc (since the article mentions the workforce of these companies).
So, once again, education from primary/secondary school is key and needs a long term investment. After that, all these talks about "increasing diversity" in tech by 'tweaking' hiring practices or what not is just PR fluff or virtue signalling because this tries to fix a consequence while ignoring the cause. Silicon Valley's giants should instead reach out to help on education if they wanted to do actual good long term.
tootahe45|5 years ago
So the question becomes why do blacks and women want tech jobs without becoming qualified for said tech jobs? or do they even want tech jobs in the first place? is it just someone else who wants them to have tech jobs?
charlesu|5 years ago