Racism and Meritocracy

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/19/racism-and-meritocracy/

by Jarred • 15 years ago

100 117 15 years ago

Estragon• 15 years ago

He claims that the difference between men's and women's interest in tech startups is not skewed enough to explain the skewed male/female ratio in the tech startup world. ("...all of the research I am aware of suggests that these differences are extremely small – not nearly big enough to explain what we’re observing in places like Y Combinator.")

It would have been nice if he'd cited the reseach which supports this claim.

pg3• 15 years ago

http://www.google.com/search?q=railsconf+audience&hl=en&...

mcteapot• 15 years ago

lol I think this one seas it all http://www.flickr.com/photos/x180/2545980399/

astine• 15 years ago

Ok, forgive me but I'm not sure what this link is supposed to demonstrate. I see mostly pictures of white men here punctuated with a few asians. I know the article mentioned a Ruby conference getting a larger female audience but these aren't pictures of that conference.

amirnathoo2• 15 years ago

Eric is not suggesting that the applicant pool is diverse and the selection process biased. Instead, I think he's suggesting that different selection processes can result in different applicant pools:

"Imagine that you were a professional musician thinking about which orchestra to audition for. You have a choice between an all-male orchestra that conducts interviews out in the open, and a mixed-gender orchestra that conducts auditions behind a screen. Which would you choose to apply to? Wouldn’t your answer be different if you were a man or a woman?

I think thought experiments like this are helpful for suggesting an alternate hypothesis to the pipeline problem: that there are qualified minority applicants who are choosing – rationally – to invest their time and energy elsewhere. I am not aware of any scientific study that proves this hypothesis is correct. But I have seen enough existence proofs to believe it is likely."

pg3• 15 years ago

The Railsconf audience images refute that explanation too. Since there is no screening process at all, potential attendees can't be deterred by biases in it.

moldbug4• 15 years ago

Stephen Jay Gould on racism, 1984:

"My visceral perception of brotherhood harmonizes with our best modern biological knowledge. Such union of feeling and fact may be rare indeed, for one offers no guide to the other (more romantic twaddle aside). Many people think (or fear) that equality of human races is a hope of liberal sentimentality probably squashed by the hard realities of history. They are wrong.

This column can be summarized in a single phrase, a motto if you will: Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen."

[http://www.sjgarchive.org/library/text/b16/p0425.htm]

Surely it's a good thing that the Ruby on Rails community doesn't face any "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude." Object-relational mapping is hard enough!

eaurouge4• 15 years ago

I think you're making the point that the group of attendees to a Rails conference is representative of the population of Rails developers. That's not necessarily true.

Alex39173• 15 years ago

The main problem with this article that meritocracies are a mythological construct and not something that empirically exist. This probably shouldn't be much of a surprise, considering that merit is literally a religious concept.

Try replacing every instance of the word merit with the word Jesus, and you'll see there is essentially no loss of meaning.

Figuring out how to reduce bias in startup funding is important, but really it's only a small part of the larger problem of identifying talent in general.

yummyfajitas6• 15 years ago

"I attempt to hire based on merit in order to increase the probability that my startup will succeed and make me rich."

"I attempt to hire based on Jesus in order to increase the probability that my startup will succeed and make me rich." <- Huh?

"The guy I hired based on merit has certainly brought my startup closer to success - he's built several useful apps, caught plenty of bugs, and has kept our India operation running smoothly in my absence."

"The guy I hired based on Jesus has certainly brought my startup closer to success - he's built several useful apps, caught plenty of bugs, and has kept our India operation running smoothly in my absence." <- Doesn't make so much sense. What does Jesus have to do with building useful apps, fixing bugs and keeping our worker's pipelines full?

Alex39173• 15 years ago

"Doesn't make so much sense."

That's the point.

philwelch2• 15 years ago

One of the problems with racism in particular is that it has effects on people from birth. Past racism may have hurt their parents' socioeconomic prospects, forcing them to be born in an economically depressed ghetto with poor schools and gang violence. Even if there's no racism past that point, if their parents were prevented from ascending to the middle class, they won't pass on middle-class virtues emphasizing the importance of education. No matter how good the schools are, they don't really work the same without positive parental involvement.

And there's obstacles to how good the schools are, too--good teachers will be scared away by the violence and gang activity that's common in those environments, and district-based taxing, funding, and student allocation procedures mean that kids in those areas are trapped in bad schools. If the school system is racist on top of that, that's even another barrier.

If you don't fix something that's that bad when the kid is five years old, by the time they're eighteen and getting out of high school, let's suppose they go to college. Okay, the colleges do everything they can not to be racist, but it's genuinely harder to meet academic standards for admission if you went to shitty schools your whole life. And even if you get in, you have to compete with the students who went to better schools and got a better start. That's a barrier against even getting into difficult academic tracks like STEM. And if the university system is racist, that's even another barrier.

Okay, the job market for developers is pretty good right now even in startups. It probably isn't even racist. But even at this point, all the forces I've already described have thinned out the numbers to the point where a disproportionately small minority of the genuinely qualified population of entry-level developers are, well, minorities. But let's say the job market is racist, too.

Once you're ready to found a startup, it's absolutely true that the pool of candidates coming to YC and others for funding is genuinely unbalanced. Even if investors do everything they can to be perfectly non-racist, racism in any or all of the levels previous to this in the person's life is going to take them out of the population of qualified startup founders. And no matter what you do to fix investment, it's not going to restore the proportion of minority startup founders to the proportion of minorities in the population. You have to fix these problems at the root, not all the way out here when it's too late to make any difference.

yummies• 15 years ago

I think this train of thought would be considered a violation of the author's "No hand-wringing" rule. The last half of this article is dedicated towards debunking the "pipeline problem" which you are describing. Now whether or not he effectively debunked it is up to debate, but at least in the case of women entrepreneurs he offers some compelling data: "...women receive only about 30% of degrees in CS. But 30% is a lot larger than 4% – and that’s a big math problem for advocates of the pipeline theory."

Retric• 15 years ago

Restricting things to gender makes it vary obvious that it's not a single stage pipeline, because YC get's much closer to 4% women applicants than 30%. The simple fact is for a variety of reasons a lower percentage of female graduates with a CS degree are interested in moving to the valley or joining / starting a start-up. That's not to say there is no discrimination just that discrimination does not account for the massive differences by it's self.

If we really want to understand what's going on we need to look at areas that attract more women than men. It turns out that the northern Virginia area has a significant female bias where there are far more young well educated females than you would expect based on graduation rates etc. Perhaps the prospect of a safe 80+k job in a good area acts a golden handcuffs that prevents many young capable women from 'seeking their fortune'. But, good or bad, cultural or biological, it's not simply a question of employer bias, people chose the areas they want to live in far more than they are force into or out of a specific region.

philwelch2• 15 years ago

The observed pattern seems to be that women make more risk-averse career choices, which founding a startup definitely isn't. The pipeline theory applies much better to blacks than to women.

Further, pg somewhere argued that there's a multiplicative factor once you factor in cofounders--cofounding a startup implies an extremely close platonic relationship, people are more likely to form extremely close platonic relationships with members of the same sex, and hence men have a wider range of possible cofounders than women. I think this argument is at least partially flawed--many businesses are started by husband-and-wife teams and there's no clear reason why opposite-sex platonic cofounder relationships couldn't work either.

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

> at least in the case of women entrepreneurs he offers some compelling data

Come on, let's not be coy about this. The particular issue that philwelch is referring to is not that of women, but of blacks. Women have a completely different set of reasons for why they don't achieve as much career-wise as men, despite similar levels of education (the first thing that comes to mind is of course the time demands of child-bearing/rearing).

But for blacks, there definitely is a "pipeline problem." The quality of education available to the average black child is much poorer than that available to the average white child. Although there is definitely both conscious and subconscious discrimination against blacks, in the enterpreneurial industry as well as a raft of others, the biggest chunk of the problem can be attributed to subpar education and a culture that actively discourages success through math/science/engineering.

billpatrianakos2• 15 years ago

Exactly! Maybe this is a small minority being extra loud. Thank you for saving me a lot of typing.

Diversity for the sake of diversity hurts us all. You really do need to fix the underlying problems. I believe that there really are few qualified minority candidates for these jobs out there and there would be a lot more if we could fix some of the poverty and segregation that exists out there.

Black people in this country live in a separate America. They have their own culture as a result of past racism. So many black youth are living in these poor neighborhoods where they're learning that the only way to get ahead is to hussle in the bad sense of the word. Take a look at hip hop and the ideals being broadcast with that music. Make that money (however you can), trust no one, the world is against you. And it really is against them. Violence, crime, gangs, drugs, poverty. This is what a lot of minorities have to deal with growing up. If they manage to avoid the pitfalls of growing up that way they then have to adjust to a whole different world in college and beyond. If we can fix this issue then we'll have a lot more qualified minority candidates.

Look at pro sports. Why are so many star athletes black? Because they had no other way out. Meanwhile the suburban white kids have the luxury of living in a safe cul de sac where they can sit quietly and study or save up an allowance to pay the smart kid I'm the block to take his SAT.

Women are brought up to be these frail creatures and have heavy emphasis on things that won't help them become the career women we see in movies. There's a lot of talk about women's rights and equality but it isn't practiced as much as rhetoric is thrown around about it.

We as white males benefit greatly from White Privilege. It isn't our fault and we shouldn't feel guilty about it but we should recognize it and try to change it. The fact of the matter is that our culture and society is heaviily biased toward helping white men succeed with the ideals we're taught, the opportunities we're given, and just the way we're generally raised.

If we can extend White Privilege to everyone then we will have more diversity. There really is just less qualified minorities than whites in this industry and going out of our way to find a minority isn't helping anything. It just covers up a problem and leaves behind the greater issue. This needs to be addressed at the root.

Anechoic4• 15 years ago

>Diversity for the sake of diversity hurts us all

I agree with this, but at the same time, a lack of diversity might (I stress might) indicate a problem with racism or (more likely these days) disparate impact and it's worth investigating and rectifying if need be. Just chalking it up to "well, I guess blacks/women/etc just aren't into tech" (not that you said that, but other posts here reflect that) may be ignoring a problem. If proper research shows that is the case, then fine, but let's not leap to assumptions.

>Black people in this country live in a separate America. They have their own culture as a result of past racism.

I see what you're trying to say here, and there are cultural/regional differences, but saying "[blacks] have their own culture" makes it sound a bit like an alien society. American black culture is just a subset of American culture - a random black guy from Chicago is going to have a lot more in common culturally with a white guy from Seattle compared to a black guy in sub-Saharan Africa.

>If we can extend White Privilege to everyone then we will have more diversity.

I'd rather just get rid of privilege totally, but that's a tall order. I do a lot of consulting for government agencies and in that world you really do get work based primarily on who you know. As a result a lot of my colleagues tend to be white males, not because of any sort of overt racism, but because the white males who head up government agencies tend to look within their circles of other white males for recommendations. Making the procurement process fairer and more reliant on merit will probably increase diversity in my market, and that's a good thing in terms of increasing opportunities for all.

vacri• 15 years ago

"pro sports as an escape from the ghetto" needs to die as a theme. There are only a few thousand professional athletes in the US across all sports, most of them men, far from all of them black - and there are something like 30 million blacks in the US.

I can't say how many of those 30 million are living in entrenched poverty, but simply seeing the discrepancy between these numbers revokes the idea that pro sports is a viable way to improve your lot if you are in a poor place.

eaurouge4• 15 years ago

"Black people in this country live in a separate America. They have their own culture..."

It's as if your knowledge of black people comes solely from watching rap videos and the NBA.

designNERD• 15 years ago

I get what you are trying to say and in general you "get it". However what you are talking about is in general a class issue, blacks just happen to be disproportionately poor. All Black Americans do not have the same culture. I just wanted to point that out because it can come off like a sweeping generalization of all Black people and that is certainly not the case.

jnordell3• 15 years ago

Mitch Kapor also has an interesting take on this: http://mkapor.posterous.com/beyond-arrington-and-cnn-lets-lo...

Ant11• 15 years ago

In the article: "When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process"

In my chess club have the same kind of female/male ratio: 12 females on 220 members. Leaving out the youth members it is 8 out of 180 or about 4% ;-) Something must be wrong with our non-existent selection process.

merkat3• 15 years ago

The problem is not in the admission process, but (amongst other things) in each individual's perception about it. A mostly male club with only 4% women will naturally attract more male population, making the group even more unbalanced over time.

leeoniya• 15 years ago

there might be an inherent gender imbalance simply because men can afford to settle down and start a family much later in life than women. founding and managing a startup takes an incredible amount of time and dedication solely to work, which can easily turn into a multi-year workaholic wormhole that leads nowhere. perhaps the majority of women would rather put 5-10 years into a guaranteed, fulfilling family than uncertain stress and a large paycheck. if i was a woman and wanted to have children before i was 30, it would definitely change my outlook for embarking on the entrepreneurial path.

maxklein8• 15 years ago

I really fail to see how anyone can see racism in this. The current people trying to make it big in silicon valley now did not start the process now, they started 10 or 15 years ago when they started fiddling around with computers or learning to code or reading business books. And it's at that stage that the current audience was created, and not right now. The people applying and the selection is just a result of that process.

And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them.

And in any case, there is this theory: if you pick any group of people at all, there are going to be a few people who are simply more able to do many things. Let's say these people are more talented and more intelligent. These people tend to work on what is currently 'intellectually trendy'. For example, a while back they would have been painters, another while back, they would have been writers, another while they would have been physicists, now they are technologists. These people search out a trendy intellectual effort and then spend their time developing their abilities there. This 'trend' is different for different groups, depending on the media that they are exposed to, and what the people around them are talking about.

Groups in America are pretty segregated, and there is a form of intellectual segregation betwen men and women. It leads to gender specific roles. It also leads to the effect observed above: Smart black guys did not start fiddling with computers 15 years ago, so they are not currently active in the tech industry.

raganwald2• 15 years ago

You use words like "clearly" and "probably" but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions. Clearly, you expect your audience thinks exactly the way you do and will probably confirm your bias.

Alex39173• 15 years ago

"You use words like 'clearly' and 'probably' but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions."

Maybe because it would take all of 12 seconds of Googling to confirm that this is probably (at least partially) correct? We all know what the statistics say and what they don't say, so asking other people to do your homework for you in place of actually contributing something is lame. I meant granted, the original comment was a bit simplistic, but the lack of statistics isn't the issue.

guard-of-terra4• 15 years ago

His explanation sounds believable and unless you supply a believable one or maybe one backed by data and other empirical evidence, we'll going to use his.

That's how arguing works in real life when the object is vast and non-deterministic (like, population).

maxklein8• 15 years ago

The "clearly" comes out of logic. If you assume that my "result" statement is correct, then the reason would also have to be correct.

Do you think African American students, 15 years ago, were spending time studying how to use computers? I think it's rather likely because:

- I've never heard of this

- Such playing-with-computers is something that was confined to the somewhat richer and educated people in American society, which the african-americans were not, 15 years ago.

I doubt that my audience thinks the exact way I do, and I doubt I have any bias that needs to be confirmed.

rsheridan6• 15 years ago

You don't need statistics to tell you that the programming community 10-15 years ago was overwhelming male and white/Asian. Some things are obvious by inspection. Do you seriously doubt this? Would it really change your mind about anything if the OP wasted 15 minutes trying to find a study proving it?

Anechoic4• 15 years ago

>The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them.

Is your stated reason ("it just did not occur to them") more likely than "they didn't have the opportunity to take those steps because of (economics/insert reason)"? A quick Google search give this link: http://www.brookings.edu/articles/1998/spring_education_darl... which indicated that in the 1990's, minority students generally had access to fewer or lower-quality resources than white students.

maxklein8• 15 years ago

I believe it did not occur to them. I doubt that asian students had much more resources 15 years ago.

sarchertech• 15 years ago

Isn't it possible that it has nothing to do with race, but with culture.

From my experience most people who end up working in technology are or were at one point part of the geek subculture.

You can't just look at Tech fields and say look it's all white and asian. It's not, it's predominantly a particular subset of white and asian men. That subset has it's own culture.

Maybe there is some cultural reason that white and and asian men are more drawn to this subculture than other demographics.

billpatrianakos2• 15 years ago

This has everything to do with culture. This becomes a big deal because of white guilt which is a result of White Privilege.

Fact: there are far fewer minority hires working in our industry

Fiction: the previous fact is a result of racism

If that were the case maybe there's reverse racism in pro sports?

pjscott• 15 years ago

Evidence, please?

jsnk• 15 years ago

Diverse demographic =/= Diverse skills and expertise

I am disappointed by underlying presumption of the article that you must have diverse demographic correlates with diverse skill sets because it doesn't.

If we continue to think that superficial physical qualities such as skin color or having a certain genitalia defines who we are as individuals, then we do indeed live in a racist and sexist society where people are judged based on race and sex.

MaysonL• 15 years ago

When thinking about this, imagine what would have to happen for a child born to a black, single, crackhead mother to have a fighting chance in life.

And then take a look at what the Harlem Children's Zone has been doing lately: http://www.hcz.org/books/HCZ%202011%20Biennial/files/assets/...

And send them a few bucks, so they can do some more of it.

jnordell3• 15 years ago

Fascinating discussion. In fact, the reasons people do or don't rock certain fields are (like people themselves) incredibly complex. The blind orchestra auditions to which Eric refers are just one drop in a sea of quantitative data about the effects of unconscious bias.

There's Robert Rosenthal's study that showed that others' belief that you are "gifted" actually results in an IQ increase. There's the famous "McKay" study, in which test subjects evaluated identical academic papers by "John" and "Joan" McKay. And on and on.

What's really interesting is the experience of post-op transsexuals, like biologist Ben Barres (who was Barbara Barres until he was in his 40s). These folks are the true secret shoppers of gender-- and the ultimate control group in terms of understanding how gender affects one's experience of the world. It would be really interesting to find a comparable race test case (an updated "Black Like Me").

A few years ago I wrote about this phenomenon in Slate-- I looked at women and ambition in general. Check out the piece if you're interested in a more generalized analysis: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/200...

neilk• 15 years ago

Self-Made Man is a tale similar to Black Like Me, where it was a writer's experiment, rather than a transgender exercise.

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Journey-Manhood/d...

There are also a lot of interesting works by transgender people, but the perspective there is different, since they usually report that they never felt comfortable in their birth gender.

jnordell3• 15 years ago

I liked Self-Made Man-- really interesting exploration of masculinity and the culture of "manhood" in general. It would have been especially interesting if somehow Vincent could have stayed in her old sort of rarefied world and experienced life there, rather than having to leave that world and join bowling leagues so she wouldn't be recognized.

Ben Barres (formerly Barbara Barres) wrote a great piece in Nature ("Does Gender Matter?") after the Larry Summers debacle. There's an interview with him here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18conv.html?pagewa...

Pretty convincing stuff on the role gender plays in our interactions with each other. To me, what's so fascinating about the experience of transsexuals is that they literally have controlled experiments going on-- they're the only people who can experience life in two different bodies. What a useful perspective to have-- I'll never know what life is like as someone of another gender/race/ethnicity, but I imagine it would be incredibly mind-expanding if I could.

amirnathoo2• 15 years ago

One thing that bothered me about this article was the way it called out YC's selection process implying it is part of the problem. Actually the Valley has never been more accessible to 'outsiders' because of the rise of YC, AngelList, and many more angel investors.

eries• 15 years ago

I couldn't agree more. My intention wasn't to call out YC as part of the problem, but simply to suggest a specific place where I think YC (and the Valley ecosystem in general) could be improved.

In fact, the only reason I think this argument has any chance of having an impact is that I think SV is one of the most meritocratic places in the world.

I'm pointing out a bug that we could easily fix if we want to.

silentscope• 15 years ago

1. Minorities, in general, are less economically privileged. It's not causation, it's correlation. Nevertheless, this translates to worse schools, worse education, worse qualifications, worse job prospects. So before minorities are even able to apply, they're being selected against economically. For no fault of their own, they have worse chances than a non-minority.

2. When giving money, Eric Ries is right, you don't just go off empirical data. I want to give money to someone I relate to and feel comfortable evaluating. Someone I can understand. When doing that, I'm probably going to choose someone who's like me. If I'm a VC or angel, that probably means a white male. That goes, without saying, for founders. I want someone who has my back, not someone who feels like more of a wild card--I'm taking enough chances as it is starting the company.

So is it Racisim? Hell yes. Are these people Racist? No. It's not as if these words are sticky bombs that implicate anyone who gets near them with an indelible smear. The world is not a fair place--rain falls and the just and unjust alike. Let's call it like we see it.

Silicon Valley, just like anywhere in the world, is not a 100% meritocracy (that I think we can all agree on). What percent meritocracy is it? That's completely subjective. However, trying to convince yourself otherwise is an attempt to wash your hands of the problem while doing nothing to correct it.

What has to happen to solve this is, thankfully, what SV does best--take risks. That means hiring someone who isn't your ideal and seeing how they pan out. That means giving a second look at people that you normally would pass over--if only to keep your lifeblood fresh.

It doesn't mean ruining your company in a futile attempt to change the entire world--but it does mean doing things different, ie, hard.

Enough with the outrage. There is racisim/sexism in the world guys (yes, guys). It doesn't mean you're a racist. Let's man up to it.

gruseom• 15 years ago

This article read to me like a concern troll (I'm just so concerned about diversity) overlying a passive-aggressive smear of the "I'm not saying" sort. As in: I'm not saying they're racist. Not necessarily. At least they say they aren't, and I take them at their word. At least until there's evidence that they're lying. Of course I have heard racist jokes.

Such language is unimpeachable on the surface and conveys something different underneath.

jphackworth• 15 years ago

At my company, we're hiring mobile developers. We have received over 100 resumes. 2 of them were from women. I wish we could hire a more diverse group, but it's pretty obvious that changing our selection process isn't enough.

marquis• 15 years ago

I have the same problem, and I'm female running a tech company. But I have a solution: I teach a group of kids to program, equal gender. Maybe in 10 years I'll be hiring some of them. You know what interests the girls most? I tell them about my lifestyle, my freedom to travel and to live how and where I want, the long lunch breaks I can take if I want (after working hard enough to get employees). By teaching these kids lifestyle options they stay engaged. It's early days yet, I've only just started the classes but I'm enjoying the process.

We're looking forward to the new Stanford CS101 online class, hopefully I can base my teaching on this which should spin off into the kids taking other online classes of their own volition.

thaumaturgy9• 15 years ago

I am racist.

And sexist.

I subconsciously attribute certain qualities to men and women, and to various ethnicities. Underneath all of the various common jokes -- "Asians are good at math", etc. -- there is an undercurrent of discussion where other people are admitting their biases, too.

When I get on the phone with technical support and hear a thick East Asian accent, the first thing that happens is I grit my teeth. I feel frustrated that I am having to try to resolve a technical issue with someone that I have to actively concentrate on in order to understand clearly; I feel annoyed in expectation of their overstated politeness; I am immediately resigned to not getting the problem resolved at all, as they are probably going to ask me to troubleshoot a networking problem by rebooting a computer.

These are biases that have been built up over a period of many years of similar experiences, one little bias at a time. And, when the call actually resolves the issue quickly and without any frustration at all, I find myself thinking, "That went better than expected."

I recognize this about myself. So, when I notice these things happening, I consciously moderate my tone, and try to consciously manage my opinions and feelings and statements. But, that doesn't change the fact that the bias is there, affecting my subconscious.

Likewise, for women in tech. I know there are amazing women in technology, and in other male-dominated fields. I'm occasionally fortunate enough to work with some of them, covering a wide range of other demographics. Still, when it comes time to hire again (someday soon, I hope), applications from women will first be met with biases built up one-by-one from a lifetime of experiences: all the various women friends that need help "fixing their computers", or of a past applicant who we hired, presented with an easy starting project and clear instructions -- "no coding necessary, just do some nice-looking Photoshop mockups" -- and who called, the next day, saying that she had cried all night and talked to her mom because she didn't think she could do the work because we used iframes in an ajax-y way.

Or, when I hear about a black entrepreneur. The first thing that bubbles up from my subconscious is, "Wow, they're succeeding in spite of modern black culture." I have to beat that thought down and consciously regard them as an individual.

These are uncomfortable admissions to make. I would be loathe to admit them in more polite company. Terms like "racism" and "sexism" themselves carry strong biases -- that the only forms of "racism" are "white superiority" and the only forms of "sexism" are blatant misogyny and creepy sexual undertones.

But, racism and sexism and other -isms are a part of who we are, a part of our psychology that dates back to our tribal and "us versus them" cultural influences. I think that trying to pretend that they don't exist is only going to prolong their effects.

Knowing that they exist can help us make better decisions.

yummyfajitas6• 15 years ago

Underneath all of the various common jokes -- "Asians are good at math", etc. -- there is an undercurrent of discussion where other people are admitting their biases, too.

That's not a bias, it's simple fact. Asians have SAT math scores 72 points higher than average, TIMSS scores 74 points higher than average, and are disproportionately represented in professions requiring significant mathematical background.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883611.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...

Further, the top 5 nations on the math component of TIMSS have been the 5 first world countries in Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) in all years since 1995 (in 1995, Taiwan was not included, and Belgium was #5).

thaumaturgy9• 15 years ago

Well, it can be both a bias and a fact.

I did not go so far as to say that biases have no basis in fact, because that's an argument I'm neither prepared to make, nor want to make.

I was making the point that biases exist.

temphn2• 15 years ago

The interesting point here is that people believe that if a fact has racist, sexist, or homophobic implications it must not be true.

Reminiscent of an earlier era in which any statements that contradicted church doctrine must simply be false. Indeed, the very concept of a "heretical but true" statement was impossible to comprehend.

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

And worldwide Asians are underrepresented as Field's medalists. And Turning Award winners. And Nobel prizes in math intesive fields like Econ and Physics.

vannevar2• 15 years ago

While we're talking about simple facts, how about the simple fact that 70% of the population has an unconscious preference for whites over blacks? (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090617142120.ht... .) The hard truth is that even if you think you're unbiased, you're probably not. And brain research increasingly indicates that we simply don't know our own minds nearly as well as we think we do (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414145705.ht...).

leot• 15 years ago

So? What are you going to do with that information?

What's a better way of figuring out if someone is good at math: give them a math test? Or look up their ancestry?

merkat3• 15 years ago

"Courageously" admitting something doesn't make it OK, simply based on the speculative assertion that a lot of people do the same. We may be living in a biased society, but admitting this doesn't make it excusable.

danking00• 15 years ago

Did you miss the very last line of his comment?

"Knowing that they exist can help us make better decisions."

He's making this admission with the expressed desire of changing, not trying to justify or excuse it.

eaurouge4• 15 years ago

We all have our biases. Some of us try to pretend we don't but the truth is we all do. For an individual to overcome his/her biases, that person first has to accept they exist in the first place.

guard-of-terra4• 15 years ago

"all the various women friends that need help "fixing their computers"," I don't see how is it relevant to hiring a developer, and I also don't see how you could possibly have no male relatives and friends asking for computer help (especially considering older demographics of those). Those are usually equally represented.

temphn2• 15 years ago

This post has many empirical problems, but let's start by looking at the male/female deck by Terri Oda. The only data in the entire deck is on slide 21, and the caption reads:

  Two normal distributions that are 0.15 standard deviations  
  apart (i.e d=0.15. This is the approximate magnitude of 
  the gender difference in mathematics performance, 
  averaging across all samples.)

In other words, what is plotted there is actually NOT data but simply the textbook Gaussian curves for two distributions.

So let's take a look at actual data. Here is a significantly more rigorous analysis:

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm

This actually uses data from three different tail populations: Female mathematicians in the NAS, Fields Medalists, and Putnam Competition winners. Lo and behold, a simple Gaussian model predicts that small differences in average mathematical ability produce significant sex differences in the tail[1]. And these predictions tally with reality (e.g. the empirical proportion of females in the NAS).

Ms. Oda also does not consider two other crucial aspects, which are:

1. The large difference in spatial ability between men and women:

  http://goo.gl/SGhDw

  On the whole, variation between men and women tends to be 
  smaller than deviations within each sex, but very large 
  differences between the groups do exist–in men’s high 
  level of visual-spatial targeting ability, for one.

2. The large difference in preferences between men and women:

  http://goo.gl/ccKyj
                     
  A study by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of 
  mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All 
  were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less 
  than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in 
  mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while 
  almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not 
  withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more 
  than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at 
  almost three times the rate of boys.

The asymmetric part of this whole debate is that someone who voices the above counterarguments in public runs the risk of being browbeaten like Larry Summers or Michael Arrington.

[1] This is of course assuming that distributions remain Gaussian, though it is well known that correspondence to Gaussianity drops off considerably as you move into the tails.

DaniFong5• 15 years ago

Mathematical achievement doesn't fit a gaussian, and neither do the gendered groups of your conception. And if mathematical ability were distributed as a Gaussian, and genetic, women couldn't be ascending so rapidly.

See for example Lisa Sauermann, the all time best performer in the international math olympiad:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Sauermann

As I wrote four years ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65494

The thing is that intelligence isn't some kind of nice, statistically normed quantity. There's more to most variables than a mean and a standard deviation -- so I don't know why people seem to always think that you can restrict a discussion of intelligence to such concepts.

...

But intelligence isn't a gene. Researchers have, since the time of Galton, tried to find a simple, biological basis for genius. You know, memory capacity, reaction times, brain size, brain structure convolution, etc. They haven't found anything -- literally everything has turned out to be a false start, even brain size, which, has been shown, within families does not even predict g. In the mid ranges, there are greater standard deviations, yes. But every single normed test is normed on a sample on the order of 1000. They're designed for regular people. The designer of the Weschler has adamantly opposed the use of IQ tests for anything other than clinical settings, for this reason. It's just no good at drawing conclusions on the extremes of ability. A better guide might be actual performance. The IOI this year had more girls than ever before -- 11. That's nearly 300% more than last year, where they had 4, and one medal. They are: Emina Bukva (Bosnia and Herzegovina) Constanza Contreras (Chile) Anna Currel (Spain) Romina Huenchunao (Chile) Vaiva Imbrasaite (Lithuania) Taksapaun Kittiakrastien (Thailand) [Silver] Sepideh Mahabadi (Iran) [Gold!] Radwa Metwali (Egypt) Katie O'Mahony (Ireland) Phitchaya Phothilimthana (Thailand) [Silver] Ye Wang (USA) [Silver] Sepideh Mahabadi had one of the best performances of anyone. If you're familiar with IOI scoring, only the top 1/12 are to get golds, and 2/12 to get silvers, thus 1 gold and 3 silvers out of 11 implies that they did at least as good as the boys, and in fact somewhat better. Were the 'standard deviation' explanation correct they should have, instead, had 0.4 girls earning maybe 0.01 medals. It just doesn't work.

And three years ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244449

Why is it sexist to say we show up more frequently in science departments because we have also been designed by evolution to be better at math?

Because compared with bench-pressing, claims of mathematically ability being better in men (and partially ordered, to boot) is seriously jumping the gun. We know what's involved in a bench press. We understand how testosterone stimulates the production of muscle. We are nowhere close with mathematical ability. We have no theory of mathematically ability -- we really don't know what it means, or if the simplest metrics are even useful for higher level math. We have no experimental results, because we have no controlled variables. We have few pieces of data, none of which are conclusively disentangled from cultural and historical influence. In the past two decades, the number of women scoring highly on the IMO, the IOI, the Putnam, and SMPY has gone up by roughly a factor of six. Doubtful that the number of girls with 'math talent genes' have sextupled that quickly. Isn't this evidence that we should hold off on our conclusions?

And four years ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65524

"Brain size does not predict general cognitive ability within families" http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/97/9/4932 You can't discount that IOI statistic becuase it's an outlier. Every single participant at the IOI is an outlier in cognitive ability. Do you know about the theory of outliers? There's this thing called the central limit theorem. It says that if you have a lot of small independent variables, randomly assigned some value, then the mean of all these variables (or, by the same token, the sum of the variables) is distributed approximately normally. But suppose the variables are not small, or they're not independent. Then the central limit theorem doesn't hold, and what you have, almost all of the time, is an outlier -- that's why there are often many more outliers than you'd predict in a given population, using a small sample. Now, I'm not saying that g is zero. I said that psychometrics is a non-science, in the same sense that a lot of the social sciences are non-sciences (you can find papers which try to show a causal effect of insurance regulation on premium prices, ignoring profits entirely, for example). The fact that g is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- most academic subtests, including IQ's, rely on skills that are either practiced as a group, or on skills that are shared between subtests. One example is focus, in general. Another is visualisation. Another is working memory. And so on and so on. Many of these skills are also practiced in situations, like school, where if one does well in one area, they do well in another. If you're the teacher's pet, you get more attention. If you're known as the bad kid, you're immediately discounted (and I've been on both sides). If you're poisoned against a learning environment, you just won't put any effort in. So it's no mystery to me that g is non-zero. The point is that the field of psychometrics is totally absent of content. There's no objective test for the validity of a test, for example -- the best they have is g-loading. Over the years, this means that tests have become higher and higher g-loaded. Now this could mean that the tests are getting better, or it could be that the subtests only look different, they are becoming more similar in content. I've been studying these tests, the actual tests, since I was twelve. It didn't take long before I figured out how poor they were at answering research questions, or questions of individual ability. If you get the chance, try to look up the history of the Stanford-Binet, or Terman's kids, or actually take a look at the scoring method behind most of these things. They're totally full of crap...

evolve2k• 15 years ago

Woah EPIC post, would be great if you added a TLDR comment upfront for skimming.

yummyfajitas6• 15 years ago

"And if mathematical ability were distributed as a Gaussian, and genetic, women couldn't be ascending so rapidly."

This is false. It could be that mathematical ability is genetic and normally distributed, but some component of women's underrepresentation is caused by factors other than this (e.g., discrimination, personal preferences).

"It's just no good at drawing conclusions on the extremes of ability. A better guide might be actual performance. The IOI this year had more girls than ever before -- 11... Were the 'standard deviation' explanation correct they should have, instead, had 0.4 girls earning maybe 0.01 medals."

Come on. I know you know better than to draw statistical conclusions from a single event with a sample size of 11. So why do it?

"The fact that g is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- most academic subtests, including IQ's, rely on skills that are either practiced as a group, or on skills that are shared between subtests. One example is focus, in general. Another is visualisation. Another is working memory. And so on and so on."

You've come up with a plausible theory of what g is. It might be f(focus, visualization, working memory). This does not make the theory of psychometrics "totally absent of content", it just means they don't understand everything yet.

The fact that pressure is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- air is made of particles obeying Newtonian mechanics which impart a force upon a vessel when they collide with it. Does this make thermodynamics "totally absent of content"?

The fact of the matter is that a variety of seemingly unrelated tests are correlated with each other. They are also strongly correlated with various life outcomes in a manner which more or less corresponds to our intuitive intuition about the idea of "intelligence". Stuff like this rarely happens by chance, and it is highly likely there is something behind it.

patio113• 15 years ago

So, how about stepping back from the issue of race because that makes people stupid: if Silicon Valley (or a large chunk of the institutions which make it up) has a persistent bias against X, regardless of whether that is invidious or just a result of suboptimal processes, and that bias is unconnected to merit, then you should be able to profitably exploit it.

Silicon Valley has many biases, of varying levels of connection to actual merit. One is that it is a very chummy place: who you know is, historically, the first filter applied to you (there is an entire culture around intros) and some folks consider it to be the best available method of approximating merit. This suggests the existence of a strategy which repeatably beats the tar out of the Valley: invest in people before they are known by the powers-that-be, introduce them to the powers-that-be, make out like a bandit. You will probably end up rich enough to take up amusing hobbies like running message boards in your spare time.

It is entirely possible that Silicon Valley has a blind spot with respect to X, where X is a entrepreneurial demographic or a market or a business model or a geographic location or a personality type or a whatever. If X is unconnected to merit, then that suggests the existence of a strategy which will predictably produce crushing. I might even go so far as to say that absence of crushing is fairly persuasive circumstantial evidence about either the existence of the blind spot or about the connection to merit.

thaumaturgy9• 15 years ago

I think the article was a solidly not-stupid approach to the issue of race; I would like to see more discussion like it.

I don't think capitalism can solve all ills; even if there is an opportunity for, say, seed-stage investment for startups run by tech "minorities", there is a whole litany of necessities and problems which give it long odds of being successful. You have to find individuals who are both interested in the problem, and have the resources required to address it; they have to have the right recipe of skills; they, themselves, have to know certain people (that chumminess again); and, moreover, they have to be willing to throw significant capital at addressing a problem which might not exist in 5 years.

Or, to put it another way: I think there can be common agreement at this point that YC is not funding and accepting as many startups as they would like to, which implies that there is a strong market demand for another YC which could be as successful, or nearly as successful, as YC itself.

So why doesn't one exist?

patio113• 15 years ago

There are a lot of investment groups which have been, ahem, inspired by the YC model. I'm totally agnostic on what degree of success any particular one or the field in general will have, but in 2022, we'll have trivially checkable empirical evidence on whether there needed to be more seed stage funding than YC was doing for itself.

long odds of being successful

Do you realize that, if you believe the odds are long against this strategy succeeding, you have to be taking the position that this isn't a serious problem in the status quo? And vice versa? I mean, you're not going to give long odds against gravity or penicillin winning, right? They're going to ROFLstomp the alternatives. If diversity is not ROFLstomping the alternatives, then we did not have a diversity problem.

over40guy4• 15 years ago

YC application asks for age. Ageism?

Rastafarian2• 15 years ago

Here is my view on the subject (in the unlikely case anyone cares):

1. Men and women are different, hundreds of millions of years of evolution made them so. Men are more aggressive. Women are better at communication (talk a lot more, learn foreign languages faster, etc.). Men are better at geometry. Women are better at working with sets and groups.

IQ scores of men are more widely distributed than women's. Women's average IQ is a little bit higher. Most of the stupidest people (IQ under 70) and smartest people (over 140) are man.

2. Different races and ethnic groups have different physical and mental abilities, including IQ. As an example look at the different Olympic sports. I'm quite sure different races dominating different disciplines is in big part due to genetics.

All the inter-racial IQ scores I've seen published in peer reviewed journals show the following picture: Black < White < Asian < Jewish.

danbmil99• 15 years ago

One second-order effect not mentioned in the article is as follows. Investors know that to be successful, their investees are going to need to succeed at social skills like marketing, business development, hiring, management of larger teams, etc. I suspect an inner dialogue that works against diversity may occur, such as "I am egalitarian enough to ignore this person's otherness, but will his vendors/customers/employees/future potential investors be this way too?"

I am reminded of something I heard about a distant relative of mine who was involved in breaking the color barrier in Opera back in the 50's. People told her it was silly to "waste" an opportunity on a talented singer of color, because they (of course) would never be accepted by the public.

These kinds of biases can be deeply ingrained in a culture, even when individuals in said culture are honestly free of first-order bias themselves.

edouard1234567• 15 years ago

Great article! Racism Disrupted by Eric! Coming from Europe, more specifically France, I find the law in the US to be very protective against discrimination. For example, compare the typical resume in France to the one in the US. In the french version you often find the following information : color picture, age (not the date of birth, the actual age...), nationality, marital status, number of kids and gender. I never saw any of this in resumes here. An example I got by googling "exemple de cv en Francais" (ironically CV stands for resume in french :) ) http://tinyurl.com/6t7p3o2 In my opinion the United States is one the of the most innovative countries when it comes to fighting discrimination. Having people like Eric Ries getting involved can only augment this tradition.

kyebosh• 15 years ago

Good piece, this discussion is needed. It's about disability too. May I briefly weigh in with an anecdote - please take it only for what it's worth:

I am a quadriplegic due to a diving accident when I was 13. I know my limitations better than any recruiter or HR department ever could, & while I have some personal concerns with meritocracies in general (especially as social policy), I only ever apply for positions in which I can be sure I meet the inherent requirements of the job. Again, I am a good worker with good skills, but I will not apply for positions in which I can't bring proper, uninhibited value.

So no problem, right? I should be awarded consideration in line with my meritocratic value. That's how the world works... Rubbish.

Regardless of council regulations mandating otherwise, I cannot access most (yes, most) workplaces due to physical barriers (poor parking, doorways, stairs etc). I'm sure some places in the world are better, but here I am. In fact I've been knocked back for not being able to access an interview room upstairs (in a semi-govt. owned office, mind you) - the actual workplace for the job was on ground level. That's not even to mention the stereotype I'm perceived as by a frightening majority of interviewees.

No, I don't have a chip on my shoulder, far from it. I'm just saying it's hard to ignore the greetings of (half-speed) "HELLO BUDDY! ARE YOU GOOD TODAY?" from people who have administered & approved your intellectual aptitude tests. Unfortunately I'm not exaggerating.

Meritocracies are not dependent on a passive HR stance. Get active about it. Educate your staff, ensure equality of access, or at least have the guts to be honest about what attributes you're looking for.

Racism and Meritocracy

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