Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/silicon-valley-isnt-a-meritocracy-and-the-cult-of-the-entrepreneur-holds-people-back/

by droz • 13 years ago

117 180 13 years ago

wired.com

jpeg_hero• 13 years ago

Pretty vapid.

Author doesn't seem to be that knowledgable on the valley.

ritchiea2• 13 years ago

I'm really interested in this kind of sentiment. Why do you feel so certain SV is a meritocracy?

sanskritabelt• 13 years ago

People in SV who have some success want it to be a meritocracy so they can feel that they succeeded on their own internal merit.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

I think it's fair to start with, "No industries or geographies are pure meritocracies." Then it's worth asking, "Where does Silicon Valley fit in the spectrum?"

Is it more or less meritocratic than teaching? Being an actuary? A politician? A banker? A lawyer? Advertising? Writing?

I don't know all of the answers, but my impression is the market forces on startups (Can you get funding? Can you get customers?) at least pushes them towards being meritocratic. Software also is more binary than fields like writing. The program does have to compile and work.

But is it a pure meritocracy? I doubt it.

arethuza• 13 years ago

It's worth noting that the term "meritocracy" was defined to be something quite different, and rather more interesting, than it's current usage:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

subsystem• 13 years ago

Somewhat similar to the "American Dream".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Truslow_Adams#American_Dr...

jnovek• 13 years ago

The thing the author is challenging here is not whether Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, but whether it is as much of a meritocracy as its participants believe. It doesn't matter much how it compares to other industries.

In my (limited) experience, among successful founders and investors -- the "trend setters" of startup culture -- there is a widely held notion that anyone with a computer, a good brain, a decent idea, a little bit of luck and the gumption to do some hard work can build a billion dollar company. The author is suggesting that this is not true.

MAGZine• 13 years ago

I'd tend to believe that if you have a badass business deal that is truly worth 1B, you have know-how to get it off the ground, and have exceptional presentation skills (its all about the sell, at this point) a VC wouldn't say no because a person is black, female, gay, or all 3. VCs are their to make money, and they see white male harvard dropouts with no social life to be a safe bet. Convince them that you have a plan to net a return, that is, convince them based on your MERIT, and you'll be successful.

Meritocracy is based on merit, not "giving everyone a fair chance," even if that's what the author would prefer. Though, that's not to say that a bias doesn't exist.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

Fair enough. But I'd suggest that it's much easier to get to $20 million as a non-white-Male than it would be in most other fields with similar educations. I don't see too many non-white Males at the top of law firms, in our country's cabinet, or atop large investment banks.

But this is speculation. What would be interesting to see is hard data based on an entry point (People graduating with CS degrees applying for VC funding versus people with law degrees applying for an associate spot) and watching how the funnels change over time. This type of data has to exist somewhere. It won't prove causality, but it will at least tell part of the story better than personal experience and anecdotes.

mcguire• 13 years ago

"Can you get funding?"

I believe that was actually part of the argument: the necessity of looking the same for the venture capitalists pushes them away from meritocracy.

And software doesn't care whether or not you dropped out of Stanford or Harvard.

kazagistar2• 13 years ago

Not sure when it became ok to call something a myth without emperical evidence.

jes5199• 13 years ago

The definition of a myth is that there's no evidence!

Crito10• 13 years ago

Well... yes it is. You don't need empirical evidence to call unicorns a myth, it is sufficient to point out the lack of empirical evidence supporting the existence of unicorns.

beachstartup5• 13 years ago

But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men?

a jewish guy and a half arab guy aren't exactly the best examples of the point this guy's trying to make.

there's also no shortage of asian and indian "key players" so ... i think this guy is trying to make one point, but accidentally making another point altogether, and then failing at it.

Kurtz792• 13 years ago

In what ways a jewish white man is not a white man ?

It's a serious question, are people of jewish faith not considered "white" in the US ?

beachstartup5• 13 years ago

it depends on who you ask.

and what decade you ask it in.

seiji• 13 years ago

It's complicated. Jewish is a religion as well as an ethnicity.

The much-before-CE cult turned into a religion turned into one of the longest running breeding experiments we have. The historical focus on internal tribal mating self-selected certain superpowers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence) that come in quite handy these days.

ritchiea2• 13 years ago

I think the author's greater point is correct but you're right, those two are terrible choices. I also think most people would not stop and question whether Jobs & Zuck are "white" and that says something about how we pick and choose who is "white." I'm black and I remember a time in high school where I was planning a trip to a baseball game with my friends (who were white) and one friends' father told us "I don't like the idea of you three white kids in that neighborhood late at night." Which was funny because, as I said, I'm black but he certainly didn't see me as so in that context. People use race to describe how they think of another person as much as they use race to describe skin colors.

temuze• 13 years ago

Also, this statement isn't proof of anything! Assuming white males have the same probability of being successful as any other demographic and there also happen to be more white male engineers, then it makes sense that the majority of "key players" in the computer industry will be white males!

It would be much more convincing if the author said X% in the industry are white males and Y% of CEOs/founders are white males.

It's important to separate the argument that society is failing in encouraging/promoting engineers outside of certain demographics and the argument that Silicon Valley is unfairly supporting one demographic over another.

Anechoic2• 13 years ago

of the point this guy's trying to make

i think this guy

I think this post makes the article's point nicely.

(take another look at the article byline, and lookup the author on Google)

beachstartup5• 13 years ago

well the point specifically said white men. not men, white men. i was reacting to the content - what does it matter who wrote it? aren't we discussing ideas here?

mrcactu52• 13 years ago

She might be referring to the 36M African-Americans & 50M Hispanich-Americans in this country. So American still has a White majority at around 60% of the population.

In the year 2010, only 36 million African-Americans in the US, is that right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

Anyway, these groups are under-represented in the Technology field. I heard one response that maybe these groups "don't value education" - I don't know how to respond to that one actually.

ars_technician7• 13 years ago

I heard one response that maybe these groups "don't value education" - I don't know how to respond to that one actually.

I'm not sure about Hispanics, but this is definitely a problem in many African-American communities. It's considered 'white' or essentially bending over for the system if you go to school and actually try.

known• 13 years ago

I think it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy

yummyfajitas4• 13 years ago

The article, like most following this formula, assume that because rewards are not distributed among a sufficiently racially/sexually diverse group, meritocracy must therefore be absent. They fail to account for the possibility that merit might not be distributed in the manner that they think.

kazagistar2• 13 years ago

Agreed. However, an uneven distribution of merit might still be a social problem; it might be indicative of vast inequality of opportunity for developing said merit. However, in this case, the problem is not one specific to silicon valley in any sense.

freefrancisco7• 13 years ago

In fact, a true meritocracy in a very competitive field is more likely to exacerbate the differences that already exist in society and result in an extremely uneven distribution. In a non-merit based industry uncle Bob can get a top job for his 3 children, and his friend's children regardless of gender, race, and any other characteristics. He can also appease reporters that criticize the distribution of his company and hire more people in the less represented populations to correct the problem. In a purely meritocratic field uncle Bob has no influence, no control, and each of the kids has to fight his or her way in. All uncle Bob can do is pay for the best education and the best opportunities for his children to compete in the meritocracy. To the extent that there are small inequalities among the population, those with the most resources will prepare their kids best to compete, and those kids will be over represented in the most competitive fields. The fact that the tech industry is dominated by white males only indicates that it is very competitive, and that white males historically have had a leg up in American society. A leg up that the meritocracy is quickly erasing.

freefrancisco7• 13 years ago

' Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered — these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.'

I don't see anything male about any of these words, I know many women who can be accurately described by these words, as well as many men who cannot. Why is the author conflating being male with these descriptions? I find the assertion that those words are indeed "male-gendered" very disturbing.

woah• 13 years ago

There's a very deep rabbit-hole of feminist studies...

newnewnew10• 13 years ago

Regardless of your sex, you're going to have a tough time as a startup founder if you can't embody those qualities. As of yet, there is no affirmative action in startups, so it's put up or get an easier job.

jacalata5• 13 years ago

That's the point, no? "male or female, you will only succeed if you can act in these typically male ways, regardless of how good your idea and execution are." Therefore, the tech scene is clearly not judging you solely on your idea and execution as they believe they are.

walshemj4• 13 years ago

How is assertive "male" gendered?

icegreentea2• 13 years ago

I don't think that that was Ahl's intentions when she labelled those terms as 'male-gendered'. I do not believe that she meant they were male-gendered like say.. 'he' or 'him'.

Likely, male-genderedness is suppose to mean something along the lines of "without additional information, most people would assume these words refer to a male rather than a female". The point isn't that you can't use these words to describe females, or that all males can be described by this, but that people just associate these words with males. For example, "chopsticks" -> asian, "NBA basketball player" -> African American.

This could actually be studied (though I can't find any studies... my social sciences research-fu is apparently really weak), and could actually be proven (as much as such things could be proven).

That said, without the proof that they actually are male-gendered, it's kinda flimpsy.

Crito10• 13 years ago

"without additional information, most people would assume these words refer to a male rather than a female"

Surely that is the problem. The problem isn't that those traits are seen as desirable or common for entrepreneurs. The problem is the people think those traits can only be found in men.

Particularly the idea that "self-reliance" is a male trait is a classic example of something that feminists have been successfully refuting for decades. It should be very clear that the notion that women cannot be self-reliant is very old fashioned; if that attitude is still present in the bay area, then it needs to be stomped out.

ars_technician7• 13 years ago

No, that's Ahl's intentions. Check the previous quote: "celebrating masculine concepts of control, competition, rationality, dominance, etc."

Apparently she believes being rational is a masculine concept.

mtrimpe7• 13 years ago

It's about taking traits that occur more frequently in men (whether they're due to nature or nurture is irrelevant) and then using them as the scales on which to evaluate entrepreneurs. There's no reason why entrepreneurs shouldn't be described as caring, holistic, fair, benevolent, cooperative.

A good example of these kinds of hidden biases is that I've found that women tend to prefer presenting their business in a calm narrative that allows them to connect emotionally with the audience.

Most startup pitches however are designed for a rapid-fire, fast one-minute, high-energy, show-time kind of 'pitch,' which to a large degree is a display of masculinity and thus a playing field where women are at a disadvantage because they either need to bend the rules to fit their natural presentation style or imitate an unnatural presentation style; both of which are disadvantageous to them.

I still remember being at this accelerator pitch where we saw tons of decidedly mediocre companies pitch and then there was this one women who had such a powerful presence and decided to bend the rules. She extended her time from one to two minutes on the spot and convinced the event organizers to go along with that in such a beautiful display of female dominance and went on to deliver a great story that emotionally connected with almost everyone in the audience.

In the end she didn't go on to the next round of course because well ... she broke the rules ...

krstck2• 13 years ago

This is the kind of rubbish that actually perpetuates sexism in the name of fighting it. "Leader" is a male-gendered word, are you kidding me?

FD3SA• 13 years ago

I agree with most of what this article is saying, but the existence of YC is a perfect counter-argument. Although I've disagreed with PG regarding his opinions on "Zuckerberg-likeness" being important in founders, I know that YC selects for merit above all else.

How do I know this? Because PG has stated many times that he is excited about founders from the University of Waterloo in Canada, which used to be unknown on the international level. Clearly, after having met some incredibly talented founders, the YC team has calibrated its "prestige" ranking to match their observations based upon UW founder success.

To me, this is as close as one can get to a merit based system. Hire based on reputation, but adjust your reputation based upon the data you collect in real time. And most importantly, give everyone a fair chance. Never disqualify anyone preemptively without viewing their application.

Furthermore, as far as VCs are involved, there can be no better stamp on your resume than having gone through a program like YC.

Now, the counterpoint to all this is that, ideally, you should be able to crowd source/bootstrap this whole thing as a solo founder because you have merit. I think we are definitely moving in that direction, but some ventures will always be more capital intensive in terms of burn rate. As such, incubators and VCs will still be the "safe" path for fast growing and/or very ambitious companies.

walshemj4• 13 years ago

You do know waterloo is where some of the builders/inventors of colossus ended up post ww2 and has along history in computing.

untog2• 13 years ago

I'd disagree with that one data point proving too much. For a start, I don't think it contradicts the "Zuckerberg-ness" issue- graduates from Waterloo are also very likely to be hoodie-wearing white men, I don't think that being Canadian counts as particularly 'diverse'.

Sure, PG is open to graduates that aren't from Ivy League universities. That's one factor. There are a lot of others.

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

Waterloo has been prestigious for at least 5 years (when I was applying it was among the hardest Canadian universities to get into, and it was already globally recognized). The only thing that has changed is more VC money, and more startup incubators, drawing the interest of progressively larger institutions.

I think the whole "meritocratic" argument is stupid. But it's worth pointing out that Waterloo is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a lot of startups are being founded because a lot of support and infrastructure is being thrown at the students. Whether the students are more suitable than others is anyone's guess, but they're in the right place at the right time (and they can afford the tuition).

Crito10• 13 years ago

Whether or not Waterloo is a self-fulfilling prophecy, after having professional experience with Waterloo graduates, I cannot help but pay attention when Waterloo vouches for somebodies merit.

Whether Waterloo is making merit, or merely distilling it out of the general population isn't really important in this case.

steven20123• 13 years ago

This article is largely garbage. Sure, Silicon Valley isn't a "perfect" meritocracy, but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world, at least that I've been in.

In Japan, and presumably other places in Asia, women are still supposed to include a photograph with their resume, and employers are reluctant to hire married women past a certain age because they feel they will get pregnant and stop working as hard. I had a friend who moved to Japan, and despite the fact that his wife was native Japanese, because she was 31 and married, she was practically unemployable. And the best he could do was get a job at coffee shop speaking English to customers. After 10 months, they moved back to the US. He hates Japan because there is no meritocracy whatsoever. Everything is based on age.

There may not be a lot of women who are CEOs of startups, but it's getting better every day, and the corporate ladder is very rewarding to smart women and minorities, at least in Silicon Valley and probably other places like NYC, LA, etc. My wife, who is in finance, went from Senior Manager to Senior Director is 3 years because she's very, very smart and the CFO recognized this and rewarded her aptly. Her bonus was >$100,000 for the 3rd year in a row, and I'm willing to bet she's made more money from her bonuses than 90% of the aspirational startup founders on HN. Her peers in finance are >60% women, and they are all extremely smart and well compensated as well. If she were living in any other country in the world, who knows if she would have been given as lucrative of an opportunity.

So sure, it's not perfect, but it's a pretty good meritocracy here, and as I said, getting better every year.

mtrimpe7• 13 years ago

The point of the article was that we're pretending it's an almost pure meritocracy though; which itself is hampering efforts to improve on the current situation.

More than anything else it's about the tech industry being in denial about this.

Anechoic2• 13 years ago

but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world

Really? I think most pro sports leagues would give SV a run for it's money in terms of meritocracy.

parsnips• 13 years ago

To be fair, that's just beginning to change because of analytics.

walshemj4• 13 years ago

You mean those with rich sugar daddy's funding them as a vanity project as most top tier football (soccer) clubs are or do you mean the socialist closed shop NFL where they only penalty for failure is the pick of next years best players.

newnewnew10• 13 years ago

Look at how hard Jeremy Lin had to fight for a spot on a team. Still lots of bias in pro sports.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

$100,000 bonus - Haha what? What department/branch of the bank? No way is it IT. Investment? I work at a bank and the most I've gotten was $10k and that's extremely rare for anyone. Hell, making $100k salaries you need to be here for like 15 years.

I'm in the wrong fucking field.

JonFish852• 13 years ago

I imagine she's not your average finance person. His whole point was that she worked hard, excelled and was recognized for that. It's probably a fairly rare occurrence. Like anything else, bonuses are top-loaded, so if she's near the top of the pile, she'll do very well.

Look around the country and I'm sure you'll find $100k bonuses in a lot of fields. It's not commonplace though.

ars_technician7• 13 years ago

Not IT if the CFO promoted her.

steven20123• 13 years ago

Me too. I've done pretty well for myself in tech, but if I knew how much people in finance made back when I was in college, I would have made the switch in a heartbeat.

peter_l_downs• 13 years ago

Congratulations on your wife's success, but how does that paragraph serve your point?

    I'm willing to bet she's made more money from her bonuses than 90% of the
    aspirational startup founders on HN. Her peers in finance are >60% women,
    and they are all extremely smart and well compensated as well.

That's finance, not the startup world, and you even make the comparison yourself! Sounds like finance companies are a much more meritocratic based on your anecdote.

steven20123• 13 years ago

My point is that just because there aren't a bunch of startup founders who are women, doesn't mean that women aren't benefiting from the halo effect of meritocracy in SV. And you don't have to be a startup founder to be extremely well compensated.

Looking at Snapchat and complaining that there aren't enough women CEOs owning $4B valuation companies is not the point. It's almost ludicrous to use what is basically a black-swan, lottery ticket winner as some sort of point of comparison for progress. The real story isn't that there aren't enough of these female lottery ticket winners in SV, it's that if you are a smart and hardworking woman, you can make a lot more money than most startup founders ever will.

wonderzombie8• 13 years ago

This is anecdata. And if we're being as rigorous about evidence against the claim that it's meritocratic, we need to be as rigorous as evidence affirming that it's meritocratic. This does not meet that standard.

nawitus2• 13 years ago

Things are nuanced rather than binary.

altoz• 13 years ago

tl;dr silicon valley isn't the liberal utopia and therefore not a meritocracy.

delinka• 13 years ago

That presumes liberals are redefining 'merit' such that it's meaningless. While I would not be surprised in the least if that's the case, I have yet to see indications from any liberal thinkers that they'd ever want to base anything on merit. Even a redefined "merit."

beat8• 13 years ago

I'm a liberal who believes strongly in meritocracy. The problem starts with limitations of opportunity. I grew up poor, in a poorly educated family, and I appreciate just how difficult it is to grow out of circumstance.

There are two separate problems here: What opportunities you have, and what you do with the opportunities you have. The latter is where merit comes in. The former is where the -isms live. Those who are fighting disadvantages must spend tremendous amounts of personal energy just getting to be on the level, merit-based ground.

Now, I think the author is fundamentally wrong in a lot of ways. She's faulting Silicon Valley itself, but I think the problems are upstream, and she did basically no analysis on that. So white males are getting the majority of venture deals? What's the ratio of deals applied to deals received? White males are the ones looking for venture deals and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurial stuff. No one is stopping women, minorities, etc from doing the same thing, and I doubt there's a significant punishment for them compared to the other 99+% of companies that get rejected.

And another thing she glossed over is the meritocracy of simply getting to that point. You don't get to waltz in and get showered with angel money just because you're white and male. You have to deliver. Those institutional biases to twenty-something Stanford CS dropouts reflect both the kind of people likely to succeed, and the kind of people likely to choose the path at all.

So while the article itself is mostly a fail, there's some truth to it. Whining about how liberals hate merit, on the other hand, is just political nonsense.

ars_technician7• 13 years ago

liberals don't believe in meritocracies. They value labor and the 'effort' put into something. i.e. someone who dug ditches all day should receive more compensation than someone who wrote code for 2 hours.

bruceb2• 13 years ago

Yeah those damn liberals. I totally heard Obama say ditch diggers should have offices in SV with foozball tables and fancy chairs and coders should be paid minimum wage.

beat8• 13 years ago

Nonsense.

nawitus2• 13 years ago

Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered — these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.

What a load of feminist rubbish on the front page.

Kurtz792• 13 years ago

I don't agree with many of the author's assumptions (do most people working at startups in SV really think that their web/mobile app will "change the world"? do everybody in SV think that tech entrepreneurship is a solution to everything ?).

I would say that most people just want to work on something they like, having an alternative lifestyle to a 9-5 job and possibly taking the chance of making it big.

I agree that there is a excessively romatic view in some circles, but is it the real representation of what people in SV think ? Or is it the most appealing view for the media ?

Regardless, some points are valid. The fact that most (all?) entrepreneurs come from middle/upper class rings true, and the "white male" argument as well (although less so, imho).

But to the credit of tech entrepreneurship, there ARE proyects that are helping to close the gap, offering education to everybody, I think about Khan's Academy, Coursera, Udacity...

I think it's too convenient to classify tech entrepreneurs as a single group, with the same vision and ideals.

pg2• 13 years ago

The same arguments would prove that math isn't a meritocracy. Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely. And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good. Indeed, that's what the word means in ordinary usage.

mtrimpe7• 13 years ago

Way to miss the point and exemplify it in the same breath.

The article is about how SV thinks it's more meritocratic than it actually is and how this false pride is a problem in and of it's own.

P.S. P.G. When this thread started I was almost tempted to make a snide comment saying "3.. 2.. 1.. Flagged off the front page."

It actually took a bit over an hour but it's now indeed been flagged off of the front page despite getting a significant number of upvotes while it was there.

Is that not just another example of allowing a vocal minority (flag-wise) to silence a majority who are apparently interested in discussions like these?

SilasX2• 13 years ago

"SV thinks it's extremely meritocratic. It's only very meritocratic. This is a big problem."

hacker7895• 13 years ago

In your mind, is it possible for someone to disagree with the article without "exemplifying the problem"?

That's the issue with first-world "social-justice warriors", like the author of the linked opinion piece. If you disagree with their premises on factual grounds, you're labeled as part of the problem. It makes honest discussion impossible.

For example, you completely ignored the point that PG made. You didn't even attempt to address it. You just labeled him as the enemy and went on to make your own point.

He made a good point, but in my mind, he didn't go far enough. Both (American) mathematics and SV are disproportionately dominated by east-Asians and Indians relative to their respective population sizes. Why does everyone ignore this?

Crito10• 13 years ago

Interesting example, both math and entrepreneurship are abound in examples of people making a big splash after going off on their own. From mathematics, people like Srinivasa Ramanujan and Gottfried Leibniz made an impact despite lacking formal mathematics educations. Their results spoke for them, not their credentials.

Edit: Nash apparently did study mathematics, not sure what I was remembering...

eliteraspberrie2• 13 years ago

Better examples of autodidact mathematicians are Galois and George Green.

freefrancisco7• 13 years ago

That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley? If there is, then the author's argument has some merit. If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal. To what end?

pg2• 13 years ago

That is an interesting question. I still can't think of one better than math and the hard sciences, which in my experience are roughly tied with SV.

The to what end question is easy to answer though. It gets you a lot more attention to claim SV isn't a meritocracy than to claim that math isn't.

ForHackernews4• 13 years ago

is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Obviously professional sport. Especially "one-dimensional" sports like running or swimming. The "best" runners in the world are so named because they consistently run the fastest. There are some qualifiers in terms of who has the time and money to train, and access to coaching, but all in all it's highly meritocratic.

eliteraspberrie2• 13 years ago

The end is to sell her book, which is published tomorrow.

vellum• 13 years ago

That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Jobs where the individual’s numbers are everything, like sales and trading.

If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal.

The author makes the mistake of looking at Silicon Valley as a monolithic institution. There are many different aspects to life as a dev.

Having said that, coding ability isn’t >*. Things like culture fit and the ability to work with other people also factor in, unless you go the solo dev route. Also, there are still a lot of idiots getting promoted, like the people that end up populating the tales of The Daily WTF.

xrctl• 13 years ago

I would submit that mind sports are the most meritocratic subculture; performance is statistically ranked and sometimes measured directly.

And........ we find that there are no women at the top.

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at speedcubing [1].

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at chess.

There are only a few women in the top 100 at scrabble [2].

There is only one woman in the top 100 at Go (EGF).

[1] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-speedcubing.html

[2] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-scrabble.html

21echoes3• 13 years ago

Math is a field famously overrun with white men. Probably not the best comparison to make if you really want to talk about what a "meritocracy" should look like. Unless, of course, you think white men naturally have more merit than everyone else..

newnewnew10• 13 years ago

I never thought I'd live to see Marxists attack Math with their class war nonsense, but there you go. Shameless.

yummyfajitas4• 13 years ago

Do you believe there are a large number of people in {white/asian men}^C who are good at math but unable to progress in the world of math?

freefrancisco7• 13 years ago

So just because white men predominate in a field that automatically makes the field less meritocratic? If you live in a society where white men have more access to the tools that will allow them to forge their merit, when those white males encounter a meritocracy they will naturally rise to the top. You can argue that the society where these men come from is not meritocratic, but you can not argue that the field they enter is not meritocratic just because they are over represented.

hammerzeit• 13 years ago

Math is a good analogy, because I think it illustrates the real question here -- to what degree should we care about the pipeline into the meritocracy?

Is a meritocracy effective if it's selecting the most deserving candidates from a skewed pool? Can we call it a meritocracy? Is it fair, for that matter, to evaluate a meritocracy by expecting an even distribution among attributes like gender or ethnicity?

jraines• 13 years ago

The war on the word "meritocracy" is just weird. You can just watch it bubble up through twitter to large blogs, to wired.

The weird thing about it is the people who hate the word are arguing not against the actual usage -- "people who demonstrate their merit get ahead" -- but against the illiberal definition they've assigned to it: "people who have inherent merit get ahead".

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the valley, and if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection. However, if they're getting money for things that you don't think have merit, like the Nth photo sharing app, then I think it stands.

ForHackernews4• 13 years ago

if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection

That's exactly what happens. You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley. Now, you can hand-wave about connections, and entrepreneurial culture or what have you, but at some level, that just reinforces the point.

hacker7895• 13 years ago

There are hugely disproportionately more Indians and East-Asians than there are whites in the Silicon Valley. Why do you think that is?

crusso3• 13 years ago

So where is your data showing that?

newnewnew10• 13 years ago

What percentage of black female CS grads from Berkeley can't get their startups funded? It would surprise me to hear there were many, because the CS grads I've known from Berkeley are very good

dnautics• 13 years ago

here is the problem with the concept of "meritocracy". What constitutes "merit"? And if you have two orthogonal, meritorious qualities, which is more deserving of advancement, one who is 100%A, 0%B? Or another who is 0%A, 100%B? Who gets to decide?

kumarski2• 13 years ago

I look at companies like Everpix with users, revenue, and growth and then companies like Albumatic.

Albumatic raised 4.1 million dollars and pivoted 3 months later.

Everpix was building a product that users loved and they had the trajectory to be great.

One question we must ask is: "What do we define as merit in silicon valley?"

kumarski2• 13 years ago

Additionally, while it is far from optimal, I do believe we(other than Israel) have the best systemic distribution of capital to companies.

crusso3• 13 years ago

The myth is that anyone can come from anywhere and achieve great success in Silicon Valley if they are skilled. It holds that those who “make it” do so due to their excellent ideas and ability, because the tech scene is a meritocracy where what you do, not who you are, matters.

Thus is the straw man constructed. The dismantling of that poor fellah is absolutely breathtaking to behold. He had it coming.

Who actually makes absolute claims like those except for in a feel good, keep your glass half full if you want to succeed kind of a way?

johngalt• 13 years ago

Anyone writing an article like this should also write what would change their opinions and a plan to fix it. Imagine you've won me over completely and SV is an elitist boy's club. Now what do we do to change it? When is your standard met? Of course defining those views would be harder to defend. It's much easier to have arbitrary standards of fairness and point out how others don't live up to it.

elchief2• 13 years ago

So I was editing OpenStreetMap the other day, because I wanted to fill in the shops in my neighbourhood.

They have a feature where you can see all the editors that are near you. There were dozens of them, and they were all men.

Why? What could possibly be preventing women from editing OpenStreetMap? Why are men at the vanguard of this project? This project is good for society, and I saw no women.

I was actually surprised, after the Wikipedia-is-dominated-by-men articles from a few months ago. I expected that women would purposely be seeking out opportunities to contribute in other areas.

In a few years when OpenStreetMap is larger, feminists will complain that there aren't enough women editors, and that men are preventing them. But men aren't preventing them.

When there's nothing preventing your group from doing something, and your group is under-represented, it is your group's fault.

beat8• 13 years ago

Alternately, when you assume there's nothing preventing someone from doing something, that doesn't mean there's nothing preventing it. First rule of debugging should be to not walk in with a bunch of assumptions and jump to conclusions based on them.

Start following out the logic of your concluding sentence, and it leads to "groups of people are unsuccessful because they are lazy and/or stupid". Is that really a conclusion you expect to reach, or that sounds right to you? If not, then maybe your assumptions are flawed.

elchief2• 13 years ago

Two economists see a Ferrari. "I want one of those", says the first. "Obviously not", says the other.

brosco45• 13 years ago

It's who you know, not what you know.

katrinae• 13 years ago

I am so happy that this view is being shared - so happy, in fact, that I created a HN username just so I could comment on it. I am female and graduated from MIT several years ago. While I was there, tech entrepreneurship far and away the sexiest thing to be doing. It was at the point where you felt like a loser if you didn't have your own startup.

Unfortunately, this fetishization of startups resulted in many ideas that were, to put it bluntly, stupid. I couldn't believe how many people - including investors, not just students - were obsessed with creating iPhone apps and social media networks.

I had a telling encounter a year ago with a woman who ran an incubator; it was somewhat tech-focused, but also had a creative bent and was partially funded by state money for assisting small businesses. I wanted to invest my money locally (a la Slow Money - www.slowmoney.org ) and was looking for mentors and partners. We had a long conversation during which this woman said things like, "what a great idea, I've never heard of anything like that before". At the end of it, though, she asked: "so let me get this straight. Are you an innovator, or do you just want to fund innovators?". This kind of myopia about what constitutes innovation devalues the contributions of non-tech entrepreneurs (and many others, too); furthermore, it discourages young people from attacking important problems outside of technology.

Interestingly, the Economist had an article recently about how public veneration of the tech elite may be ending: http://www.economist.com/news/21588893-tech-elite-will-join-.... Even though I'm part of this group, I'm glad this issue is being discussed.

ForHackernews4• 13 years ago

Sadly, this article has already been kicked off the HN frontpage by the "flamewar" filter, and the comments here (including from HN's illustrious founder, Paul Graham) illustrate just how resistant tech types are to the mere suggestion that factors beyond individual gumption play into their successes.

memracom2• 13 years ago

My take on this, and I have spent some time in SV working at a startup in Redwood City, is that SV does NOT attract the best and the brightest. Instead it attracts a gaggle of me-too-ers who apply cargo cultism to ape the successful companies. This actually has the effect of REDUCING innovation because the startup culture is afraid to try new things, afraid to build on something tried and tested in the MidWest or New York because they are worshiping at the temple of Sandhill Road.

It is not just an issue with women (who the article quite rightly points out, have a great track record of starting successful businesses) but it is also an issue with age and with experience. SV often rejects people who are not young enought purely for ageist reasons but it also rejects those who are too experienced, too educated. The kind of people that built NASA are persona non grata in SV.

There are still some smart people coming out of SV because of Stanford and UC Berkeley being there, but if those two schools moved away, the whole house of cards would collapse.

avifreedman• 13 years ago

Effort does not correlate exactly with results, but the chances of success are high if one tries and is capable.

In both tech and hustle, it's easier with wealth, privilege, connections, luck, and/or friends.

But large swaths of tech and hacking can be done on a $200 netbook or a lab of $100 used notebooks.

The hustle part... That's easier if you have hustle. If you are a geek, make a tool that's needed and sell it to another geek.

I've seen male, female, black, white, mongrel, rich, poor, and those with role models and without success at tech and business. It's harder without but still possible.

And I think SV may indeed be the best place in the country to succeed in - in gambling terms, the result converges faster with the expected value given effort and application.

Particularly (in my opinion) because past failures are discounted and companies, especially startups, are willing to give startups a try without as much suspicion.

benched• 13 years ago

Nothing that people do could possibly be a meritocracy, because people are fucks. In fact, every social problem is easily explained by the fact that people are fucks. Q.E.D.

Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

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