Posting anonymous for obvious reasons. I'm not black, but I am a minority. The racism in tech is so obvious, my eyes bleed sometimes. At my workplace, they will consistently take an average white worker (no special degrees, no special schools) and promote them over and over until they are multiple levels higher than others.<p>Its all BLM woo haa on slack but what really matters is promotions, raises, projects, opportunities, and nothing shows up there. Pretty soon, you have a 24 or 25yo director of VP presiding over a PoC (some of whom are black) who has two or more decades of experience and who is obviously doing all the real work.<p>The entire c-suite has a single person of color. The board has none.<p>Then, you hear people grumbling in management meetings that some of the "diversity hires" are not motivated. Think -- why <i>would</i> they be motivated given what goes on?<p>Addendum: Not saying this doesnt happen outside of tech, but I know it happens in tech because I see it company after company, and especially at my current venture-backed employer. So consider that when you hear empty talk about tech being a meritocracy. Now granted, tech does have good numbers of Asians, but I think that is sheer funnel input volume driving that.
While bias in hiring is certainly an issue, I don’t believe that its the primary factor.<p>Most of this disparity is due to differences in opportunity. Blacks in the US are less likely to have the resources at their disposal to enter our field. They are less likely to have two parents at home, to be able to afford college on their own, to have the familial financial and emotional support system necessary to have the required risk tolerance to attempt their own venture, and most of all - less likely to have escaped the pressures of devoting all of their energy to financial survival in the first place.<p>Assuming the above statement is true, the only way to solve that problem is the address the root causes: stable families, educational opportunities, easier access to decent wages, and lower housing costs.
Like mentioned in the article, only 13% of Americans are black[0].<p>Secondly, nearly 30% of that 13% are living in poverty[1].<p>So really you only have ~8% of Americans who are both black and not in poverty. From there it gets whittled down further for cultural reasons. You could similarly ask "where are there so few white rappers?" or "why are there so few male nurses?" and find cultural reasons and pressures involved for that.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219" rel="nofollow">https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/index.html%3Fp=4193.htm...</a>
Generational wealth. Ask yourself why there are so few entrepreneurs—of any race—who can take big risks without a family safety net to fall back on.<p>Now realize that slavery was only two generations ago, Jim Crow / legal segregation ended with this generation, and mass incarceration and systemic racism are ongoing.
Tech entrepreneurs come out of IT.<p>In the US, when I was a teenager, blacks kids who were into computers were doing the same things the other people going to computer clubs and whatnot did. Some knew more than a lot of the white kids. As people graduated high school, went to college, got internships and jobs, somewhere along that route a lot of them fell off.<p>Also, I worked at some places with a lower manager that just seemed to have it in for the staff black IT person for no discernible reason, making life more difficult for them etc.
I didn't think about it before but just thinking now - I know more Indian origin tech founders in the US than Black tech founders in the US.<p>I find that a bit surprising suddenly. I'm an Indian who has never been to the US so I can not imagine the ground reality. But it's odd when I think of this. And I follow a good chunk of tech stuff online from various founders.
This article seems to solely focus on venture-backed startups. It would be interesting to understand how the venture world does in terms of inclusivity versus more traditional entrepreneurship like starting a restaurant or other small local business.<p>According to surveys from US Census data in 2017 (1), it seems pretty similar. This points to not VCs as the source of the problem but more to the general racism that exists. Starting a business in any sense is perhaps the largest financial risk any individual can take. Being able to afford that risk is a huge privilege accessible to only a few. I'm glad there's a focus on creating more opportunities for minorities in the VC but ultimately this reflective of the structural racism that seeps through every part of American society.<p>(1) <a href="https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-businesses/" rel="nofollow">https://blackdemographics.com/economics/black-owned-business...</a>
Interesting note that with sufficient discrimination, even non-discriminating agents will have the discrimination propagate to them. If I know that a black woman is going to have a hard time raising loans, hiring, finding a business partner and a white guy is going to have an easy time doing all that, even a non-discriminating VC will just go for the latter. After all, you're just blindly chasing outcomes. And there's no edge to be had by choosing someone who is holistically less likely to succeed because the environment doesn't favour them.
Isn't there just an infinite series of questions that you can ask? How come there are so few paraplegic entrepreneurs? How come there are so few Eskimo entrepreneurs? I don't think that equality of opportunity will necessarily lead to homogeneity and equal representation in every single field of commerce. People are all wired differently with different inclinations/desires/ambitions/goals/skills.
This Planet Money episode investigate the issue in an interesting analysis: <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876097416/patent-racism" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876097416/patent-racism</a>
For whatever reasons, it seems to me that relatively few black people study for engineering and science degrees. At least that's my feeling in Europe.<p>Then it's simply a trickle down effect, like for women in tech: Few choose this path so even fewer end up being tech entrepreneurs or at Google/Facebook, etc (since the article mentions the workforce of these companies).<p>So, once again, education from primary/secondary school is key and needs a long term investment. After that, all these talks about "increasing diversity" in tech by 'tweaking' hiring practices or what not is just PR fluff or virtue signalling because this tries to fix a consequence while ignoring the cause. Silicon Valley's giants should instead reach out to help on education if they wanted to do actual good long term.