Since you are referring to affirmative action and hiring quotas as “real barriers” I would guess that you haven’t really been in a situation where you the first/only person of your gender or race (etc) to do something. In that case (since you haven’t lacked representation) I’m not sure how well you can speak to its importance. But please correct me if im wrong.

This is actually how it played out for me once I recognized it. I'm of the mindset now that I can jump in and do things. And I think you hit on one of the most important lessons that came out of it for me - the only thing stopping you is you.

With that said, some form of representation helped me greatly with it. It doesn't need to be an exact match, but for me it needed to be enough to make me break my assumptions and see whatever weird walls I had put up in my thinking.

I would tread carefully when saying any kind of discomfort is “easily overcome”. We are human beings after all and it’s a pretty generalized statement.

Being a white male but simply being unique in coming from a poor community in a poor city was enough for me to inflict a lot of unnecessary pain on myself through undergrad by seeing myself as different from the majority of elites in my program.

"without artificial constraints the only thing stopping you is you."

To be a plumber, yes.

To be a Doctor, kind of.

To be anything really competitive, not really, no.

There is a reason startup and regular CEO's are way over-represented from upper middle class families, and not ultra poor classes.

If you don't grow up playing Golf (expensive), it's highly unlikely you're going to the PGA.

For the poor kids to even fathom they could do something, they need to be exposed to the concept in a material way, on the whole. Obviously it's not always the case but representation 'is a thing'. And of course it can be way overstated in importance in many cases.

most of us here have our own drive, but I’ve come to appreciate that other people are inspired by seemingly superficial things

It clicked for me when I let my publicist go wild and she got me on listicles of BIPOC founders, before, we just had lots of quotes and interviews. Only people already interested in the project on its own merits were following along. After, there were lots of people that are interested in the representation in that kind of niche who otherwise just wouldn't know how to find that representation. Or just wouldn't be able to tell by founder names alone.

and of course we got the amplified engagement from people arguing about “why does race matter” in the LinkedIn comments. so shoutout to the useful idiots, publicists expect that to exist and calculate it.

Feeling uncomfortable is not what is a barrier. A barrier is an executive sexually harassing you to the point of suicide with no recourse. See: the blizzard fiasco. The riot fiasco. The Google fiasco. The Uber fiasco. Etc…