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.
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.
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.
You haven't provided any real evidence of the existence of a "halo effect of meritocracy" that is benefiting women in Silicon Valley.
There are lots of women who are well-compensated outside of Silicon Valley. Have you never met a female lawyer, doctor, investment banker, accountant, dentist, real estate agent or small business owner who lives and works outside of this area?
> It's almost ludicrous to use what is basically a black-swan, lottery ticket winner as some sort of point of comparison for progress.
That is a reasonable argument, but just because you can show that this is a less-than-convincing way of debunking the notion that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy doesn't mean that you have proven Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.
> 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.
You keep pot-shotting "startup founders" but it's not clear what point you're trying to make.
Given the high failure rate of new businesses generally, you're not saying much by pointing out that it's easier to "make a lot more money" through gainful employment than entrepreneurship. Heck, a person making minimum wage is earning "a lot more" than the broke, couchsurfing founders you will inevitably meet from time to time in Silicon Valley.
Entrepreneurship itself is a massive black swan event. With failure being most common outcome, and success a rarity.
The whole idea of a start up revolves around the concept of persistence. Its a long drawn battle, which demands a arduous march towards a point where some thing magical is supposed to happen. If you are not ready to put in efforts which can kill you, only face crippling failure on routine basis, don't start a company.
There is nothing fair/unfair merit or otherwise about it. This is how the game is.
Don't expect to walk into a boxing game and expect to be hit by cotton buds.
More than anything else it's about the tech industry being in denial about this.
Really? I think most pro sports leagues would give SV a run for it's money in terms of meritocracy.
I'm in the wrong fucking field.
Look around the country and I'm sure you'll find $100k bonuses in a lot of fields. It's not commonplace though.
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.
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.
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.
But what data causes you to 'tend to believe'? That assumption is kind of at the heart of the article - not that SV is a pure meritocracy (I doubt many places in the world really are) but that people's perception is that it is a lot more meritocratic than it is - and no-one ever checks to see if their perception is backed up by fact.
That said, starting with the same skills and money it shouldn't be any harder to bootstrap a tech business. If you're profitable and growing, raising money should also be pretty fair. Traction is the real meritocracy.
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.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/20120730-cabin...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Truslow_Adams#American_Dr...
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.
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?
I'd love for PG to run an analysis once of what words occur most frequently in flagged posts and their comments.
I don't think you could get a better representation of this community's unspoken biases than that.
I'm also pretty sure you'd find that words like feminism, female, sexism e.a. would feature quite high on the list.
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?
By the way, this is the bread and butter of what they teach to kids in the soft majors in university nowadays.
[1] http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html
By doing so he gave an almost painfully accurate example of the problem the article addressed, hence my use of the word "exemplifies."
As for the east-Asians and Indians; I've never heard anything but positive stereotypes about them when it comes to programming. It's worth considering that that itself might be contributing to their disproportionate presence to some degree (i.e. in which way does causality go in this case.)
I think it's a lot more interesting to take pg's argument in a different direction. If you accept the premise that intellect is evenly distributed regardless of race or gender (for the record, I accept it), then why is mathematics dominated by white males? Because it's an observable fact.
Start applying Five Whys and see what happens.
Also, in this scenario, even if the tech industry is not actively sexist, it is being affected by the sexism of the wider society - and, if you think there is anything wrong with that (eg decreased pool of potential employees/founders/idea people), then it is quite possible to make tech-industry-specific moves that counter the extra disadvantages imposed from outside the industry, like affirmative action programs for girls that give them increased access to the tools that will allow them to forge their merit, even when you can't quite identify the process that is reducing their access in the first place. In fact I think that for a field which prides itself on solving big problems, saying 'it's not us it's the rest of society' is a cop-out, and to agree with your statement and not support affirmative action in some form is equivalent to supporting entrenched sexism.
Meanwhile, people tend to forget that half of successful startup founders are immigrants, including large portions from China and India. Most tech companies I've seen are not very white. If Silicon Valley is a good old boys network, the good old boys have done a terrible job at exclusion.
That is the real Silicon Valley of today.
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.
Can you point me to the great mathematical and hard science accomplishments going on right now?
All I see is ad sales and hucksterism.
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.
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.
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).
Edit: Nash apparently did study mathematics, not sure what I was remembering...
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
For some reason, education does not carry the stigma of sports or the arts or business in these communities.
It is trendy to talk about Women in technology, but we need to think about Race and technology. Everyone notices it nobody wants to talk about it.
However, often times when someone has a valid opportunity it's usually encouraged
It's a serious question, are people of jewish faith not considered "white" in the US ?
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.
and what decade you ask it in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Firstly, I don't think anyone ever thinks that those traits can only be found in men. It's just that they believe that its more likely men to have those traits. Like the chopstick example I gave, no one is ever going to say only asians use chopsticks, and if you told them that the person in question was actually white, they likely wouldn't bat an eye. But their first guess would be asian. So it's not really a problem, because that situation doesn't really exist.
But say we adjust and say the problem is that people think its more common for men to have those traits. Then:
A) Someone comes up with a very good way of measuring those traits. Say it actually turns out to be pretty objective and repeatable and consistent. And then they go out into the field and test a representative sample of North Americans. And then they find that amongst North American men and women, men do score higher in those traits by meaningful measurements of "higher" (say both a higher mean, and an asymmetric distribution shifted towards the higher end).
Now, I'm not saying that that's true, nor do I want that to be true. But if it -is- true, then it turns out people are right! Their intuition matches reality. Now what? Maybe the problem is that its actually true, and we have to dwelve into nature vs nurture and all that "good" stuff. And this is honestly something we have to consider. Given the self-reinforcing nature of society/cultural pressures, and the non-trivial possibility that there are actual biological differences that will bias the traits of the genders, it's actually possible that some sort of difference could be found.
B) Same thing as above regarding reliable tests, but the tests come out negative. No meaningful differences between genders. Well then yes, we have a problem.
Apparently she believes being rational is a masculine concept.
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 ...
Nobody has a magic wand they can wave to give startup success to timid, easily defeated people. If it is your nature to make excuses, I suggest you go get a government job. No amount of feminist cultural revolution is going to convince VCs to throw away their money in order to be politically correct.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As I said upthread, I don't think the burden of proof should rest solely on people who're questioning whether SV is basically a meritocracy. Either it's relatively easy to demonstrate that the claim is sound, or we have a lot more discussion ahead of us.
The important piece is not even so much to say categorically that "it's not a meritocracy," but to make the claim for data reciprocal. Ideally both positions should supply data, and in general I don't believe people expect data from folks who say "SV is meritocratic." People will rush to poke holes in people's arguments who claim the contrary, but I see a dearth of data & skepticism supporting the affirmative case.
If we're all supposed to be skeptical nerds, maybe we should apply a little more skepticism towards positions that, to skeptics like ourselves, would seem self-serving (i.e. it's basically is a meritocracy and therefore we needn't worry or take action).
According to that report, 87% of funded founders are white; 92% of funded founders are male.
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.
What a load of feminist rubbish on the front page.
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.
Sure, PG is open to graduates that aren't from Ivy League universities. That's one factor. There are a lot of others.
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).
Whether Waterloo is making merit, or merely distilling it out of the general population isn't really important in this case.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?"
Author doesn't seem to be that knowledgable on the valley.
