Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by matt_wulfeck 3744 days ago
> When there's hard data showing improvement, then we can relax about it.

What hard data are you proposing?

1 comments

What do you mean? I'm not saying such hard data exists, but data showing that race/gender/orientation/etc are not related to being under-represented as founders (after accounting for base rates) or as funding winners, and that race/gender/orientation/etc are not related to being underpaid, being given less favorable funding terms, being passed over for promotions, or enduring unfair discriminative working conditions.

I'm not aware of much convincing data on this. Most of the data about it relating to start-ups fails to adequately account for base rates, which is a double problem: it sensationalizes superficial discrepancies that are symptoms of the social processes that generate tech workers and founders (which causes knee-jerk contrarian reactions from tech people who rightly feel the sensationalized issue misrepresents things), while failing to give enough attention to real issues that persist after accounting for base rates.