[jacquesm]

You may have a point. The decision of who to fund may rely in part on seeking people similar to oneself and if the demographics of the applicant pool are not reflected in the staff of YC it may skew the outcome against minorities.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Why does the concept of free association stop, and the and the chilling effect of we can't be seen together without a representatives from every phenotype begin?

When do we start to demand that Latino rap groups (eg. Cypress Hill) hire to meet diversity quotas?

[jacquesm]

It stops when you're large enough that statistically speaking you should have people of all walks of life in your portfolio. If you then don't that's proof that there is some kind of bias at work.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

How do we determine whether the bias is caused by the employer or whether by the applicants?

Anyway, I'll agree that we need to have this conversation, and we need to work out some way of applying some rules that seem somewhat fair, and that the issues should be dealt with on all fronts.

We, in Australia anyway, already have varying rules / laws / regulations that apply to a workplace depending on the number of employees and / or revenue. So it would seem to make sense that diversity quotas would be applied in a similar fashion. I mean if we, as a society, believe that's necessary, which does appear to be the direction we're headed.

I guess I tend to recoil from the idea because I work in heavy steel fabrication and construction. The job roles in this industry tend to be very traditional with regard to gender. Women work the administrative side, men do all the dangerous / dirty / heavy / hot / long hours work. And as far as I can tell everyone is okay with that.

Until I see diversity quotas applied in the job roles that kill and injure men at work it's a little hard for me to take serious this ... squabbling ... in tech industry.

What might be best is, since this doesn't really involve me, as in: I don't work in the hotbed-tech-industry-in-a-large-city, I might just stay out of the conversation.

[jacquesm]

> Until I see diversity quotas applied in the job roles that kill and injure men at work it's a little hard for me to take serious this ... squabbling ... in tech industry.

That argument was beaten to death years ago. The basic outcome is this: you should allow people to work where they want to work, anything else is conscription (the Soviets tried this with predictable effects). So unless you are willing to force people to work in jobs they don't want diversity won't be 100% across all kinds of jobs simply because people self select for the kind of jobs they feel they can do and which will not lead to them getting injured or killed on the job in higher numbers than those that are physically more suited to doing that work.

So the diversity conversation will center on those professions where such innate differences won't make a difference. Even so there are women who do traditional 'mens' jobs and do them well but they are rather the exception than the rule.

And very few of those 'mens' jobs are really in that category, most of the time it is simply tradition rather than some actual basis in fact. Though I'll definitely yield to there being some of those in the steel industry, I've worked near two steel plants (IJmuiden and Sault Ste Marie) and know many steelworkers and would definitely not see them being replaced by females (or less bulky men) any time soon.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/apr/26/meet-wo...

That said I do know a female welder and there are plenty of women in construction who don't care about danger (which should be avoided anyway), dirt or heat and for 'heavy' we have cranes.

[belorn]

You can achieve gender quotas without conscription. For example, the state could institute a policy to favor bids from companies with no gender segregation. No one would force women to work at a construction companies, but those companies would suddenly feel a major pressure to get female employees. Similar, the government has multiple dangerous / dirty / heavy / hot / long hours work that they sub contract, and all those could get the same treatment.

You could also do the reverse and encourage men to get into more safe work, while freeing up competent women to go into typical male professions. Both psychology and veterinarian have both around 10 female applicants per male, and the median school grades needed for both is very high. 40% of those women could easy be denied a spot in those female dominated professions in favor of gender diversity, and could then go into tech. It would be very interesting if a large veterinarian company and IT company would join in a pledge to hire one minority gender employee if the other did so. A "fair trade" in the area of social activism.