stoweboyd:

First Round Capital has released their State of Startups report. There’s a lot of great info charmingly displayed, but this factoid jumps out of the report:

We asked founders to pinpoint the main driver behind women and ethnic minorities being underrepresented in tech. While men and women agreed on some factors, they diverged on others. Men are more likely to blame the pipeline into tech; women place greater emphasis on unconscious bias and lack of role models.

I’m glad the question was asked, and not surprised by the gap between the sexes. 29% of women attribute the underrepresentation to unconscious bias in hiring or promotion, while on 12% of men do. 

There’s a piece in the NY Times today, The Roots of Implicit Bias by Daniel A. Yudkin and Jay Van Bavel, that describes research that shows how thinking of a person as being part of a different group – fans of a different foot ball team, or from another country – can lead to bias in decisions about them, for example, people judge more harshly if others are caught cheating in a game than a member of the observer’s own group.

It’s heartening that this bias can be overcome – at least situationally – by taking a longer time to make a judgment, where the in-group/out-group bias almost disappears. 

Perhaps leaders of startups need to take a longer time in their hiring and recruitment of women and minorities, to overcome any bias that may be lurking there.

I wonder if l, to understand this better, anyone has done any research on a different subset of tech workplace – namely fin tech – and in particular include large banks that are the source of more tech employment than startups. From my, admittedly limited, experience, whites, and in particular North-American whites, represent tiny minority overall, even when not accounting for offshoring (though disproportionately over-represented at the top where many arrived from other than tech background). The usual gender gap, however, is even worse than at startups, despite active outreach and encouragement that at least I witnessed.
My current company (which thankfully is not a bank) is less than 15% white, though I could count all women on one hand.
if nothing else it is might show that implicit bias CAN be overcome with rational reasoning and enough prodding, which makes me cautiously optimistic.