

Why Diversity Matters - danielharan
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/02/why-diversity-matter-meritocracy.html

======
patio11
The lean startup crowd exalts the power of data to overturn shadow beliefs
about what is good for the business that more reflect the personal opinions of
the people in charge rather than the reality on the ground.

I say this with the utmost respect: "diversity leads to
innovation/meritocracy" is a shadow belief (just like "all good programmers
are geeky white males from MIT or Stanford" is a shadow belief). It may be
true. It may also be catastrophically untrue. I'm agnostic. I can afford to be
agnostic about this since I'm one guy in a rice field and nobody's opinions on
diversity will change the race/gender/etc composition of my business (kinda
hard to do with a one-man team), but if you're making hiring decisions based
on this, you might want to start thinking of process design decisions which
place more emphasis on the data and less on shadow beliefs.

(Possible solution not accounted for above: I suppose if you value diversity
as an end goal to itself, then you could run your business in such a way as to
maximize it even if it was not optimal among other axes.)

~~~
danielharan
He addresses the point head-on: "Diverse teams make better decisions than
homogenous ones. I won’t recap the academic research that underlies this
assertion; for that, you should read James Surowecki’s excellent Wisdom of
Crowds.

~~~
patio11
I am not unfamiliar with that research. I'm just not very impressed by it,
particularly with the relevance of it to the issue at hand.

An awful lot of academic writing about diversity starts with the conclusion
and then finds results to justify it. I mean, hypothetically supposing one
were to do a double-blind study of pick-your-favorite-improvement and find, to
your surprise, that it resulted in _more_ skew, not less. ("We scrubbed all
the resumes of any indication of race/gender and ended up inviting _more_
white males to interviews?! Dude, WTF.")

Would you want that study to be in your CV when tenure decisions were being
made, knowing what you do about the shadow beliefs of the people on your
tenure committee? Bury that data and bury it deep if you value your career.

Incidentally, some sources of repeatable bias in academic studies are actually
documented in the literature (whoa, meta!) For example, people have a tendency
to not publish null results and just file them away in a desk drawer, which
means the published literature in e.g. marketing systematically exaggerates
the magnitude of effects. If your team is doing A/B testing and every test
moves the needle something is almost certainly wrong, but in the literature
something almost invariably moves the needle.

~~~
ohashi
Larry Summers would publish that paper. What about all those researchers who
already have tenure? There are plenty of academics who are willing to
challenge the status quo on thinking if they believe they found evidence to
the contrary. It would then be their duty to explain why something like that
might happen. In your example perhaps it could be associated with a white
people generally still having more opportunities throughout their lives in
education (better schools on average), job experience (better jobs on average)
and perhaps other factors. They could even spin that into people aren't being
given an equal chance based on race and there is lasting effects throughout
people's lifetime. The RESULT is the same: people hire more white people in
blind tests, but the call for action is different.

~~~
patio11
Larry Summers as in "forced out of Harvard with the precipitating event being
that he suggested there might be an outside possibility that differences in
female participation in science are caused by differences in female's
motivation to pursue science" Larry Summers? He would not be the first example
I'd bring up in defense of the academy's willingness and ability to tolerate
heretics. He had tenure, he has status, he was the flipping President of
Harvard, he had just about everything going for him an academic possibly
could. And that _still_ didn't save his job when he said something the academy
didn't like.

~~~
ohashi
I thought about not writing that but decided it would probably be good bait to
see if you were going to actually look at the rest or not and actually comment
on substance. You make it sound like he lost his status and his job. He simply
got a different position at Harvard and works with Obama, real step down.

------
jacoblyles
>"So when a team lacks diversity, that’s a bad sign. What are the odds that
the decisions that were made to create that team were really meritocratic? "

By what kind of a priori logic does the author presume that any given
meritocratic filter will happen to have an equal pass rate along arbitrarily
chosen orthogonal characteristics such as race and gender?

For any given test for any kind of ability, I would be shocked if the
population selected happened to perfectly fit the hiring-brochure rainbow.
It's just not very likely. It is very possible that a more meritocratic
selection procedure results in less diversity.

In fact, that's precisely what happened when California passed a referendum in
the late 90s to forbid considering race in admissions to the University of
California. The process became less biased and the results became less
diverse. My apologies to the author's preconceived ideas.

>"Demographic diversity is an indicator. It’s a reasonable inference that a
group that is homogeneous in appearance was probably chosen by a biased
selector. Even if men have an innate advantage at software development, the
gap would have to be massive in order to explain why startup after startup has
an all-male team."

Innate biological gender differences are not the only cause of differential
average programming ability between gender populations. Sociological factors
matter too.

While some of these sociological forces may be unjust and we might want to
address them, that does not change the fact that by the time they reach
adulthood the population of qualified programmers has many more males than
females. Thus, a lack of diversity can emerge from a just meritocratic
process.

The thinking here is just sloppy.

~~~
eries
> By what kind of a priori logic does the author presume > that any given
> meritocratic filter will happen to have > an equal pass rate along
> arbitrarily chosen orthogonal > characteristics such as race and gender?

I don't think that's a correct reading of the argument. The right question to
ask is "What would have to be true about the underlying population to support
the observed result that a particular startup is 100% male?"

Let's assume that there is significant "differential average programming
ability between gender populations" and that this has a combination of
biological and sociological causes. Even so, I think we can agree that the two
populations are probably normally distributed around each average, right?

Now, is it safe to assume a roughly equal standard deviation for both curves?
I'm not aware of any data to suggest otherwise.

So now we can be specific: how large would that differential have to be before
we find ourselves in the part of the curve that has many men but basically no
women? I haven't done the math, as it seems intuitive to me that this is going
to yield an absurd result, namely, that men would have to have an overwhelming
advantage.

At that point, it seems more reasonable to me to infer that we have a
selection bias in our filter, than that the curves are so far apart in
reality. My personal, albeit anecdotal, experience has given me no reason to
doubt that conclusion, either.

So, I don't think the argument depends on an equal pass rate, and I think it
stands up even if you believe in substantial gender differences, regardless of
cause.

~~~
bokonist
Doing a startup is not just about programming ability. Determination, desire,
competiveness, a willingness to take risks, etc, are all far more important.
Of the long course of human existence, something like 40% of men have
reproduced, while 80% of women manage to reproduce (
[http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-
anyt...](http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-
good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/) ). Thus for a woman to reproduce
she basically has to not take risks, and not screw up. But the proper
reproductive strategy for a man is to take major risks so he can be the top
dog with 5 wives, rather than the median man with no wives. The result is that
men are by nature far greater risk takers. Startups require a lot of risk and
a lot of sacrifice, it's not at all surprising to me that it is so male
dominated. All the most risky activities, throughout the entire course of
human history have been male dominated.

And also, being good at programming is not just about having the smart genes.
It's also about liking programming. I'm a nerd, I like spending most of time
dealing with abstract logical concepts rather than with people. Most women are
not like this. We have several women on our team in QA and product management.
They have undergraduate degrees in engineering from top schools. But they
don't program. Why? Because they don't like it. Whenever I talk with women
about career plans, and mention programming, the usual response is something
like, "meh". On the flip side, I'm pretty sure I would hate working in PR.

Men and woman are different. And you know what? That's OK. I don't see what
this obsession is with putting all of society in a blender until every job as
a perfect distribution of every demographic component. Celebrate and embraces
differences!

~~~
foldr
Isn't it maybe a bit of a stretch to go from the hypothetical reproduction
strategies of our stone-age ancestors to the gender balance of startup
founders?

A much simpler and more informative approach would be to compare the gender
ratios of startups in less techy/programming fields. If what you say is
correct, the predominance of men should be more or less equal in these.

It's kind of embarrassing to me that whenever these issues come up on forums
like this, people immediately start getting into amateur evolutionary
psychology. This is basically code for "I like things the way they are; end of
discussion."

~~~
bokonist
The reproduction numbers aren't purely hypothetical, it's based in DNA studies
- [http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-
anyt...](http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-
good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/)

And a lifetime of observations tell me that men in general are greater risk
takers and more competitive. I cannot prove my thesis with 100% rigor, but
it's the best explanation of the facts that I've got.

 _It's kind of embarrassing to me that whenever these issues come up on forums
like this, people immediately start getting into amateur evolutionary
psychology._

There's never going to be perfect data on either side that proves any of this.
We'll never know for sure how much of the male/female divide is genetic or
environmental. Neither sociology nor psychology is a Popperian science. So all
we can do is combine knowledge of what science might apply, personal
observations, stories from others, personal experimentation, readings from
histories, etc, and make a judgement. In a word, we use Phronesis -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronesis>

~~~
foldr
I said that the inference to reproduction strategies was hypothetical, not the
numbers.

As you say, there simply isn't any good evidence available for any position in
this domain. For this reason, I don't see the point in making these highly
speculative connections between reproduction strategies and startup gender
balance. It only serves to cloud the issue by offering a pseuoscientific
defense of the status quo (and by going off on a hell of a tangent).

The whole thing is a complete distraction from considering the issue in a
practical way. If we actually got significant numbers of women in these
positions, we could find out whether or not they were inherently unsuited to
them.

------
grellas
The type of proposition set forth here is more relevant to an academic debate
over women in the tech workforce than it is to any real-world decisions about
who to bring in to your founding team.

Why? Because founders get together in teams based mostly on knowing each
other, having worked together, hearing about one another's reputation, and the
like. The focus is on merit as displayed by real individuals that one knows or
hears about and not merit as tied to some form of abstraction such as
"diversity."

This does not mean that diverse teams can't come together. They can and do all
the time. But it does mean that, if a non-diverse team of founders sees one
another as the best people for the venture at hand, no one in a normal real-
world situation is going to say, "This won't work because we are not diverse
enough." In such cases, founders simply do _not_ measure _merit_ by this sort
of criterion - it is hard enough finding good co-founders without
superimposing arbitrary rules on top of an already difficult process!

My point is that "diversity" as an abstraction simply does not figure into
most decisions about how to constitute a founding team when it comes to
specific cases. Thus, while the argument of this piece may be commendable, I
think it approaches the issue from an ineffective perspective with its focus
on the constitution of founding teams. Men and women alike are free to form
whatever founding teams they like and they will do so or not for specific
reasons relating to the merits of the individuals involved, not based on
"merit" that is defined by gender-based averages or assumptions.

------
araneae
A lack of demographic diversity is only an indicator of a lack of meritocracy
if you believe that bias is responsible for the lack of diversity.

 _For you_ , diversity might be important, but for your trash-talking
colleagues it's probably irrelevant. (Even if you buy that a lack of
meritocracy is generally demoralizing, which I think is a pretty weak claim.)

~~~
eries
Clearly it's not important for those colleagues. I'm honestly curious as to
why, given that I believe that the behavior in question seems to me anti-
meritocratic (because it drives away worthy people from wanting to work with
your team).

I also don't think "trash-talking" is really the right phrase, as it connotes
a kind of equal back-and-forth among peers. That's not the behavior I observe;
usually it's pretty one-sided.

------
seldo
It is ridiculously embarrassing that in 2010 when a tech person talks about
"diversity" they mean "we should hire more women". Women are the majority of
the population! And yet here we are.

~~~
GFischer
However, for the hiring age most start-ups are considering, there are more men
than women, not taking into account education or other factors (Between 1990
and 2000, the male population grew slightly faster than the female
population).

Women are only the majority of the population (in the US) because they live
longer.

Immigrants with tech backgrounds tend to be mostly males, too (and probably
immigrants period).

(some data taken from
<http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/people/a_gender.html> . More data I
didn't look into here:
<http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/women02.html> )

------
blasdel
Your analogy between all-male developer/ops teams and all-female marketing/PR
teams is really apt -- both groups feel alienated by the other, but neither
will internalize how alienating they themselves are to the other.

