Tech companies are famous for moving fast. Yet despite calling diversity a priority since 2014, they remain mostly white and mostly male.
A survey of 67 workers highlighted the issues faced by people of color, women and LGBTQ people in the tech industry.
The problem, in Kapor Klein’s estimation, is not one of education but of access and support. A number of Black tech professionals agree that the industry’s reliance on personal relationships to grant access and opportunity is partly to blame, producing a network effect that militates against Black and Latino inclusion.
The large pools of money that invest in venture capital funds as limited partners will trust new venture capitalists to handle their money only if more established investors they’ve worked with in the past will vouch for them — and more established Black investors are few and far between.When a Black VC goes out to try to raise a new fund from those limited partners, Maqubela said, “They’re taking all the demographic patterns they know and applying them purely against you.
“I’ve spoken to a black VC who could run circles around me intellectually on finance, product, you name it, but didn’t know you needed strong references to go to LPs credibly,” Maqubela said. “It is a testament to the structural nature of how venture capital is broken.”This system has made for a venture capital landscape that is less diverse than more mainstream financial institutions.
Companies are reluctant to broaden the schools they recruit from to include historically Black colleges and universities, said Williams, who advocates for diversity in Silicon Valley. “It always comes down to some semblance of seeing it as lowering the bar,” she said. Williams, who used to work at StubHub and Facebook, said she’s seen candidates get passed over because they attended an HBCU.
“Tech’s approach to diversity the last few years has been like filling the bathtub with the drain open,” said Kapor Klein, who co-wrote a 2017 study on the topic. She said companies need to do the hard work of inspecting everything from hiring and investment practices to who runs the HR department to root out practices that alienate and exclude underrepresented groups. “If they’re biased, fix ‘em,” she said.
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