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Silicon Valley VCs and the Gender Gap
fysdt writes with this excerpt from TechCrunch:
"An analysis of Dunn and Bradstreet data shows that of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms (as in Silicon Valley) were founded by women. Look at the executive teams of any of the Valley's tech firms — minus a couple of exceptions like Padmasree Warrior of Cisco — you won't find any women CTOs. Look at the management teams of companies like Apple — not even one woman. It's the same with the VC firms — male dominated. You'll find some CFOs and HR heads, but women VCs are a rare commodity in venture capital. And with the recent venture bloodbath, the proportion of women in the VC numbers is declining further. It's no coincidence that only one of the 84 VCs on the 2009 TheFunded list of top VCs was a woman. ... Additionally, it is harder for women to obtain funding than for men. ... historically, women-led companies have received less than 9% of venture capital investments; in 2007, the proportion of funded female CEOs dropped to 3%."
Time for another insightful discussion on the gender gap in tech. There will be no flames, no attacks, and no blaming. Just quiet, reflective discussion.
SSC
...that if women aren't highly represented in these endeavors, it might be a sign that women just aren't interested in the same damn things that men are?!
Sheesh!
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
>"of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms were founded by women."
Yes, we have discovered a massive conspiracy by society to prevent women from founding new companies. New evidence shows States refuse to give business licenses to women, especially if it is apparent it will be a high-tech company. News at 11....
If you believe that sociopaths are more likely to become effective CEOs, as has been claimed, then given that antisocial personality disorder is about 3 times more common among men than women, this is pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Film at 11.
..don't panic
It is indeed sad. How else am I to meet that cute but nerdy female counterpart who can outcode me in C and be in my guild?
SSC
I'm a man, I don't have venture capital, so I don't care. If women want more venture capital, its not my issue.
You should care because the only way to make this work (without further using tax dollars and programs to forcibly put women in these positions) is to do one thing: should you successfully reproduce and should your progeny have the XX sex chromosomes then it is up to you to ensure that said progeny have equal support from you to pursue desires in sports and technology ... and any other male dominated profession. As lame as this sounds, equality at home from birth produces equality everywhere.
Do not enforce Barbie Dolls upon them. Do no not let their friends enforce a stereotype on them. Support their true desires should it be technology, sports or hair dressing.
The problem here is not the VC funders or the companies. The root of the problem is society at large. It's been going on for quite sometime in some societies more than others. Only you as a parent can change it for your offspring. It's a huge societal change that takes at least one generation with a limitless maximum of generations to complete the transition. Politics seems to have made headway and technology can as well.
The other solution is that people are installed that might not be the most qualified person but present the equally valuable diverse viewpoint in decisions and products. Not everyone values this as highly as I do and I understand that it upsets people when companies and governments try to make equal opportunity employment quotas.
Remember: it's up to you to support this change. Don't rely on the government or your neighbors or whatever deity you may believe in. It's your job to change this if you want to see it changed.
My work here is dung.
Okay, I guess I should get in here before it gets really bad. I'm a PhD student who studies entrepreneurship, so I've read a bit on the topic of gender discrimination and difference in entrepreneurship. In fact, I'm writing this instead of working on the lit review of my research proposal. There is plenty of evidence that women are discriminated when they look for loans or investments. A good read is Blake 2006 "Gendered Lending: Gender, Context and the Rules of Business Lending" in Venture Capital 8(2) pp. 183-201. Basisiaclly, there are pretty large, statistically signifigant, differences in loan approval rates between men and women, after controling for a host of factors like education, business plan, experience ect. Plenty of women applying for loans for high-tech businesses were told by the banker to instead start more traditionally women-oriented businesses like salons or clothes stores. On the venture capital side, access to venture capital is heavily dependent on social networks, if most venture capialists are men, then women will have a harder time getting into these networks. The old boys network still does exist, and it's hard to break in to.
But why does this matter? The fact is that entrepreneurship is the only way that the American economy is going to grow. This is the best feature of our economy. So sure, I agree that women might not be equally as interested in entering the technical fields as men (though I'd say this is due in large part to implicit and explicit discrimination rather than anything biological). But we need all the entrepreneurs we can get. If women, who as you recall make up half the population, can't get a fair shake at starting high-tech firms poised for fast growth and export-base sales. we're doing the economy a disservice.
Sleep is for the weak!
Google sez: testosterone+finance
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Barbies? Yugh. If I have a daughter and she's not programming by the age of 10, I'm going to disown her.
On a more serious note, I hope that this changes soon. Keep in mind that we're still coming off the tail end of the "Math is hard!" generation. It'll take a while, but I'm confident as the new generation grows up, we'll get there.
Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. People who get put in positions that they don't deserve, just because of their skin color or their gender might hold the title, but won't hold the respect or the credibility.
I know plenty of females that are competent in terms of technology. But the ones who are in leadership positions right now started out in tech 20+ years ago. They were the first wave. Now, we have more females in the general ranks, and they will filter their way up. But it takes time.
Force-feeding gender equality in a meritocracy won't work. They have to earn it just like everyone else. And when they do, no one will blink an eye or care, because everyone will think they deserve it.
Fat Camp.
Allow them to be interested in what they want, if they are interested in areas that are considered female and not tech or sports etc, let them. Then again getting parenting advice from slashdot is pretty bad :)
The big mistake is to think that these financial CEO COO XYZ jobs require talent. Some of the people in these positions are extremely talented, but you shouldn't compare them to things that really require talent, like academics or sports. By and large, it's just a bunch of white guys hiring their friends into ridiculously high paying jobs with no skills other than being good at socializing with other white guys. Sorry about the egregiousness, but somebody had to say it.
Aside from the veritable goldmine of easily disputed points you afforded me (and the complete lack of behavioral science references that your post begs for that matter), you do represent an popular and therefore essential viewpoint in this discussion.
You and I will have to agree to disagree and instead I'll address the people reading this thread: this person is who you and your children have to deal with. They're not always men and sometimes they're as innocuous as writers for sitcoms and television showing that women should play the subservient role in any relationship or else it will fall apart. Your wife might make more than you, deal with it.
If you have a daughter, she's going to interface with daughters of the above attitude and it's going to be very trying for your child not to strive to make the cheer leading squad. I'ts going to be hard if she wants to sit at a computer and code up her ideas with her peers expressing this gold standard of high school politics. It's going to be hard like it was hard for me to shirk off sports and instead embrace music and computers. My friends were few but they're still my friends and, hey, we're all lucratively employed. I don't know about the football team and frankly could care less. Sports are great and staying in shape is crucial to your health and well being but the second you step off that field the real parts that matter in your life begin. In the classroom. You're entertainment when you're on the field. It might get you laid in high school but it won't get you employed later in life.
Teach your children to poke holes through arguments that rely on name calling like "gayboys" and try to enforce alpha male hierarchy. These are values and ideals that are, in my humble opinion, vital to success and acceptance. It's your choice to instill them firmly in your children.
My work here is dung.
No man is an island. These stereotypes exist whether I like it or not. I have an 18 month old son we are about to have a daughter.
I'm not about to teach my son to play with girl oriented toys like dolls etc. or dress him in dresses. Regardless of what I believe, he would be the one to suffer if I did. He would be teased. He would be ostracised. He would be beaten up. I'm not going to change society as a whole just by making my own house rules that do not fit in. Me and mine would just be labelled weird.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Really?
This is pointless.
Compete on a fair and equal level or stfu and go home.
Nobody gives a damn that women are not ceo's of it companies, if it was a concern to them they'd have built their own firms but it's not so drop it.
My gender plays no role in forming a company, a lot of other real life factors occur, the tree hugging moronic hippies that think "equality" is solved by making unlevel playing fields are completely lost at step 1.
cute, nerdy, female?
Choose two.
The other solution is that people are installed that might not be the most qualified person but present the equally valuable diverse viewpoint in decisions and products. Not everyone values this as highly as I do and I understand that it upsets people when companies and governments try to make equal opportunity employment quotas.
So you're saying that women are different, think different and behave differently and that that specific diversity is valuable and should be considered when appointing humans to fulfil working responsibilities.
Yet at the same time I sense you are against recruitment discrimination based on gender.
Either it is irrelevant to be a woman and all appointments should be based upon qualification, competance, skills etc or gender is relevant and the appointment process should factor in gender wherever it can be shown that aptitude statistically divides along gender lines.
I don't think you can realistically ask to have it both ways.
For myself I think gender is irrelevant. I have recruited, subsequently trained and long worked with a number of both men and women in IT workplaces. Some were great. Some were not. I never felt it useful to factor in their gender when estimating their abilities, professionalism and usefulness.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Women do compete between themselves more than men do. Men are able to organize large and hierarchical structures (e.g. military, church etc) while women usually prefer horizontal relations exactly because they are less willing to subordinate.
Women are just not that keen on taking risks, they prefer long-term stability - that is probably why they are not numerous in risky businesses like being a VC. And I do agree, that's natural: males are nature's way to experiment while female's role is to pick the most successful one among them and reproduce his genes. Somehow it is akin to VC's role in business, though.
Coding etudes
Most comments seem to be from the outside looking in, looking from the big picture to the small.
Try a different strategy. Look at the small picture and imagine it replicated a zillion times.
So, the wife and I serve the evil empire at our corporate jobs. Due to gender quotas, etc, she's pretty much untouchable at a big enough corporation in her technical field. The only way it could be better for my wife, is if she were a minority. Me, I'm just another off the shelf white male tech dude. Which of us should stay in the corporate world to haul down some cash and (more importantly) health insurance? The replaceable cog in the machine man, or the quota'd fire-proof woman? Obviously the least risky solution is she keeps her day job, he forms the new company.
Multiply by roughly 10000x and you get the reported numbers. No great surprise, really.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You should care because the only way to make this work...
What do you mean "make it work"? Perhaps it already is? As far as I can see the ONLY data backed evidence in the article is that more men than women get VC dollars and that the women are equally, if not better, qualified. This is NOT evidence of sexism and could be easily due to the fact that women may find the high pressure and huge work load of starting up a company less appealing than men. This could even be viewed as a sign of superior intelligence!
All I'm saying is that perhaps, for the most part, stereotypes have been greatly relaxed (although there are still some throw-backs out there) and what we are seeing is the result of those relaxed stereotypes. We do know that there are differences between the genders so it should not be surprising that this results in differing levels of interest for different types of job. What we have to care about is ensuring equal opportunity for all and not worrying about differing take-up. While the article does conjecture about that there is no evidence to support those conjectures.
Barbies? Yugh. If I have a daughter and she's not programming by the age of 10, I'm going to disown her.
Translation: "I don't give a fuck what my daughter actually wants. She is, after all, only a FEMALE. She will do what daddy wants her to do."
Thank God you're only dreaming about what you'd do IF you had children. Please, never have any.
You're assuming A: there is a problem and B: that the same percentage of women want these types of positions as compared to men. Women have the capability to be whatever they want, especially in the US. I've worked for some large tech companies and there were lots of women in senior management. It is insulting and condescending to assume that women need help. 90%+ of registered nurses and medical assistants are female. I wonder if there is some reason that men are being over looked for those positions? I think we need a taxpayer funded study to see why this is.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
So there are a bunch of dudes that you find cute and nerdy?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Carli Fiorina was such a hugely pathetic failure at HP not because she is a woman, but because she zero engineering expertise (degrees in philosophy, medieval history and business if I'm remembering correctly). Apple found out the same thing when they hired John Scully to be CEO. Total fail. When non-engineers try and run tech companies, there seems to be a *much* higher probability of failure.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I do some "Angel" investing on occasion (I'm not at VC stage yet), meaning that I invest some of my money in promising startups. As much as it may seem that "the kids" have all the tech-saavy and good ideas, I look for startups that are lead by people with fairly extensive experience in both "tech" and business. That means that I'd be hard pressed to put my hard-earned money into a new company that's being run by a 25-year-old who is probably right out of college and has never run a business before. Now, I know that many of the great companies were started by kids with no business experience and I'm probably missing out on a good thing here. However, when I am presented with two competing proposals of otherwise equal potential where the difference is that one company is lead by a kid with no "real-world" experience and the other is lead by someone who's been in the field for 10-20 years, has run other businesses (even failed ones), I'll probably go for the experience - if all other factors are equal. In fact, I believe the youngest person I've ever funded was around 33 at the time.
So, how does this fit in with the gender issue? I've been in the IT field since 1984 and I can tell you that girls were almost entirely absent from my field. What this means in terms of total experience today is that those in the high-tech field with the most experience tend to be predominately men. It would also follow that those with enough experience in their field who are seriously ready to both run a business that requires funding at the VC-level (i.e. millions of dollars) and have enough of a portfolio and background to attract VC would tend to be predominately men. Think about the ages of people running *most* large, successful companies; they tend to be in their 50's or older. Look back at how many women were in the workforce, getting management and "technical" experience in the 70's and 80's. Keeping in mind that during that time women really didn't have the same opportunities as men in the workplace and they tended toward more "traditional" positions - thus further reducing their potential experience in roles that would lead to high-level executive positions.
Is this *fair* to women? Not really. They've always had to fight harder to be accepted into non-traditional roles in business. Is it *fair* to men for women to get moved into positions of authority simply because there aren't enough women in positions of authority? No. However, as someone who puts my money out there on the line, I'm looking for the best chance of a return that I can find. I don't care about the race, creed, color or gender of who's leading the company. I care about their chances of leading the company to success and my getting a return on my investment. Generally that will tend to lean toward those with experience, and in the technical fields that *tends* to be populated with males.
Now, I'm always on the lookout for the exceptions...
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Homeless men greatly outnumber homeless women.
Or how about fixing the died-on-the-job-gap, too?
Men die more often on the job.
Focusing on those few men that have been wildly successful is silly when so many other men are used and thrown away.
Bottom line is, you have no sense of respect for ages old cultural values, and you want to experiment. You don't like anything about the "status quo", and you think a different status would be better. All of this, despite the fact that you have NO EVIDENCE to support your new status.
What do you envision, precisely? That the population is divided evenly, with 50% males, and 50% females, and both sexes equally represented in ALL professions, hobbies, avocations?
While you are engaged in your social engineering, what exactly are you going to do about other genetic characteristics? You're going to mandate that x% of our representative government consists of genetically disabled people? Including morons (not a socially acceptable term, but accurate) psychos, and idiot savants? How about midgets? How about people like me, who are color blind? Is the world ready for a hemophiliac as president?
We simply cannot all be alike. More, I don't WANT to be like everyone else. I certainly don't want to be like you - anymore than you want to be like me!
How about a little bit of "Live and let live"?
If Suzie WANTS to play with her Raggedy Ann, or Barbie, why SHOULDN'T she? Boys are allowed to play with dolls - they just usually choose G.I Joe.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's not necessary to masculinize girls to get them to grow up with a sense of equality. Don't force Barbie dolls on kids, but don't deny them either.
I am a computer scientist/engineer, I'm a woman, and I had Barbies, Kens, Skippers, Barbie's van, airplane, car, plus a giant disembodied Barbie head hair styling thing... I also had legos, lincoln logs, rubick's cubes, Lone Ranger toys, and Gumby toys. More importantly, I had books - Pippi Longstocking, Ayn Rand, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and Isaac Asimov. Most importantly, I was never told I couldn't do something because I'm a girl (or for any other reason). I was allowed to explore any (feasible) pursuit my heart desired - horseback riding, little league cheer leading, art, hiking, science, math, electronics, gymnastics, carpentry, riflery, linguistics, and computing.
I wasn't raised to be a girl.
I wasn't raised to be a boy.
I wasn't raised to be a androgynous political statement.
I was raised to be a person. As a result, I can put on heels and a miniskirt and go out for a romantic night on the town, and get up the next day, toss on a backpack and go explore the wilderness for a week without a shower, makeup, or cell phone.
I agree: Equality starts at home. It's the whole package - what you give your kids, what you tell your kids, what you teach your kids, and, most importantly, what you show your kids. You are the most important role model in their lives.
Venture capitalists are risktakers. Tech top execs are risktakers. Overall execs are risktakers. Taking risks tends to send people to the extremes of their groups, bigger winners or bigger losers. Men tend to be at the top of professions, but also at the bottom, and in the lowest jobs, and without income at all. Men are much more likely to be injured by their jobs, to have risky jobs, and live shorter lives.
Women tend to take fewer and less extreme risks, and tend to be in the middle of achievement, but more reliably achieve minimum standards of living.
Biologically men are more expendable. Aggression gets more rewards, but it also takes more damage. The limiting factor on human population growth is the number of women, while even one man can produce an entire generation among all the women.
There are social conventions held over from less developed societies that work to hold women back. And the bias towards training men to take risks and be expendable is an unfair gender bias now that the biological value isn't what determines social value.
So long as risktaking is so different between men and women, rewardtaking is going to be similarly different. We could get closer to our inherent value regardless of gender's arbitrary constraints if we stopped ignoring the gender behavior that we are free to change, but don't, that affects success. And if we stopped ignoring the costs to either gender that come with either the achievement or the risktaking that underlies it.
--
make install -not war
That's because these days, if a man can't prove for certain that he isn't, he's automatically guilty of being a peadiofiddlder if he even thinks about doing any of those jobs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Oh, don't fear "talking down" to me. Just try talking sense.
As I stated - society has worked reasonably well for millenia, with the males out taking risks, and women generally occupying their CHOSEN niches, in relative safety.
A relatively small percentage of today's population is unhappy with this arrangement, and they work hard to change society.
Do you have the least shred of evidence that society will be stronger, or that either males or females will be happier if you succeed?
Are today's women who work for a living really HAPPIER than their grandmothers who stayed at home, and tended the hearth?
I suspect that with a name like "eldavajohn" you are no more qualified to answer that question than I am. Maybe some of the ladies would like to chime in? If so - feel free!
My position is, activists are much to ready to change society, with no clue as to what unforeseen results we might see.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
At the moment, there is heavy social pressure to conform to the ideal, and deviations are often treated as horrible aberrations rather than honest differences. I think it is a good parent's job to try and discern whether their daughters really want to play with Barbies or are being made to want it, and whether their sons really want to play with their GI Joes. What is essential is not any proportion for equality, but the effort to level the playing field and let everyone succeed on their talents and abilities. To use everyone's abilities and give everyone the opportunities to be what they want to be. It is reasonable to assume that if there are very few women engineers, there is some sort of societal or biological factor. The fact that in other countries (a friend of mine tells me it is the case in China) that women are seen as better suited for engineering, or that in times of need (such as World War II) many women stepped up and acted as capably as men, that this entire thing is a social imposition and not a true desire of the people, and that people are being restricted in their desires because of the configuration of their genitalia. The reason why live and let live doesn't work is because the forces that push people to conform are not abiding by it. Everyone is unique, and that should be cherished. Girls who want to play with barbie should. Girls that don't should not be pressured to.
As lame as this sounds, equality at home from birth produces equality everywhere.
Childless, eh? My mom grew up in a log cabin, got the hell out of the poverty, went to college, and ended up being responsible for the communications network of a major railroad. My wife's a surgeon. My sisters have positions of responsibility in their fields. Frankly, the idea of women as somehow inferior is just foreign to me.
I have two daughters. One plays softball on a year-round team, spends her free time drawing and animating cartoons with Scratch (without me suggesting it - I just showed it to her one day and she took it from there), asked for and got a remote control helicopter for Christmas, and wants to be a biologist or an astronaut.
The other loves strawberries and picks only pink clothes, asks for and gets Littlest Pet Shops and Polly Pockets for birthday and Christmas, wants to be a puppy, and is the stereotype of a little drama queen to her mom's chagrin.
Two kids. Same environment. Same opportunities. One is science oriented, and the other seems tracked for fashion design. I think nature has a lot more influence than you're giving it credit for.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I'd have a double standard based on gender. If my son isn't programming by the age of 10, I'll disown him, too. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it's good to be the daddy.
In fact, as I sit here typing this, I'm eying my nine-year-old dog and thinking, "You know, he hasn't produced any useful code lately..."
Your posts remind me of those old white guys arguing that women shouldn't be giving the right to vote because it would lead to anarchy.
Or gender is relevant but only as a proxy for directly relevant skills, and we should attempt to discriminate according to those skills directly, rather than by the proxy of gender. The problem with that approach, if you would call it a problem, is it means there will be inequality of result; if gender is a proxy for directly relevant skills, then (given the roughly 50-50 split of the population) directly relevant skills are also a proxy for gender.
How so, exactly? You will note that I do NOT advocate that women should be kept barefoot and pregnant, and kept out of any field of work. I am arguing against some vapid revolutionary concept that the world should be forced to push women into a field that many women find uninteresting.
Go ahead - read all those previous posts again. The basic premise is, there are few women who own or manage a particular type of company. There are few women in senior positions in the field. Hence, something is wrong with society, and we should mandate changes.
I say, "Why?" Are there large numbers of women who WANT into these positions and fields? Are women intentionally being shut out?
Let's see some evidence. I don't mean anecdotes by one or six activists, some or all of whom may simply be incompetent. Let's see some statistics regarding the women who have struggled and worked to get into the field, and were unfairly shot down by callus fools who are members of the Good Old Boys club.
I also argue against government quotas and subsidies aimed at fixing what I see as a nonexistent problem. You want quotas and/or subsidies? Prove that there is a problem. Show me that women are being discriminated against, and you'll get my vote.
Meanwhile - how many ethnic Persians own corporations in Silicon Valley? How many ethnic Kurds? How many Jews? Should we mandate that every group in the world who might conceivably claim some sort of prejudice be subsidized, as well?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Girls are fine at that age, it is when they start dating that their IQ drops to room temperature. But I got a cunning plan: I just forbid my daughter to date! That will work right? I mean teengirls do listen to their father right? Right???
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They're not always men and sometimes they're as innocuous as writers for sitcoms and television showing that women should play the subservient role in any relationship or else it will fall apart.
Sitcoms almost always portray the father/husband/man figure as a bumbling idiot that is coerced into unwittingly doing his wife's/partners/childrens' wishes.
That's all I wanted to say.
Whenever the subject of woman not being represented in a chose profession or field comes up, I can't help but notice something interesting.
The professions are programmer, CEO, the financial field, doctor, or some other high paying white-collar job. I'm pretty sure that women are underrepresented in coal mines, off shore oil rigs, Alaskan crab boats, and the like. All of those jobs are also high paying, but they're just not...ya know...glamorous or easy to do while still have long fingernails.
What a crock.
I would say there are two things that should be noted:
1. Saying 'no' to direct pressure/requests from another human is quite easy. What is much harder to resist are the pervasive 'background' pressures, because they mostly pass beneath our notice unless we're actively looking for them. Media, TV, toys, clothes, parents, friends, teachers all contribute to low-level stereotype reinforcement. Read any book or magazine aimed at girls and there are common themes in the subtext that are often highly damaging. I don't suggest you read it, but you can google for criticism of 'Twilight' to see the sort of thing I'm talking about.
2. The subtle stereotyping doesn't only affect women. There are a whole bunch of them aimed at men, subconsciously seeping into your brain as you grow up. Expectations of how men should behave, what things they should like, what jobs are appropriate for them etc. The difference is that women, through being oppressed for so long, have had the issue brought to light in a big way, and have had the motivation to want to change this. Perhaps in a few decades we will see a large-scale backlash against stereotyping of men.
I'm a female programmer, and I've always been strongly interested in 'masculine' things, but I had the benefit of supportive parents and a lack of trash media. I've seen plenty of my peers from school who were perfectly bright and interested in learning at a young age, yet headed straight to bimbo-ville as they reached their teens. If there is a genetic predisposition towards or against certain fields (in either gender), IMO it is certainly a less significant effect than social conditioning.
If you're not part of the old boy network, your gender doesn't really matter.
I mean nepotism is still nepotism.
We must disagree.
You can ignore history if you want, and try to rationalize away the fact that minorities don't make it to the directors and boards of major corporations because they were unqualified.
I believe in choosing the best person for the job. In reality, what happens is that people also choose people that they're comfortable with. For a long time in the boardroom, that meant caucasians and not non-caucasians. Only in the past decade has that changed.
The US elected a president of color. It showed how things have changed. Yet when you travel to conferences, trade shows, conventions, people of color are often absent.
Racism is favoring one race or another to the detriment of another. This is still done today. The holy-of-holies in Silicon Valley are just as contemptuous in this regard as the boneheads in Birmingham Alabama or the stars-and-bars wavers in Columbia SC.
There is no neutrality, no color-blind world as you see it. Instead, people use subtle cultural inclusion and exclusion cues to be around those that they want to be. Integration is tough, and it takes courage, and the simple count of people of color in top management at Fortune 500s will tell you the truth about who wishes to hire whom. Call it racially unbalanced statistics, but the epithet of calling it racism is a lie.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Good point. We should probably pay men in primary or secondary education, nursing, and child care more than women. Keep increasing the premium until the gender ratio is balanced. I'll bet there are quite a few men who would be willing to teach snotty nosed kindergartners for $150K/nine month school year.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
If you think that these ridiculously high paying jobs require no skills and nothing other than a buddy from the tennis club downtown, then why aren't you doing that?
Speaking for myself: because I have no desire to. The hours suck, the non-skills are schmoozing and making small-talk with small-minded ignoramuses, and while the financial rewards are considerable the lifestyle is hollow and dull.
I ran my own company for quite a few years, and saw very clearly from my clients and partner companies that on average the higher up the food chain you went the less it mattered what you know and the more it mattered who you know. If "knowing the right people" and "fitting in with an unbelievably dull and ignorant social set" can be considered skills then I'll grant you these jobs require skill: the skills of a self-interested political manipulator, perhaps.
But the fact remains that in my current position I could do everything the company president does (I know this because I was the president of my own company and have worked in senior management at companies larger than my current employer) while he could not do a single aspect of my job.
Ergo, the GP's point is correct: CXO jobs require little to no actual skill, as the term is generally used. Or rather, to do them well does require skill and talent, but the majority of the occupants of these positions today are unskilled and talentless, which explains the dismal state of America's once-great corporations.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
That's my point. They don't truly want an equal representation in the workforce. They want an "equal" representation in the fields that they choose.
But who does?
Which, in case you're not paying attention, is not the same thing or quite as noble as the advocacy groups would have you believe.
It never has been equal. Advocacy groups, in particular NOW, basically just advocate for their groups with the expectation that because they are not the ones in power, they can rationalize pushing to any extreme, knowing that conservative groups can and will push back. It's pretty fair to assume that NOW leaders do not like men, NAACP leaders do not like white people, or at least don't care about them, and so on.
It's messy, and ugly, for sure, but, it is democracy and the thing worse than this would be to have a law that says that the government would decide who can associate with whom politically.
This is my sig.
Perhaps because he doesn't have a buddy from the tennis club downtown, isn't a member of the right country club, and didn't go to the right school/fraternity?
Funny how no-one ever actually manages to tell us what these skills actually are. I mean, other than knowing the right people. How do you know he can't do them? The average drone never actually gets the chance to show whether he can do these jobs or not. How often do you see a CEO job advertised, either in the newspaper or on your company's notice board? The average company, when looking for a CEO, asks a recruiter, who goes round trying to poach everyone else's CEO. Your ex-CEO will probably be recycled onto another one of those companies.