their categories are broad enough to arrive at any result they wanted. still I never ever considered any of the SV bosses to anything close to libertarians.
I think that SV founders fall into a pretty solid category of people who were raised by educated, successful people.
My main concern with this is that people raised by successful, hard-working people don't understand poverty and the culture around it.
Zuckerberg is a perfect example. He's a guy who preaches about tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, but he grew up in an upper middle class suburb that was lily white and had no diversity itself.
As a guy who grew up in a working class family with major cultural dysfunction that was mirrored by people all around me, I recognize that the typical "solutions" tossed out by these people are useless.
I WISH that the only reason minorities were underrepresented in tech was racism. The real reason is the culture of poverty. This spans race. How many white people from trailer parks in West Virginia or Kentucky do you encounter in the tech scene? Probably a similar number to black people from poor inner-city neighborhoods. Almost none.
In fact, when you encounter minorities in SV, they are typically from middle class families with college-educated parents. It's a perfect example of why the "surface" aspects of diversity are not only a bad metric, but one that contributes to the problem by acting as a red herring from true root causes.
Yet the SV CEOs think they know everything because they built a web app that streams music.
Exactly. It drives me crazy to hear people who never moved 20 minutes outside of downtown Manhattan and went to a 30k a year high school act like they possibly understand what it's like to be working class or that they can begin to diagnose major issues in society. They've never seen anything but the upper crust of it.
I also think its something that is regional. About 50% of the Asian population lives on the West Coast, so it makes sense that you might see more of them in big tech firms, even the ones from historically underrepresented ethnic groups (filipinos etc.).
Sometimes I wonder how the conversation would shift if Silicon Valley were instead Silicon Delta or someplace else Southern. For instance Atlanta has a fairly robust black middle class and has long been a hub in the South. Would we be having the same kinds of conversations about minority representation if Silicon Valley were centered in a region that gave a geographic advantage to another minority? In the same way that half of the Asian population is concentrated on the West Coast, half of the Black population is concentrated in the south, as well as a good chunk of the black middle class. Would we see a lot more black people in tech if the tech industry called Atlanta rather than San Francisco home?
Even so, could decentralization and remote work be seen as an avenue to increase diversity? I don't know the answers to these questions but I would love to see stuff where researchers have asked them.
