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Another is that white men are simply the ones that show up, because of some combination of aptitude and effort (which it is depends on who you ask), and that admissions to, say Y Combinator, simply reflect the lack of diversity of the applicant pool, nothing more

Some populations are more interested in science, in math, in business, and in taking risks than others. But all of the research I am aware of suggests that these differences are extremely small – not nearly big enough to explain what we’re observing in places like Y Combinator.

This is why I personally care about diversity: it’s the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy.

When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process, that it’s not actually as meritocratic as it could be.

There’s plenty of good research on the subject of team performance that shows that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many different kinds of tasks.

Wherever selection processes have been studied scientifically, errors have been found. These errors are called “implicit bias” in the research literature, which causes a lot of confusion, because the word “bias” connotes malevolence.

And what the grownups have discovered, through painstaking research, is that it is extremely easy for systems to become biased, even if none of the individual people in those systems intends to be biased

they had performers audition behind a physical screen, so that the judges could not see their race or gender while they played.

When rating performers anonymously, it turned out that men and women played equally well, on average.

According to the research on implicit bias, our selection processes are making some huge, obvious mistakes.

But pattern recognition is just a fancy word for bias.

I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out.

It turns out that when people are in a situation that defies stereotypes, reminding them of the stereotype diminishes their performance.

stereotype threat.

I think this helps explain why asking more minorities to apply to these programs doesn’t work. Consciously thinking about proving a stereotype wrong impairs performance.

Explicit diversity programs have the solution exactly backwards