zlacker

>>ericza+(OP)
Firstly, assume positive intent, I am not undermining the topic of racism and rather like that we are giving the issue the proper attention and hope to see real change.

That said, has anyone seen stats that say what is the right balance of POC based on market realities? I work in finance, not VC, but still as a hiring manager it’s every difficult to force diversity when the overwhelming majority of candidates are white males. It’s a similar issue as women in tech, you have to take a step back and look at the university systems and how a more diverse set can be encouraged to take a finance track. Likely, there is an issue with college in general and we need focus on why white have higher attendance rate (no data, pure assumption). And so on. It’s a systemic issue that needs to be addressed. You can’t always just rebalance the current diversity mix because the inventory of qualifying candidates may not support it.

I read recently that 13% of America is black. I googled that the average BOD is 9.2 members. To me, 1 black person in the room is about right. Granted there are probably high number of boards with 0 blacks. But I’d be interested to know if this is due to the above mentioned market realities. There are certainly racism impacting the micro but maybe the macro is better than we think?

>>conduc+zA
Yes the pipeline is real. Companies interested in leveraging the productivity of the nation should consider having an active role in more universities, instead of just the ones that get them the best connections. The federal government and defense contractors are certainly pulling from these other universities.

Regarding boards, that's a bigger dissertation. "White male" is much too reductive, when there are certain kinds of people that have disproportionate representation on boards. Even the whole finance sector has extremely disproportionate representation from some extremely small ethnic groups.

So, what is the right number? Its more like a complete rebalancing would match "market realities".

The point of companies is to address a market, the point isn't to make people inside of it feel like they won the merit lottery on their own accord. A board should be able to identify and relate to the markets they need to address. If having a voice to more accurately tap into underserved markets is the stage that the company is at now (because it adequately serves the larger markets already), then it needs more than 1 person that has experience in those markets. Otherwise it will just get tone-deaf ads, tone-deaf outreach efforts, and risk getting cancelled from making huge misses.