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?
when plural you want to use color descriptors as adjectives. black people, not "blacks", white people, not "whites".
nobody can say why, but they are not synonyms to be used interchangeably between sentences, and will undermine your positive intent.
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.
Why is this preferred and how would I know it's preferred (absent this conversation)? Is it a well known faux pas or something one person on the internet is nagging about (no offense)? In my mind, "people" is inferred. I think this is how people talk where I live, pretty sure I hear it on the local news/media. When I think of terms like "black college" it's inferred to be a college that is predominately attended by black people. The college is not literally the color black like with phrases like "white house".
Reminds me of when I was a kid and my grandpa would use the word "oriental" to describe Chinese, Korean, Japanese. He would use worse words at times but this was his version of the politically correct vocabulary. It was very commonly used as a PC phrase. As I got older, I learned it wasn't really the best word and reasons why. But it never would have been obvious to me that it was a racist term and seen as negative to those it was meant to described.
I am not sure there is any etymology to follow here, aside from the common theme of being recognized as people.
Regarding consensus, you can try blackpeopletwitter reddit on a throwaway. you can look at comment threads and see the reactions and facepalms when people use the adjective as a plural noun.
People definitely say it, but not people considered aware.