Giving up on ‘diversity and inclusion’; TechCrunch, April 29, 2018

Jon Evans, TechCrunch; Giving up on ‘diversity and inclusion’

"I went to see Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital speak this week. Her remarkable story is pretty well known by now — she “built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless,” to quoteBackstage’s site. She said several interesting things, but let’s start with this one: as of 2019, she will no longer be giving talks on diversity and inclusion.

That may raise eyebrows, given that her fund focuses on funding underrepresented minorities. Her reason, and I’m paraphrasing here but I feel I’ve captured the gist, is that Diversity & Inclusion have become to the tech industry as Human Resources is to a big company; a fig leaf there to protect the status quo, not to improve it.

It’s hard not to agree with her. Companies host D&I events and speakers; hire vice presidents of D&I; organize “diversity training” (which, according to copious evidence, doesn’t work and in fact often backfires.) They talk about diversity. They add diversity slides to their PowerPoint decks. But what do they actually do? I am reminded of Nassim Taleb’s famous dictum: “Don’t tell me what you think, just show me your portfolio.”"