The type of proposition set forth here is more relevant to an academic debate over women in the tech workforce than it is to any real-world decisions about who to bring in to your founding team.
Why? Because founders get together in teams based mostly on knowing each other, having worked together, hearing about one another's reputation, and the like. The focus is on merit as displayed by real individuals that one knows or hears about and not merit as tied to some form of abstraction such as "diversity."
This does not mean that diverse teams can't come together. They can and do all the time. But it does mean that, if a non-diverse team of founders sees one another as the best people for the venture at hand, no one in a normal real-world situation is going to say, "This won't work because we are not diverse enough." In such cases, founders simply do not measure merit by this sort of criterion - it is hard enough finding good co-founders without superimposing arbitrary rules on top of an already difficult process!
My point is that "diversity" as an abstraction simply does not figure into most decisions about how to constitute a founding team when it comes to specific cases. Thus, while the argument of this piece may be commendable, I think it approaches the issue from an ineffective perspective with its focus on the constitution of founding teams. Men and women alike are free to form whatever founding teams they like and they will do so or not for specific reasons relating to the merits of the individuals involved, not based on "merit" that is defined by gender-based averages or assumptions.
Why? Because founders get together in teams based mostly on knowing each other, having worked together, hearing about one another's reputation, and the like. The focus is on merit as displayed by real individuals that one knows or hears about and not merit as tied to some form of abstraction such as "diversity."
This does not mean that diverse teams can't come together. They can and do all the time. But it does mean that, if a non-diverse team of founders sees one another as the best people for the venture at hand, no one in a normal real-world situation is going to say, "This won't work because we are not diverse enough." In such cases, founders simply do not measure merit by this sort of criterion - it is hard enough finding good co-founders without superimposing arbitrary rules on top of an already difficult process!
My point is that "diversity" as an abstraction simply does not figure into most decisions about how to constitute a founding team when it comes to specific cases. Thus, while the argument of this piece may be commendable, I think it approaches the issue from an ineffective perspective with its focus on the constitution of founding teams. Men and women alike are free to form whatever founding teams they like and they will do so or not for specific reasons relating to the merits of the individuals involved, not based on "merit" that is defined by gender-based averages or assumptions.