By Asad Ramzanali & Josh Sledge, Financial Health Network
这并不奇怪,你们中的大多数reading this post, but it is worth stating:Fintech has a diversity problem。
金融科技多样性的具体数字很难钉住。但是我们确实知道，在领导层面，技术和金融都大大缺乏种族和性别多样性。在风险支持的科技初创公司的首席执行官中，只有3％是女性，少于1％是黑人，而西班牙裔则不到1％。金融上的数字同样糟糕：只有4％的全球银行是由女性首席执行官领导的，而且很少有高管是少数群体。
A few months ago, we started asking ourselves what we should be doing about the lack of diversity in fintech in our role as an active participant of the fintech ecosystem. This question is especially poignant for us at Financial Health Network because we support innovation in products designed to improve financial health — particularly for the 57% of Americans that are struggling financially. While women and racial minorities don’t make up the entirety of the financially struggling, their representation among the segment dwarfs their representation among fintech founders. Innovation can come from many sources and we are of the belief that a large and diverse group of people are needed to work on solutions to improve financial health for Americans.
当时，我们开始与第二个公司会面，以金融解决方案实验室(FinLab), a $30 million, a five-year initiative managed by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (Financial Health Network) with founding partner JPMorgan Chase that supports early stage innovators that can help improve financial health for Americans.
What follows is built off of an internal paper we developed to help establish our point of view on how we can contribute to improving diversity in the industry through FinLab. While increasing diversity is the right thing to do on its own, we are laying out our thinking on the topic for two primary reasons: First, we want to build on the existing momentum pushing the industry to address its lack of diversity by adding our voices to the conversation. Second, increased diversity in fintech will yield more and better products that can advance our mission of improving consumer financial health in this country.
The big problem can be broken into smaller parts
To help us get our heads around the admittedly intimidating topic, we spent a few months reviewing what others have said on the topic and talking to people in the space. We hosted a brainstorm dinner with startups, moderated a panel discussion duringSoFin @ SXSW, and participated in several events and meetings with fintech ecosystem players to discuss the diversity problem. An important component to this problem can be summed up in what a founder recently told us, “The people building financial products just don’t look like the people who need these products.”
The roots of the lack of diversity are not specific to finance or technology. Deeper societal issues — like the gender and race gaps in access to quality STEM education and jobs — are complicated and can seem too difficult for any one organization to make a dent in solving. We see a couple of major root causes that are most relevant to the role we play in fintech — as a funder and supporter of existing products and services — that we can start to address.
Lack of a robust pipeline
Investors often say that there are not enough founders from underrepresented backgrounds “in the pipeline.” Most of these “pipeline” companies come from investors’ networks of other investors, accelerators, universities and ecosystem players.
这是一个问题，因为风险投资的关系和以网络为中心。几乎每个风险投资公司都会告诉您，通过他们资助的创始人的简介开始，开始就资金机会开始就资金机会开始对话的最佳方法。妇女和少数民族不像网络中。这里有一个负面反馈循环问题。寻找改变方法对于解决金融科技的多样性问题至关重要。
Selection biases
A lack of representation from women and specific racial groups among VC partners opens the door for selection bias. Venture capital firms with no female partners invest in companies with women CEOs three times less frequently than VC firms with female partners. This is especially problematic because women make up fewer than 10% of partners at VC firms, a ratio that is troubling and unfortunately declining. One analysis of the VC world shows that 2% or fewer of VC partners are Black or Hispanic.
当VC的业务数据较少并根据创始人进行判断电话时，这种偏见最早的阶段最早发挥了作用。今年早些时候关于投资者特洛伊·卡特的文章和Tweetstorm by entrepreneur Matt Josephbrought these issues to life.
Many call this an issue of “pattern matching” or “unconscious bias.” But it is hard to maintain that “unconscious bias” is a tenable position when it is now a commonly known and discussed issue. As tech journalist Kara Swisher often points out, simply acknowledging unconscious bias does not absolve people from the responsibility for failing to act to improve the situation. In this day and age, it’s unacceptable to do nothing.
FinLab numbers are improving
One small step toward improving diversity in our space is to share data about how we’re doing as an industry. The following stats reflect how FinLab is doing as a program in its second year. Overall we are doing better than industry benchmarks, and saw improvements between our first and second cohort. However, we believe that we can — and should — do better.
We use the term “founder” to refer to anyone with the title of Founder, Co-Founder, CEO, or Executive Director. We use the term underrepresented racial minority to describe individuals who identify as Black, Hispanic or Native American.
申请人
Roughly 30% of applicants for our first two classes have at least one female founder. FinLab accepts both for-profit and nonprofit organizations as applicants. Of our for-profit applicants, just 25% have at least one female founder. This compares favorably with the ~18% of all funded startups in 2014, which is an admittedly imperfect benchmark. We are unable to ascertain data about applicants’ race or ethnicity.
It is worth noting, though it is not surprising, that nonprofit applicants have much better gender diversity: Over half of applicants last year and over 60% of applicants this year have at least one female founder, CEO or executive director.
Selection
Our selection process involves a team of reviewers who help narrow down the hundreds of applicants to ~15 finalists. A Selection Committee then selects the best nine companies from those finalists.
我们的最初选择过程包括去年的24人，今年来自金融健康网络和合作伙伴组织，今年包括32人。万博电竞怎么玩两年来，超过40％的评论家都是女性。我们在2015年有两个人，2016年有四人来自代表性不足的种族少数群体评论申请。
Last year’s seven-person Selection Committee included three women and one person from an underrepresented racial minority. This year’s six-person Committee included two women and two people from underrepresented racial minorities.
总体而言，我们承认有必要在我们的选择过程中，尤其是在最早的阶段中包括更多代表性种族群体的审稿人。
Finlab公司
我们的第一和第二组各有九个组织形式zations. The first cohort includes three organizations with one or more female founders, and one with a founder from an underrepresented racial minority. The second cohort includes five organizations with one or more female founders, and three companies with founders who identify with an underrepresented race. In both cohorts, the nonprofit organization in the cohort is led by a female CEO. We are encouraged about the increased diversity in our current cohort relative to our previous group of companies.
Finlab公司with 1+ Founders from Underrepresented Groups
This improvement is meaningful and something we’re proud of. The biggest change in our process from 2015 to 2016 is that we started putting greater focus on founder diversity and seeing ourselves as part of the solution. We spent more time thinking about groups we could leverage to help notify a more diverse group of potential applicants about our program. We spent more time thinking about people who were part of our selection process. Importantly, our criteria for selection into the Lab did not change. We continue to pick organizations based on team, product, and consumer impact.
We also started asking our companies for metrics about their teams. Of the total 80 people — founders and employees — working at the companies of 2016 class of FinLab, 41% are female and 20% are from underrepresented ethnicities. We are excited to see and share these results. But we recognize a need to be more thoughtful in our approach and we are actively thinking about how to encourage our companies to improve these numbers.
FinLab 2016 Companies’ Founders by Race
Even，在我们的第一个队列中的一家公司，已介绍a number of measuresto reduce hiring biases for their entry-level roles, like requiring a demographic-blind survey and an anonymized job simulation, rather than accepting resumes and conducting interviews, which inherently open the door for human-bias. This is a great step.
Going forward
While our second cohort of companies includes more founders from underrepresented backgrounds, we need to continue improving the diversity of people involved in our selection process. At this point, we are all mindful of the biases that exist, but there’s still no getting around the perspective that is added when we have a more diverse group of people selecting companies. We’ll also continue to explore ideas and solutions for removing bias for processes beyond just selection for our program — like hiring within our companies.
We are also conscious about not only meeting founders through our existing networks. So if you are a founder with a startup helping Americans improve their financial health, reach out. We want to meet you. We are at@TheFinLab。我们保证会做出回应。
This post originally appeared on October 17th, 2016 onBlavity.com。Blavity是一家技术公司，可以向前思考黑色千禧一代，以推动文化和现状的界限。
