Like a lot of folks, I’ve gotten sucked into reading about Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey. Part of that, I’m sure, is the fact that we relish witnessing women in the midst of a catastrophic fail (which is a super crappy tendency to have…).
But while I was reading their stories, I was morbidly fascinated by how were they able to get away with so much and how easily we’re deceived by unsubstantiated markers of wealth or expertise.
Let’s be real though, I was also left wondering if a person of color could have been as successful.
After all, PoC can’t “get away” with everyday activities like sleeping in a dorm common area.
I’m all for taking risks to get places, especially when it comes to entrepreneurship. But the reality is, some people are rewarded more for those risks than others.
According to a piece by Bärí A. Williams:
“…[R]esearch shows that black founders who get a chance to pitch VCs succeeded at the same rate as all other founders; nonetheless, black founders account for just 1% of funding received. We need more people who can identify that talent and act on it, which is hard to do when less than 3% of the employees on VC firms’ full-time investment teams are black or Latinx.”
The stats are pretty bad for women too. From an article about Ashwini Anburajan:
“Of the $84 billion of VC investment that went into startups in 2017, just 2.7 percent were invested in women-led companies, according to Fortune.”
And the odds are even worse where race and gender intersect (surprise, surprise!):
“Black women founders comprised just 0.2 percent (24) of all venture deals (10,238) from 2012-2014, according to a study by digitalundivided, an organization that supports black and Latina women tech founders with coaching and funding.”
In the cases where folks decide to ignore the odds and go for it, they can sometimes even be penalized for taking risks. The VC world aside, women who decide to ask for raises “were more likely than men (30 percent versus 23 percent) to report that after asking for a raise or a promotion, they received negative performance feedback that they were ‘bossy,’ ‘aggressive,’ or ‘intimidating,’” according to Vox.
I’m sure that as folks who traditionally haven’t been in positions of power gain it, we’ll be hearing more and more stories of them messing up (hey Miki Agrawal).
And maybe it’s possible that there are certain traits that are likely to make you more successful in the current business world and also more likely to mess up (although maybe it’s dangerous to believe that “CEOs are bad” because scripts like “rich people are bad” probably hold us back from being super ambitious, but I digress…).
But since one part of the personal finance equation is making more money, it’s important to consider how the barriers to earning more are different for different people and to find ways to break them down.
So what can we do? I guess we can start by questioning why some people are at the top disproportionately and fighting back against the stories that we’re told (“black men are dangerous” or “white women are innocent”) that are at the root of this discrepancy.
But we can also use money to even the playing field a little. Maybe buy your next coffee at a local minority-owned business to reward the risks that those entrepreneurs took. Or pretend you’re a tiny little badass VC and find a small entrepreneur’s Kickstarter to contribute to.
The advice we get for building wealth already involves a gamble–whether through entrepreneurship or investing in the stock market–but for some there can be even more factors that can make the odds bleaker.
If you have any other thoughts, let me know and sign up for my newsletter below, where I’d love to continue the conversation and share any helpful responses I get!