Survey: Founders More Likely to Believe in Age Bias Than Gender or Racial Bias
And, yes, they asked mostly guys
By Kimberly Weisul
Could it be true that age discrimination is more prevalent in Silicon Valley than either gender or race discrimination?
More than a year after #MeToo, a new survey from First Round Capital says just that. It also finds that two-thirds of male founders think their companies are inclusive environments for parents, but just one-third of female founders agree.
The First Round survey is one of the most comprehensive surveys of tech startup founders. It’s been published for the past four years, which gives it the potential to show how that community has changed over time. Its respondents are representative of the community it surveys: largely white and male. But it also highlights the ways in which the experience of the “average” founder can be dramatically different from those who are not white and male.
When asked about bias, 37 percent of founders in the First Round survey said they believe that age bias — which after all has the potential to affect everybody — exists within their community. The wording of the question, which asked founders to identify various types of biases, may have made that response unusually low. When asked, separately…
