Why we must acknowledge privilege and bias to tear down systemic inequality

Growing up, whenever I felt discouraged, my dad’s words of inspiration were, “Water always finds its level.” As a chemical engineer, he was being scientific with his inspiration -- he was referring to the phenomenon where if you hold different widths of tubes in a trough of water, water always gets to the same level in each tube. It was his way of saying that if I just worked for it, I would achieve whatever I set my mind to.

I grew up with this view of meritocracy, free of race or gender role constraints. Even my grandfather in the 1940s was an advocate for gender equality -- my mom and aunts are all doctors. My parents were equally progressive -- they had the same expectations of achievement for my brother and me.?

So when I found that water wasn’t finding its level, I kept thinking that it must be my fault -- I was being oblivious to the alternate explanation that perhaps there were blockages in the system. I only realized this when I was almost burnt out from being an entrepreneur.

In 2012 when I was fundraising for my second startup, Likelii, an online wine store that offered personalized recommendations, the feedback I got from VCs was overwhelmingly positive: “This was the best pitch I’ve seen in years. Let’s keep talking.” But even after many great pitches and positive feedback, it never quite translated into being able to close the round.?

One VC who liked the pitch said that if we could show a strong conversion funnel, he’d be interested in investing. Here was proof that water could rise to its level. After six months of hard work, our numbers were looking promising and I followed up. We had 68% of inbound visitors engaging with our recommendations engine, of which 33% registered, and out of this 8% were buying wines. The conversion funnel was strong but our absolute numbers were still small -- we could only afford to spend $5K a month on marketing and were getting 17,000 unique visitors a month. We wanted to raise a seed round so we could demonstrate this conversion funnel on a larger scale. His response this time was sobering, “I’m impressed with what you guys have achieved. But in the end, investment is a gut-based decision and I’m just not feeling it.”?

I saw my white male counterparts get funding with far smaller barriers to cross. Getting funding wasn’t a matter of showing metrics -- a good friend of mine (white male) got funding for the idea of becoming the next Visa without any product in the market. Many investors who didn't want to invest in Likelii because we were in the alcoholic beverage industry had no such qualms when investing $6M in a startup in the same space that was started by three (white) guys straight out of college.?

I began to realize that gender and color were important factors in determining who got investment. Studies show that female founders receive just over 2% of the total venture capital invested in a year. For women of color, the statistic looks much worse. According to incubator and research center,?DigitalUndivided’s?ProjectDiane?and ProjectDiane:Latinx studies, Latinx women-led startups raised 0.32% of the total VC funding raised by startups, while black women raised only 0.06%.

Yet, I brushed aside such stats after I talked about my experience with women who had succeeded in the startup world. What I heard often was survivor bias, for example, a successful entrepreneur declared to me, “I don’t see it as a disadvantage to be a woman. In fact, I often use it to my advantage that I’m underestimated.” A woman VC dismissed that it’s harder for a female entrepreneur to get funded. Her advice was, “You have to get a thicker skin.”?

I was in a downward spiral, overworking myself, and convinced that if I just worked a little harder, I could get what I wanted. It was taking a toll on my personal life -- my husband and I spent most of our time arguing and my 6-year old was angry at me even in her sleep.?

My turning point came when I attended a talk by Peggy McIntosh about the unearned advantages and disadvantages that we carry with us in every endeavor. For example, I have a Bachelor’s and a Master’s from MIT but I couldn’t have applied to MIT as an international student from South Africa without a few unearned advantages. I came from a well-educated family that encouraged me to apply and we could afford the fees for my application and standardized testing.?

My unearned disadvantages meant that when I excitedly announced to a classmate that I got admission to MIT, his reaction was, “How did you get in?” It was as if my classmate had suddenly become unaware of all my achievements at school. You have privilege if you’ve never had to defend that your achievements were based on merit.?

After four of my classmates reacted the same way, I learned to avoid a hostile response to my news by sharing it differently, “I can’t believe it, but I got into MIT.” You have privilege if you've never had to talk about your achievements deprecatingly.

At the end of McIntosh’s talk, I told her about my experience with fundraising and asked her for advice. I still remember my words, “I’m going to keep working at it and I’m sure I’ll eventually get funding. But I’d love your advice on what I could do differently.” I was grateful for her response, “You may not get funding. And that’s OK. Just don’t internalize it.” It was the first time that I had permission to accept the possibility that if water wasn’t finding its level, the problem was with the system.?

McIntosh asks us to imagine a line, the “social line of justice”. Your unearned privilege puts you above the line while your disadvantages put you below. For example, being white puts you above, being male puts you above. A speech defect can put you below and so can a disability. Every factor that puts you above the line is like having a weightless backpack of goodies that makes your journey easier.?

Having lived in many countries, I’ve had the opportunity to experience life above and below this social line of justice. Growing up in India, the society was racially homogeneous but the socioeconomic differences were stark. We lived in a house next to the beach but just across the street was a slum area - I was confronted with our economic privilege every day.

When I was 12 we moved to South Africa where the color of my skin was perpetually important. As the first non-white in my class and the second in the school, I experienced living below the social line of justice because of my color.

In the US I’ve found that being a brown woman often puts me below the line. To pull myself above, whenever I would start a new job, I’d wear my MIT Brass Rat (the class ring) for the first few months and place my hands visibly on the table. The privilege that came with my MIT background was that everyone assumed that I was good at my job unless proven otherwise. Yet it was often hard to be heard as a woman in meetings.?

Most recently, when I lived in Singapore, I found that my accent and the lighter tone of my brown skin put me above the line. I was seen as an American and that gave me privilege because of Singapore's colonial history. I found it vastly easier to be heard when I spoke in business meetings. I even noticed my privilege in casual interactions on the street. I remember when buying fruit at a street stall, although there was a Chinese woman who had been waiting to be served, when the stall owner saw me, he was ready to serve me first.

The importance of acknowledging privilege and bias

It's tempting to think, "I'm not racist and I treat everyone equally so I've done my part." Unfortunately, it’s not enough to be “color-blind” because privilege (or lack thereof) permeates our every interaction and endeavor. Even if you go about life carrying zero bias, you assume that everyone is starting life at a neutral point on the social line of justice. The reality is that every person started the journey either above or below the line. When we don't acknowledge that the system doesn't give everyone an equal chance, we become part of the problem.

Being below the line meant that I never managed to raise a VC round for Likelii. For someone else who is far below this line of social justice, it affects their ability to make a living and feed their family. To help society make progress, we need to pull up those below the line whenever we can.?

If we all acknowledge what puts us above and below the line, each of us can extend the privilege we have and give access to those who don’t. Water will find its level but only if we fix the blockages in the system. It’ll only happen if we all recognize our unearned advantages and disadvantages that we carry with us.