"My Experience: On race, culture, gender, and religion in Silicon Valley."

"This brings me to a point about “culture fit”. Often times, you’ll hear about people being a good “culture fit” for a particular team with which you’re interviewing. This basically means did your interviewers find you personable, fun, and easy to get along with. Sadly, a big part of culture fit ends up coming down to the background of the team for which you’re interviewing. A team of mostly white men will tend to find other white men to be the best culture fit, the same for largely Indian, Chinese, or Russian teams.

If you’re a woman, you’re probably not in engineering. I can’t tell you why this is, but it is. There are lots of jobs for white women in Silicon Valley tech. You can do a variety of administrative positions, HR positions, product management positions, business development positions, UI design positions, and other things, but very rarely will you find yourself in engineering. If youare a woman in an engineering position, you are likely Chinese. For whatever reason, Chinese women go into engineering. Unless you’d like to work in QA, in which case your best bet is to be an Indian or Russian woman. I have no idea how this started, but somehow it did, and there are the same “culture fit” issues in hiring here as well. Somehow, though, if you get into QA as a white or Indian man, you have a good chance of becoming the team manager...

I went to Mexico with the CEO of Uber and a few other guys, and I did that because we all fit into the same cultural group of single young white guys working at a six-man startup in a shitty office in SF ten years ago. When these guys move on to work at (or start) new companies, they start talking to people they used to work with at old companies to see if they want to join...

I’ve watched a team go from being a group of young white guys to a group of middle-aged Chinese guys as the project got boring and all the white guys moved on to startups and other more interesting places."
http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/35azfr/my_experience_on_race_culture_gender_and_religion/

This post! So much truth! I asked my Dad (the non-existent black man in tech in Silicon Valley) and he thinks it also have to do with VC monoculture, so that you need to have a bunch of white guys to get any idea started anyway.