Force for Equality

Julie Wainwright

06.03.21

Discrimination is rampant in our society, and especially so in the venture world. The funding numbers for women and minorities are dismally low. Julie is taking on the fundamental issues at The RealReal, hiring her workforce to be a diverse and accurate representation of society at large.

Summary:

Discrimination is rampant in our society, and especially so in the venture world. The funding numbers for women and minorities are dismally low. Julie is taking on the fundamental issues at The RealReal, hiring her workforce to be a diverse and accurate representation of society at large.

Thuy

There's been a growing call for corporate leaders to be more socially responsible, and this has been intensified by the pandemic, by the Black Lives Matter movement. Do business leaders have an obligation to play a more active role in helping to solve societal problems like racial inequality? What mindset should they bring to these types of issues?
Julie_Wainwright

Julie Wainwright

Wow, that is a big, big question. So I have to say, especially as a white woman, I always felt like I was discriminated against. I really had to get educated to really understand. And I was there's no doubt about it, but not... But then look at what a black woman - how many black female entrepreneurs have you interviewed? There are so few. There's very few white ones. There's even fewer black ones. How many black males get funded through the venture capitalists? How many black males are there in VC? So you start looking at the rampant and structural and institutional discrimination in our society. It's really horrific. And I've spent a lot of time reading and getting educated and learning from educators during this time. So as a business, the best thing we can do is certainly be aware of our built-in biases. Everyone - managers and we've dedicated, we now are going, everyone's going through, I think, eight hours of anti-bias training and bias awareness. But more importantly, we have a huge focus on making sure what we do is equitable, which we already did a survey we're really equitable. Make sure we keep that up, but more importantly, making sure when we interview new people, we have a funnel that looks like the rest of the US. One of the most eye-opening things for me was sitting in at a conference of the Black Directors of America, and they said, look, there's no funnel problem, folks. People used to say, well, I can't find the candidates. And that may have been true 50 years ago. It's not true now. So making sure we have a diverse funnel so we can hire the best people. And to be honest, as a startup company, you're always talking to your current employees and say, do you know anyone, who do you know? Thinking that good people know good people. Well, that's great. But then those people tend to hire people that look like them. So consequently, if you don't have a racially diverse executive team when you get started, you're not going to have one five or six years later if that's the way you hire. So we want a concerted effort to make sure that we have really diverse candidates in the funnel. And then we also can eliminate bias and give people opportunities, of all color, to rise to the top. So I would say I thought we were pretty good at the beginning when I was getting educated. And now I think we have a long way to go.