Minorities in PEVC - ask me anything

Hi,

I'm a long-time user of the forum, and I want to offer an Q&A for anyone who might find my experience interesting and potentially helpful. And to put it upfront, I'm especially interested in learning how my experience can be helpful to those whose personal backgrounds are not mainstream in PE.

On my own background - Currently ~10 years into my career, at a decent sized PE fund. My own background can be classified as "minority" across a few lenses. Earlier in my finance career, I frequently doubted if I could "make it" - I came from a low income background also, so I needed to really work hard to gain the soft skills and polish that many of my peers were accustomed to when I was younger. My professional background has been finance oriented; I've not always been in a role /at a firm that would've naturally positioned me the best for "next step" (part of it was correcting and making up for what I was lacking when I was younger in the early years of my career), though I have been able to generally do my best to keep moving my career forward so far.

While there are still many things I need to figure out for myself to advance my career, I want to offer my experience in this Q&A to anyone who might be interested. A few things that I spent a lot of time thinking about when I was starting out include:

  • How to understand white-collar work place politics when you didn't come from that world
  • How to gain sponsorship /mentorship when you have no natural overlapping interests with the more senior professionals in your firm, how to build relationships with seniors/peers/management team if you came from a very different background
  • How to be a good professional if your starting job was not stellar
  • As this is a job that involves a lot of soft skills and perception management, how to best be situation-aware and position yourself well in different settings

I'm also curious to know what others who are perhaps minorities in this industry want to know - what are some common problems people are trying to solve, and how we can get there together. If you have questions, feel free to PM me; I may anonymize all the questions and write a general resopnse on my experience and thoughts in them at the address below as well:
https://minoritiesinpevc.business.blog/

My motivation is to help in any ways I can. Yes, I may get monkey shits from certain people for doing it, but I still want to see if I can help.

Best,
A middle aged monkey

 

Thank you for doing this. Can you share on the how to understand white-collar office politics point? How did you over come this? Also - what sort of things did you realize you were lacking in earlier points of your career and how did you realize these?

 
Most Helpful

Much of the learning were trial and error, here are a few things I've observed:

1) The dominant group in this career are often very selfish and territorial in careers. They do not feel bad about blocking someone else even if it's unfair. I think this is partially because they are raised with the external reaffirmation that everything ought to be theirs anyway. This is not really comformative with the way that many minorities are brought up (for example, some minority groups such as hispanics may be raised with a strong sense of "us"/community, some other minority groups may be raised to be respectful culturally, some gender are raised /expected to be nice, etc.). It took some time to observe this and understand how to solve the issue in each case.

2) Some of the things I lacked do not necessarily apply to all minorities; I lacked them because my background was low income. For example, I was not able to dress sharply until ~5 years into my career (I'd be noticeably different and more poorly dressed compared to other folk and I couldn't even figure out why, until a few years of observations later. I had a very volatile childhood which made me more prone to stress some times (which I needed to learn to tame).

3) Confidence can be harder for someone who constantly doubt if they belong/if they just got lucky. Often times one needs to be confident to be trusted at work place. It took me time to develop that as well.

4) Much of bond-building happen in semi-work semi-social situations. For example, in one of my jobs, many people in the office went to the same private school or exercised in the same clubs. It's not easy for people who don't do so to join. However, that was many years ago in a relatively conservative setting; I do think this has somewhat loosened up in the last few years

 

I think PE firms do not care much about diversity when it comes to recruiting candidates in an intrinsic way. For the large funds (with higher LP scrutiny, and some of them being listed companies) - they "care" because of LP pressure. Organizations cite "diversity is good for business" on their websites, but in practice, people generally prefer those who are similar to them (as people always think they are the best). In terms of business, a Harvard 6'2 white male squash player will likely relate better to another Harvard white male graduate who's the CEO of the company he's trying to chase. At some point, it becomes a business advantage.

In middle market/LMM, it's more so the case, as you are often sourcing from business owners who are not from "worldly" backgrounds themselves (think the owner of a family business in mid-west who is literally the king in his domain and don't really need to interact with diverse population).

PE firms care about diversity in recruiting as they need to have a website that's not just showing all white males in this day and age, given the political climate. Very few genuinely care. You see that being reflected in "soft" decisions such as promotion, assignment of interesting/value-adding projects at work.

 

Are east asians and south asians included in this "diversity"?

 
Analyst 1 in IB - Gen:
Are east asians and south asians included in this "diversity"?

Good question. I can only cite cases I observe. I think both still face certain stereotypes that are disadvantageous. So from that perspectives, they are minorities. I am not sure if from a recruiter's perspective whether they are included in "diversity", especially for the males. It may be an idiotic observation - but I think for Asian males, height can often be used to discriminate as well. I have actually worked at work places where tall male colleagues would boast that they are very tall in the office. However, I can't profess to be an expert in the detailed dynamics myself.

 

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