No hispanics in PE
Started an internship at a MF and it's shocking how little Hispanic presence there is. Why is this the case across the industry?
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Why does it matter? Less than half a percent of the NBA is asian, but no one is complaining about that. Hiring should be merit-based in all industries.
I never said anything was a problem? I simply asked why is it the case that there so few Hispanics in PE.
No one complains about that because Asians don’t have a culture of complaining / victim hood. We have a culture of keeping our head down and trying to get rich in a risk-adjusted way. Same reason why there are few Asians in politics.
LMAO asians complain all the time
Maybe because NBA athletes are a minuscule portion of the population, and it doesn’t meaningfully impact opportunities to build wealth for any group?
You’re a clown if you think PE is any more significantly widespread wealth building than the NBA. It’s a tiny industry.
Check Clearlake, Thoma Bravo, 3G Capital, not sure “no presence” is accurate…
A lot of the hispanics in PE are white, there’s plenty. If that answer doesn’t satisfy you, it’s because there’s high inflation and high interest rates in LATAM countries so there’s little to no PE presence abroad, which then means firms aren’t setting up KKR LATAM but they will set up KKR Asia/Europe. I also think there’s just low representation of latinos in finance broadly (VC might have the highest percentage).
yeah buddy nice try "high inflation and high interest rates", just stop the sugarcoating and say they're uncivilized poor places compared to Asia/Europe
Username checks out. Low caliber for sure.
This is the right answer. At my M7 MBA and other peer schools or higher like Harvard from my observations, there are a lot of people who are technically Hispanic or Latino on paper who have worked in high finance including PE, but they look so pale and white in person and dress very European influenced that you would never be able to tell. These are the ones taking all the “DEI” spots even though they come from family wealth and went to boarding school in Europe during their youth. Have a lot of classmates who come from families who own multi-million, sometimes multi-billion dollar businesses in countries like Mexico, Chile, Brazil, etc. They’re obviously going to beat out the poor Hispanic immigrants in resources and network for the same seats.
Spot on. Look at any Ivy+ undergrad program and the majority of Hispanics entering into finance from these schools are extremely wealthy and white passing.
What are you on? The founder of literally the largest software PE fund in the world is Puerto Rican. There's a massive LATAM PE and VC scene IN said regions. There are plenty of Hispanics you'll encounter they're just white, but maybe that doesn't count in your view? It's the US, my question to you would be why should there be a large Hispanic presence at a MFs?
It’s not an argument about why there isn’t any Hispanic presence. It’s simply their observation for why there aren’t many who become involved in PE specifically.
Being Hispanic, one thing I commonly see among fellow Hispanic friends and family studying finance is they, a majority of the time, say they never knew it existed.
For the other group of people I know, their reasons are that they don’t believe they know “the right people” that’ll get them into PE or would rather work as an accountant or a position that their parents currently work in.
Being that PE is a already difficult field to be in, I’ve seen many who would rather play it safe and work in a field with better odds for employment out of undergrad so that they may be able to pay for loans and/or expenses to look out for elderly family members.
This is solely my experience. I’m sure various reasons come into play for why Hispanic presence within PE is very low.
Second this, as a hispanic in PE my view is that you end up in what you know, which for most underrepresented groups is not PE.
Lots of people saying merit this merit that. It's undeniable the influence of prestige, contacts and guidance towards careers, which for hispanics or other underrepresented groups is much more limited across the board, even for those who come from more privileged backgrounds (albeit far for likely the more you climb the economic affluence ladder).
Also, for those pointing to LatAm as a worse market, my response is re hispanics in the North American market, which I think is what OP is talking about.
Brazil has a sizable market
They are not Hispanic (relating to Spain or to Spanish-speaking countries, especially those of Latin America)
You're getting MS OP but it's a valid question. The answer is that Hispanics have the lowest college attainment of any racial group in the US (21%, compared to 41% for white, 28% for Black, and 59% for Asian). A college degree is essentially a requirement for PE, so this naturally thins the numbers.
Then factor in the highly polarized nature of wealth/income/education within the Hispanic community - Hispanics of European descent (Anya Taylor-Joy is from Argentina...) are wealthier and make up a majority of Hispanics in PE, and are typically not visually identifiable as Hispanic.
Ends up being that the Hispanic population of non-European descent is very low in finance. It also doesn't help that you have the same dynamic of diversity pipelines being filled with wealthy white women or Deerfield educated Black dudes - tons of very white Hispanics going through those pipelines.
They're all in Miami bro
There are many. They are just indigenous to Europe and so you can't tell
All the diversity spots allocated for Hispanics are snatched up by either the whitest Greenwich nepo babies you’ve ever seen or white-passing Latinos that own the means of production in their shit country. Their ancestors are often the reason for the suffering in their country, including economic disparities, and if it weren’t for them, there would be a less need for diversity programs in the first place. It’s actually appalling that so many of the “Hispanics” are the descendants of conquistadors and Nazis who fled Germany post-War.
For some reason, the DEI efforts enjoy rewarding the colonialists as opposed to people whose lineage have suffered true oppression. There’s a reason you rarely see 5 foot 2 Ecuadorean natives in banking. Because their quotas are snatched up by the children of the same people who oppressed their forefathers. The blatant disregard of the DEI movement for ACTUAL diversity is also visible from the fact that Spanish people qualify as Hispanics. That’s pretty absurd in my view.
I have no issue with diversity programs that actually improve representation of underrepresented groups that are actually underrepresented, but the system rewards racial embellishment and creates a veneer of diversity — LPs can rest easy knowing they allocated their funds to a firm that is 20% Hispanic, when in reality they grew up in Atherton and went to Harvard-Westlake.
The amount of Hispanic nepo’s I have seen in banking / PE is crazy. I’d say as a percentage, there are more Hispanic nepo’s in PE than white people.
I’m Hispanic so it’s pretty apparent to me when I see these people in SEO that are from Connecticut or Long Island and should really be there.
PREACH BROTHA
As a white passing Latino from Venezuela who distinctly remembers standing for hours at a breadline with my mother and father at the age of 5, screw you.
Not everyone was some rich "empresario" or "colonizer" (Word we don't even use in our countries so keep this BS divisionism crap to yourself) in their home country and then randomly decided to move to the US.
We've had struggles you couldn't imagine.
You think you’re any more deserving than the poor child from Vietnam / Laos just cause you stood in line? You think they didn’t face issues growing up? But then you’re white passing and they’re not, so you have an added advantage. There’s no reason you should be steps ahead of them in the oppression Olympics.
This is true of most of the DE&I programs at business schools too - the only minorities they let in are the children of billionaire oligarchs. No school wants to let in an actual descendent of slaves or truly oppressed people, they’d prefer to fill their class with the kids of Nigerian / South American feudal lords instead.
You're right and it is a problem
It's funny how anytime anything race or ethnicity related comes up on WSO, there is an absolute freak out even when the question is as innocent as yours.
To answer your question, Hispanics are the most recent immigrant group so there's a lot of assimilating that will need to happen.
There absolutely needs to be more Hispanics in the PE space, if you look at Thoma Bravo there's a huge interest from LPs to invest in their funds due to the Hispanic roots of Orlando Bravo.
Also, in my experience finance is not as respected and known in our culture compared to law or medicine (or other high paying jobs). I grew up in an overwhelmingly hispanic area and didn't know what IB / PE / HF was until I was like a sophomore in college. Doubt any of my high school friends could tell you what IB is. My grandparents think I'm a bank teller and my parents think I'm a financial advisor. Less awareness - > less presence.
This.
Believe it or not, there is no prestige in it for their local community. Seen it again and again - the smart Hispanics take DEI spots in medical schools and law schools. White hispanic nepo babies can’t compete with them in those fields.
this is just an anecdote, but it seems like a large majority of the smartest Hispanics I know from both my college and my HS prefer:
engineering (including software engineering) >> medicine > finance
how do you know who's hispanic and who's not? for example, Louis CK is Mexican, but if you just saw him at an office, you wouldn't count him as hispanic probably. you would need to ask everybody's ancestry to know whether they're hispanic.
Probably because they either don’t want too. Or Are not good at it.
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