Being the 0.1% as a Queer Latina Founder

Less than 0.1% of US venture capital goes to Latina women founders.

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Women are 50% more likely to accept the unpaid, unpromotable tasks at their jobs. Roughly 200 extra hours a year.

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40% of LGBTQ+ workers in the US hid their identity at work last year.

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I am all three.

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Each of those numbers is a separate tax the workplace charges for being a kind of person the dashboard does not know how to measure. The Latina tax: outgrow the market, get 0.1% of the capital. The woman tax: carry the work nobody else will. The queer tax: shrink to stay safe.

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Here is the part nobody writes a corporate post about. Those taxes do not add. They compound.

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When you are a Latina founder, you outperform a market that has already decided you are not the default. When you are a woman, you accept the work that does not get measured because someone has to do it. When you are queer, you make yourself smaller in some rooms so the work can continue. Run the three together and the cost compounds. You spend years carrying work that does not get counted, building companies that do not get funded, in a body and identity the system has not bothered to learn how to see. The cumulative cost is not the hours. It is the wear of carrying them alone.

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I am visible about being a queer Latina woman founder because the next one needs to see it is possible.

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If the only people loud about all three are the ones who absorbed the cost in silence, the next queer Latina founder figures out the math from scratch, the way I did. The way everyone before me did. I would like that to be the last time.

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This is the Pride post. The rest of it is just the conditions in which Pride is required.

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The Chambiar team has built the coordination layer for modern work because measurement systems do not see the work, only the performance of it. The work that disproportionately falls on the people the system already discounts is the work it cannot afford to keep ignoring. We built the thing that sees it.

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On Wednesday I will be on a stage talking about another version of this

This Wednesday I am on a Pinkmatter panel at NY Tech Week called The Hidden Performance Tax of PMS in the Workplace. Hosted by Roma Vishwanath-Deutsch, with Kashvi and Dr. Sanya Anand. Roughly half the workforce manages physical and cognitive symptoms one to two weeks of every month while medicine has ignored the condition for 60 years and workplaces have done worse. Latina women are statistically more likely to be undiagnosed. Same tax, different lens. Thursday's piece is the longer version of that argument.

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What this Pride post is, and what it is not

Visibility is not a brand value. It is a structural correction.

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Every person who is loud about all three of these identities at work makes the math a little less invisible for the next one. That is what June is for. That is what the rest of the year is for. That is what this entire company is for.

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Kyrie

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If this hit, see what the work system is not paying you for. Pull your free Work Receipt. Two minutes, no signup.

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Subscribe on Substack so the next piece (Thursday — the panel essay) lands in your inbox, instead of you going to find it.