Of the many men who toil in high-tech, few are as heroic as James Damore, the young man who penned the manifesto “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” In it, Damore calmly and logically exposed the tyrannical ideological edifice erected to perpetuate the myth that, in aggregate, women and men are identical in aptitude and interests, and that “all disparities in representation are due to oppression.”
Despite active recruiting and ample affirmative action, women made up only 14.5 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively, of computer science and electrical engineering graduates, in 2015. While they comprise 21.4 percent of undergraduates enrolled in engineering, females earned only 19.9 percent of all Bachelor’s degrees awarded by an engineering program in 2015.”
There is attrition!
Overall, and in the same year, 80.1 percent of Bachelor’s degrees in engineering went to men; 19.9 percent to women. (“Engineering by the Numbers,” By Brian L. Yoder, Ph.D.)
As Damore, and anyone in the world of high-tech knows, entire human resource departments in the high-tech sector are dedicated to recruiting, mentoring, and just plain dealing with women and their ongoing nagging and special needs.
In high-tech, almost nothing is as politically precious as a woman with some aptitude. There’s no end to which companies will go to procure women and help them succeed, often to the detriment of technically competent men and women who must do double duty. Their procurement being at a premium, concepts such as “sucking it up” and soldiering on are often anathema to coddled distaff.
A woman in high-technology can carp constantly about … being a woman in high-tech. Her gender—more so than her capabilities—is what defines her and endears her to her higher-ups, for whom she’s a notch in the belt.
While male engineers—and, indubitably, some exceptional women—are hired to be hard at work designing and shipping tangible products; women in high tech, in the aggregate, are free to branch out; to hone a niche as a voice for their gender.
Arisen online and beyond is a niche-market of nudniks (nags): Women talking, blogging, vlogging, writing and publishing about women in high-technology or their absence therefrom; women beating the tom-tom about discrimination and stereotyping, but saying absolutely nothing about the technology they presumably love and help create.
Young women, in particular, are pioneers of this new, intangible, but lethal field of meta-technology: kvetching (complaining) about their absence in technology with nary a mention of their achievements in technology.
The hashtag “MicrosoftWomen” speaks to the solipsistic universe created by females in high-tech and maintained by the house-broken males entrusted with supporting the menacing matriarchy. Are these ladies posting about the products they’ve partaken in designing and shipping? Not often. Women in high-tech are more likely to be tweeting out about … being women in high-tech. Theirs is a self-reverential and self-referential universe.
For example, to learn more about the unbearable lightness of being “principal engineering lead at Microsoft” when woman, turn to “I Want Her Job™.” Mind your P’s and Q’s, numskull. This isn’t a website—but a “community,” in the lingua franca of feminized America—bolstering women’s pursuits and careers. In trendy speak: “Connection. Community. Conversation.”
One featured techie’s professional title, aforementioned, is impressive: “principal engineering lead at Microsoft.” As is to be expected of a woman hard at work in the ruthlessly competitive field of high-tech, she spends her days as “a female tech ambassador,” writing fluffy, gyno-centric books on self-affirmation, “mentoring other women via Skype,” “answering emails … on how they, too, can enter the world of tech,” designing clothes, and, according to her impartial boosters, being the “next greatest female tech rock star.” It’s all in a woman’s day’s work.
The techie men known to this writer don’t have time to design clothes, although they dream of it (men and women being interchangeable, and all that stuff).
So intent are women on equal outcomes at all costs, as opposed to equality of opportunity, that they’re pleased to serve as political props; ornaments in a corporate world compelled to affirm the idea that under the skin—and but for the Great White and his wicked ways—men and women are similarly inclined and endowed.
Working from the premise that equality of representation—engineering being 50 percent female—is an achievable, desirable and laudable goal for all, Pinterest’s Tracy Chou, at gigaom.com, calls for “a ‘state of the union’ every year, where companies” are compelled to cough-up their latest “demographic data,” and are thus held “accountable” to the public, while also tracking which of their initiatives has worked.
To incriminate, presumably, Chou has published a series of charts detailing the male-to-female ratios in America’s technology titans. (Delve deeper and you find, moreover, that men are still doing most of the technical work; women the non-technical work.)
Yes, women are making different career choices. Viva la difference.
Of course, to say that “science [or applied science] needs women,” reasoned Theodore Dalrymple, in a 2014 Taki’s magazine column, is as logically consistent as saying that, “Heavyweight boxing needs Malays,” “football needs dwarf goalkeepers,” “quantity surveying needs bisexuals,” “lavatory cleaning needs left-handers.”
“Science does not need women any more than it needs foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis. What science needs (if an abstraction such as science can be said to need anything) is scientists. If they happen also to be foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis, so be it: but no one in his right mind would go to any lengths to recruit for his laboratory foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis for those characteristics alone.”
