Melinda Gates Declares War On Men

All the old feminist malarkey about chimerical wage gaps and the absence of women on corporate boards, in STEM fields, etc. The Harvard Business Review story on the subject is both depressing and predictable, hitting on the “we’re not showing enough women in STEM and positions of power in Hollywood” nonsense, raising the obvious rebuttal of many people believe gender inequalities in professional advancement are a reflection of women’s own choices” while failing to seriously grapple with the real arguments behind it — the usual feminist hand-wave that accompanies such facile, boilerplate dogma.

Then there’s the business of eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace. Here’s their big idea:

That’s why it’s so important that companies, philanthropists, and activists follow the lead of organizations such as TIME’S UP and the Collaborative for Women’s Safety and Dignity, both of which are committed to fighting for equity foreverywoman in the workforce. TIME’S UP is partnering with major organizations like the National Women’s Law Center and the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team to promote an unprecedented policy and advocacy agenda to expand rights and protections for women, whether they work in the C-suite or on the factory floor. The Collaborative for Women’s Safety and Dignity is focused on ensuring that survivors of sexual harassment — and women of color in particular — have a central role in creating solutions to end gender-based violence in the workplace. The Collaborative’s early ideas include building an evidence-based communications hub to help drive more-effective messaging, and seeding and scaling data-driven programs that develop leadership capacity among survivor-led movements.

This is all boilerplate, dogma that assumes “survivor” first, as though every lame effort at a pass were the same thing as violent rape. And we can’t have a whole paragraph without kneeling before the intersectionalists (“women of color”)! She then stumps for mandatory paid time off for caregiving, never mind Sweden’s outcomes there. She observes that women are underrepresented in Congress versus their overall numbers in the population, and opines that “When you look at the data, though, you see that the problem isn’t that women don’t win; it’s that they are less likely to run.” So ... she’s going to force women to run for elected office? Randomly boot male candidates for office?

The muddle-headedness continues ever on. Why do women leave the field? They gamely try to answer:

The Kapor Center, an organization dedicated to diversity in tech, commissioned the Tech Leavers study in 2017, a “first of its kind national study examining why people voluntarily left their jobs in tech.” The study found that workplace culture plays a significant role in driving turnover — especially for women and underrepresented minorities. Nearly two-thirds of the 2,000 respondents indicated that they would have stayed in their jobs had their employers fixed their culture. The study also found that culture problems are expensive — costing the industry more than $16 billion each year.

If you actually dig down to the Kapor Center/Pew survey of people who left the tech field (PDF), on page 24 you will notice a chart of all the reasons why people experienced unfairness; many of them are similar across the board (more white/Asian women were likely to complain about bad management [47%] than any other group, but it was the most popular single complaint of all surveyed), and many are similar across sexes. Particularly striking is the fact that 10% of white/Asian women surveyed had experienced unwanted sexual attention — in contrast with 7% of white/Asian men! If the big problem is inept management, it's hard to see how diversity voodoo would fix that.

The eyelids start to droop. We have read this all before, the tendentious assumption of guilt, the painful, earnest, and venal belief that shamans could right these non-problems. At last, she gets to the real point: she’s going to harangue and pressure companies to make stupid decisions based on whether they have “enough” women (emboldening mine):

Those of us eager to increase women’s power and influence can’t rely on other people’s sense of ethics or self-interest. We need to amplify the pressure they’re feeling. Three constituencies — shareholders, consumers, and employees — hold disproportionate influence over institutions. By mobilizing they can translate that influence into targeted pressure.

Translating back to English: there is no upside to companies for any of this insane program because we have nothing to offer them but pain. There is no quid pro quo for hiring more women — and frankly, there never will be, because people who think as she does operate based on a victimhood ideology that blames men for every disparate outcome, divorcing women from volition, agency, and responsibility. As John Barry writes in Quillette,

A world that has been told—falsely—for decades that gender is merely a social construct, is a world in which a well-intentioned multi-billionaire can throw a huge amount of money at gender equality, despite admitting that this is “only a small fraction of what’s necessary.” But what if the reality is not so much a leaky pipeline as an unstoppable tidal [wave] of women’s choices? What if money can’t make mother nature go away?