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[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Antonio García Martínez] Silicon Valley’s fake diversity problem

Once our lucky candidate is given the job, the measurement doesn’t stop. Every tech company has an involved performance review process, aligned with whatever management gospel they believe. Employees, having spent long hours both working in Zoom meetings and bonding in “offsites” — imagine a school trip combined with group therapy — are then asked to submit “360-degree feedback”. Similar to East Germans writing Stasi reports on their neighbours, employees rank all their colleagues according to whatever rubric is deemed most important.

The calculus is even harsher among Silicon Valley’s high-growth startups. Here, returns on techno-capital can be stratospheric, way beyond even other capitalism-soaked boom times of the past. A single well-timed investment can make good on a venture capitalist’s entire fund, and a few choice years at the right company can set up an engineer for life.

But herein lies the problem: if venture-capital-fuelled technology is one of the most brutal, though effective, amplifiers of human talent, then the outcomes will be spectacularly unequal. Which is why the diversity agenda — the thought that all groups must enjoy equal representation everywhere we choose to measure — reaches such a crusading fervour inside the tech industry. The economic peaks and valleys that must be pummelled smooth are Grand Canyon-esque in their proportions. But in the current American zeitgeist, that enormous discrepancy in outcome is instantly projected along a single obsessive dimension: race and ethnicity.

The diversity reports from large public tech companies — they’re all required to publish them nowadays — reflect this one-dimensional focus. Consider a table from Google’s 2021 US diversity report below. Asians constitute over 40% of all of Google; that’s a seven-times overrepresentation versus their population percentage. Whites form barely 50% of Google, which is less than their percentage of the population as a whole.

More amusing in Google’s report is the crude racial categorisation which perfectly captures the progressive agenda’s simplistic approach to “diversity”. Here you can toggle the region to any part of the globe, and all of humanity in its spectacular diversity reduces to essentially the same five buckets: Asian+, Black+, Latinx+, White+ and Native American+. In true American style, it takes all the world’s real-life cultural diversity, puts it through the meat grinder of American racial politics and pops out five flavours.