Put a fork in me, I’m done. I just can’t keep up this façade any longer. After a lifetime of treating everyone the same – regardless of their gender, race, age, politics, disabilities, status, or sexual orientation – I’m coming clean.
Deep inside, I’m a raging misogynist, racist, and every other kind of “ist” there is. Never mind how I think, feel, and behave. Never mind a thirty-plus-year career promoting meritocracy and personal accountability above all else.
If all the diversity consultants, minority activists, uber liberals, and victim mentality sheeple call me a discriminating, biased, sexist, inequality denier rife with insidious microaggressions that have taken over my brain, then it must be true.
In all seriousness, when I wrote Silicon Valley’s Diversity Myth, I knew I was taking on a third rail issue. I knew I would hear from everyone who makes a living by feeding the flames of these ludicrous myths and bullying anyone who gets in their way. And I was not disappointed.
It was fascinating to see such an overwhelmingly biased display of selective statistics and self-serving conclusions from dubious pseudoscientific research in posts like this one. But then, these consultants and activists make fortunes getting tech companies to cough up big bucks just to keep them off their backs.
But I was disappointed to see some of the Silicon Valley elite abandon all sense and sensibility, sell their souls, and pander to the angry mob mentality with tweets like this one from Steven Sinofsky, the former head of Windows who abruptly left Microsoft in 2012 in what was publicly and politely described as a “mutual decision” by both parties:
You tell me, @stevesi Did you discriminate when you were a top exec at Microsoft and why no women general partners at a16z (men 6, women 0)?
— Steve Tobak (@SteveTobak) December 28, 2015
No, I have not yet received a response. Don’t hold your breath.
And I was surprised to see this tweet in response to The 10 Worst Entrepreneurs of 2015, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been:
Women lead <7% of venture-backed startups, yet we’re 30% of the “worst CEOs”? Right. https://t.co/gCQKlvsGnx
— Lyssa Neel (@lyssaneel) December 28, 2015
Funny, but the gender of those on the list never occurred to me. The same was true of The Worst CEOs of 2015, which included Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer at #3 and HP’s Meg Whitman at #1. Must be those nasty microaggressions and unconscious biases rearing their ugly heads.
For the record, the overwhelming majority of executives and business leaders I’ve known over decades in the tech industry are colorblind, gender-blind, everything blind. Don’t get me wrong. Of course discrimination still exists on an individual basis. It probably always will exist.
But if there is institutional bias, as the inequality agitators angrily proclaim, then all of Silicon Valley, including some of the most liberal and forward thinking C-Level execs on planet Earth, is in on the conspiracy. And that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Lastly, I applaud famed venture capitalist Mike Moritz’ response to a question about the lack of women partners at his firm, Sequoia Capital, saying their job is to hire the very best team, regardless of race and gender, and they will not lower their standards. And you can rest assured that I will never give in to cultural conformity, kowtow to bullies, or lower the standards of my commentary, either.
Image credit photographer Roger Snider