Sep
2
The Downside of #MeToo Feminism and Reverse Discrimination
“Our nation is about to be transformed, thanks to the #MeToo movement…. #MeToo is going to unleash a new torrent of gender and race quotas throughout the economy and culture, [and] the net consequence will be a loss of American competitiveness and scientific achievement.” — Heather MacDonald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal
Heather MacDonald
While the #MeToo movement has had the benefit of encouraging women who have been sexually harassed and abused to come forward and name those who took advantage of them, it has also morphed into a feminist witch hunt and excuse for pushing anti-male discrimination. From Hollywood to banks to publishing houses, companies and organizations in various industries are being pressured to screen out males — especially white ones — from consideration for hire or advancement. Men are also being demonized and fired for daring to suggest that men and women are different. This is not only wrong, it’s stupid.
Heather MacDonald, whose work I am familiar with regarding “the war on cops”, gave a speech on this topic back in April of this year (2018). The speech was later adapted into an article titled “The Negative Impact of the #MeToo Movement” for Imprimis, and I have reproduced a fair chunk of the second half of it for you below….
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Silicon Valley is a #MeToo diversity bonanza waiting to happen. It’s not for nothing that the Mountain View headquarters of Google is referred to as the “Google campus”; the culture of the Silicon Valley behemoth is an echo chamber of shrill academic victimology. Managers and employees reflexively label dissenters from left-wing orthodoxy as misogynists and racists. It is assumed that the lack of proportional representation of female, black, and Hispanic engineers at the company is due to bias on the part of every other type of engineer.
In August 2017, Google fired computer engineer James Damore for writing a memo suggesting that the lack of 50-50 gender proportionality at Google and other tech firms may not be due to bias, but rather to different career predilections on the part of males and females. He cited psychological research establishing that on average, males and females are attracted to different types of work: males to more abstract, idea-centered work, females to more human-centered, relational activities. Damore was not disparaging the scientific skills of the female engineers working at Google; he was trying to explain why there were not more of them. Nevertheless, Google accused Damore of using harmful gender stereotypes that put Google’s female employees at risk of some unspecified trauma.
Google’s adoption of the bathetic rhetoric of academic victimology to justify firing Damore was bad enough. But in January 2018, the National Labor Relations Board released a memo upholding Google’s action on the same grounds: Damore had engaged in discrimination and sexual harassment by employing “harmful gender stereotypes.” The reasoning behind the NLRB memo puts at risk the job of every academic scientist researching the biological and psychological differences between the sexes. The ideological imperatives of feminism are trumping the search for scientific truth. This is a dangerous position for a society to embrace.
The following month, a Google recruiter challenged Silicon Valley’s quota mentality by refusing to obey an edict to purge white males from consideration for entry-level engineering interviews. The recruiter alleges in a lawsuit that he was promptly fired. Google, it seems, would rather not be informed about potentially groundbreaking tech talent if it comes in the wrong color and shape….
Despite the billions of dollars that governments, companies, and foundations have poured into increasing the number of females in STEM, the gender proportions of the hard sciences have not changed much over the years. This is not surprising, given mounting evidence of the differences in interests and aptitudes between the sexes. Study after study has shown that females gravitate towards different types of jobs than men, as James Damore fatally observed. Females on average tend to choose fields that are perceived to make the world a better place, according to the common understanding of that phrase. A preschool teacher in the Bronx, profiled by Bloomberg News, exemplifies such a choice. She has a B.A. in neuroscience, but opted not to go to medical school so as to have an impact on poor and minority children. Her salary is a pittance compared to what she could earn as a clinical or research neurologist, but she said that pay is not her top motivation when it comes to choosing a job.
Even under the broad STEM umbrella, females seek jobs that are seen as directly helping others by a two-to-one ratio over males. Females make up 75 percent of workers in health-related jobs, but only 25 percent of workers in computer jobs and 14 percent of engineering workers, according to a Pew Research Center poll. In 2016, nearly 82 percent of obstetrics and gynecology residents were female — yet no one is complaining about gender bias against males. And in a resounding blow to the feminist narrative about bias in STEM, it turns out that the more gender equality in a country, the lower the percentage of females in STEM majors and fields. The more careers open to females, the less likely they are to choose math or science.
Finally, there is the most taboo subject of all: the non-identical distribution of high-end math skills. Males outnumber females on both the bottom rung of math cluelessness and the top rung of math insight. In the U.S., there are 2.5 males in the top .01 percent of math ability for every female in that category. This is not a matter of gender bias and cultural conditioning; gender differences in math precocity show up as early as kindergarten.
Given these different distributions of interests and skills, the only way to engineer gender proportionality in the hard sciences is to put a ceiling on male hires, no matter how gifted, until enough females can be induced to enter the field to balance out the males. And indeed, the National Science Foundation, which has announced that progress in science requires a “diverse STEM workforce,” seems to be moving in that direction. This is undoubtedly good news for China, as it furiously pushes ahead with its unapologetically meritocratic system of science training and research. Not such good news for the rest of us, however.
The #MeToo movement has uncovered real abuses of power. But the solution to those abuses is not to replace valid measures of achievement with irrelevancies like gender and race. Ironically, the best solution to sexual predation is not more feminism, but less. By denying the differences between men and women, and by ridiculing the manly virtues of gentlemanliness and chivalry and the female virtues of modesty and prudence, feminism dissolved the civilizational restraints on the male libido. The boorish behavior that pervades society today would have been unthinkable in the past, when a traditional understanding of sexual propriety prevailed. Now, however, with the idea of “ladies and gentlemen” discredited and out of favor, boorishness is increasingly the rule.
Contrary to the feminist narrative, Western culture is in fact the least patriarchal culture in human history; rather than being forced to veil, females in our society can parade themselves in as scantily clad a manner as they choose; pop culture stars flaunt their promiscuity. As we have seen, every mainstream institution is trying to hire and promote as many females as possible. As the #MeToo movement swells the demand for ever more draconian diversity mandates, a finding in a Pew Research Center poll on workplace equity is worth noting: the perception of bias is directly proportional to the number of years the perceiver has spent in an American university. The persistent claim of gender bias, in other words, is ideological, not empirical. But after #MeToo, it will have an even more disruptive effect.
[Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College]
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Regardless of your sex or ethnicity, this ought to make you mad. Even when math and science can be shown to support real, natural, non-biased differences in males and females, some people prefer to reject the evidence in favor of their feelings… or a specific agenda. Speaking of ignoring science in favor of an agenda, it should be interesting to see how the acceptance (by some) of the existence of multiple new genders will affect the feminist and other demands for quotas, etc. Something tells me it won’t be pretty. And, as MacDonald indicated, such “progressive” moves are bound to have negative impacts both on our nation’s economy and security. As she said earlier,
“The ideological imperatives of feminism are trumping the search for scientific truth. This is a dangerous position for a society to embrace.”
Indeed.
P.S. After transcribing the above citation from my hardcopy of the article, I found it online here, in case you want to read the whole thing. There is also a link to download the issue as a PDF.
