There’s odd, there’s silly and then there’re public targets about the gender gap. It is, I’m sorry to have to say, idiocy to be setting targets for how many female managers there are in tech companies. So what in buggery is it that people are doing here?
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Tech giants vow to double the number of female managers by 2022[/perfectpullquote]They’re following fashion that’s all. Society has a head of steam up about how appalling it is that the lovely, well paid and comfy jobs atop Big Tech companies – you know, the ones that make dynastic fortunes – are largely held by men.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Some of the world’s largest technology companies have pledged to boost the number of women on their management boards to 30pc by 2022. At a “Tech for good” summit in Paris on Wednesday, a total of 45 technology companies, including Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, IBM, Booking.com and Uber signed a pledge to meet the target in a bid to open up their boards to more women. The French presidency said businesses that accomplish the goal should then pursue complete parity, including on executive committees. President Emanuel Macron was due to dine with 180 technology company executives on Wednesday night in Paris. According to a recent study of the technology sector by consulting firm McKinsey, women represent just 15pc of management posts at present. [/perfectpullquote]Because these are lovely well paid jobs lots of people would like to be catapulted into them. Therefore we’ve a campaign driven by the sort of already upper middle class women who would be so catapulted that they should be catapulted.
That this isn’t about gender equity or diversity can be seen from this chart:
There are indeed trawlerwomen but where’s that campaign to get equal representation? A diverse workforce? You’d not have to be an entire and total cynic to think that perhaps well paid jobs indoors with no heavy lifting – and considerably less danger – are prompting a campaign to gimmesomeofthat rather than dangerous, physical, outdoor ones that aren’t entirely well paid now, would you?
So, the campaign itself, this idea that there just simply must be more women in Big Tech management positions isn’t quite mani puliti.
What turns it into idiocy is this:
We’ve really got that qualified workforce among women to be 50% of the senior management of large tech companies, right? Sure, there’s one way to do it which is to staff HR and accounting entirely with women and leave the men playing with the machines. But that’s not really what is meant here, is it?
Or at the corporate level:
So, a challenge to any feminist or other who wants to pick it up. What is it that indicates that gender imbalance in tech is a problem that must be solved when larger and more extreme gender imbalance in fishing, lumberjacking, garbage collection, isn’t? Other than that tech is a more fun and better paid job of course?
And therefore where is the campaign to get more women drowned at sea while producing our fish fingers?
In my limited experience when you make an engineer into a manager you lose a good engineer and gain a bad manager.
Netflix are a tech company? The problem is that when you start stretching the definition of “tech” to include companies that are also into things like content production, you aren’t comparing apples with apples.
Yes, they have some talented people running a very good infrastructure (I can bore you with this later), but so do banks and travel companies. They aren’t tech like Microsoft are.
It never ceases to amaze me that Progressives go on and on about the 10% and the 1% and how unfair all that is, then spend vast amounts of their energy trying to get women into those categories. Is it bad being a highly paid manager at a big company or not?