Share 72 Shares

You know why Silicon Valley and the whole tech industry is pushing women and minorities into taking up coding and into various techno-geeky fields of study? It’s because they want the other 50 percent of the workforce to join the pool of programming professionals and put downward pressure on tech salaries.

So when you come across idiotic articles like this one asserting that Tech Would Be Better If More Women Designed It, think again and wonder what the underlying agenda is. According to that piece;

Women make up just a quarter of the STEM workforce but closing the gap would not only help tackle the skills shortage in the tech industries, it would also lead to better performance, said Emma McGuigan, managing director of Accenture’s technology division in the U.K. and Ireland. “We all know that you get the best team performance when you have diverse teams and people from different genders and backgrounds. That is when you get the best ideas,” she said.

That figures of course, considering this is a claim tech giant Accenture is making. Accenture, after all, is a company that’s spreading its tentacles into every corner, nook, and cranny of the globe in search of cheap labor to churn out code, so it can bill its blue-chip clients hundreds of dollars per hour of “development time”.

So now it’s all about getting women into STEM fields (“STEM” is a now-popular acronym standing for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics). That’s sort of the 21st Century equivalent of fat-shaming. Back in the old days, lots of women suffered self-esteem issues thanks to an entire marketing industry idealising a concept of beauty that favours tall thin and fair-skinned women. Today, it is Silicon Valley spreading notions that women who do not get into STEM are uncool.

See, the thing with political-correctness is that it is not immune to this thing called unintended consequences. The science and tech field, in particular, is rife with textbook cases of this phenomenon. Every invention has unintended consequences. Cars once heralded as wonder inventions are now the scourge of urban living. Antibiotics have led to the proliferation of “super-bugs” that now threaten to wipe big mammals off the face of the planet. Nuclear weapons beat a resolute enemy quickly back in World War II but now find themselves in the hands of an even more crazed bogey.

Those hipsters who now STEM-shame women into turning away from the humanities and liberal arts so that they can, we are told, go head-to-head with men in Silicon Valley have blinded themselves to the known and unknown-unknown unintended consequences of this initiative mounted under the banner of political-correctness.

All these guys really want is a vast pool of code monkeys they can pay with bananas. Politically-correct that.

In an age when people worry about the loss of our humanity thanks to the onslaught of artificial intelligence, social media and device addiction, and robotics, the last thing we need is an army of people — whether they be men or women — who got into coding just because some billionaire who comes to the office in jeans and sneakers everyday says it’s a “cool” thing.



print

Spread it!

Tweet

More

Email





WhatsApp

