the potential myth of the meritocracy
Suddenly this topic seems to be all around me. Although, I’m not sure if it was always here, or if I just wasn’t paying attention. But it’s here in a big way. The meritocracy discussion seems to be mainly about women in tech, but to a lesser extent, minorities.
At first it was an old colleague of mine on twitter. And frankly, I was annoyed to see his many-times-a-day posts about feminism and how the whole world is conspiring to keep his daughter from enjoying science and math. It went on like this for years and I eventually stopped following him because he never talked about anything else and I was tired of his rant.
What I didn’t understand at the time was this was all part of a much larger discussion. Although I did notice the growing trend about a year ago and started to take notice. Looking back at stories from the past few years shows just how much attention this is getting from major internet media outlets: Tech Crunch, The Guardian, Quartz, The Atlantic, Wired, NPR, The Boston Globe. You can even watch the rise of the term ‘meritocracy’ on Google trends as it begins in early 2009, likely in association with its so-called myth.
Recently, I also ran across an indiegogo project called CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap which promises to explore the lack of diversity in the tech world. At this point, it’s fully funded and I’m excited to see it when it’s ready.
Today, the discussion seems to be finding new ground after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s remarks caused a minor internet storm, where he made some regretful remarks about how women should behave regarding salaries and ended up having to take it all back. And that’s great, the man ate his silly words and hopefully we all learned something.