#MediocrityToo: The coming mania for inclusion will erode standards of merit and excellence

Article here. Excerpt:

'The prospect of left-wing entertainment moguls having to sacrifice their box-office judgement to identity politics is an unalloyed pleasure and of little consequence to society at large. But bean-counting won’t be limited to Hollywood. Corporate diversity trainers already sense a windfall from #MeToo. Requests from organizations wanting to “explore further the intersection of power with diversity dimensions and inclusion” have recently increased, according to a “client success” manager at a major diversity-consulting firm. A rival Silicon Valley-based consultancy, Paradigm, sent around an email celebrating Oprah Winfrey’s #MeToo speech at the Golden Globes and reminding potential clients of “how much work needs to be done” regarding “inclusion.” “I absolutely think the broader cultural conversation is motivating organizations to take a more serious look at their cultures,” says Joelle Emerson, Paradigm’s leader. Corporate boardrooms, executive suites, and management structures will be scoured for gender and race imbalances. The advocacy group 50/50 by 2020, which argues for equal male and female representation in business, has recently received several new commitments from organizations pledging to achieve gender parity by the year 2020.
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As the #MeToo moment swells the demand for ever more draconian diversity mandates, a finding in the 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. Females in STEM businesses who have a postgraduate degree are over three times as likely as STEM females without a college degree to say that their gender has impeded their success. It is doubtful that those highly educated female STEM workers are actually more subject to chauvinism than their less-educated counterparts. Their workplaces are likely composed of other highly educated products of the academy, marinated for years in an environment dominated by feminist thinking. Those are also the workplaces most subject to external pressures to achieve gender parity. All the incentives run in the opposite direction: away from chauvinism and toward favoring females over males at every possible opportunity. The persistent claim of gender bias is ideological, not empirical. But after #MeToo, it will have an even more disruptive effect.'