Affirmative Action in Action
January 12, 2015
B. WRITES in response to the post on Intel:
Will hiring more women make Intel a better company? No.
The problem with women in the workforce at Intel is very similar to the problem Ms. Hale describes at the National Health Service: women get pregnant and work less, forever. Assuming they don’t quit outright.
To paraphrase Sheryl Sandberg, there are women who learn to “lean out.” Put their feet up. And they can’t be fired, even though they have no union contract protecting them. The problem is most acute at the salaried level. Everyone else shoulders the burden.
The Left wants to rebuild our economy along the lines of what works for unionized teachers in public schools.
Teachers’ unions negotiate contracts that accommodate one pregnancy after the other for an employee. Substitutes are hired. The teacher can come and go and come and go; for a modestly competent teacher, there isn’t a great deal of damage to a classroom full of students in the public school model. This model doesn’t work for salaried engineers at a manufacturing facility, though.
To hit its target demographic numbers, Intel will do whatever it has to do that is not technically illegal. It will leave women “on the books” as employed, promoting them over men even when they are measurably less productive than men. The measures will be rewritten until the targets are reached.
And it’s all terribly unfair to the women who are bright, who are decent, who are hardworking, who contribute to Intel’s chip performance and manufacturing goals on terms dictated by the demands of the free market.
Will hiring more women make Intel a better company? No.
But it satisfies the Left, and they are calling the shots in government, which determines an intent to discriminate based on disparate impact.
Ultimately, $300 million is protection money demanded by the government but payable to Anita Sarkeesian and various consultants. A jobs program for people who can’t code? She is trying to position herself as the Al Sharpton of Silicon Valley: arbiter of sexism.
Thanks for letting me get this much off my chest.
Laura writes:
This is not a problem created exclusively by the left. What is known as the “right” is also to blame for the unraveling of the family and promotion of the economic autonomy of women, which leads to affirmative action and the economic harms caused by affirmative action.
Economies are not founded on economic principles alone. The American system promotes radical autonomy, undermines families and communities, and has left people struggling on their own, fighting tooth and nail for their rights. An atheistic democracy cannot address this. The Republican Party fights all too often for money interests and allows as much socialism as it can to enable those money interests. The Democratic Party fights for pure socialism and sexual immorality, the latter being a nice compensation for all the political control that socialism entails. The answer to all this is not more socialism. The answer — which is to be sharply distinguished from any kind of utopian solution because there is no political utopia, there is not the slightest possibility of political utopia and political atheism, which is the belief that society has no obligations to God, only individuals do, itself produces utopianism — is the Social Reign of Christ the King.