One of the biggest recent grifts is getting women and “underrepresented minorities” into STEM, albeit I wonder if the recent wave of mass layoffs will have a cooling effect. Surely, a lot of their supposed “allies” have found themselves without a six-figure job that consisted of little more than having breakfast, lunch, dinner, and red wine on tap on the company’s dime. The entire girls-into-STEM movement is an outgrowth of feminist ideology, of course. As such, they use similar terminology. Essentially, this campaign is based on the old feminist cookbook except that the issue is not voting, having to work (lol), or access to higher education. Instead, now it is about widening the funnel to all those cushy six-figure jobs that have gotten a lot rarer in recent months.

A key term of the girs-into-STEM campaign is that all women form a “sisterhood” and as such, women in STEM should go out of their way to support other women. This kind of so-called positive discrimination really exists. In particular in larger organizations that either operate in the US or have taken funding from a US venture capitalist this message gets pushed relentlessly. I have seen this in action myself, with female managers promoting female engineers regardless of how incompetent they were. They also actively try to block your own career aspirations as you are a big bad meany and belong to the sex that has kept women down since the dawn of time.

All such initiatives, as inventive as they may seem to their dim-witted creators, only have a limited shelf-life, however. First, there is the problem that women do not have any sense of “sisterhood”. They backstab each other so quickly you would not believe it. In fact, women even talk an excessive amount of crap behind the back of their current best friend ever, and they also change allegiances really quickly. Female friendships are extremely short-lived. They drop their high school friends the moment they enter college, and very few of their college friendships will endure, just like it is the case with their professional relationships at work. I find that it is almost unheard of that women have long-lasting friendships. This only works in tight-knit stable communities. The elderly housewives in the village my parents are a good example. Today’s woke twenty-something career woman, in contrast, changes friends only a little slower than her romantic partners whereas men often have at least one or two friends from way back whom they have stayed in touch with over many years.

The second problem is that women will not really help each other out. During the heydays of the girls-into-STEM propaganda train, female managers got brownie points for promoting unqualified women and this is why they did it. It is nothing but an expression of short-term thinking. Right now, quite a few companies are struggling to survive, however. Margins in tech are often not particularly good, which did not matter in the growth-at-all-costs period. Now, it is much more important to run a tight ship, which men are better suited to. Of course, this does not apply to all men, but by and large, men are simply better leaders because of evolutionary pressure. In times of uncertainty it is also paramount that you can keep a cool head, which women seem a bit less able to do. Thus, you can expect women to frantically throw each other under the bus while they are looking for a man to sort things out. I thought of the last part when I did some interview practice with a company that seems to be struggling with their tech. I only spoke to women in the interview process. One of them could not shut up about their support for women and “hiring the best person”. Yet the fact that they were interviewing a toxic male like me seemed to indicate that not all was well in this gynocratic wonderland.

Projects like getting more women into STEM work great if profitability is seen as optional and money is cheap. Words are cheap, too. In the end, reality always exerts some corrective force on unstable systems. Right now, I think we have passed the turning point of about 15 years of very aggressive propaganda. One layoff at a time, this is getting rolled back now because only relatively few senior managers are willing to sacrifice their well-paid job for an ideology, and the one that do simply cannot properly reason about the consequences of their actions.