In an article in CityAM, Debbie Wosskow praises the successes of the dynamic UK tech industry.
“The UK tech industry is a shining example of all that is good about British business in the 21st century: lean and hungry companies full of smart, hard-working people geared up for success.”
However apparently all is not well:
“But when it comes to gender equality, tech is failing to move with the times.”
Sigh. You have to hand it to the feminists sometimes: as Belinda Brown noted in TCW the other day, no matter what the statistics show, they can be always twisted to match the convoluted logic of the feminist cause.
Surely the inconvenient fact here is that IT is vastly successful business that is vastly male-dominated. All that fashionable diversity counted for nought after all, and what matters for success are, perhaps, those very unfashionably masculine qualities of fanatical obsession and intellectual curiosity.
Let’s extend the logic further the way a fashionable MetroLib or feminist would: given that 86 per cent of IT jobs are held by men, the success of IT plainly “proves” the need for a quota in all industrial sectors of 86 per cent men. The statistics are unchallengeable: men are good for business!!!!
Of course, it proves none of these things at all: for one thing individuals should be free to choose whatever they want to do, not what fits the needs of business or sates the metropolitan liberal addiction to virtue signalling. Secondly, whether “masculine” or “feminine” qualities are currently in vogue, it is extremely crass and demeaning to us all as individuals to translate that into the need to hire more men or more women: what is needed are individuals with those qualities, whoever they are.
That said, perhaps the success of IT, in all it’s Jurassic, masculine glory, should give us pause for thought: is the relentless feminisation of society elsewhere leading to its stagnation?
The fact is that we are, over the medium term, slowing down. George Osborne made much of projected GDP growth figures of 2.5 per cent per year for the next few years. However, those figures look decidedly worse for our own individual prospects when you take into account immigration, even if you believe the Chancellor’s extremely dubious Brownian style projections of recession-less growth far into the future. Few of us dare think about the consequences for our public finances or our society if another recession hit anytime soon.
Of course there are many other reasons for our secular stagnation: the debt overhang from the Great Recession, ageing demography, weak external demand, but we should now start to take another look at whether the relentless social engineering of the past few decades is really delivering the gains, in terms of economics or social justice, it promised, or whether it is simply bad for your wealth.
