The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  Treating the untamed male libido as a political problem calls forth a legal remedy, manifested by the highly technical “affirmative consent” rules for sex on college campuses. But law is less effective than informal norms in regulating behavior, especially in a post-liberation environment that has stripped females of the protections of modesty and restraint. Traditional culture tried to civilize the male libido by celebrating the virtues of gentlemanliness and respect. Under a traditional concept of propriety, masturbating in front of a female acquaintance (as the comedian Louis C.K. was wont to do) would have been unthinkable, a violation of the lady’s modesty and the gentleman’s dignity. Now, however, with “ladies” and “gentlemen” banished from our social universe, and even from language, such behavior is apparently no longer unthinkable. Most men would not feel themselves harassed if a female acquaintance masturbated in front of them; they might even consider themselves to be lucky dogs. That women recoil from this same behavior reveals a fundamental divide between male and female experiences of the body and sex.

  Feminists’ tic of blaming males for every female behavior that contradicts their ideal of gender equality undercuts that very claim of equality. Naturally, Jessica Bennett trots out the feminist trope that it is the patriarchy that makes females want to “attract male desire.” Women are apparently the helpless dupes of the fashion and cosmetics industries, and have been brainwashed into spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year in order to be noticed by men. That brainwashing extends to highly paid movie stars as well. The Times’s gender team produced an online series called “The New Red Carpet” to combat gender stereotyping and harassment in Hollywood. Before the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, team member Bonnie Wertheim informed readers that stars’ dresses during such awards ceremonies “are not a reflection of their own style.” Rather, the “red carpet industrial complex” forces those gowns on otherwise self-effacing and reclusive actresses in order to reinforce the “widely held perception that women’s bodies are available for public consumption.”4 (The “red carpet industrial complex” exerted its dastardly power to the bitter end. Though the female stars at the Golden Globes wore black outfits as a #MeToo protest, those outfits just happened to include bare shoulders, plunging necklines, slit skirts, and stiletto heels.)

  But if women are so vulnerable to advertising and manipulation, why should we be bootstrapping them into positions of economic and political authority? In fact, the fashion and cosmetics industries respond to consumer demand; it is women who, irrespective of the alleged patriarchy, try to attract male desire. And they are not averse to exploiting their sex appeal in order to get ahead. An internationally famous opera conductor stopped visiting the dressing rooms of female soloists unaccompanied after two singers made passes, but women in the orchestra and other singers continue to throw themselves at him, according to an assistant. Many of Arturo Toscanini’s affairs were instigated by the singers in question, including Geraldine Farrar and Lotte Lehmann; career advancement may not have been an unhoped-for consequence of those liaisons. And regarding Hollywood, today and historically, is it so unimaginable that actresses have used sex as currency to gain access to roles, when an entire body of literature documents the phenomenon?

  If the #MeToo movement only eradicates exploitative sexual demands in the workplace, it will have been a force for good. Its likely results, however, will be to unleash a new wave of gender quotas throughout the economy and to mystify further the actual differences between males and females. Pace the feminists, Western culture is in fact the least patriarchal society in human history; rather than being forced to veil, females can parade themselves in as scantily clad a manner as they choose; pop culture stars flaunt their promiscuity. There is not a single mainstream institution that is not trying to hire and promote as many females as possible. And yet females are apparently still so beaten down by sexism that the Times’s gender editor asks rhetorically if females should even be deemed able to consent to sex, since “cultural expectations” make it awkward to say no. How long will it be before feminists demand the return of chaperones?

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  Hollywood and the media are already showing the #MeToo quota effect. It’s no coincidence that the Today show now has two female anchors. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has pledged to double its female and minority members by 2020. Actress Natalie Portman’s sneer in presenting the best director prize at the 2018 Golden Globe movie awards—“And here are the all-male nominees”—will become the standard response to any perceived lack of “diversity” in entertainment. The Wall Street Journal’s pop music critic, Jim Fusilli, for example, groused that females were underrepresented among Grammy award nominees. “There is no Grammy category comprised entirely of women,” he complained. “No groups led by women are among the nominees in the Best Contemporary Instrumental, Best Jazz Instrumental, Best Large Jazz Ensemble and Best Contemporary Christian Music album categories.”5 How many female-headed groups exist in those categories and how good are they? That question is sexist. Six female music industry executives then accused the Recording Academy’s board of trustees and leadership of suffering from “inclusion issues across all demographics.” In response, management has penitently promised to overcome the “unconscious biases that impede female advancement” in the music industry.6 The National Hispanic Media Coalition protested the 2018 Academy Awards lunch because of the paucity of Hispanic Oscar nominations. Even before the Hispanic protest, Hollywood execs were experiencing quota fatigue, given the pressures from feminist, LGBTQ, and disability activists to hire by identity category.

  The prospect of left-wing entertainment moguls having to sacrifice their box-office judgment 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 2018 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 Paradigm’s leader, Joelle Emerson.7 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.

  The art world will be hard hit. After harassment allegations surfaced against a publisher of the contemporary-art magazine Artforum, the Los Angeles Times published a gender tally of art museum directorships. Females hold 48 percent of them—not a promising start for a diversity crusader. There is a silver lining, however: Only three women run museums with annual budgets of more than $15 million, and they’re paid less than their male counterparts. It doesn’t matter if director salaries are commensurate with experience and credentials; sexism is assumed, and impossible to rebut.

  Two months before the explosion of #MeToo, New York mayor Bill de Blasio anticipated the coming pressures on museum management. The city’s culture funding would henceforth be contingent on the diversity of an arts organization’s employees and board members, he announced. The New York Times helpfully pointed out that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, and the American Museum of Natural History are led “largely by white male executives and power brokers from Wall Street, real estate and other industries.” Have those “white male executives” preserved the cultural patrimony bestowed by visionary collectors of the past? Did those “white male executives” generously donate millions of dollars to the institutions they serve? Who ca
res? The Times put a picture of conductor Andris Nelsons—a white man—performing at Carnegie Hall on the front page as a damning illustration of the problem.

  What hangs on the walls of art museums and galleries is an equally inviting bean-counting target. In a sample of nearly seventy institutions analyzed by the Art Newspaper, females had solo shows only 27 percent of the time from 2007 to 2013. Female artists have graced the cover of Artforum only 18 percent of the time since the magazine’s inception. That is about to change. “The art world is misogynist,” Artforum’s new editor-in-chief David Velasco told the Los Angeles Times. “Art history is misogynist. Also, racist, classist, transphobic, able-ist, homophobic. I will not accept this.… Intersectional feminism is an ethics near and dear to so many on our staff.”8 The history of art that Velasco so derides has produced crushing beauty and profound insight into human nature. That is irrelevant to the coming crusade.

  Individual artists will now be subjected to #MeToo litmus tests. Phony sexual-harassment charges against contemporary painter Chuck Close led the National Gallery of Art in Washington to postpone indefinitely an upcoming exhibition. Museums will try to inoculate themselves against such purges by bulking up in advance on “diversity” acquisitions. They’ll need to expand the definition of who belongs in a museum by bringing in female artists and people of color, Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, told The New York Times.9

  Orchestra conductors will be evaluated based on their gender and race, especially after harassment allegations surfaced against Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine (those allegations involved gay sex but will be leveraged for feminist purposes) and against Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Charles Dutoit. Orchestra boards will pay penance for their own inadequate diversity by a mad rush on female conductors, whose numbers are minuscule. It was already difficult two years ago to land a US conducting position for a universally esteemed white male conductor, reports his agent. Now it would be nearly impossible, the agent believes, adding wistfully: “If I had a trans conductor, I would be rich.”10

  New Yorker music critic Alex Ross triggered outrage against the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra when he tweeted in February 2018 that they had programmed no female composers in their upcoming season. It is ludicrous to suggest that these institutions are discriminating against female composers. That same month, CSO conductor Riccardo Muti brought Jennifer Higdon’s Low Brass Concerto to Carnegie Hall, a piece commissioned by the Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore orchestras. But Ross and his followers demand affirmative programming quotas. The fact is that over most of music history, the greatest composers have been male. At a time of diminishing classical music audiences, it is reckless to wield identity politics against our most important and precious musical institutions.

  The economics field has also been hit with #MeToo diversity pressures. A panel at the annual American Economic Association meeting in January 2018 charged that gender discrimination was pervasive in economics, an argument that fit into the “larger national examination of bias and abuse toward women in the work force,” The New York Times reminded readers. If females are underrepresented on economics faculties, it is because of such insurmountable barriers as the percentage of male economists cited in leading college textbooks: 90 percent. Were there comparable female economists who could have been cited for the relevant proposition instead? Unlikely, but in any case, we don’t need to know. Is it possible to pursue intellectual inquiry out of love, rather than because you’re following someone of your own gender or race? Apparently not. The Times bemoaned the “shrinking pipeline of women in economics departments”: while females made up 33 percent of first-year PhD students in 2016, only 13 percent of full-tenured professors were females in 2016. But it takes decades for graduating cohorts to work their way through the system; when those tenured economics professors were students, their cohort was much less than 33 percent female.

  Economist Deirdre McCloskey rejects the idea that competitively qualified females are being excluded: “There is nothing like discrimination on the part of hiring committees,” she says.11 Self-selection may come into play, however, she adds, since economics is a “macho field” that pays relatively little attention to the impact of females’ family roles on the timing of a scholarly career. Modern-day economics has grown increasingly math-based. The percentage of males who score in the upper range of the math SATs (scoring 700 or more on an 800-point scale) is nearly twice as high as the percentage of female high-scorers. Males outperform females on the macroeconomics and microeconomics AP exams. Males are also more competitive than females, economist Johanna Mollerstrom and others have shown. Such facts have a clear bearing on the composition of a “macho,” quantitative field like economics, but they are not allowed to be mentioned in any discussion of “diversity.”

  Stanford’s business school is claiming surprise at a recent whistleblower study showing that it favors females over males in awarding financial aid. The chance that such a practice was inadvertent is zero. But such female preferences in business and economics programs will only accelerate to combat an alleged culture of bias. Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has instituted a year-long program in leadership development, IGNITE, to create a “truly diverse and inclusive senior leadership team.” Participants will receive executive sponsorship, coaching, and personality assessments, something that many aspiring top managers might value. Participation is limited to women, however, as part of Dow Jones’s campaign to reach 40 percent female executive leadership quickly. Such efforts are undoubtedly underway at many major news outfits and have only redoubled in urgency.

  Silicon Valley is a #MeToo diversity bonanza waiting to happen. It’s not for nothing that the Mountain View headquarters of Google is referred to as the “Google campus”; the culture of the Silicon Valley behemoth is an echo chamber of shrill academic victimology. Managers and employees reflexively label dissenters from left-wing orthodoxy misogynists and racists, as revealed in the lawsuit filed in January 2018 against Google by James Damore. (See chapter 1.) “Punching Nazis” is celebrated on Google chat boards.12 It is assumed that the lack of proportional representation of female, black, and Hispanic engineers at the company is due to implicit bias on the part of every other type of engineer.

  In February 2018, a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting addressed the “cultural and institutional practices” that suppress female and underrepresented minority “voices” in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). But as we’ll see, those “voices” have already been the target of hundreds of millions of dollars from government, foundations, businesses, and schools pouring into gender- and race-exclusive math and science programs. The results of such efforts, such as the Latinas in Tech initiative, run by the National Center for Women & Information Technology, or the overhyped Girls Who Code program, have been modest.

  It is curious that the #MeToo movement is concerned only with gender representation in particular occupational categories. For instance, most HVAC and refrigeration installers and mechanics are men, yet there is little outcry about getting more girls into vocational training for these jobs. Similarly, virtually all workers in the carting, moving, trucking, and mining industries are males, but female underrepresentation in these high-injury and high-fatality occupations has not sparked celebrity outrage.

  As the #MeToo moment swells the demand for ever more draconian diversity mandates, a finding in a 2017 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 more than 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 extends the reach of academic feminism, it will have an even more disruptive effect.

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  FROM 1970S HIGH THEORY TO TRANSGENDER BATHROOMS ON CAMPUS

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  Academic theory leapt again from the university to the real world with the Obama administration’s 2016 ruling that public schools must allow boys, bearing their full complement of male genitals, to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms if they declare themselves female.

  For two decades, a growing constellation of gender studies, queer studies, and women’s studies departments had been beavering away at propositions that would have struck many people outside academia as surprising—such as that biological sex and “gender” are mere ideological constructs imposed by a Eurocentric, heteronormative power structure. Even though skeptical journalists have regularly dived into the murky swamp of academic theory and returned bearing nuggets of impenetrable jargon and even stranger ideas, the public and most politicians have shrugged off such academic abominations, if they have taken note at all. (Senator Marco Rubio’s deplorable jab at “philosophy majors” during his 2016 presidential run demonstrated how clueless your typical politician is about the real problems in academia.)

  But a pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media. The products of the narcissistic academy graduate and bring their high-theory indoctrination with them into the federal and state bureaucracies and into newsrooms. Even the judiciary is affected. The opinion of the federal district court striking down California’s Proposition 8 (declaring that marriage was an institution uniting men and women), for example, was steeped in the women’s studies notion that marriage originated as a way to impose a subordinate “gender” role on females.