Well, maybe. But, as Kantor pointedly asks in a short introduction to Sacks’s email, if Silicon Valley is truly a meritocracy, “why do mostly men prevail?”

This is a question that has become increasingly urgent. This summer, Jesse Jackson shamed a number of important Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and LinkedIn, into publishing a breakdown of their employees by race and sex. The numbers are appalling — something the companies were forced to concede once the figures became public. At LinkedIn, 2 percent of the work force is black, and 4 percent is Hispanic. Google is 70 percent male, with 91 percent of its employees either white or Asian. Facebook: 69 percent male and 91 percent white or Asian. When it comes to leadership positions or board seats, the numbers are even worse. Can this really be the result of “meritocracy?”

There aren’t many women or African-Americans working in Silicon Valley who would agree. “Silicon Valley’s obsession with meritocracy is delusional,” Freada Kapor Klein, the co-chair of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, told The Los Angeles Times in May. “Unless someone wants to posit that intelligence is not evenly distributed across genders and race, there has to be some systemic explanation for what these numbers look like.” Her husband, Mitch Kapor, designed Lotus 1-2-3, the seminal spreadsheet program that helped to make the IBM PC famous, and he calls the reality of Silicon Valley’s hiring practices a “mirror-tocracy.”

In its December issue, Fast Company published two articles about being black in Silicon Valley that included a round-table discussion with a handful of African-American tech leaders. They talked partly about the cultural reasons that African-Americans have been underrepresented: It can be hard to take a big financial risk when you don’t have a safety net — like parents or friends with money — to fall back on if you fail. They note that so often, Silicon Valley executives only want to hire people who have graduated from certain schools, like Stanford or Harvard. Very few recruit from Clemson, even though, as Nicole Sanchez, a diversity consultant, told me, “Clemson graduates the most black computer science graduate students in the country.”

But what shines through most is the extent to which people in Silicon Valley exhibit “unconscious bias.” “The meritocratic glow of Silicon Valley is so frustrating,” said Kanyi Maqubela, a partner at The Collaborative Fund, during the Fast Company round table. “It creates a pass for people who use things like the ‘culture filter’ ” — such as sharing the same interests as others at the company. “What’s the culture filter?” he continued. “An easy excuse to be prejudiced.”