Joy Pullmann, The Federalist, June 5, 2018

Melinda Gates has decided to enter the venture capital world by sending her money to people based at least partly on their sex and skin color, she said in a recent Fortune interview.

“It’s been incredibly disappointing to watch how few women-led businesses are getting funded,” Gates said. “Ultimately, if we want more innovation and better products, we’ve got to put more money behind women and minorities. That wasn’t happening, so I decided to step in and see what I could do to help a little bit.”

Here are other portions of her interview where Gates specifically says some criteria for how she invests in startups are race and sex. She clearly says she preferences women and non-whites over men and white people, specifically for these immutable characteristics that have nothing inherently to do with business success. “Over-index” is essentially a financial or data version of affirmative action.

I am specifically looking at funds who over-index on women-led and minority-led businesses.

I’m asking a lot of business questions about how they will go about their funding, how they will over-index on women’s businesses, and how they will hold themselves accountable for a great return.

Some of these big firms often believe in the white guy in a hoodie disrupting a whole industry. So we’re going to disrupt it by making sure we’re indexing for women and minorities because they’ve got great ideas.

Many of them think if they have one female at the table, they’ve done their job. Another big one is when they say that they have trouble finding women. Those are just excuses. They don’t know what investing in these areas looks like until they get several women who are partners in their firm.

A white man could easily make products that meet minority women’s needs and desires, and vice versa. Their race and sex has nothing to do with their drive and ingenuity. But Gates implies that they do, which is weird and patently stupid, to put it mildly.

It’s not only Gates who feels comfortable revealing her race and sex biases when deciding where to spend some of her billions. It’s industry publications, too. {snip}

It’s by now automatic in our Alice in Wonderland world to {snip} imagine the social hypocrisy, not to mention cries of racism and sexism, if the scenario were reversed. What if Gates had announced she’s going to give “white guys” a boost in her investment calculus, merely for being white guys? Or what if she complained about a startup for having only one man on its board because then “they don’t know what investing in these areas looks like”?

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Gates is, of course, merely one prominent person among many spending lots of time and money addressing what seems to be largely a feature, not a bug, of human nature under conditions of historically unparalleled social freedom. Yet instead of addressing real inequalities, such as the development-retarding home environments of children whose parents chose not to commit to each other for life or hiring practices at companies like Google that seem to purposefully tilt the playing field against whites, men, and non-leftists, companies like Microsoft, Gates, Apple, Pfizer, Intel, AT&T, and Facebook choose to address the actual structural inequalities like these with PR rather than equality.

They sponsor pseudo-academic conferences that generate “research” that amounts to narrative-pushing. They hire lawyers and PR people instead of considering the possibility that they are wrong. Obfuscating reality allows them to play politics without even admitting it is politics, much less truly investigating whether their politics fit human nature, even though mangling it even accidentally is highly dangerous.

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In the Fortune interview, Gates says “I think real change can occur when the VC community starts to demand that the people it invests in have diversity, the right values, and the right behavior.” When asked to “define diversity,” she responds, “I define diversity as when you have a mix of people seated at the table who look representative of our whole society.”

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Instead of considering evidence like this, Gates and those like her rush in and assume social crimes like racism and sexism. Guilty until proven innocent.

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Affirmative Action Schemes Hurt Intended Beneficiaries

Furthermore, evidence from countries that have imposed class quotas on business boards have actually seen a decline in opportunities available to women and minorities. What either written or unwritten diversity quotas tend to do is secure opportunities for a select few people who are already at the top and fit the quotas’ arbitrary criteria. So far there is no evidence they actually increase opportunities for the artificially advantaged groups, and some that they reduce their opportunities and create dangerous social conditions by weaponizing and thus delegitimizing their promotions as artificial rather than earned.

Other attempts to rig finance and tech on women’s behalf are already backfiring, and Gates has even indicated she’s aware of this yet so far seems blind to how it applies to her new venture capital strategy.

“Guys in finance only hire who they can fire easily. Young men they can fire without a problem,” an anonymous female venture capitalist told Business Insider. “The unfortunate thing that happened in the #metoo movement is that men don’t want to ride the elevator with women who could pitch them for fear they would accuse them, let alone mentor that person alone.”

By weaponizing women as women, Gates is likely to reduce their opportunities by making them too political for others to work with safely. {snip}

Punishing People for Their Group Status Is Deeply Unfair

Lastly, Gates presents her strategy as a just corrective to an unjust current system, but is actually the opposite. By elevating women based not on their work but on their sex, she necessarily disadvantages men based not on their work but their sex. Of course, men can’t change that they are men.

Therefore, she is consciously and publicly discriminating against men for something they can’t change and that has nothing to do with their potential for bringing her financial returns or serving the market needs of anyone, including women and minorities. {snip}

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