In the movie The Godfather, there’s a scene where Don Corleone is giving Michael some advice about life. He says, “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” It’s a great line and it was true for most of human existence. The role of males in society has always exposed them to the greater risk. That and male competition has often been for keeps. When the stakes are high the room for error is smaller so men have always had to be the less reckless of the sexes.

We live in a soft age where women run most things so that means we live in a careless age as well. All sorts of silly and ridiculous things are indulged because the margin for error seems endless. You can make up a bunch of silly diversity rules, for example, on the college campus, because little serious work is done on the college campus. Most of what is done is busy work. In the areas where serious work is done, like the hard sciences, you see very little of the PC nonsense we associate with the academy.

That’s a pretty good measure to keep in mind. In any area where you see lots of PC jaclassery, you can be sure that most of the work is unimportant. Of course, the opposite is true as well. In Silicon Valley, for example, work has to get done and the work is challenging, so they don’t waste a ton of time on counting colors and vaginas in the work force. Even Facebook is forced to comport to reality.

Facebook has put itself at the forefront of efforts to recruit a more diverse workforce, including a targeted internal recruiting strategy in 2015 designed to bring in female, black and Latino software engineers. Yet within Facebook’s engineering department, the push has been hampered by a multi-layered hiring process that gives a small committee of high-ranking engineers veto power over promising candidates, frustrating recruiters and hindering progress on diversity goals. Facebook started incentivizing recruiters in 2015 to find engineering candidates who weren’t already well represented at the company – women, black and Latino workers. But during the final stage for engineering hires, the decision-makers were risk-averse, often declining the minority candidates. The engineering leaders making the ultimate choices, almost all white or Asian men, often assessed candidates on traditional metrics like where they attended college, whether they had worked at a top tech firm, or whether current Facebook employees could vouch for them, according to former recruiters, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about their work.

The people running Facebook need real work to get done and get done quickly. That means hiring the best people they can find. They don’t have a lot of time to indulge the diversity nonsense so they don’t. If they filled their cubicles with a rainbow of diversity hires, the PC Puritans would love them, but their share holders and users would not. Since the latter pay the bills, Facebook can live with some bad press. Zuckerberg will just donate another billion dollars to some Progressive cause.

That leads to another rule. When a company that appears to doing real work hires a powerskirt to bring diversity to the firm, it means the insiders have cashed out and no longer think the firm is a good bet. Yahoo made that clear when they hired Marrisa Mayer to diversify the company. She immediately went berserk and started firing men and turning the place into an estrogen circus. This was possible because the smart money had left and they could afford to indulge in some PC jackassery.

That’s the thing about modern liberalism. Identity politics cannot survive contact with reality. That’s because it is the ultimate luxury item. It can be indulged only where the consequences are of no consequence. The Federal government can have a workforce that ticks all the boxes on the diversity scorecard, because no one actually wants the government to do anything. Having a collection of incompetent people at a government agency goes unnoticed so they can fill it up with diversity hires.

While the futurists promise us a future where all the required work is done by AI robots, so we can enjoy the long overdue flying cars and jet-packs, that’s not now. In the present, the hard work of keeping society going still needs to be done by competent people. Ask anyone who hires for a living and they will tell you that the demand for competence outstrips the supply in just about every field. That means wherever real work gets done, diversity can never be a top priority, so it will not be a top priority.

Reality. It is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.