Penna Dexter

The #MeToo movement is curtailing sexual predation in the workplace. But it has a growing destructive component. Institutions across society are doing all they can to make certain the term “all white male” could never be used to describe them.

Journalist, attorney, and Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald spoke about this to students and faculty at Hillsdale College. She warned, “#MeToo is going to unleash a new torrent of gender and race quotas throughout the economy, on the theory that all disparities in employment and institutional representation are due to harassment and bias.” She says American competitiveness and scientific achievement will suffer.

Ms. Mac Donald points out that diversity and inclusion were top themes at the World Economic Forum, chaired exclusively by women this year. CEOs revealed that a key determinant of managers’ pay levels are now their record of hiring and promoting females and minorities.

There’s a “war on merit.” Criticizing it can get you fired.

Just ask James Damore, famously fired by Google last year for writing a memo suggesting that bias is not to blame for the fact that tech companies aren’t employing men and women at 50-50 rates. He cited research showing that men and women are attracted to and prepare for different types of work. Saying this supposedly risked traumatizing female Google employees.

But the attention — including billions of dollars — paid to attract women into the hard sciences is not paying off.

Ms. Mac Donald told the crowd at Hillsdale, “This is not surprising, given mounting evidence of the differences in interests and aptitudes between the sexes.” Males often prefer “abstract, idea-centered work.” “Even under the broad STEM umbrella,” she says, “females usually seek jobs that are seen as directly helping others by a two-to-one ratio over males.”

But mainstream institutions in our society — Hollywood, business, banking, Silicon Valley, and certainly academia — are turning themselves into pretzels to prefer “diversity” over aptitude, sacrificing excellence.