Why are there no Big Important Women™ in tech? Uhm, because your ideas suck and you’re all pansy-assed cowards?

 

 

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey all have in common? They’re men. They’re white. They’re heterosexual (AFAIK). They’re smart.

 

None of that counted for shit. Sorry, feminists. Whine your little guts out til the end of the freakin’ world. Being a straight, white male had nothing to do with why those men are famous and rich beyond measure. I’ll let you in on a little secret: there is one reason, and only one reason those men are the giants of the tech world.

 

A brilliant idea.

 

See, that’s the whole point of capitalism, and why it works the way it works. You see a problem (often when others don’t even realize it’s a problem yet) and you solve it in a way that is brilliant, efficient, user-friendly and reasonably easy to manufacture.  You don’t need money to make your idea happen. At least, not your own money. You need venture capital.

 

Venture capital happens when someone has some extra money lying around they would like to turn into more money. Venture capitalists invest in new ventures in the hopes that the new venture will turn their money into more money. It’s really that simple.

 

Money creates more money when invested wisely.

 

How do you convince venture capitalists to give you money? That’s also pretty easy. Have a great idea and then sell it. Your great idea won’t get anywhere if you don’t know how to sell it. Mumble and stare at the floor and downplay how it works and you are not likely to find anyone throwing bags of cash at you. If you don’t think it’s a truly great idea, why the hell would anyone else?

 

Great idea + knowing how to sell = venture capital.

 

Get a load of this pity party for women in tech, in Newsweek. What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women is a giant sobbing, blathering mess that ignores our two key means of getting venture capital. The women in question have a shitty idea that won’t work, and they are mumbling, stammering simpletons who can’t express themselves. Two strikes and you’re out, ladies.

 

The gist of their idea is that women need to connect with other women in tech so they can help each other out professionally because vagina. Women should not cultivate relationships with other professionals in their areas of expertise because men are gross and might look at their asses. Their genius idea is called Glassbreakers. Oddly enough, venture capitalists are not throwing oodles of cash their way because misogyny and sexism, amirite?

 

Here are just a few reasons why Glassbreakers is a stupid idea that won’t work.

 

 

First of all, the answer to sexism is not more sexism. By creating an app that connects humans with vaginas to other humans with vaginas you are leaving out half your potential market. Really well thought out, ladies. Let’s assume that no men will assist colleagues with great ideas if those colleagues have vaginas and then exclude them from women’s networks based on that assumption.

 

Secondly, the idea that women are going to genuinely help other women is laughably naïve. Heaven help any woman in tech who is above average pretty, who thinks other women are going to help her. Virtually 100% of women will aggress against a peer they perceive as sexy. Women will not only refuse to help an attractive woman in tech, they will go out of their way to demean and harm her. Women who achieve power over others (#BanBossy!) are hated pretty much by everyone, but by other women in particular. Lady Bosses are often petty, mean-spirited drama queens and women are each other’s own worst enemies. Why would tech be any different? This story in particular makes me laugh: a feminist went to work for a feminist organization and ended up hating those bitches and quitting. Lol. Yeah, Glassbreakers is such a great idea! Let’s connect women professionally so they can actively destroy each other! That should work! Who wants to invest?

 

 

Thirdly, by their own admission, the developers are addressing a problem that doesn’t exist: sexual harassment and sexist behaviour. Eileen Carey, one of the devs, “claims she has only rarely experienced sexual harassment or even sexist behavior”, but in the next heartbeat claims “bias and harassment are endemic in her profession.”  So which is it? Rare or endemic? And they wonder why venture capitalists are not chucking money at them?

 

And finally, both developers admit they are pathetic cowards when it comes to selling their ideas. After rambling and mumbling all over the place, one investor had to outright ask Carey if she wanted funding. Way to sell that concept! If women are incapable of the “swagger” and “confidence” of men, how are they going to be capable of mentoring each other? If women habitually understate their accomplishments, how are they going to convey anything the slightest bit useful to one another?

 

Glassbreakers hasn’t attracted funding because venture capitalists hate women. Nonsense. It has failed to attract funding because it’s a crappy idea the developers themselves can’t get behind.  If women in tech want to improve their positions, they need to do two things: grow a set and have better ideas. Easy peasy. Sitting around whining and crying that teh menz are mean, casting about for someone to blame other than themselves, and looking for any excuse to avoid asking the tough questions are the things holding women back. Who wants to bet the majority of these mewling children identify as feminist?  Funny that Marissa Meyer didn’t experience any of these terrible roadblocks, and thinks feminism is a crock of shit, too.

 

Hey women in tech who aren’t really killing it, if you’re looking for someone to blame, try a mirror.

 

And then get back to work.

 

Lots of love,

 

JB

 

 

 

 

This is how you do social justice

One of the criticisms often lobbed at men’s rights activists is that we don’t actually do any advocacy work. Notwithstanding the fact that advocacy work takes a fuckton of money, that is simply not true. Carnell Smith, for example, won his own paternity fraud case in the Supreme Court and writes model law that has changed the legislation surrounding paternity fraud in ten states and counting. Smith has been featured as a guest expert on Dr Phil, Fox Business News, CBS Early Show, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN news and many other syndicated talk shows.

 

 

From suicide prevention to domestic violence counselling, intactivism to educational reform, MRAs around the world are gathering, agitating and building the war chest we will need to challenge sexist laws that discriminate against men. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a budget of $40 MILLION dollars, most of which is paid out in salaries and very little actual work is accomplished, so we have a ways to go before we can challenge the Supreme Court and pass an Equal Rights Amendment. The war chest at SPLC stands at $245 MILLION – we are up against some well funded competitors.

 

Social justice warriors are just as frequently accused of doing nothing more than pissing and moaning on social media about perceived oppression, and today I want to take a moment to shine a spotlight on a man who is not just talking about social justice, he’s doing it.

 

 

His name is Dr. Matt Woosley and he is an anesthesiologist. In 2012 he went to Haiti, intending to stay for one year and serve in Port-au-Prince, but once he got to Haiti, he saw a desperate need, decided to do something about it.

 

What the people in Port-au-Prince needed was work. Work that paid a living wage. Work that made it possible for them to eat, educate their children, create safe neighborhoods. Dr. Woosley came up with an idea: could the people in Port-au-Prince be trained to make industrial grade medical scrubs and compete for business on a global scale?

 

Using his own money, Dr. Woosley purchased industrial sewing machines and began training people in the neighborhood, and the Little Haitian Factory was born.

 

We pay our workers 5x the daily average. We share all of our profits directly with our employees. It is our intention for them to receive a living wage and escape poverty.

We are not a charity. We are financed from my personal savings.  Our success has depended solely on the quality of our products and our ability to empower customers to purchase. The better we do in selling our products, the more secure is the future of our factory.

 

 

The factory is up and running and now all Dr. Woosley needs is more customers. He has a GoFundMe campaign under way, requesting $50K to hire a professional sales team to begin marketing the factory’s products to hospitals and healthcare facilities in the US.

 

Dr. Woosley is a man making a difference in the world. I met him when he sent me an email totally unrelated to his factory, and I have encouraged him wholeheartedly to crowdfund to meet his needs. He had his trepidations, as being self-sufficient and a fully functioning for profit enterprise is incredibly important to him. Little Haitian Factory is not a charity. Dr. Woosley is not interested in peddling the “poor victims in Haiti” narrative.

 

He doesn’t want to give the people he watches over a fish. He wants to teach them how to fish. And he’s doing a fantastic job of it.

 

Please consider donating to the Little Haitian Factory at GoFundMe, and if that is not within your means to do, please share this as far and wide and as you can.

 

Let’s help Dr. Woosley change the world.

 

Lots of love,

 

JB

 

Harvard MBA men are brash, bold, confident, assertive and mad skilled at math. The only way women can compete with them is to squash all those qualities. Oh, okay. That seems both smart and fair.

All right everybody!  Stop thinking about Syria and gas attacks and Iowa issuing gun permits to the blind. WTF, Iowa?!?!?.  Hey, what can possibly go wrong?

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130908/NEWS/309080061/?odyssey=nav%7Chead&nclick_check=1

We have a real problem to tackle today.

Harvard MBA ladies suck at competing with Harvard men.

The country’s premier business training ground was trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem. Year after year, women who had arrived with the same test scores and grades as men fell behind.

Oh dear.  Well, that’s not very good, is it?  What to do, what to do…

[The Harvard MBA class of 2013] have been unwitting guinea pigs in what would have once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy: What if Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/education/harvard-case-study-gender-equity.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Look at that statement carefully.  You’ll note that Harvard isn’t interested in fostering the success of ALL their students.  Nope. They’re doing a gender makeover than only involves one gender.  Success is strictly on the basis of Lawful Possession of Labia. Feminist fantasy indeed.

I suppose Harvard might want to consider changing their motto from Veritas to Vaginatas?  Maybe add some teeth to the crest or something? Just a thought.

After reading the Times article, it looks to me like the program to engineer the girl’s success entails the following:

Teach women how to raise their hands.

 

 

Ha!  You probably think I’m kidding, right?  Nope.  Not kidding. Some of the most accomplished, educated, ambitious business students in the country had to pay $100 000 to sit in a class and learn how to raise their hands, because the ladies quavered when confronted with hard thinky stuff like math and that’s not fair!

Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 2011, Neda Navab sat in a class participation workshop, incredulous. The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Ms. Navab had been the president of her class at Columbia, advised chief executives as a McKinsey & Company consultant and trained women as entrepreneurs in Rwanda. Yet now that she had arrived at the business school at age 25, she was being taught how to raise her hand.

Every year the same hierarchy emerged early on: investment bank and hedge fund veterans, often men, sliced through equations while others — including many women — sat frozen or spoke tentatively.

Since 50% of the marks in courses come from class participation, stenographers were placed in each classroom so that women weren’t accidentally discounted in marks.

 

Okay, no real problem with this, but when you couple it with this, a problem suddenly appears.

New grading software tools let professors instantly check their calling and marking patterns by gender.

Hmmm.

So if professor’s call patterns are now being tracked on the basis of gender, who wants to bet that professors overlook male students whom they KNOW can contribute better, more nuanced and meaningful comments in favor of women who have less to offer, in order to make certain patterns fall into ideological lockstep? The Dean wants equality over quality, so screw both the male students and the whole class?

There’s some genius pedagogy right there.  Let’s gather all the best business minds in the country and then make sure half of them don’t get to speak because penis?  Very clever.

Had the professors rid themselves of unconscious biases? Were the women performing better because of the improved environment? Or was the faculty easing up in grading women because they knew the desired outcome?

 

Gee, I wonder.  What, exactly, is the value of a grade you only received because the true competitors are being crippled before the starting gun fires?  It’s like popping open the champagne to celebrate your gold medal in the 100 yard sprint, and neglecting to mention that you were racing 5 year olds on crutches.

Yeah, big accomplishment.

The case study method, which relied on cold-calling students about a firm’s predicament, was “rounded out” with a collaborative, time-consuming, cover your ass and spread the blame technique called “Field”.

Obviously, “Field” allows women to access all their male classmate’s strengths and then claim partial credit for them.  The “team” worked together to figure the case out.  Bullshit, the team did.  One guy took a leadership role and everyone else rode his coattails.

Been there.  Done that.

True story: In my MBA, I was in a group with a man who had a PhD in Astronomy and another man who was a mechanical engineer.  They used to argue about what kind of mathematics to use to solve tricky problems in financial analysis.  “Trigonometry is for children”, huffed StarDoctor.  He worked at an observatory in South Africa that had amazing facilities but paid him shit money, so he used to run guns for the local guerillas on the side.   A very interesting guy. 

The other member of my team was a Chinese woman with an undergrad degree in mathematics who barely spoke English, so she basically coasted and got the same marks as the rest of us while doing what amounted to jack shit.  I, of course, wrote up all our findings and was the keynote presenter for almost everything.

We played to our strengths.  Our team agreed from the get-go that “equality” was fucking dumb.  We were supposed to take turns doing analysis, writing, presenting, etc., so we would be well-rounded, but we decided fuck that nonsense.

We played to our strengths.

144 students. Six major case competitions.  We won five.  Actually, bullshit.  We won all six, but the awards committee couldn’t bear that one team would sweep the medals.  It was unprecedented.

And StarDoctor was unequivocally our leader.  Me and the engineer kept him on his toes, to be certain.  I once disagreed with StarDoctor so vehemently he stormed out of a meeting and got in his car and started driving away and I jumped on the hood of his moving car.  He got out of the car, physically removed me from the hood, threw me in the grass and drove away, and refused to make the changes I wanted.

Mr. JB took StarDoctor out for a drink and a chat after that episode.

Turns out StarDoctor’s conclusion was right, and we were offered positions at the organization we were analyzing.  StarDoctor was unwilling to bow to me to keep the peace and none of us were the slightest bit interested in towing some ideological line about fairness or equality.

We were in it to win.

That’s what kills me about initiatives like Harvard’s that are trying to alter the landscape so that women can succeed.  In order to alter the landscape, you are destroying what makes the MEN such formidable competitors. Now, I’m not stupid.  I realize that the men who are in the Harvard MBA program are rich, connected and come into the program with advantages most of us can only dream of, but they cannot parlay those advantages into real world rewards without combining them with boldness, confidence, assertiveness and a total unwillingness to kowtow to political correctness.

What are we achieving when we take our best and brightest men and force them to squelch the attributes that ultimately benefit us all so that women can feel like they won the race? What exactly are the women going to do with their glorious credentials?

Ms. Upton decided to take a far lower-risk job managing a wealthy family’s investments in Pittsburgh, where her fiancé lived. “You can either be a frontier charger or have an easier, happier life,” she said.

The reality is that most of the women graduating from the Harvard Business School with MBAs will end up housewives, taking care of children in a luxurious lifestyle funded by the men they secured as a result of their fancy degrees.

A surprising number of highly educated MBAs are dropping out of the labor force. Associate Professor Catherine Wolfram, a member of the Haas Economic Analysis and Policy Group, studied surveys taken by nearly 1,000 Harvard undergraduate alumni and found, 15 years after graduation, business school graduates are more likely than doctors and lawyers to leave the workforce. The common factors: being married, being female, becoming a mother.

http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/news/faculty/Wolfram2.html

And you know what?  Yay!  Good for them!  I think those are some damn smart ladies.  The women in the 2013 class of Harvard MBAs don’t seem to be the slightest bit different.  The Dean cancelled the traditional Halloween costumes-in-class extravaganza to prevent the sexy ladies from taking a prime opportunity to market themselves as potential child bearers.

As Halloween approached, some students planned to wear costumes to class, but at the last minute Ms. Frei, who wanted to set a serious tone and head off the potential for sexy pirate costumes, sent a note out prohibiting it, provoking more eye rolls.

No matter.  The ladies still found time to deck themselves out in Playboy Bunny costumes, seeing no conflict with the institutional gender transformation designed to give them the leg up over their male classmates and their unapologetic pursuit of sexual market value.  The administration might think that’s a problem, but the women sure as hell didn’t.

Students were demanding more women on the faculty, a request the deans were struggling to fulfill. And they did not know what to do about developments like female students dressing as Playboy bunnies for parties and taking up the same sexual rating games as men.

Here’s the part that really, really made me giggle. One woman in particular was intimidated at the sexually charged climate that governed social interactions at Harvard.

“Someone made the decision for me that I’m not pretty or wealthy enough to be in Section X,” [Brooke Boyarsky} told her classmates, her voice breaking.

Actually, Brooke, you made that choice yourself when you decided “morbidly obese” was  good look for you.

I entered H.B.S. as a truly ‘untraditional applicant’: morbidly obese.

Owing to the new gender environment that promotes the interests of women over men, Brooke managed to graduate in the top of her class, earning a Bakers Scholar award.  But what was she really excited about?  What made her really happy?

She lost 100 lbs and she is dating now!

“I am super excited to go to my 30th reunion,”

So Harvard is basically Weight Watchers for the upwardly mobile?

Fantastic.  What a great way to mobilize our intelligentsia.  Men:  shut up.  Women:  lose weight and lock down that man.

It truly baffles me that THE single most prestigious university in the world can fall for this.

And it worries me.

When feminists have infiltrated the very best institutions of learning to the point that those institutions are willing to silence their male students so women can feel “good enough”, all the while ignoring the fact that most of the women are there on elaborate missions to nail down their own personal Mr. Darcy, the time for action has come.

I’m all for gender equality in higher education.  Any man, or any woman, should be able to pursue their interests and ambitions and passions without facing down socially constructed barriers based on antiquated ideas about how men and women “are”.

But it should also face reality.  Our antiquated ideas are based on centuries of lived experience.  Most women love babies, family and men far more than they will ever love a Bloomberg Terminal.  And most men love their families and babies and women so much they will spend hours chained to a Bloomberg Terminal to provide for them.

Telling men to sit down and shut up and teaching women how to raise their hands destroys the ability of both men and women to achieve their dreams.

And really, isn’t that the ultimate goal? We want all humans to be able to achieve their dreams.  Most people have dreams that are very simple.  Family, home, food, warm water for a bath at the end of the day.  Not that difficult.

The interesting thing about prioritizing the “feminist fantasy” of the world is just how little that fantasy represents the reality of what most people want.

The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

Maya Angelou

Me neither, Maya.

Why do women go to Harvard in the first place?

To find a husband.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen

Where to find a single man in possession of a good fortune?

Here’s a good place to start:

Raise your hand when you see one you like!

Lots of love,

JB