Feminist Claims Wall Street Culturally Superior to Silicon Valley

Newsweek cover Jan. 28, 2015 (Newsweek)
Newsweek

Newsweek never recovered from withholding the publication of investigative reporter Michael Isikoff’s expose of an alleged sexual relationship between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in early January 1998. But 17 years later, and two sales of the magazine for $1 each time, the new owners have gone all in to revive their publication’s elitist liberal roots by publishing Nina Burleigh’s “What Silicon Valley Thinks Of Women”.

As a premier New York feminist writer, Burleigh has published dozens of flame-thrower victimization pieces, including “Genius and Young Flesh””A High School Student’s Nightmare: Dating Violence”; and “What If Weiner Was a Woman?”. In “Baby Palins” she dismissed accomplished young right-wing women as frauds for not crediting feminism for paving the way for their success.

When once asked by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz if she could be impartial as the  White House reporter for Time Magazine during the Clinton Administration; she answered: “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”

Burleigh’s latest screed is that “a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley.” She trots out geeks-gone-bad anecdotal horror stories as her hook that sexist discrimination explains why 50% of venture capital tech start-ups are not led by women. According to Burleigh; “One problem with the male-dominated system is that top partners have almost never been exposed to women as professional peers. Their interaction with women is limited to their wives and daughters, and maybe executive assistants.”

Meritocracy and entrepreneurship are obviously not Ms. Burleigh’s “thing.” She colorfully dismisses the Silicon Valley culture that creatively connects 3,057,761,038 Internet users and generates over $1 trillion of GDP each year as “Northern California’s venture capital boys’ club and the socially stunted boy-men that the money men like to finance.”

As her evidence of Silicon Valley institutional sexism, Burleigh follows a pair of women who quit their day jobs to start RedRover as an app that helps parents find kid-friendly things to do. As a sign of their deep sacrifice for the cause, Burleigh claims:

The pair eschewed new clothes, walked instead of Ubered and assembled a small, mostly unpaid staff. They found pro bono lawyers with startup expertise, signed contracts, designed and revised their PowerPoint pitch a dozen times and met with more than 50 potential investors. The programmer tested the algorithm. They had 1,500 clients wait-listed for a beta launch. They attracted interest at five large technology companies, including Twitter. They told investors their project was the next Pinterest—the way screenwriters tell movie moguls their scripts are the next Titanic.

Although the two women raised $125,000 in “pre-seed” venture capital and successfully launched their business, Burleigh is incensed that the women couldn’t raise their $525,000 objective. She claims the “one thing these two founders are missing, and it is almost the sine qua non of the fabled Silicon Valley startup. They don’t have penises.”

Since Burleigh’s feminism is a hammer and men are the nail, she rejects any reminder going to college is now sexist against men with a male-female ratio of 43.6%–56.4%.

The vast majority of women who enroll in college science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) chose to major in biology. This explains why 53% of biological scientists are now women and about 47% of medical students are women. It is conscious choice rather than misogyny that explains why women graduate with only 17% of the type of math, computer science and electrical engineering degrees that Silicon Valley craves.

Ms. Burleigh in her search for misogyny seems to have overlooked that Meg Whitman is Chairman, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard; Ginni Rometty is Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM; and Marissa Mayer is CEO of Yahoo. In the most recent diversity data released by tech-giants Google, Hewlett Packard, LinkedIn, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and eBay reveals that about a third of tech employees are female and the percentage is definitely rising.

Ms. Burleigh is the latest in a list of camp-following opportunists to jump on board the Silicon Valley victimization bandwagon. As I chronicled for Breitbart on December 11, 2014 in “Jesse Jackson Talks Diversity as Silicon Valley Outsources Jobs,” the Rainbow PUSH already has a very public campaign to enforce “Valley” racial quotas.

Silicon Valley is incapable of saving itself from its “frat boy culture” that, according to Burleigh, “rewards young men and shortchanges women.” Her formula for taming the Valley is to bring in the type of “lawsuits and diversity consultants in every corner” that Burleigh says has cleansed Wall Street.

New York self-appointed intellectuals, like Nina Burleigh, often refer to the rest of America as “fly-over-country.” But arguing that Wall Street, which produces nothing, is culturally superior to Silicon Valley, which is creating the future, raises the bar for cultural arrogance.

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