It probably wasn’t inspired by U.S. Senator Mazie Hirono, who not long ago told men to “shut up.” But that’s in a way what a new Financial Times tool will do: warn writers if they’re quoting too many men and force them to purge male voices.
As RT.com reports:
The Financial Times has a woman problem, or so it thinks. In the push for gender equality, and to reach out to female readers, boffins at the paper have developed a bot that warns journalists when they’re quoting too many men.
The paper, which mostly covers the stuffy, male-dominated worlds of finance and industry, found that only 21 percent of the sources quoted in its articles were women. To combat this, the FT team then developed a bot that trawls articles, scanning pronouns and first names to warn section editors if they aren’t including enough women in their stories, according to a report in the Guardian.
Staff at the paper have been warned that in the future, textual analysis will be used to scan their articles as they type, on the lookout for over-representation of male voices. Presumably, a stern-voiced AI will wag a virtual finger at them if they neglect to include women.
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This is another example of how an Equality-Dogma-enslaved Western world increasingly assigns positions based not on merit but quota. The Financial Times is going all-in on this, too. After boasting that the paper increased its percentage of female opinion writers, The Guardian informs that the Times’ “opinion desk is tracking not only the gender of contributors, but also their ethnicity and geographical location, as part of an effort to commission more female voices, more minority voices in western countries and more local voices elsewhere.”
With merit clearly not the top priority, is it any wonder the mainstream media have become Fake News Central?
But since Diversity™ is so important, I’m waiting for the tool that tells you when too many men are rushing into a fire zone, flood area, or some other disaster; the operation can then be halted until enough female rescuers are found.
The point? As American Thinker’s Katie El-Diwany wrote earlier this month, within “the feminist grievance narrative, there is no whining about women being ‘excluded’ from working-class male-dominated professions. There is more than plenty of talk about the dearth of women in science, in engineering, in upper management positions, and as CEOs. But there is no one asking: where are all the female garbage-collectors, the female elevator technicians, the female landscape laborers, the female oil rig workers?”
Note here that women are also mostly excluded from workplace deaths, 92 percent of which comprise men. This is because men are generally the ones taking the most dangerous jobs — again, the ones feminists don’t lobby to get women into.
The same double standard is evident in the intersex wage-gap controversy. Leftists will complain about women earning less in general, a phenomenon conclusively shown to be due to the sexes’ different career choices, not discrimination. In particular, leftists may focus on women’s lower earnings in the fields of sports or acting, which are the result of market forces. Yet regarding female fashion models earning considerably more than their male counterparts, we hear crickets.
As El-Diwany concludes, “All of this reveals that feminist clamoring for ‘equal representation’ is not about equality at all. It is about power and prestige.”
Returning to the fembot quotation terminator, I quoted El-Diwany not because she’s female, but because she penned something recent, relevant, and relatively profound. And that’s the point. People should be cited for the same reason they should be hired: merit.
The best reason to quote writers is because they’ve profoundly expressed Truth. This will result in their mainly being men for a number of reasons. One is that you quote from history, and most of history took place a very long time ago — when it generally was men doing the writing. Thus, most quotations will have been birthed by men.
Moreover, with our degraded intellectual age paling in comparison to the distant past, the latter provides an inordinate percentage of the quality written material. Ergo, virtually all the truly great quotations will have been birthed by men.
So whether it’s work or play, quotas negate quality. Can you think of an area — where performance is easily quantified (i.e., sports) — in which diversity improves quality? Would the NBA, NFL, MLB, or World Cup soccer teams be better if they were 50 percent female and reflected the wider population’s racial and ethnic composition?
This loss-of-quality phenomenon doesn’t disappear just because diversity imperatives are applied to harder-to-quantify fields, such as medicine, air-traffic control, law, or journalism. The only difference there is that diversity dogma’s destruction is easier to hide. Journalists’ performances aren’t measured with a stopwatch, after all.
Of course, this isn’t the first time in history ideology trumped meritocracy. One reason the giant USSR was given fits by tiny Finland in 1939’s Winter War is that the Soviets had replaced competent officers with obedient communist-party ideologues.
Suppressing the meritorious is a recipe for civilizational disaster — one the Left seems to replicate everywhere it takes power.
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