I would in no way say that SV is even very meritocratic. Compare start-up demographics numbers to population-at-large numbers... The fact that commenters like you would read this article, hopefully think for half a second, and then still insist that SV is "very meritocratic" is exactly the problem.
The problem, I think, is external to SV. It's not that women and minorities find themselves blocked within SV - it's that they don't get into that path in the first place. The problem starts long before someone gets the opportunity to drop out of Stanford CS to pursue their dream of selling Facebook for Cats to herd-mentality VCs.
I'm not sure if you are making an intentional reference to this or not, but it does make an interesting counter-point to the assertion that mathematics is a meritocracy: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
"This is a special collection of problems that were given to select applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. These problems were designed to prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra complaints and appeals. This collection therefore has mathematical as well as historical value."
I don't think that's a counter point; it's a long discontinued practice of deliberately discriminating against people of a given race because other people of that race were too successful.
It's not something I support, by the way, in case the sarcasm in my above comment wasn't apparent.
It is one example (of many) of access to a mathematics education not being a meritocracy. In the linked discussions on that paper, there are people arguing that this practice is ongoing in the US (although tweaked a bit to be less obvious).
Regardless, I think it is important to realize that access to a [mathematics] education not being a meritocracy is different from mathematics itself not being a meritocracy. It is related, so this is only a partial counterpoint, but I think it is interesting to consider nevertheless. Certainly one has to keep in mind that biases in our education system will influence what we see in industry, even if the industry really is a meritocracy.
Why is that a problem? Because someone who can say with moral certainty "this is my money, I earned" is not an easy mark for the sort of people who produce nothing but demand an equal share of the work of others? Because they won't subscribe to the ridiculous notion that there is no virtue in creating wealth but only virtue in giving it away? Maybe that is precisely why those who produce nothing hate the concept of meritocracy so much. It makes it harder for them to guilt people into giving away what they rightfully earned.
It's important to be able to tell the difference between something you earned and something you were given without earning it.
If someone fails, does that necessarily mean they didn't deserve success? Or is it possible that external forces took from them something they had, "with moral certainty", earned?
The article points out that white males are overrepresented in SV success stories. Are you going to argue that they are dozens of times more productive than women, or non-white people?
Let me make the point in a way that does not pit groups of people against each other. If you do the same thing over and over, hustling and making pitches, and then one day you get someone to fund you, does that make you inherently better on that day? Do you have more "virtue" on that day than you did the day before?
Let's say someone founds a company and it fails. This person feels like they didn't deserve to fail, so they start another company and it succeeds. This person will take the success as s true measure of what they deserve, and will ignore the failure as a fluke. But they will look at failed companies around them and feel superior, even though they also failed once.
There are lots of people founding similar companies, making similar pitches to the same investors. I can't see an argument that they "deserve" wildly different valuations.
Holding wealth creation as a virtue devolves very quickly into worshiping money. Anyone with money is to be respected, and anyone who doesn't have money has nothing interesting to say.
You begin from the premise that everyone who believes they have earned their money is correct. This is why the phrase "born on third base, think they hit a triple" was born.
It's fine if your premise is that people who have money deserve it a priori. But let's be honest. A great many haven't worked orders of magnitude harder despite orders of magnitude greater wealth. A great many are not themselves (but for their wealth) orders of magnitude inherently more valuable to society than everyone who has less.
Maybe the community has a bias against pointless class warfare. You want to make an effective feminist statement in Silicon Valley? Start with a github profile.
Right, right. Let's skirt past the idea that men may be in any way responsible for the industry they dominate, and focus on the fact that women aren't creating enough GitHub profiles or having enough hackathons.
In addition to shifting the blame, this is a convenient way to avoid taking any sort of responsibility for our own behavior or our peers, so congratulations on squaring that circle.
This community, like most others, has an unspoken bias against third-wave feminist bullies.
Look what happened to the "Atheism Plus" communities. They have been completely taken over by bigoted "social justice warriors" and their activism.
Completely.
Atheism is almost never discussed. And when it is, it is always discussed in the context of third-wave post-modern feminism. Think I'm lying? Take a look at any Atheism Plus community. Any!
Once a community accepts the tenants of post-modern discourse, it's over.