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Silicon Valley’s Mirror Effect “If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley,” wrote David Sacks in an email to The Times’s Jodi Kantor. 大卫·萨克斯(David Sacks)曾通过电子邮件告诉《纽约时报》的乔迪·坎特(Jodi Kantor)：“如果世界上真有任人唯贤这回事，那它一定存在于硅谷。” Kantor was working on an article, published in The Times on Tuesday, about the Stanford class of 1994 — the class that graduated a year before Netscape went public, and, for all intents and purposes, started the Internet economy. She was exploring why the men in that class had done so much better in Silicon Valley than the women. 坎特当时正在撰写的一篇关于1994届斯坦福(Stanford)毕业生的文章，已经在周二的《纽约时报》上发表了。这届学生毕业于网景公司(Netscape)上市一年前；无论从哪点来看，他们都是互联网经济时代的开启者。坎特想要弄清，为什么他们中的男性在硅谷的表现远远好于女性。 Sacks, meanwhile, was one of the most successful members of the class. At Stanford he wrote for The Stanford Review, “a conservative-libertarian campus newspaper,” where he befriended Peter Thiel, a fellow libertarian. Then, in 1998, Sacks, Thiel and a handful of others — overwhelmingly white and male — founded PayPal, which made them all very rich. Since then, the PayPal Mafia, as these men are known in Silicon Valley, have seeded companies, founded companies and sold companies — in effect, financing another generation of (mostly) young white men. 而萨克斯是这届学生里最成功的人之一。在斯坦福就读期间，他曾为“兼具保守与自由气质的校园报纸”《斯坦福评论》(The Stanford Review)撰稿，并在报社里结识了同为自由主义者的彼得·蒂尔(Peter Thiel)。后来，萨克斯、蒂尔以及其他几个人——几乎全是白人男性——于1998年创办了给他们带来万贯家财的贝宝(PayPal)。从那时候起，这些以“贝宝黑帮”(PayPal Mafia)的名号行走于硅谷的男性，在孵化、创办和出售公司的同时，实际上也在资助新一辈创业者——其中大部分人都是白人男性。 In the email, which Kantor posted on her Facebook page, Sacks described meritocracy as one of his “core values,” and noted that when he has hired and promoted women, it was because they were the top candidates. “I chose the best person for the job, I needed the best talent to win, and I wanted to foster a culture of excellence.” 萨克斯在那封被坎特发在了Facebook个人页面上的邮件中表示，任人唯贤是他的“核心价值观”之一；如果女性是最佳候选人，他就会聘用她们或者让她们得到晋升。“我物色的是某项工作的最佳人选，我得用最优秀的人才去赢得胜利，我想要培育卓越文化。” Well, maybe. But, as Kantor pointedly asks in a short introduction to Sacks’s email, if Silicon Valley is truly a meritocracy, “why do mostly men prevail?” 好吧，也许是这样的。但坎特在简短介绍萨克斯的邮件之际提出了一个尖锐的问题，在硅谷真的是任人唯贤吗，“为什么事业发达的大多是男性？” This is a question that has become increasingly urgent. This summer, Jesse Jackson shamed a number of important Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and LinkedIn, into publishing a breakdown of their employees by race and sex. The numbers are appalling — something the companies were forced to concede once the figures became public. At LinkedIn, 2 percent of the work force is black, and 4 percent is Hispanic. Google is 70 percent male, with 91 percent of its employees either white or Asian. Facebook: 69 percent male and 91 percent white or Asian. When it comes to leadership positions or board seats, the numbers are even worse. Can this really be the result of “meritocracy?” 这已经成为了一个日渐迫切的问题。今年夏天，杰西·杰克逊(Jesse Jackson)公布了一份关于雇员种族和性别构成状况的详细报告，把谷歌(Google)、Facebook、苹果(Apple)、领英(LinkedIn)等许多硅谷大公司羞辱了一番。报告中的数字令人极为震惊——它们被公诸于众后，上述公司被迫予以了承认。领英的员工中，黑人占2%，拉美裔占4%。谷歌的员工中，男性占70%，白人或亚裔占91%。Facebook的员工，男性占69%，白人或亚裔占91%。与领导职位或者董事会席位有关的数据则更为糟糕。“任人唯贤”的结果真的会是这样吗？ There aren’t many women or African-Americans working in Silicon Valley who would agree. “Silicon Valley’s obsession with meritocracy is delusional,” Freada Kapor Klein, the co-chair of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, told The Los Angeles Times in May. “Unless someone wants to posit that intelligence is not evenly distributed across genders and race, there has to be some systemic explanation for what these numbers look like.” Her husband, Mitch Kapor, designed Lotus 1-2-3, the seminal spreadsheet program that helped to make the IBM PC famous, and he calls the reality of Silicon Valley’s hiring practices a “mirror-tocracy.” 许多在硅谷工作的女性或者非裔美国人都不会这么看。“硅谷对任人唯贤的着迷是虚妄的，”卡帕社会影响中心(Kapor Center for Social Impact)联合主席弗里德·卡普尔·克莱因(Freada Kapor Klein)说，“除非有人想要假定不同性别、不同种族的人之间存在智力上的差异，否则这些数据的出现一定有某种系统性的原因。”克莱因的丈夫米切尔·卡普尔(Mitch Kapor)曾设计出划时代的表格处理软件Lotus 1-2-3，帮助IBM个人电脑声名鹊起，他把硅谷在招聘政策方面的现实称为“物以类聚，人以群分”。 In its December issue, Fast Company published two articles about being black in Silicon Valley that included a round-table discussion with a handful of African-American tech leaders. They talked partly about the cultural reasons that African-Americans have been underrepresented: It can be hard to take a big financial risk when you don’t have a safety net — like parents or friends with money — to fall back on if you fail. They note that so often, Silicon Valley executives only want to hire people who have graduated from certain schools, like Stanford or Harvard. Very few recruit from Clemson, even though, as Nicole Sanchez, a diversity consultant, told me, “Clemson graduates the most black computer science graduate students in the country.” 《快公司》(Fast Company)杂志12月号发表了两篇有关硅谷黑人员工的文章，其中包括一场与几位非裔美国人科技领袖的圆桌讨论。他们讨论了非裔美国人占少数的文化因素：如果你没有一张在失败时可以依靠的安全网——比如富有的父母或朋友，就很难去冒较大的财务风险。他们指出，硅谷的高管经常只想要招聘特定学校的毕业生，比如斯坦福大学或哈佛大学(Harvard)。几乎不会有高管从克莱姆森大学(Clemson)招聘，虽然多元化顾问妮科尔·桑切斯(Nicole Sanchez)告诉我，“克莱姆森大学计算机科学专业毕业的黑人学生是全美最多的。” But what shines through most is the extent to which people in Silicon Valley exhibit “unconscious bias.” “The meritocratic glow of Silicon Valley is so frustrating,” said Kanyi Maqubela, a partner at The Collaborative Fund, during the Fast Company round table. “It creates a pass for people who use things like the ‘culture filter’ ” — such as sharing the same interests as others at the company. “What’s the culture filter?” he continued. “An easy excuse to be prejudiced.” 不过，最引人注意的还是硅谷人所展示出的那种严重的“无意识的偏见”。谷歌的精英化的光环是如此地令人失望，The Collaborative Fund的合伙人卡尼·马克贝拉(Kanyi Maqubela)在《快公司》杂志的圆桌会议上说。“它成了使用‘文化过滤器’这类东西的人的通行证”——比如，这种人会只招聘与公司其他人有着相同兴趣爱好的人。“什么是文化过滤器？”他接着说，“就是施加偏见的一个方便借口。” |
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