Ellen Pao and reddit threaten discrimination far worse than anything Pao ever experienced from KPCB

Ellen Pao, who recently lost her gender discrimination case against the venture capital firm KPCB, is also the interim CEO of reddit, the entertainment, social networking, and news site. Ms. Pao has made some remarkable -- and, quite frankly, very disturbing -- statements recently about how she is trying to change reddit's hiring practices. As WSJ reports:

Ms. Pao, who said she wants to stay long-term as reddit’s CEO when a one-year interim period ends, said she has removed salary negotiations from the hiring process because studies show women don’t fare as well as men. She has brought in well-known Silicon Valley diversity consultant Freada Kapor Klein to advise the company. And she has passed on hiring candidates who don’t embrace her priority of building a gender-balanced and multiracial team. “We ask people what they think about diversity, and we did weed people out because of that,” she said.

What exactly is Ms. Pao saying here?

Is she saying that, if reddit currently had, say, a higher percentage of Asian and Indian males in its workforce than the percentage in the general population, then, reddit would apply some kind of "weight" or "points" against new Asian and Indian male job applicants in order to achieve a "gender-balanced and multiracial team?" Is she saying that race- and gender-based quotas are being established at reddit in the attempt to have a workforce that reflects the racial and gender makeup of American society at large?

Suppose I applied for a job at reddit (not that I ever would, given the obviously highly politicized environment there, but suppose). Suppose that, when interrogated about my views on "diversity," I said that my opinion was that race and gender were not criteria that should ever be considered in the hiring process. Suppose that I said that it was my opinion that the goal of hiring the most highly talented, intelligent, hard working employees, regardless of their race and gender, trumped the goal of having a workforce whose racial and gender makeup mirrored that of the general US population. Suppose I said that I subscribed to the philosophy of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and believed that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race and gender is to stop discriminating on the basis of race and gender. Is Ms Pao saying that reddit would "weed me out" for holding such principled and unexceptionable views? If reddit did so, it seems obvious to me that reddit would be practicing a form of discrimination far more heinous than any of the things that Ms. Pao ever experienced at the hands of the partners at KPCB.

Quite frankly, if Ms. Pao's statements are a reflection of how she would go about trying to build a successful software company in Silicon Valley, judging skin pigmentation and the shape of one's genitalia to be more important than the ability to craft complex software, it is no surprise that KPCB found her wanting.

As I have written in the past, so-called "Progressives" are now seeking to poison our businesses and universities (see SCA-5) here in California with racial and gender politics. It is time for executives at Silicon Valley companies to stop groveling, get some friggin' spine, and tell these people: we are drawing a line in the sand; your racial and gender categorizing is not welcome here.