What's gotten into Google?

A gander at its page today includes something it has never done until now: inserted a tiny little link on its home page to advocate for the seemingly fine-sounding issue of equal pay for women, which takes us to a full-blown political advocacy video of the left-wing stripe we expect from Google.  The people at Google did it small, as if to draw attention to it.

Make no mistake: a floodgate has opened.  I suspect we are going to be getting a lot more of this any time we try to use Google's search engine.  Allowing these people to monetize our data apparently wasn't enough.  Now they want to hector us.

The fact of the matter is, women's pay inequality is America's most bogus issue.  Adjust the data for time in workforce, part-time work to tend kids, and other factors, and women don't come up short at all.  This editorial in Investor's Business Daily the other day explains the issue well.

According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, women would have to work until April 10 this year to earn the same as men made last year.  It's a clever way to put a spotlight on a Census figure showing the difference in median weekly earnings between men and women.

Of course, the claim that this gap is due to gender discrimination has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked.  Economists have pointed out for years that when you control for things like career choices, job risks, actual hours worked, etc., the supposed gap disappears.

The advocacy in the video is just another garden-variety left-wing cause based on faulty information.  It's junk thought from the geniuses at Google, and nobody should be surprised.

Google has had trouble attracting female engineers for the reason Megan McArdle described well: many women know tech, but not that many women are the fanatical geeks Google requires.  She wrote from her own experience in tech, and her experience rings true.

No, the reason I left is that I came into work one Monday morning and joined the guys at our work table, and one of them said "What did you do this weekend?"

I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance.  I had attended a concert that Saturday night.  I answered the question with an account of both.  The guys stared blankly.  Then silence.  Then one of them said: "I built a fiber-channel network in my basement," and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.

At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people.  I liked the work.  But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free.  Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me.

So I went to business school, and eventually I landed myself in the kind of career that I was happy to do on weekends, and nights, and most of my other time – a career that I did, in fact, do for free for five years before anyone offered to pay me for it.  My field, policy journalism, is also predominantly male.  But it's less male, and it suits me better.

Those facts may be related.  Thinking back to those women I knew in IT, I can't imagine any of them would have spent a weekend building a fiber-channel network in her basement.

Google also is full of leftists.  Combine that with the geek realities, and you get leftist hectoring and disinformation on women's issues, along with hectoring and grievance-mongering, such as is seen in the video.

It's what made Google engineer James Damore condemn the search engine giant and its excessive deference to political correctness around women as a "cult."  His criticism of the company and its politically correct culture around women as well as its silencing of men who dissent is what got him fired.  To most Americans, he was just speaking the truth.  But to Google, which can't attract a parity number of female engineers, he's politically incorrect, beyond the pale, and in need of silencing.

Obviously, the cult has continued.

Now the hectoring is coming out to indoctrinate not just its own engineers, but the broad public.  Obviously, Google is paying some sort of lip service to political correctness because it fears the leftist women within its corporate culture.  As that politically correct cult has grown, its demands are increasing, spilling over into indoctrinating the public.

This is getting obnoxious.  Can Silicon Valley cook up any more new reasons for the public to loathe it?