Um, you don't think that calling the given situation meritorious would be racist/sexist? 1. Construct a system to deliver engineering educations. For whatever

Um, you don't think that calling the given situation meritorious would be racist/sexist? 1. Construct a system to deliver engineering educations. For whatever reason, white males are overrepresented in this system. 2. Place those engineers at top engineering firms and startups, where they succeed. 3. Conclude that the system rewards effort and ability fairly, and therefore the current beneficiaries are the best and most deserving. Step #3 is ignorant and stupid. To cast this another way, this would be like going back to a pre-Jackie Robinson period of baseball history, or the pre-integration period in basketball history, and concluding that the best baseball players in the world are white. Yes, in a very literal sense that is true, if you define basketball players as only those people who can right now play basketball professionally, in a system which is accessible only to a small subset of the population. Even if there were people playing amateur or street ball, who had great raw potential, without being able to enter programs where they could hone and refine their skill they would be inferior in many ways to the pros. And a person who would hew to that literal rendering would be considered myopic, shallow and intellectually dishonest. Similarly, to say that the current crop of engineering talent represents the most deserving talent in the world is a backhand to all the people who are excluded from participating in the system to begin with. So yes, you can't say "programming is a racist institution because it doesn't hire people who don't exist." You can, however, say that programming is a racist institution because it benefits from a lopsided system of selection, and then arrogantly declares that the selection system is fair, that those selected received no undue benefit in their selection, and therefore those selected are the best.