When faced with the assertion that tech is a meritocracy — an observation oft mentioned in open source where getting one's patch into a repository has only to do with the merits of the patch and nothing to do with irrelevancies such as whether the author is a hermaphrodite — the author only mentions as counter-evidence 1) who gets to be on the cover of Wired, and 2) who has managed to parlay tech experience into soft, people-skills positions like directors in high-status companies. I'm not sure I would buy either of those as a metric of meritocracy.

Edit: to put a finer point on it, I don't think anybody has ever claimed that the politics of business hierarchies or that of thinly-veiled glamour magazines is meritocratic, and it doesn't help anyone understand the issue to conflate those things with tech.

Linked in the article is a metafilter post which I found very interesting: http://www.metafilter.com/98385/Board-diversity-by-the-basic...

> Tech is not a meritocracy, and it does not run on the right thing to do.

This is never backed up. I agree with the 'who cares' message though.