If the system were fully meritocratic, you'd expect a lot more females in the industry, for one. Unless you suppose that females of all races are objectively less capable in some way. But then you'd have to explain why there are so many females being successful in other hard sciences like biology.

The fact is that many people aren't given early access and encouragement to technology, and the ones that do experience constant pressure and put-downs. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. I've done hundreds of interviews and dozens of interview trainings, and have personally observed lots of silly behavior, from treating women more harshly than men, to dismissing a candidate because their family name implied a background of poverty.

A "safe" example to think about: it's very common to rubbish people who went to this university or that one instead of yours, which is obviously the best. You can write that off as good-natured play, but consider that I've had to build a career in tech without a degree. It's only by the slimmest chain of coincidences that I was able to even get the opportunity to be seen and evaluated. The "meritocratic" system simply doesn't believe that anyone without the nous to afford college is worth even noticing.

The hiring manager at the end of that food chain is often unaware of all that. He (and it's usually a "he") passes over resumes and chuckles at their university choices, then picks "the good ones" to jump through hoops and from there picks "the best". To him, that's meritocracy.

Assuming that raw talent is equally spread among races, and that education is equally effective for all races, then a meritocracy should have a racial diversity that is the same as the larger population's.

I consider the first assumption (equal raw talent) to be quite probable. I consider the second assumption to be implausible.

Black and hispanics make a combined 30% of the U.S. population but 7.14% of tech workers, if we were a true meritocracy you wouldn't expect those numbers.

Of course, this isn't the fault of the tech industry. People in lower socio-economic classes are not exposed to technology at early ages and often don't have the ability to go college.

So if tech is a meritocracy it's a meritocracy for people in certain classes.

Especially, when taken as the starting point, an income distribution for candidates that is biased along racial lines?

(Income of family is known to be linked to educational quality.)