Imagine a company which exists entirely online: no physical office, all employees work from home over the Internet. Imagine that all employees and managers and executives use gender-ambiguous screennames, and no one is allowed to ask any questions which would reveal identity, gender, etc. (Perhaps there's a small HR department that handles the real identities, but it's not allowed to share them with anyone else, nor to influence hiring or promotion.) Imagine that all hiring and promotion is done purely based on performance. It's impossible for identity or gender or race, etc. to be a factor in hiring or promotion.

Would such an environment be "unmeritocratic"?

This would be much more meritocratic than our current system. And it would result in much better diversity.

You don't even have to be as extreme as your example (nobody could work in the conditions that you mentioned).

Things like blind resume screening have been shown to significantly reduce hiring bias, and more companies should be doing it.

Also, the biggest discrimination problems in tech aren't even direct hiring discrimination problems. One big reason why companies are not very diverse is that companies tell their employees "refer your friends!" and then they are surprised when the white men only refer other white men.

Making efforts to specifically reach out to women, and making sure they apply to your company (without lowering any bars or anything), work very well in increasing diversity.

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly. You seem to be saying that, in order to promote meritocracy, women should be given preferential treatment over men (i.e. hiring, promotions, compensation, etc). You also said that the hypothetical environment I mentioned--in which gender is not a factor whatsoever--would be more meritocratic than current environments.

So you seem to be simultaneously saying that 1) a system in which gender was a non-factor would be more meritocratic than contemporary systems; and 2) that a system in which women are given preferential treatment over men would be more meritocratic than contemporary systems; and 3) that a system in which women are given preferential treatment over men would be still more meritocratic than the hypothetical system.

Point 3 seems a natural conclusion given that you have argued for point 2; if point 3 were not true, it would seem logical to argue for point 1.

Am I misunderstanding you?

I work in conditions very similar to what he mentioned.

I work with several people remotely, have for months, have made paying projects, haven't heard their voices ever (or even seen photos of them in some cases).

Thinking on it, in some cases I literally don't know the person's ethnic background. One of my guys could be black or white or Indian and I wouldn't know. Even his name is a strange three-letter thing I haven't heard before. Huh.

So yeah, you can work like this.

I think that many skilled people would perform pretty bad and leave. Maybe especially in tech, I mean no other industry tout "culture fit" among most important criteria. For some reason, guys in tech need that social aspect of work.

You may be right. But what about open-source software projects on the Internet? Many participants in them don't know anything more about their "co-workers" than their username, but they seem to accomplish a lot.