Aha! Now that I read it, I see it’s clearly all a clever hoax, like that Midichlorians article that was submitted to the learned journals…
/s
It would be interesting for me to see someone take him up about this offer.
Here’s someone raising a few points and complaining that there’s a climate of shaming and some opinions are shouted down. There’s a media outcry, he’s shouted down and fired. There are news reports around the world, and three out of four reports I’ve read grossly misrepresent the content of his memo.
Wired posted most of the memo, conveniently removing some diagrams and some sources from it.
The full thing can be had here: https://diversitymemo.com/
His biological facts seem to be supported by science; as a layperson I don’t know the exact state of the art in the research into gender differences, but I don’t see anything obviously wrong. Contrary to what has been said in some secondary sources, he does not generalize from the facts he cites and does not claim that “women are unsuited”.
Naturally, the average opinion on bbs is against him. Nobody has to agree with him. But when someone politely states a fact-based opinion (which might still be wrong) and then has this opinion misrepresented, loses his job, and gets insulted for it all over the internet, then I think something is going wrong. I don’t know if there is an “ideological echo chamber” at Google, but someone getting fired over this does count as strong evidence in my book.
I’m posting this here because no one in the comments section for my favorite left-leaning newspaper in Austria too many people were agreeing with me, so I have to venture further out of my own cultural bubble. Please don’t rip me apart. I just fail to see the point where this memo crosses from “I disagree with him” territory into “this toxic fucking sexist idiot needs to fired, ripped apart and deserves no sympathy” territory.
I’m not going to go anywhere near that little lot other than to say I didn’t see anything in his doc or the links that I would consider supporting his ‘facts’ with science.
I disagree with him but I agree that I don’t see anything in it that would justify a dismissal.
The rest of your statement though - he put his views out there publicly, so he can’t complain that other people disagree, even disagree vehemently.
Sympathy? Not from me. He might have an employment claim. If so, go to it. Other than that, he made his bed, etc.
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That’s the funny thing when someone comes in who’s JAQing. They typically aren’t interested in any sort of reasoned discourse. I don’t think anybody that sits down and takes the time to write a several thousand word essay on why D&I targets are bad for everybody or why women are unsuited for work in software engineering is interested in honest debate.
Maybe we were reading a different essay. He may not have gone out and said, “women are unsuited for software engineering jobs” but was quite adamant that men are better suited for tech jobs than women. Never mind that a woman invented the field of software engineering.
Again, maybe we were reading a different essay. What you call "fact-based opinion’ looked a lot more like prejudice to me. This is also someone who called to “de-emphasize empathy”. That says a lot right there.
Maybe you haven’t worked with people like this in the past. Maybe you’re not a woman trying to make a name for herself in software engineering who has to work twice as hard to get ahead only because she don’t have a penis. Or you’re not subject to harassment or micro-aggressions from male co-workers because you’re a female.
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Far smarter people than me have already debunked this type of screed dozens, if not hundreds of times before me. It is not incumbent on me as a progressive to waste my time writing yet another rebuttal to yet another asshole. Damore is an emotional vampire, and he can kindly fuck off.
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My husband, who works in a company that really, truly makes an effort to be diverse and inclusive, is very frustrated this morning as he is having to tell people that “you cannot discuss this at work and say it’s ‘non-political’.”
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I also work at a very D&I focused company and have come across a lot of people that want to discuss this. In some explicitly apolitical places it’s been shut down because it really is extremely difficult to not bring politics into it (I suppose it’s possible, but you need to really dance around a lot of politically motivated landmines). Other places I’ve actually seen earnest support for the theses presented in this essay (even from women) which I find both surprising and disappointing.
BioReaganomics
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It might have helped if he’d offered some concrete examples of when he or others were unfairly “shouted down” or “shamed” for their reasonable behaviour or opinions. Women in STEM provide a constant stream of examples of inappropriate behaviour from their male colleagues, from being ignored at meetings to blatant sexual harassment, that paint quite a clear picture of why they are poorly represented in those fields - and it’s not because they can’t handle the stress or are biologically disadvantaged towards thinking systemically.
But James demonstrates quite clearly in his manifesto that he’s not listening, and hasn’t heard. He’s all for inclusion as long as he doesn’t have to change his behaviour, consider other people, or make space for them. It’s more important to him that he be able to discuss his political views without people pointing out their flaws or sharing contrary opinions (which I assume is what he really means by “shouted down” and “shamed”), because conservatives are the real victims of discrimination don’t you know.
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Don’t forget White Males as being the Real Victims.
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Don’t forget that white males become garbage collectors for “status”:
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I can’t remember because I’m trying to block out what little I read of it, but didn’t he disavow the idea of “toxic masculinity” in there somewhere? Because. Dude.
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Well he doesn’t mention it by name… There is a bit about how men can’t complain about their issues without being labelled “misogynists and whiners”, and that has a footnote that seems to affirm certain aspects of toxic masculinity:
He complains about political correctness a lot. I’m tired of reading the thing now, almost every aspect of it is frustrating.
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Christ, what an asshole. I actually like the idea of a company credo that’s more than just “Don’t be evil”.
It might be well intentioned, but it almost doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s easy to agree with something like,“Don’t be Evil”, and that’s a great reason to have a more detailed credo: It’s something potential employees, clients, and investors can look at to decide if they want a business relationship with you, Weed out the folks who don’t understand things like equity, equality, privrlage, etc. If after working there a few years, they send out an email blast about women not belonging in tech they can quickly be referred to the credo they agreed to when they signed on. If they don’t like it, work somewhere else.
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I suspect that any teaching value the moment might have is severely curtailed by the question of what the moral of the story is: it is possible that axing the guy was genuinely about concern over hostile environment; but it’s at least as likely, probably more so, that the moral of the story is “don’t put your name on something that drags your employer into an unwinnable(between the people asking pointed questions about why ‘tech’ involves white management bros herding mostly white and some Asian coder dudes they were frat brothers with and calling the result ‘meritocracy’ and people insisting that anything less than Mencius Moldbug being crowned god-emperor of a Dominion of chillingly retro social relations is a SJW conspiracy, Google PR wasn’t going to have a good day after this little treatise swam out of their internal reddit-alike) PR fiasco and expect them to still be your employer.”
That’s a quite plausible motive; but it’s so dull that it has zero chance of prevailing against more colorful theories; but it also suggests that there may not be much thoughtful engagement or cost-benefit analysis beyond “a controversy controversied us: we did what seemed least controversial of the available bad options”; which might require a skilled PR flack in more subtle cases; but is basically orthogonal to argument about the issue; more of a corporation’s flinch response.
In absence of biographical data and inside reports, it’s also hard to know whether or not the character and prior behavior of the author had anything to do with it. Some compilers of heavily-if-selectively footnoted internet tomes on gender are about as innocuous in person as one could want(albeit more likely in a passive sort of way, not a ‘human whose company people enjoy’ kind of way; the more outgoing ones usually have other things to do); others give off a “Hi, I aspire to be the next Elliot Rogers!” vibe that would be insufferable from low orbit.
One might be inclined to look differently on the termination of someone who nobody can even remember hearing an opinion from before his little magnum opus went more viral than planned than one would about someone for which this is just HR’s “thank God he was finally dumb enough to do something irrefutable and undeniable; rather than following his usually expert instincts to be a sleazebag whenever the story will be hard to verify!” moment.
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Computers became a more pretisgious field to work in around that time, thanks in part to the desktop revolution that started about that time.
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Headline is too long though. Let me see…
“Alleged Rapist defends misogynist”
Yep, that should do it.
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One of my colleagues posted this on our internal social network:
https://www.codefellows.org/blog/1984-year-women-left-coding/
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