Forgive the title. It’s just clickbait, borrowed from a Pedro Almodovar film that starred Carmen Maura and introduced to an international audience a young Antonio Banderas.
The article really is about the Google memo. Yes. That memo.
“Have you heard about the Google memo?” asks Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle.
“James Damore, an engineer at Google, wrote a memo suggesting that maybe there weren’t so many women at Google because women are less interested in sitting around and staring at code all day. The internet erupted.”
“Erupted” could actually be a euphemism because social media went nuts.
And the aforementioned Mr. Damore was fired by Google.
As The Federalist reported, people had their different takes on what Damore wrote:
“He said women may be genetically unsuited for tech jobs,” barked The Washington Post.
“That guy didn’t want any women near a computer,” proclaimed CNN.
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai finally addressed the controversy, he stated, “to suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not okay.”
Only, that’s not what James Damore said.
Lee Jussim (professor of social psychology at Rutgers University and a Fellow at Stanford University, writing for Quillette Magazine, 07 August 2017) actually read the memo:
“The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right. Its main points are that: xxx 2. The social science evidence on implicit and explicit bias has been wildly oversold and is far weaker than most people seem to realize; 3. Google has, perhaps unintentionally, created an authoritarian atmosphere that has stifled discussion of these issues by stigmatizing anyone who disagrees as a bigot and instituted authoritarian policies of reverse discrimination.”
In short, Damore didn’t say that women are inferior to men.
What he said was that men and women have differences, and that each exhibit differing areas of strengths and weaknesses, and that women (frankly, rightly) prefer to avoid high stress jobs or jobs with high inanimate components.
Of course, the response would be is that there are perfectly good number of women who succeed in high stress corporate technology-oriented environments, of which Sheryl Sandberg is given as example. But such is a fallacy by exception (i.e., making a conclusion about a group based on information culled from an individual).
Consider the abovementioned Megan McArdle, having worked as a technology consultant, agreeing with Damore, particularly regarding preferences.
Remembering once coming to work on a Monday, a male colleague asked her what she did during the weekend and her reply was of being with a friend and going to a concert.
Her male colleague said he set up a fiber-channel network in his basement.
Upon hearing that, the other men in the room got excited and spent the next several minutes talking about the intricacies of fiber-channel technology.
As Ms. McArdle recounts, “No one told that guy to go home and build a fiber-channel network in his basement; no one told me I couldn’t. It’s just that I would never in a million years have chosen to waste a weekend that way.”
Psychiatrist Scott Alexander agrees: “This is exactly what the researchers cited above are saying about sex differences accentuating in more gender-equitable countries. If we were less gender-equitable now, women would take whatever they could get. Now that we’re more gender-equitable, they take things which correspond to their gender-specific interests, like veterinary medicine, and we observe larger sex differences.”
“If we continue to insist that, no, women really want to do tech, but stereotypes and sexists are pushing them out, we’ll end up with constantly increasing social engineering to prevent stereotypes (see Slate Star Codex, 07 August 2017).”
And so really: what actually constitutes a fair distribution between the sexes? Would forcing a 50-50 proportion be reasonably equitable?
Also, what about transgenders?
But, as Alexander points out, women dominate the following fields without accusations of discrimination: “men make up only 10% of nurses, only 20% of new veterinarians, only 25% of new psychologists, about 25% of new pediatricians, about 26% of forensic scientists, about 28% of medical managers, and 42% of new biologists.”
Medicine and (from my own experience) law are increasingly being dominated by women.
The hypocrisy of all this manufactured outrage is best exemplified by Google itself.
First, Susan Krashinsky reported in 2015 that: “Google’s policies allow advertisers to target ads by gender,” thereby acknowledging impliedly and implicitly that gender differences do exist.
Finally, the Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo had this observation, “some women” from Google “stayed home … because the memo made them ‘uncomfortable going back to work.’”
This “women too upset to work” because of a science or evidence-backed memo, Ms. Prestigiacomo notes, ironically plays “into the worst gender stereotypes of all — the overly-emotional and irrational woman — and inadvertently proving what they are so fiercely attempting to deny: men and women are different.”
Jemy Gatdula is a Senior Fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.
Twitter @jemygatdula
