(2017-08-10) Singal How The Internet Got The Google Memo Wrong

Jesse Singal: How the Internet got the ‘Google memo’ wrong

Social media exploded after the tech website Gizmodo published a document that had been widely circulating among Google staffers. Its author, a software engineer named James Damore, argues that Google is unfriendly to conservatives, that the company’s diversity initiatives are misguided, and that the company’s internal culture limits the open discussion of difficult issues. But the part of the memo that hit Twitter and Facebook like a bomb concerns biological differences between men and women. Damore argues that such differences, not just misogyny, could partially explain hiring disparities between men and women.

reaction consisted largely of people responding to claims Damore himself never explicitly made

Here’s a quick look of some of Damone’s most controversial and widely circulated claims:

Claim: “Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men.”

Social science research backs this up.

Claim: The various reported differences between men and women are “exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective.”

In this case, Damore makes a sweeping claim that he doesn’t fully explain, much less defend

Many of the stories told by Evo psych have attracted immense controversy; critics claim these stories are too broad and too vaguely defined to be scientifically tested.

Claim: “[T]he distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and. . . these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

This gets a “mixed.” To understand why, imagine if I claimed to you that biological forces “may explain” why you like hamburgers

Claim: Women’s higher levels of neuroticism “may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report [within Google] and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.”

Almost certainly false.

What’s true is that, in studies of the “big five” personality traits, women tend to score significantly higher on neuroticism than men, just as they score higher on agreeableness (a fact that Damore also points out) in most countries where such research has been conducted

Why even bother fact-checking a flawed document that’s caused such a negative reaction?

By the standards of scholarly research, Damore’s memo is an amateur effort — a mishmash of defensible science, questionable speculation, and unexamined assumptions reflecting the author’s own values.

One reason Progressives have so strongly rejected Damore’s memo is that, overall, they’re less comfortable with the idea of deep-seated sex differences than sex researchers are