patrick.net

" who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board arguing that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering"

This is not what he argued as far as I can remember.

Heraclitusstudent says

Anyone think this has a chance against Google?

If it goes in front of a jury it might.

He definitely has a chance. His firing was complete SJW BS. I hope he makes tens of millions of dollars in damages.

anon_45790 says

This is not what he argued as far as I can remember.

Yup, Yahoo has SJW'd their content again.

What he actually said was that Women find interest and motivation in different things, so they approach problem solving differently, and cited not ONE but TWO psychology, peer reviewed, studies to back up his point.

anon_45790 says

" who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board arguing that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering"

This is not what he argued as far as I can remember.

This is also not what I heard him say on Bloomberg.

Persecution is good. It is easier to maintain a persecution complex with occasional de facto persecution.

I reread the memo again. As far as I can tell, this may be the one triggering sentence in the memo that got him in trouble:
I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why
we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
He would have been better off saying preferences and personality traits.

I think there is a chance

anon_3e01a says

the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes

Does anyone doubt that this is factually correct?

There is plenty of science to back up varying distribution of abilities between the genders. To take a trivial example, men can lift greater weights than women on average. This is not open to scientific debate, only to ideological distortions.

The typical distortion is to misrepresent the argument as saying that all men can lift greater weights than all women. Damore was careful to point out exactly this kind of misrepresentation as a near-certain response to even the slightest questioning the SJW Koran.

I'm a big Jordan Peterson fan boi, so I'm kinda shocked to take the counter argument here.
Fearless leader, are you saying lifting weights explains the [un]equal representation of women in tech and leadership? The rest of the memo is fairly airtight, but you can drive a truck through abilities. Abilities could be taken as a pejorative term. Not sure why I didn't notice it when the memo came out originally. From what I can tell, he did a good job footnoting the preferences part, so maybe it comes down to a poor word choice.

yeeeeah but.... even if you make that nuance of not saying "all men can life greater weights than all women", you are still saying that statistically women can lift a lower weight. Now the first thing you see when looking at a woman candidate (after her boobs) is that they are part of a category that can lift lower weight. You see the category first, you don't see the individual skills. This is how the human brain works. Not to mention how women see themselves. Which is why Google calls this "harmful stereotype" i.e. something that can affect how women are seen a priori independently of their skills.
Hence the thought gestapo reaction. And I'm not sure how this memo will stand in a court room, even if demonstrably true.

Still I'm not convinced lying and defending a lie is a good approach to fostering justice. It seems to me the entire rational to bring more women for the sake of bringing more women is preposterous to start with and based only on vague economic notions that a larger labor force will be good be default. They should fight for access and against discrimination, not for equality.

anon_3e01a says

I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ

Different abilities is not the same as "less capable for engineering" (the former is quite a general statement), but I am sure that it will be used against him and interpreted mean exactly that.

Damore clearly ties abilities to equal representation of women in tech, which, if I was a women, I would might be inclined to read as "less capable for engineering". It's his only big misstep in the memo, but I can see how that would trigger some folks. Given the tenor of the rest of the memo, I think its ridiculous that he was fired and the lawsuit may have merit. Harmeet Dhillon is becoming the Gloria Allred of the conservative set.