"...thus proving Damore's point."

The James Damore fiasco continues. As Philip DeFranco noted (link in previous post), Julian Assange of Wikileaks has publicly offered Damore a job, and I suspect that other companies will be doing the same. In the meantime, triggered women at Google are now skipping work because they've been made to feel uncomfortable by Damore's ten-page screed (which, along with being called both a "diversity memo" and an "anti-diversity memo," has also been called a manifesto, probably because of its length). As this article points out, the disgruntled women's action essentially confirms what Damore says in his piece regarding feminine emotionality.

In the document, Damore suggested that "women on average are more cooperative" and "more prone to anxiety," and that this often involves a search "for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average."

What could demonstrate these arguments more clearly than women staying home (focusing on life over work and accepting a cut in status) in solidarity with other women (more cooperative) and feeling "uncomfortable" going back to work (more prone to anxiety)?

Indeed, NPR quoted [software engineer Kelly] Ellis as a sympathetic source, noting that "she left Google in 2014 after she was sexually harassed." Ellis also reported feeling traumatized by seeing "similar language when I was at Google being shared on internal message boards and other different internal forums."

Here's the thing: Ellis refused to report the verbal sexual harassment she received at the time, posting it on Twitter only after she had left the company, and acknowledging she had no evidence to support her claims. She said Google "reprimanded me instead of him," despite the fact she hadn't reported the incident. Nowhere does Damore's document dismiss sexual harassment or support the idea that women should be objectified.

[...]

The manifesto was very fair, presenting the virtues of the Left biases and the Right biases, but warning against the dangers of imbalance. Damore was not arguing for Google to become a conservative company — he was arguing that it should have more intellectual diversity, correcting blind spots and maximizing value for everyone concerned.

The women employees at Google, by reacting the way they did, underscored his general points about men and women. Again, Damore only said that gender stereotypes explain the difference between the average man and the average woman — many men and women overlap on the spectrum.

In general, women focus more on empathy, work-life balance, and cooperation, while men focus more on leadership, things and ideas, and competition. "Status is the primary metric that men are judged on, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail," Damore argued.

Rather than just focusing on why women are less frequently in top leadership positions, he explained that "the same forces that lead men into high pay/his stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths."

Men did not ditch work on Monday, even though many of them undoubtedly were disturbed to see a memo questioning their basic assumptions. Women did, and the reporting focused on them as victims, proving both of Damore's points that women tend to be less competitive and that society tends to be protective of women.

Damore was not denouncing either of these trends as bad, but insisting that social sciences and companies like Google need to acknowledge them. Unfortunately, this reaction suggests both that Damore's analysis was accurate and that it will fall on deaf ears.

The "thus proving Damore's point" notion has become a meme, of sorts, over the past week as this kerfuffle has attracted public attention. Google is now a ponderous company that often seems blind to many ironies, e.g., the contrast between its "Don't Be Evil" motto and its collusion with China in helping to reinforce China's Great Firewall, which suppresses information that the Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to see. And now we see the irony that Google, supposedly pro-diversity, actually wants employees to march in lockstep and hew to a specific ideological line. Google owns YouTube, so this ties into my earlier post re: the continuing constriction of free speech on that platform.