Google fired Damore for sexism, but we need science over bias

Google CEO Sundar Pichai's response, following the firing of software engineer James Damore, struck a balance between freedom of expression and safety from discrimination in the workplace. 

It’s tempting to take a binary stand on what’s happening in Google. You could either wholeheartedly dismiss former Google engineer James Damore’s memo as bigoted screed, or you could label Google as Orwell’s real-world thought police bent on crushing divergent socio-political views.

The truth as well as the right thing to do, in this case, lie somewhere between those two extremes. For either extreme only further damages the fast-deteriorating relationship between the sexes. The state of this relationship will increasingly shape the future of global politics and humankind itself.

There’s certainly considerable truth to what Damore’s memo said. A voluminous body of credible scientific research suggests men and women have biologically different personality traits — cognitive ability, interests — which lead to differing career choices. In Nordic countries, the most gender-equal as per World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap (GGG) Index, gender stereotypes in employment and education galore. Men make up a vast majority of engineers, technicians and construction workers, whereas women dominate the professions of nursing and teaching. In 2010, the proportion of tertiary degrees awarded to Norwegian women was 83% in health and welfare studies but only 20% in computer science.

 

What’s more, these numbers have hardly changed despite utmost efforts towards gender parity over the past two decades. Norway’s former Equal Opportunities Commissioner acknowledges (4:15 – 4:25, in the video above) not just the failure of these efforts but also that the differences are not due to discrimination. Simon Baron Cohen and others (17:30 – 19:10)



posit that the differences are not due to social conditioning but due to biology. Science also says some women might simply be too good for STEM careers, thus supporting Damore’s argument that sexism doesn't explain everything.

There’s one little problem with those scientific arguments: science and humanitarianism don’t always go hand in hand. Scientific research on gender and eugenics, dubious or credible, has been used to justify violence and discrimination against women and racial minorities for centuries. Taking James Damore’s arguments at face value — no matter how vehemently they, and the studies they quote, make room for individual exceptions — would not only mean neglecting the clear sexism at the workplace as well as scientific rebuttals to the science that alleges biological differences, it would result in a step back for humanity as a whole. Once the female gender is deemed unfit for certain roles, even the best of companies, including Google, could get away with paying mere lip service to egalitarianism and making exceptions for exceptional individuals. The worse ones would conveniently make the even-Google-does-it argument. Generations of progress could be reversed in a matter of seconds.

Some might agree with Damore’s firing, but hopefully it has more to do with the discomfort his female colleagues may have felt in working with him than with his divergent views.

In the war between science and humanitarianism, however, the latter has, in certain fields, triumphed to the point of reverse discrimination. It begins with the GGG Index itself, which is designed to capture only those variables in which women are disadvantaged, and not the other way round. So, for example, GGG Index penalises countries for having less than 50% women on corporate boards, but not for having far fewer men than women in higher education — a dangerous phenomenon being observed all over the world.