James Damore’s “google memo” is available online, so anyone interested can see his claims that there is no wage gap, that women are paid less because they don’t want to work as hard as men, that feminism and racial civil rights were invented by “Marxist intellectuals”, that any institutional effort to address racial and gender disparities – even something like a mentoring program aimed at women – is illegal and unethical, that Google itself is run by people with a secret “leftist agenda” and so on. These crassly ignorant and offensive claims are not particularly original, you can find them all over Jordan Peterson for example. But Stuart Reges wrote:
For the last ten months I have been discussing this issue at the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering where I work. I have tried to understand why Damore’s opinions generated such anger and have struggled to decide what I want to do in response.
He tried, so sincerely, to understand why people would get angry reading stuff like:
Yes, in a national aggregate, women have lower salaries than men for a variety of reasons. For the same work though, women get paid just as much as men. Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employee sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power. – Damore
Poor men. Those emasculating bitches just spend money that hard working men earn daring death itself while writing Java code. Reges, Steve Pinker, Scott Aaronson and a number of others who are actually paid to educate in the sciences have produced a tsunami of bad faith argument or, at best, comically bad reading comprehension for people who claim to be scholars.
As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.” – Damore
In this case, suggesting that men and women are different either in interests or abilities is considered blasphemy. – Reges
There are three common features to the Damore Defenders in the Sciences. First, they either didn’t read Damore’s essay or they are willing to lie about its contents. Second, they affect a ridiculous pompous Olympian detachment and pained incomprehension at the pushback they receive for defending this garbage. Third they all participate in a fraudulent claim to be defending the proposition that men and women are different against some imaginary opponents. Of course, nobody at all has claimed that men and women are identical.
When I tried to discuss Damore at my school, I found it almost impossible. As a thought experiment, I asked how we could make someone like Damore feel welcome in our community. The pushback was intense. My question was labeled an “inflammatory example” and my comments were described as “hurtful” to women. – Reges.
Bummer, man. People disagreed with you. It’s funny how these champions of free speech are so upset that people are allowed to disagree with them.
but when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner – Damore
Imagine that. How hurtful. I mean, why wouldn’t an open minded person want to make someone who writes the following “welcome in our community”?
Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.” -Damore
Damore’s twitter handle briefly claimed that he had been “fired for truth,” but really he was fired for honesty. – Reges
Yeah, right. Of course, Reges published in Quillette, so the sheer bullshittery of his essay is no surprise.