Alastair Houghton
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

Your point 0 counters an argument he didn’t make, namely that any given woman isn’t suitable or doesn’t want to be an engineer. He was quite careful, actually to explain that what he was saying was statistical — namely that it’s possible that there are non-bias reasons for womens’ underrepresentation in tech, and that there is science (which he linked to) that supports the notion that one such reason might be sex differences. (Note that he doesn’t, and it wouldn’t be sensible to, discount the notion that there genuinely is some sexism or undesirable stereotyping at work.)

I suspect that, like a lot of other people, you only saw the Gizmodo version of what he wrote, which had diagrams and links removed. I’d like to say that that was just Gizmodo’s editorial incompetence, but I think there’s a very real risk it was deliberate on their part.

Here’s a full copy of the “manifesto”.

Also, on the Adam Grant piece you link to, Scott Alexander published a rebuttal. There are numerous psychologists who agree with everything James Damore wrote in his piece, and of course, as is the way with this subject, some who differ. Marcel Weiher has a summary of the science on his blog, which includes an interesting debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke.

It’s a shame that so many people parrot the line that all the recent science disagrees with James Damore’s memo, because that simply isn’t the case; and James quite clearly has a point about the Google echo chamber — Google rather ably demonstrated that by sacking him, and all the quotes I’ve seen from the senior management involved appear to indicate that they misconstrued what he wrote, as did far too many others.

    Alastair Houghton

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    Indie Cocoa developer