Why we should go beyond sexism to critique the Google diversity memo
I spent much of last week doing research in Holocaust archives. Every day, a family came in looking for information about their relatives. This profound act that crosses cultures and contexts — a family trying to connect with each other across generations — is cast with such sadness because they have to do so in archives about genocide. Count me among the liberals upset by that memo, but know that those families are why. Much has been made of its sexism, but we need to hold its ahistoricism to the same scrutiny.
A huge factor driving Holocaust was exactly what this Googler was saying we should use to inform policy — aggregate studies that use biology to explain mass level differences in aptitude among huge groups of people. Here in the US, we also used this kind of science to inform and justify slavery, forced medical experimentation and eugenics.
It’s easy, from our modern vantage point, to dismiss this science as inherently racist junk. That’s true. What’s also true is that, in its day, this science was legitimate and prominent. The people who created these understandings were smart, and many were of goodwill. When they were led astray, it was not only by bigotry, but by the confidence that their understandings were valid because they were based in the most advanced science.
[I don’t know if he should have been fired. The fact that that memo make so many feel so fearful, angry, or vindicated shows that there is something deeply wrong. I don’t cast aspersions when I say this; if one of my colleagues wrote that he thought that biological differences in aptitude “might explain” the presence of people like me in the workplace, going to work would be immeasurably harder, and I would probably do worse. In any case, I don’t have a point to make about this — I don’t know.]
The point I do want to make is that one of the deepest problems with how this memo used science actually has nothing to do with whether the science is true. I’m not in a position to know how good his cited studies are, or the scientific consensus around them, and nor are 99% of the people opining on it. In fact, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that, through the lens of our current capacity to understand the human brain and biology, all of the science he cited is excellent.
It is still a terrible idea to use that kind of science to form and legitimate policy.
It is very early days for the relevant fields. The scientists working on these issues are doing important work that we should value, but one day our descendants will see our current understandings and the ways we came to them as primitive, and they will be right.
This does not mean that we should dismiss or denigrate this science; it simply means we should not use it to inform policy about who gets what in one of the most powerful organizations in the world. It means that we need to be humble about the extent and certitude of what we know, and legitimate science by giving scientists the resources they need to discover more. It also means that we need to learn from the disasters that happened when we’ve relied on this science to shape social policy.
Writing a 10-page memo (which frankly seemed pretty slapdash in execution) arguing that, nonetheless, we should use this kind of science, and we should view women’s performance through its lens, is frighteningly glib and ahistorical. While we should be able to engage a broad array of ideas openly and in good faith, there are some we need to handle with care, and he did not treat these ideas with the care we need. He framed the anticipated backlash as only a product of diversity “groupthink” and political correctness, missing too many points to list here. People freaked out not only because it’s easier to scream than listen, but because he did not seem to appreciate all the levels on which his ideas are difficult and frightening, and the historical memory that drives that fear.
I would love to know what he makes of this memory.