Sexist, yes, but the Google snitch did have a good point
n the evening of Friday August 4, Google employees at the tech giant’s Silicon Valley headquarters began feverishly tweeting about an internal memo posted by a colleague. Entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, the memo – by one James Damore, a 28-yearold software engineer – excoriated Google’s commitment to “diversity”, and particularly its attempts to get more women into technical roles. These, he insisted, were authoritarian, “unfair” and pointless, the product not of rational decision-making and business sense but of a harmful Leftist groupthink rife in tech, the media and the social sciences. What Google needed more of was ideological, not gender or racial, diversity.
So far, so good. But the kicker running throughout the screed (presented in the orderly bullet points befitting a techie) was that biological rather than social reasons underlie the stark absence of women in the tech industry and particularly in software engineering.
Damore said that trying to get more women into high-powered technical jobs is futile because women naturally experience more “neuroticism” than men, causing them to shun top or difficult jobs. Then there’s their inbuilt preference – repeatedly shown in recent years to be nonsense – for “people rather than things” leading to jobs in “social or artistic areas”. Meanwhile, women’s higher “agreeableness” not only befits them for these people-tastic, “soft” jobs, but makes them less inclined to ask for raises. On the flip side, men are more status-driven and interested in “things” rather than people.
Unsurprisingly, these assertions caused outrage within and outside Google, and Damore was promptly fired (and is now gearing up for a law suit). Since the memo went viral, Damore has been publicly pilloried by every pundit in the Left-leaning mediasphere, pigeon-holed as a poster boy for the loony far “alt” Right, and courted by creepy figures such as Julian Assange, no doubt looking for his next whistleblower.
All this seems a ridiculous reaction to the memo, however disagreeable some of its contents (of which more later). For Damore had a number of fundamental points concerning personal political biases that should be trumpeted far and wide.
I particularly liked his curt list detailing “Left biases” (eg, “compassion for the weak”; thinks “disparities are due to injustices”) and “Right biases” (“disparities are natural and just”; humans are “naturally competitive”). Cleverly, he argues that both leanings have upsides for business, but that too much Leftiness creates a “politically
Ocorrect monoculture” that is bad for ideas and progress. These are hardly the words of a raving, far-Right lunatic – they are, in keeping with Damore’s own self-designation, those of a “classical liberal”, and very wise, too. Indeed, the sacking has only proved Damore’s point about the growing intolerance among the Left to different, and particularly more conservative, views. Such intolerance has been in train for years now within the tech industry: in 2014, Brendan Eich, the CEO of Mozilla, was sacked when it emerged he was privately against gay marriage.
So Damore should be applauded for his stance against Leftist authoritarianism. But he has, even to his would-be champions, made it difficult to do so wholeheartedly. For while he’s spot on when it comes to the cult of political correctness, Damore’s grasp of gender difference is sketchy at best. His explanations concerning women are reheated, stale, boring and at times even incoherent.
First off, Damore seems oblivious to the vigorous critique of these ideas that has been ongoing for a good 20 years or more. Indeed, his obsession with woman’s nature curiously mirrors those of Victorian and Edwardian pundits and politicians – such as Lords Cromer and Curzon – who opposed women’s suffrage on the grounds of our “innate” inability to handle matters beyond the domestic sphere.
Before posting his memo, Damore might have perused such books as Brain Gender by Melissa Hines, the Cambridge professor of psychology, and Columbia professor Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences. Some reflection on women’s oncecentral role in coding and software (before they were squeezed out in the Eighties) – or on game-changing computer scientists like Ada Lovelace (1815-52), Grace Hopper (1906-92) or Karen Spark Jones (1935-2007) – might also have been useful.
Damore could have been hero material. Unfortunately, he seems to have let himself become yet another angry young man with a bee in his bonnet about women. He should spend less time obsessing about women’s aptitude for hard science and more time working on his own. Still, Damore surely doesn’t deserve the public flaying he’s receiving now. Its ferocity only proves that the spirit – if not the full content – of his document is right. As season two of Antipodean crime drama Top of the Lake swings into gear, we have an interesting and refreshing development to ponder.
Nicole Kidman, who plays an adoptive mother, sports an exuberant grey wig. Kidman will always be a classic bombshell but, reasoned Academy Award-winning director Jane Campion, why must she also look eternally young?
“I thought it would be fun to have her be older,” said Campion. She added that grey hair would be “really liberating… not to have to feel like, ‘oh, I have to be young and beautiful. I just have to be the character. To be that woman’.”
That such attitudes are Top of the Lake now shaping the look and feel of smash-hit TV is a breakthrough. In an industry in which older women have long found themselves devalued in the race for the new young thing, Campion’s decision to whiten Kidman’s locks suggests that perhaps rigid standards of glamour and femininity on TV are changing.
Certainly, it’s hard to imagine Top of the Lake’s other star, Elisabeth Moss, scooping all the plum roles – as she is doing today – 10 years ago. Moss is fairly plain and not particularly glamorous, but she is a riveting actor. Could the equation of female worth with youth and beauty finally be shifting?
Damore should be applauded for his stance against Leftist authoritarianism