In which a man suggests that women and men are, in fact, different. And gets fired for it.
Isn’t there evidence that males tend to cluster, intellectually, more toward genius or idiocy, whereas females tend to cluster toward average?
If so, this means that while there are, of course, both genius and idiot women, it also means that, all things being equal, any woman dealing with any man will likely not be dealing with an equal. It is more likely that he will be either smarter or dumber than she is, which explains a lot of our cultural noises about men being stupid and women being evil, or vice versa, or whatever.
If you’re a man interacting with a woman, she will probably be either your intellectual superior or your inferior, statistically, because you are less likely to be average than she is. Your odds of finding a woman exactly as smart as yourself are low, because you’re probably either an idiot, or, if you’re lucky, a genius. And if you happen to be average, well, good for you, unless she’s an outlier.
In essence, the #googlemanifesto dude is probably writing somewhat above the intellectual capacity of a lot of females. Which explains much of the enraged backlash: they’re mainly responding to key words.
Luckily, intelligence alone isn’t that big of a deal. It’s just one facet of any human being; there’s a great deal more going on, and much of it much more important.
I do denigrate his cost efficiency model. Many things should be done because they’re right, and not because they increase income. Using money as the go-to proof of efficacy is as ridiculous as expecting everything to be nice and feel good. Success can be measured by a variety of benchmarks, not just efficiency-as-measured-by-sales. Psychological well-being, for example, or longevity, or generosity.
http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320
Look! They call it an “anti-diversity screed”! Because it suggests that males and females are biologically non-identical!
Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.
OMG are boys and girls different, measurably and demonstrably so?!
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Just saw this posted to Facebook:
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/11/16127992/google-engineer-memo-research-science-women-biology-tech-james-damore
And yet we both know far more boys who are interested in STEM than girls. I know a variety of PhDs; the males are all physicists and mathematicians; the females are all poets or historians. So what?
As a girl, no matter how much they tell me to I just can’t chalk it up to “the patriarchy.” I suck at math, the majority of girls I’ve met in my life do too, and none of us care enough to want to get better at it. There’s nothing wrong with this, and as apparently society has decided that specialization is cool and people should love what they do, why can’t I let the people who are interested in STEM do STEM?
There IS something wrong with thinking that males and females are exactly same and that any and every discipline should be 50/50. Where’s the clamor to get more boys into teaching or housekeeping?
Shoe horning women into STEM they’re not interested in to increase their earning potential is stupid. Just pay more for the stuff women already do, like, oh, I don’t know, care giving, child rearing, nursing, academia, shit like that.
Also, anyone who says there are no sex differences in brains is, well, I’m not a scientist, obviously, but it seems they’re like the equivalent of doctors who are anti-vax (in the sense that they ignore the preponderance of evidence and cherry-pick obscure unduplicated study to shore up their ideology).
I’m fine with brains being sexed, I’m fine with brains being amazingly plastic, and I’m fine with men getting more of the genius than women. I’m not fine with a worldview that says my preferences are not my own but were foisted upon me by the world at large because I’m too intrinsically stupid to know my own feels. Fuck that. I KNOW I don’t have talent for maths, I KNOW I have talent for writing and cooking and music. To hell with anybody who tells me my own preferences aren’t my own, that I’m a “victim,” or that my own observations are wrong. The argument that we just arbitrarily invented sexism and then inflicted it on ourselves is much, much weaker than the reverse, which is that society is this way because a lot of this just expresses this way due to sex.
Obviously sexism exists, but, like racism, it doesn’t affect everybody: not everybody does it, and not everybody suffers from it.