Mr Demore has lost his job at Google because he said:
Men are interested in things. Women are interested in people. Men are much better at creating and selling things than women. This is why 80% of high tech jobs are held by men. Because these differences are rooted in biology, attempts to correct this imbalance with diversity programs are ill-advised, wasteful, and doomed to failure.
Let’s think about these ideas in their social context, the high tech world that the high tech men have made.
Let us posit, for now, that men are better at creating new hardware and software that manipulates the world of things, whereas women are better at understanding people, including what people want, what people feel, what they need, and what will make them happier. What then ought be done about this? Should most women accept the fact that the most lucrative and prestigious jobs will always go to men, that they must be contented with being social workers and mothers and such soft womanly occupations? Should society accept this as the natural order of things?
The notions that women have, for example, inadequate mathematical chops and are inferior in objective, abstract and unemotional reasoning has a very long pedigree. Much longer than the first international. One highly valued set of skills and one profession after the other has declared to be best suited to men (medicine, marketing, politicking, horse trading, pimping, playing the guitar, drug dealing, wrestling, playing the saxophone, the drums, being a mafia don, and so forth). Neither has it escaped the sharp eyed attention of scientists and statisticians that popes and cardinals and priests and generals thrive when equipped with male brains and other exclusively male organs. It’s just a shame, that this is how it is. But it’s nature; they can’t help it.
There are three problems associated with the idea that the dominance of men in the high tech sector is natural and should be accepted: (1) the assumption that the prodigiously male work environment in silicon valley can’t and should not be changed; (2) that it’s somehow natural that men should make a lot of money while their wives stay home and take care of the kids; (3) that this is about the sorts of skills required in engineering, instead of being a general – and acutely reactionary – thesis about who should have dominance and power.
In the high tech industry, the work environment is intensely male, intensely competitive and often rather puerile and anti-social. The high-stress ethos of the industry – where people are often expected to work up to sixty hours a week or more and to be on call evenings and weekends to meet deadlines and fix problems or just crank out the next release as soon as possible – suits men much more than it suits women. The biology unfortunately possessed by women forces them to think of their children and families and want to spend weekends and evenings with them. It’s not their fault that they are this way, there’s nothing to be done.
Consider a parallel with the military. Assume for a moment that the fact that most generals are men is biologically determined. Perhaps testosterone is helpful in planning how to dominate, exploit, attack and kill people. Might not a sane society want to limit the power that such men have outside of the military, that is, the power to influence politics and the social agenda. I would make here the very feminine assertion that not killing is better than killing, and that peace is better than war. Yet here just the opposite thinking prevails – those who maintain that it is normal and inevitable that the military be dominated by men also believe that these alpha males are the natural leaders of society in all the realms of power. This sentimental and tabloid Nietzschean belief holds sway. It is to these people we must look to in order to make America great again: how it was before women and blacks and Marxists and liberals and diversity programs invaded, depleted and denigrated the virile and precious national white male virtues upon which civilization depends.
When people argue that the skills required by much sought after jobs are inherently male, their arguments are never restricted to just one realm or industry or profession. They always wind up arguing that men are naturally dominant in general. This is true because if this dominance was limited to a particular industry – did not pertain to power in general – then it would turn out that men, far from being naturally superior, are endangered, if not inferior. For consider: if political power were equally shared, if 51% of managerial and executive and senior governmental positions were held by women, what would happen to the power of corporations like Google, and the power of engineers within it? Perhaps these women, concerned about people more than devices, would ensure that workers are never coerced into working hours that deprive them of time with their children, or subject them to such high stress that only high tech alpha males can withstand. Perhaps they would alter the incentives and machinations of the thing-based global economy so that google would need to try and find out what people actually need, rather than what they can be led to buy. The world might become more hospitable to women, children and other living things.
In one important sense the attack upon corporate diversity programs is valid. But it’s not that things can’t be changed because neuroscience (that endless fount of contemporary pseudo-wisdom) shows us that. It’s that these liberal and bureaucratic and ass-covering programs, meant to show that the corporations really want more female engineers, can never address the real issue: if the proclivities of women – natural and/or cultural – are toward cooperation rather than domination, toward empathy and solicitous listening rather than manipulation, then they will always be kept in inferior positions in corporations that worship only the gods of money and power. Hence the solution is to change these corporations which, as fully social and cultural entities, created and chartered by the (somewhat) democratic body politic, having no biologically determined inadequacies. To change them and the world they create into places where thoughtful, ethical, compassionate people are treasured and thrive. Even if, horrors, this might advantage women over men.