Revisiting the Damore Affair

He got more right than he got wrong.

I do not remember thinking all that much about James Damore’s memo about women in tech when it dominated the headlines in August of 2017. At the time, I’d just taken a new, larger role at work and also had some personal health issues which were all-consuming; I just don’t think I had it in me to give a shit about some jerk getting fired from Google. The news summaries made it clear he’d been salty about diversity initiatives and tried to argue that women were just less suited for tech. “Typical whiny alt-right white guy” was the distinct impression I got. I’m not sure I even read the memo except perhaps to skim for the juicy bits. His name was then relegated to the recesses of my mind, only to get dusted off by the occasional anti-woke complainer.

This week I stumbled on it again. A colleague at work asked me to participate in a study about morals in the workplace and cited the affair as an example of conflicting moral frameworks publicly coming to a head. I decided to revisit it. The more I read, the more confused I felt. I found almost nothing about it offensive. In fact, the ideas he was trying to express are extremely similar to the ones I am actively advocating here and, to a lesser extent, in my own workplace now: That everyone has biases, and that advocates in the space of diversity & inclusion have some extreme biases they are blind to. What was I missing? Why was this guy portrayed as evil incarnate? I had to do some Googling (sorry, James) to remind myself why people were so upset at the time. (Hmm, would I have gotten different results with Bing or DuckDuckGo??) It was an "anti-diversity screed". He was “questioning women in tech.” His analysis was somewhere between “naive” and “dangerous”.” Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, said her daughter asked her if it was true that women are biologically less suited for tech, and this was why he had to be fired.

Did we all read the same thing?

I am an engineer. I think these days, a lot of the general public thinks of Silicon Valley when they think of engineers, but engineers work across the economy designing and building cars, bridges, vaccines, textiles, rockets, food packaging, semiconductors, you name it. I work on products that fall in the “big-ass machines” category. It’s not something I dreamed of doing my entire childhood. As a kid I wanted to be a teacher, then a psychologist, then in television production. I decided on engineering after falling in love with physics in my senior year of high school. I’d always enjoyed math and I loved using it to design things or predict behaviors (like how far a projectile would go!). My dad is an engineer and he always gently nudged me in that direction without pressuring me; he just casually let me know how awesome it was and how good I would be at it. My being a girl never really factored into any of it. (As an adult, I’ve done a lot of volunteering with the Girl Scouts to expose girls to engineering careers, but I don’t recall any such opportunities while I was a Girl Scout in the 1990s.) Despite coming from the same gene pool, growing up with the same dad, and going to the same schools, neither of my younger sisters pursued a career in STEM, and no one thought any less of them for their choices.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about women in STEM and why there aren’t more of us. I certainly cannot speak to the climate in Silicon Valley, but in my rather staid-but-strives-to-be-progressive company, I’ve never personally faced any significant gender discrimination. In fact, if anything, I’ve been given more opportunities to serve on high-visibility projects and more flexibility with a small child than I might have as a man (and likely some scholarships in college). Don’t get me wrong… there have been conference room meetings where someone cracks an inappropriate joke and someone else says, “Hey, not in front of the lady!” or some such stupidity. More often though, there is the situation where someone does not seem to be listening to you or taking your ideas seriously, and you just wonder—is it because I’m a woman? The wondering can be enough to drive someone crazy over time. But my motto has always been to give people the benefit of the doubt, and assume ignorance before I assume malice. So if I am that concerned that they might not be receiving my message, I just repeat it (or get louder) until they do. But that is just part of my personality, and it is not something women and minorities should have to do to be heard, at least any more often than white men do. So yes, discrimination exists. However, it seems like it would have to be much worse than what I’ve witnessed (and be informing the college plans of high school students) for it to be wholly responsible for the rate of women entering STEM to stay close to flat at the 25-30% representation rate it’s been at for 30 years.

Revisiting Damore’s memo, I am going to focus first on his message about women in tech, which is all that the media focused on, and come back to his comments on corporate diversity initiatives. Let’s start with what he doesn’t say:

1. That women (or minorities) are less intelligent or less technically capable¹

2. That under-qualified women (or minorities) are being hired into tech²

3. That discrimination doesn’t exist

4. That diversity is bad

5. That women are neurotic (Ok, actually, he did totally step in it on this one.)

At its heart, what I think he was trying to say, but fumbled horribly, is that there are fewer women than men in tech at least in part because women get to choose their own career, and fewer women seem to want a career in tech than men, long before they would show up at Google’s campus. As I see it, here are the points he was trying to make, arguably ineloquently, but that were totally overlooked by media.

1. While discrimination against women and other groups absolutely still exists and is bad and needs to be stamped out, it is probably not the only cause of gender disparities in STEM. (“Every event has multiple causes.” Note that this is an extremely low bar to meet.)

2. Women, on average, have slightly different interests, strengths, and personality traits than men, but averages do not represent an entire population and there is significant overlap between the populations. (Note he says this could be due in part to biological factors; “in part” does heavy lifting here.)

3. In order to attract more women into careers in tech, Google should find ways to shift its own culture to attract and reward a wider range of interests and strengths in the workplace, especially those traits that are more prevalent in women

4. Many of the brute-force approaches Google (and many other companies) have adopted to address gender and racial disparities are themselves discriminatory and will likely backfire, stoking resentment and letting the possibly more dominant root causes of gender disparities fester

5. To make Google more appealing to both women and men, he suggests increasing and rewarding collaboration, supporting more part-time work opportunities, and challenging gender norms for men

What’s funny to me now is that not only do I find none of this controversial, I’d literally made this case myself prior to his memo.

In the mid-2010s, I worked as part of a team to recruit and hire engineers for our company. We had ambitious “good faith” goals for female representation in entry-level hiring that far exceeded the gender ratio of graduating students in the U.S. Meeting the goals required aggressive outreach to women on campus and at conferences. It also led us to re-write our job postings and re-think our interview process and questions for subtle cues that might be advantaging men. Internally, the public targets led to a lot of division. While some applauded the bold attempt to dramatically shift our demographics, others felt the focus on women was overlooking the issue of underrepresented racial minorities. Some women felt uncomfortable and worried that their co-workers would think they were only hired to meet a quota; some men felt there was no way to meet the goal without “lowering the bar” for women or illegally discriminating against men. (Just to clarify, it is against the law and against my company’s policy to use gender as a factor in final hiring decisions, and those laws and policies were followed. Also, these stories are just my personal perspective and I don’t speak on behalf of the company.)

The comments about “lowering the bar” bothered me the most. For one thing, we weren’t hiring a single person who we could quantifiably measure against a single pre-set “bar;” we were building a team, and the strongest team is composed of a mix of people with different strengths and perspectives to balance out and challenge each other. Secondly, to the extent there was a “bar,” maybe it needed to be raised for everyone, not lowered for some? At a large conference for women in engineering, I gave a brief talk on this idea. My primary thesis was that rather than lowering any standards in order to hire more women, we should paint a more wholistic picture of what makes for a good engineer that takes advantage of strengths more prevalent in women like communication, teamwork, and compassion, and stop “lowering the bar” for people who did not compete well in these areas. I argued that through about 4th grade, girls and boys show equal proficiency and interest in math, but as girls go through puberty, their interest drops off. When middle school girls are asked what is most important about their future career, the top answer is that they want to help people. Engineering is thought of as cold and calculating; young women with a propensity for math and science are often drawn to careers like teaching or medicine because it is a way to use math and science that helps people in a tangible way.

Which woman is helping people? (Also, no one I know wears a hard hat.)

It seems fairly obvious to me now, but wasn’t obvious when I was a kid, that engineers DO help people. We make cars safe, we make it possible to visit your grandkids on the other side of the country, we make it possible to detect and treat tumors, we entertain you with silly apps, we keep your homes and offices at comfortable temperatures, we build bridges for you to cross or sewers for you to, ehm, use. One candidate I remember interviewing told me she’d initially wanted to be a doctor, but switched to engineering when she realized a doctor can only affect the lives of the people she sees each day, but the engineer who designs the MRI machine could affect the lives of millions. (She got the job.) It does not seem controversial or even negative to me to say that on average, most women just don’t get all that excited about machinery for machinery’s sake. I know LOTS of women who are brilliant and would make wonderful engineers, but you couldn’t pay them enough to do it—it just sounds painfully boring to them. They don’t feel any discrimination or exclusion about it—they’re just like, hmmmmm, pass. And that’s okay! I certainly want more girls to know it’s an option, it’s exciting and fulfilling, it’s a great way to help people, and that whatever their personality, they will have strengths to bring. And I don’t want them to face unnecessary obstacles. But if they ultimately decide to be doctors, lawyers, nurses, psychologists, teachers, opera singers, or even stay-at-home moms, well, I am happy for them! Women make valuable contributions to society in those roles, too.

Ultimately Damore’s memo triggered such a strong reaction in part because we, as a society, are really caught up in some objectively weird ideas. One is that because STEM fields are prestigious, we should want more women to enter them. To that I say, why should engineering be more prestigious than teaching or nursing? And why don’t we count those fields as STEM too? Why should we want to pressure a young woman to enter a field she’s not all that interested in, anyway? This brings me to the next weird idea—that a gender imbalance is a problem that needs to be fixed in the first place. Is there a national conversation worrying that there is too much discrimination in nursing preventing men from entering the field? No, we simply accept that men are not as interested in that field. Are women not allowed the same level of autonomy?

I’m strawmanning a bit, but I think it highlights how much we’ve lost focus. The initial goal was to eliminate barriers to entry and success, to break down stereotypes about engineers and make sure girls knew it was an option for them. Damore (and I) took it a step further and said, how can we rethink the field itself to make it even more attractive to women while also increasing the impact of a company’s workforce? The truth is, after decades of fighting sexism, it’s possible we actually made progress! It’s possible that discrimination is not the dominant factor in the remaining disparities. That leaves us to find other creative ways to improve the field, but it also challenges us to answer “what does ‘good enough’ look like?” If the answer is 50/50, we will have to engage in some massive social engineering at all ages. To what end? It ceases to be a righteous cause if you have stamped out the majority of barriers facing women and you instead have to start coercing women or erecting barriers for men.

Considering that the general points he was trying to make about broad-brush gender differences were warmly accepted by an organization dedicated to promoting women in engineering when they were presented by a female engineer (me), and not all that different from actual corporate diversity training sessions I have attended within the last 10 years, something else must explain the reaction (despite the fact that only the gender comments were covered by the news media). That “something else” is the rest of the memo, and who wrote it. The message was coming from a white male who identified as libertarian and proclaimed open skepticism of corporate diversity and inclusion efforts. He was clearly a Bad Guy.

I once made a comment on Slow Boring tossing out the idea of the good guy/bad guy illusion. Here is the heart of it:

We almost all intuitively believe we are good people. Whatever we take pride in is part of what makes us good. Anyone who seems to challenge an idea we take pride in is bad. People who band together in “mobs” or “news rooms” or “communities” who spend significant time challenging things we consider to be not just good, but core to our very being, are Very Bad. Judging others as Very Bad is a defense mechanism to avoid confronting the evidence we might not be Very Good, and resulting justification also ends up making us feel Very Good! Meanwhile our all-out attack feeds their need to defend and the loop goes on, fueling tribalism forever.

People who are passionate about diversity & inclusion, or feminism, or anti-racism, it’s more than an extra-curricular activity. It is a major part of what makes them a good person. I think of this image from Matthew Inman’s Oatmeal comic strip "Believe" often. (Mr. Oatmeal, if this is copyright infringement, I apologize and will remove it! It is just such a vivid mental model for me on this issue.)

Copyright © 2020 Matthew Inman. I hope this isn’t stealing. Oatmeal is awesome.

Inman/Oatmeal’s message is that some beliefs become “core beliefs” that become integrated into our sense of self. Our brains react to ideas that challenge these beliefs in the same way we respond to literal mortal danger. We protect our core beliefs at all costs. For a person whose “sense-of-self” house has “I’m Inclusive™!” at its foundation, a message like the one Damore was trying to send is a nuclear bomb. (I know, because I experienced the fallout of such conversations myself last year.) He is saying: you are not actually being inclusive, because you are not including the people who respectfully disagree with you on this issue in the conversation. By setting up development programs that are explicitly gate-kept by race or gender, or effectively using race or gender as part of a hiring or promotion decision, you are not being inclusive. It is far easier to decide Damore is a Bad Guy than inspect the structural integrity of your sense-of-self. (A colleague emailed him, “You’re a misogynist and a terrible human. I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you.” Apparently, this employee was issued a ‘final warning’ by Google, whatever that is.)

Damore, believing himself to be a Good Guy, was obviously upset by all this. Lucky for him, all of the right-wing internet had a warm welcome ready for him. He posed for photos with Peter Duke, who is, according to the NYT, the “Annie Leibovitz of the Alt-Right.” He did an interview with Jordan Peterson, who has most recently been turned into the literal Bad Guy Red Skull in the recent Captain America comic book written by Ta-Nahesi Coates. This move in turn reinforced the right’s view of Coates as a Bad Guy, of course. I digress, but it shows how (literally) comical this all becomes.

Meanwhile, despite Google’s claims that they took the rest of Damore’s concerns seriously, pretty much no mainstream media attention was paid to them. Here are some excerpts where I feel he was almost unconditionally spot-on (major conditions included in brackets or footnotes). Maybe they will strike a different tone vis-a-vis the blog of a liberal, pro-D&I female engineer.

People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document. Google has several biases and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology.

At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.

Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company. A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors. Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming³ dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies.

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:

• Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race

• A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates

• Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate [see footnote 2 again for Marie’s conditions]

• Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)

• Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination

These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google.

I hope it’s clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism). [Emphasis mine.]

My concrete suggestions are to:

• De-moralize diversity.

  • As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the “victims.”

• Stop alienating conservatives.

  • Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity⁴ and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.

  • In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.

  • Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

• Confront Google’s biases.

  • I’ve mostly concentrated on how our biases cloud our thinking about diversity and inclusion, but our moral biases are farther reaching than that.

  • I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.

• Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.

  • These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.

• Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.

  • Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.

  • There’s currently very little transparency into the extent of our diversity programs which keeps it immune to criticism from those outside its ideological echo chamber.

  • These programs are highly politicized which further alienates non-progressives.

  • I realize that some of our programs may be precautions against government accusations of discrimination, but that can easily backfire since they incentivize illegal discrimination.

• Focus on psychological safety, not just race/gender diversity.

  • We should focus on psychological safety, which has shown positive effects and should (hopefully) not lead to unfair discrimination.

  • We need psychological safety and shared values to gain the benefits of diversity.

  • Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX.

• De-emphasize empathy.⁵

  • I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.

• Prioritize intention.

  • Our focus on microaggressions and other unintentional transgressions increases our sensitivity, which is not universally positive: sensitivity increases both our tendency to take offense and our self censorship, leading to authoritarian policies. Speaking up without the fear of being harshly judged is central to psychological safety, but these practices can remove that safety by judging unintentional transgressions.

  • Microaggression training incorrectly and dangerously equates speech with violence and isn’t backed by evidence.

• [Redacted due to significant conditions on my part⁶]

• Reconsider making Unconscious Bias training mandatory for promo committees.

  • We haven’t been able to measure any effect of our Unconscious Bias training and it has the potential for overcorrecting or backlash, especially if made mandatory.

  • Some of the suggested methods of the current training (v2.3) are likely useful, but the political bias of the presentation is clear from the factual inaccuracies and the examples shown.

  • Spend more time on the many other types of biases besides stereotypes. Stereotypes are much more accurate and responsive to new information than the training suggests (I’m not advocating for using stereotypes, I just pointing out the factual inaccuracy of what’s said in the training).

Was it ranty? Yes. Would he have benefitted from some edits and collaboration with someone who sees things differently than he does? Ironically, yes. But regardless, he was making a lot of important points, the most important of which is that this issue has been moralized to the extent that these concerns cannot even be considered in good faith. They are too blasphemous. The biggest irony is exactly what Damore attempts to point out: diversity and inclusion is about making everyone feel like they are wanted on the team, and that a wide range of views can solve complex problems more quickly and effectively. For attempting to contribute to the conversation in an unorthodox way, he was fired.

1. In the only version I could find of Damore’s memo online, there was only a passing reference to IQ. However, one of the two primary findings of the NLRB was that Damore made a claim that the distribution of IQ is wider for men than women, leading to similar averages but more extreme outliers on the “top of the curve” in the male population than for women. It is possible Damore scrubbed this from the memo as he apparently crowdsourced edits to it in the few days it floated around Google before he was fired. (The other finding was his statement about neuroticism being more prevalent in women.)

2. I’ll grant that this one is debatable; he does mention that Google has created “Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate” but the internal link is dead. I believe what he is trying to say by “decreasing the false negative rate” is that negative biases about candidates are examined more closely for “diversity candidates” than for white males, meaning they are still fully qualified but misinterpretations of their qualifications are questioned more thoroughly.

3. Shaming is in the eye of the beholder. But, as they say, impact matters more than intent?

4. I personally wouldn’t say it’s the “most important,” but almost certainly has the biggest impact on team outcomes, which is a major selling point of corporate diversity initiatives.

5. This one is controversial. I will say I often attempt to deeply empathize with two parties committed to misunderstanding each other and it gives me literal headaches. The brain seems hardwired to want to pick a side.

6. In this bullet, Damore advocates being “open about the science of human nature... 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.” I have an issue with this statement being offered so casually as it’s a very slippery slope into biological racism, which I abhor.