This past week, Google software engineer James Damore released a 10-page manifesto titled "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber."
In it, he suggested that the reason employment gaps between men and women exist in technological or scientific fields is that because women are not biologically capable of creating careers out of said specific fields, something that men are supposedly able to do.
In his opinion, women lacked the ability to lead, had less aspirations for success and drive, and because said attributes were invaluable in the STEM field, they were therefore unfit for the field as a whole. Any attempts to close the gap were politically motivated, Damore wrote, and were discriminatory in themselves due to the fact that they pushed out non-progressives.
He was promptly fired from Google and has risen to cult fame among the right-wing media.
But is anyone completely in the clear here?
Yes, Damore is in the wrong in the most popular way people seem to be nowadays - morally. There is much about his manifesto that is (or has been) proven incorrect. Damore's opinion that the gender wage gap is a myth is exactly what he calls it. The wage gap between men and women varies among different states, with women making from 64 to 89 percent (Wyoming and New York, respectively) of what men make. The average wage gap in the United States is about 80%. Never has there been a coding program incentivized solely by the government to encourage young girls to code; such programs have always existed to simply encourage them to learn . Not even Damore could possibly argue that it isn't within a woman's right to learn.
(Not to mention that such programs wouldn't have been popularized or pushed so hard if men hadn't been so condescending to young girls about STEM professions to begin with. So many issues wouldn't be a problem if they hadn't decided to be so patriarchal about them in the first place.)
But to be fired for publishing it? It's a little less clear-cut.
It's an argument that the right-wing media is so very fond of: the First Amendment, in which every citizen has the right to free speech. In this case, it was Damore's right to publish and pen the manifesto. No man (or woman) should be stopped from expressing their opinions, regardless of how offensive the other side may find them. Google's decision to fire him because of his opinions unfortunately does make them somewhat liable of being one of the "raging left" - quick to silence any dissenting voices that don't agree with a somewhat liberal agenda. It's a move that happens a lot more often than it should.
However, when Damore wrote the manifesto, he also chose to circulate it to other staff in the form of an interstaff memo, which has since leaked to the public. If he were to be fired for anything, it could very well be for attempting to undermine the general goals of the company on the topics of gender equality. Almost insubordination, really. (It's all in the wording.)
Should James Damore have been fired from Google? Yes. But should he have been fired for writing a manifesto? No.
(Whatever Google thinks could have happened with the manifesto's spread is fair game.)
