This past week there's been much social media buzz about a story involving a former Google employee who got fired for an eight page paper regarding diversity, the Affirmative Action clause, and Google's ideology on inclusion. I've heard many different opinions on this matter, some agreeing with Google's decision to let James Damore go and others disagreeing, stating that to fire him is a violation of his first amendment rights. Let's take a look at the basic content of this short paper to start off with.

The paper begins by laying out Damore's opinion of the biases present on Google's Mountain View campus, claiming that 95% of Google employees have a tendency to display a politically left ideology that creates extremist and authoritarian policies/viewpoints. In introducing these "biases," Damore displays a chart that lists supposed biases from both the right and left. Left: compassion for the weak, disparities are due to injustice, humans are inherently cooperative, change is good, open, idealist. Right: respect for the strong/authority, disparities are natural and just, humans are inherently competitive, change is dangerous, closed, pragmatic.

Okay.

Is it just me or is it blatantly clear what this guy's biases are? Purely from the language used within this chart, it's obvious that the author has a right wing bias. That's not necessarily a bad thing as I'm more than aware that in general I have a strong left wing bias, however the entire point of this paper is to argue to not make decisions or rule with one bias or the other.

Moving on, the paper then goes on to discuss what Damore labels as, "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech." The "causes" that he labels here are what he determines as factual biological differences between men and women that would cause men to be more predisposed to gain employment in the tech and leadership industries. Again, though he holds his words here to be inherently factual and supposedly based on scientific evidence, there are no direct statistics or references to prove any of what he says about the capabilities and overall tendencies of men and women in the work force. It's this exact part of the paper that has been the reason for the majority of the controversy.

I can definitely see the point of the people who say that he seems misogynistic and basically has the opinion of any run-of-the-mill "all lives matter" type straight white male; in fact, he is a straight white male. However, I can also see that what he's really trying to do is point out that there are other factors aside from oppression that tend to affect statistics of the amount or representation of women in certain job fields. For example, there is a major lack of female representation in the oil and mining industries. Is that because they have a hard time getting hired in those positions or is it because most women simply don't want hard manual labor jobs that have generally high death rates?

After this "biological" perspective of women in the workforce, specifically in the tech industry, he then goes into personality differences between men and women that also contribute to lack of representation. He claims, as expected, that women tend to be more compassionate, more social, more agreeable. This is why, according to Damore, we don't see women in positions with long hours that don't deal with something cooperative and creative and that requires strict leadership.

Now the section directly following this discusses how the gender role for men hasn't made any societal changes, while the female gender role has made leaps and bounds. I do agree with the discussion he presents about men being silenced when they feel they are being affected by gender issues and that it's expected for them to be in fields like tech and leadership, rather than more social and less stringent roles. However, Damore completely ignores the studies and statistics that show the difficulty for women to get hired into roles that would allow them to progress into leadership and high stress positions. He completely ignores the hundreds of large companies who have cultures opposite to Google in that they only hire white cis-gendered males into sought after, high status positions--such as Wall Street banks.

Following the personality section, Damore then lists a series of suggestions for "non-discriminatory" ways to close the gender gap in the tech industry, which, to me, sounds like a list of stereotypes. It's basically like handing the girl that walks out onto the football field a set of pom poms instead of a helmet. It's like telling her, "Look I know you're here and all and that's fine but I really think you're better suited for this skill set rather than the one you're obviously interested in."

The discriminatory practices that Damore lists in the following section, even to me, do seem problematic. However he lists them here out of context and they could very well be perfectly legitimate in the intent and execution. There's then a small section about why we're biased as human beings before he then goes into yet another list, this one full of suggestions for helping to eliminate or better the practices that are currently discriminating against white males.

This is a lot of information and it's a bit of a long break down of the paper, but now you have a much better understanding of what everyone has been talking about regarding the Google scandal. My point in bringing this particular situation up is this: You don't have to agree with Damore to understand that he has the right to say what he wants to say. He has his own beliefs, his own views. He has a right to feel psychologically safe in his work place. In recent years, American society and media has been absolutely terrible about limiting who gets to speak and whose opinions have a right to be heard. That's not how freedom of speech works. There is always going to be someone who disagrees, or someone who is offended. But being offended doesn't mean your opinion is right. While I can recognize that Google most likely had reasons for firing James Damore other than that they were offended, I will be the first liberal to tell you that conservatives have valuable opinions too.