My reading of the memo was that Damore's hypothesis was mostly centered around differences in population averages of interest, and not necessarily innate ability. Once you've had several decades of heightened interest in a subject, it's understandable that differences in effective ability would result just from that.

> There will always be deviations from the norm, and given the fact that there are known physical and psychological differences between the sexes[1], I don't see why those differences wouldn't lead to differences in career choice overall.

This sentence is nonsense, which you can tell from how you had to formulate the conclusion. Not "A therefore B" but "A therefore you can't rule out B."

Yes there are gender differences in psychology. But the link between the specific gender differences the Manifesto author pointed to and the conclusion is non existent. The piece is just a bunch of handwaving. It's the Chewbaca defense of sexist ranting.

How is that misrepresenting what he said? Yes, it is true that there will always be individuals that are deviations from the norm. That is already implied in either scenario.

Here is a direct quote from the memo:

"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."

This sounds exactly like what the above poster summarized: "women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles".

> To those downvoting me, can you please explain why?

My guess is because you've condensed the central underlying premise into a compact, impossible to misunderstand, obfuscate, or mischaracterize idea, upon which a real discussion can be undertaken. This is counter to the goals of one side of this discussion, in my opinion.

You're being downvoted because this is a fundamentally dishonest argument. Even if you believe the bit about averages it's clear that the recommendations made by the memo didn't pertain to the average. They pertained to the staff of Google, where the average employee - man or woman - has abilities that vastly exceede those of the population in general.

Using this "on average" bullshit when making adverse reccomendations aimed specifically and directly people who are anything but is an especially nasty sleight-of-hand, and sound reason to disregard the writer's claims of good-faith and benovelence.

Of course, it's possible that Damore is just an brainless idiot who is too intellectually mediocre to check his own work for basic logical consistancy, but he lost the benefit of that particular doubt When putting Harvard and MIT on his CV.

At this level, the rules are different. If, like Damore, you're presenting yourself as one of the best and brightest, you better live up to a very high standard when taking public shots at the standards of others. Otherwise, you could get dumped very unceremoniously.

> "we shouldn't do anything to increase diversity..."

He didn't say that either. In fact, he advocates for more diversity and suggests changes that, at least according to him, should increase diversity without the negatives he's concerned about.

> The moment you point out that the same kind of argument was made about black people not long ago, most of the trolls just disappear.

Or they completely stop taking you seriously.

The increasing absurdity of this discussion is astonishing.

"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."

I don't think there's any conflating going on when he literally says biological differences in preferences and abilities explains why there aren't more women in tech.

That's something the memo does quite a lot as well. When it talks about "innate dispositional differences" between women and men, and uses quite deterministic language such as "as society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian innate differences have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider” it becomes increasingly unclear whether he is talking about suitability or preference or if women have the power to overcome these "innate differences."

It doesn't help that in the English language the word "disposition" can be used to mean both innate tendency and preference. When I say "I have a nervous disposition" I mean "I have an innate nervous tendency" rather than "I prefer to act nervously", but "disposition" can also mean "the power to do with something as one pleases." The fact that he does pair it with "innate" suggests that this preference is something we are born with however, and something that would indeed impinge on our biological suitability for a role.

He even goes as far as to suggest that "there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles" can be and "we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this)." It seems clear to me that he is using quite causal language there, and this isn't just a "preference" for people-oriented roles he's talking about.

Also, to be charitable to NYT, the fact that we are having to be this forensic with language over something that was written last week (as opposed to Plato's Republic, written 5000 years ago and which has been through many translations), and still can't agree what the memo is about, probably suggests that any misinterpretation is understandable and probably not borne of malice.

> Last week, Google fired a software engineer for writing a memo that questioned the company’s gender diversity policies and made statements about women’s biological suitability for technical jobs.

The paragraph from NYT does not make any kind of normative "ought" claims at all about what is reasonable, it merely states that he was fired and this is what the memo said.