Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites on intelligence tests. Four years ago, it was Jason Richwine, a Heritage Foundation scholar who said whites outperformed Hispanics on such tests. Now it’s James Damore, a software engineer who was fired last month by Google for writing a memo that said women tend to be less interested than men in solitary work, such as software coding.
In a world full of prejudice—illustrated most recently by the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville—it’s healthy to be revolted by biological theories of inequality. But in Damore’s case, the revulsion has gone too far. He and his arguments have been misrepresented, and his constructive ideas have been buried. His critics have falsely pitted the moral truth of equality against the plain fact of sex differences. By firing him, Google has confirmed that what he described in his memo—a progressive “echo chamber”—would rather purge than engage dissent. An opportunity for dialogue has been missed.
I’d like to reopen that dialogue. I believe all of us could gain from it, because I’ve been through an episode like Damore’s. Ten years ago, intrigued by Watson’s remarks, I wrote a series of articles about racial differences on intelligence tests. I have many regrets about it, but the biggest is that I didn’t understand the social consequences of my words. To me, batting around studies and theories about race was an intellectual exercise, and I thought it was sufficient to stipulate that you can’t judge individuals based on such theories. I was wrong. The only message people took from the ensuing uproar was that a liberal writer was endorsing scientific racism. To this day, I believe that the association I projected in those articles, between race and intelligence, did a lot of harm.
It’s clear to me, from Damore’s memo and from interviews he has given since he was fired, that he doesn’t understand the consequences of his words, either. He, too, will probably end up wishing he had written them differently. And after him, there will be other Damores. Curious people will find studies of differences, particularly between the sexes. The response from well-meaning egalitarians—that such differences don’t exist—will fail. The heresy may go underground, but it will return. And the cycle will repeat itself until we learn that the problem isn’t difference; it’s how we talk and think about it.
Maybe we should try a different approach. Instead of debating biology, let’s focus on the social effects of characterizing groups. I hope we’ll take two lessons from the Damore episode. One is that it’s dangerous to traffic in stereotypes. The other is that it’s dangerous to deliver that anti-stereotype message through caricatures, falsehoods, and purges.
Damore has been widely vilified as a pig. That’s nonsense. In his memo, the 28-year-old engineer acknowledges sexism and praises feminism. He criticizes stereotypes and restrictive gender roles. He notes that it’s irrational, not just wrong, to judge anyone on the basis of sex. He affirms the liberal principle that we should “treat people as individuals.” He also accepts the progressive principle that we should “correct for existing biases.” He writes: “I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.”
In interviews, Damore talks in a sheepish, halting, college-campus left-speak. He seems earnest and awkward. He’s eager to make clear that he thinks the women at Google are just as good as the men. He explains that he doesn’t attribute all gender gaps to biology and that it would be wrong to do so. He tells girls who are interested in technology as a career to go for it.
Like Watson and Richwine, Damore notes that group differences are overlapping distributions, not categorical divisions. But unlike them, he doesn’t focus on ability. He argues that women are underrepresented at Google and similar companies not because they’re less adept at coding than men are but because, on average, they’re less interested. I’d be shocked if that theory accounts for the 4:1 ratio of men to women in Google’s technical workforce. But it’s not, as detractors have alleged, a claim of male superiority.
Damore isn’t a misogynist. He’s a nerd. And that’s crucial to understanding not just what he gets right, but what he gets wrong. His mistakes are a nerd’s mistakes. He thinks, as I once did, that if you say group averages don’t warrant prejudgment of individuals, smart people won’t read or apply them that way. He’s mystified by the backlash against him. “As a very logical person, I laid out my argument,” he told right-wing podcaster Stefan Molyneux in an August 8 interview. About the resulting outcry, Damore confessed: “I don’t really understand it.”
What Damore didn’t grasp is that logic is no match for the social power of stereotypes. You can talk all day about curves, distributions, and outliers. But most people will absorb the stereotype, not the exceptions. That’s how stereotypes work: They simplify thought by categorizing things such as predators, trees, and the tribe next door. If you say Jews, on average, are wealthier than non-Jews, people will associate Jews with money. And when they meet someone who’s Jewish, they’ll start the relationship with that stereotype in mind.
In a society or profession where Jews can defend themselves, these effects might be manageable. But where Jews are vulnerable, the stereotype can accelerate discrimination. And it gets worse if you ground the stereotype in biology. Suppose we find genetic combinations that correlate with acquisitiveness or lack of generosity, and it turns out that these combinations occur at a higher rate in Jews than in other populations. If you were to go around talking about this association, you’d be telling the truth. But you’d also be poisoning the world with the suspicion that every Jew who applies for a job, by his nature, is greedy.
If Damore had thought more about social context, he might have anticipated that his memo was more likely to reinforce discrimination against women than—as he had intended—to avert discrimination against men. Men dominate the technology industry. Eighty percent of Google’s tech staff, and nearly 70 percent of its total workforce, is male. When 80 percent of the people around you are men, you get the impression that men belong there and women don’t. If you’re a woman, this impression can deter you from applying. It can isolate you as an employee, exhaust you with the burden of having to prove yourself, and skew evaluations of your work because men expect less of you.
Damore fixates on the impracticality of perfectly equal representation. In his memo, he argues that if women, under neutral conditions, wouldn’t be 50 percent of Google’s tech workforce, the company shouldn’t aim its hiring process at that goal. To a nerd, that’s a simple equation. But in real life, the dynamics of discrimination are complex. In a world of stereotypes, striving for balance can be a hedge against inertia. If you don’t push for parity, you’ll drift further and further from it, because the stereotype that women don’t belong at your company will take over. That’s what has happened in much of Silicon Valley.
To support his argument, Damore cites research on anxiety, sociability, testosterone, and sex differences. The research is fine, but it applies only to selected traits and to the general population. To apply it to software engineers at Google, you’d have to know more about what kind of women—and what kind of men—consider or apply for those jobs. You could just as easily point to data that show girls outperform boys academically, apparently due to greater self-discipline. Why infer from the sociability data that men are more suited to programming, rather than infer the opposite from the academic performance data?
When Damore talks about the paucity of women in technology, he presents biological differences as an alternative explanation to discrimination. But discrimination can work just as easily in conjunction with such differences. If women and men thrive equally at Google, there’s no business incentive to discriminate by sex. But if women, for biological or cultural reasons, are 10 percent less likely than men to fit in at Google, it’s much more plausible that a stereotype will develop. And that stereotype can affect hiring and promotion decisions that go well beyond a 10 percent difference in outcomes.
Damore’s biggest mistake isn’t that he oversells the science of sex differences. It’s that he doesn’t understand how the invocation of science, particularly in a debate about group differences, is perceived. He writes about gender research in his memo, and talks about it in interviews, as a way of justifying his position. He thinks he’s just defending himself. But to people who worry that women are already besieged, in the tech industry and in society generally, the use of science to defend female underrepresentation—particularly when it’s packaged with terms such as “neuroticism,” which Damore has acknowledged was a clinical, socially obtuse choice of words—comes across as deeply threatening. Science has tremendous cultural power. Invoking it in this context feels like a declaration of inferiority, even if, on closer inspection, it isn’t.
And that, in part, is why the backlash has been so furious. Damore’s critics, from scholars to executives to feminists, have attacked his arguments as “pseudoscience”—an epithet that has become as reflexive, tactical, and meaningless as “fake news.” They’re quite wrong. There’s no clearer gap between any two demographic groups, in terms of biology and behavior, than between the sexes. The gap is often blurry and full of exceptions, but it’s obvious to anyone with open eyes. People who deny this are getting in the way of a far more interesting project: understanding how we’re equal even when we’re different.
Difference deniers see any claim of difference as an accusation of inferiority. But research in this area is complex, often in surprising ways. In general, men perform just as well as women (though not always) on cognitive tasks. But sometimes the average man and the average woman choose different strategies. So where distinctions arise, they can be understood as matters of style rather than ability. In the realm of attitude, as opposed to aptitude, there’s lots of evidence that men tend to behave or react differently from women in the ways Damore outlined. And, yes, some research links these differences to biology. But this same research also confounds simple dichotomies between masculine and feminine.
When you think about sex differences in terms of style or disposition—and recognize that in many contexts, styles and dispositions prevalent among women can be more effective than what most men tend to do—the debate over women in the workplace gets more interesting. You start to think about gender balance not just as a matter of fairness, but as an engine of intellectual diversity and innovation. And you begin to realize that Damore, in his sometimes hamfisted way, is pointing toward a synthesis that can get us past the tired, ill-conceived debate between gender equality and gender difference.
Much of Damore’s memo can be read not as a denial of gender bias but as an articulation of how it works. “Women on average are more cooperative,” he writes. “Women on average look for more work-life balance.” He adds that women also display “higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.” From one point of view, this is a man blaming women in order to excuse discrimination. But from another point of view, it’s an analysis of how companies punish women for healthy or virtuous behavior.
In an email to employees after Damore was fired, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Damore had violated the company’s code of conduct by suggesting that women “have traits that make them less biologically suited to [Google’s] work.” But what Damore actually suggested, in his memo and in subsequent interviews, was that Google could change its work structure and hiring procedures to suit more women. “We should make the workplace a place where you can actually thrive if you’re cooperative,” Damore told Molyneux. As an example, he proposed programming in pairs. Damore also argued that Google’s interview process might disadvantage women by measuring “only how well you work by yourself. . . . We never really measure how good someone is on a team, which is really important to how [well] you perform at your job.”
When you get past the caricature and listen to Damore—and when you see how he thinks and rethinks as he listens to others—you realize how much good could have come from an open-minded conversation among him, people like him, and those who disagree. Instead, Google terminated the conversation and sent a sharp message, by firing him, that such ideas won’t be tolerated, much less engaged. The company’s decision brought relief to employees who felt that his memo had created an environment hostile to women. But it pushed many libertarians, conservatives, and free thinkers into the closet.
Firing people for talking about sex differences in a clumsy but fair-minded way is bad for everyone. It’s bad for those who get fired or silenced. It’s bad for Google, which has become what James Damore warned against: an ideological echo chamber. And it’s bad for society because it entrenches the false idea that sexual equality can’t withstand a frank, nuanced discussion of sex differences. If you force people to choose between reality and feminism, you’ll end up with fewer feminists.
But just because you can talk about differences by sex, race, or ethnicity doesn’t mean you should. Part of intelligent cultural conservatism is understanding that the ideas passed down to us from the Enlightenment and the civil rights movement, such as treating people as individuals, are social institutions. They’re vulnerable to erosion, just as faith and family are. Charlottesville was a warning. If you go around spreading biological theories of sex, race, and attitude or aptitude, the culture of fairness can unravel.
My recommendation, having made that mistake, is to bypass demographics. If biology affects mental traits, then focus on the traits and the biology, not on associating them with a group that can be stereotyped. In Damore’s case, that would mean talking about cooperativeness and anxiety, not about women. Do Google’s practices disadvantage people who prefer collaboration or are prone to stress? Does that cost the company talent? It might turn out that these practices favor men and that rethinking them would bring more women into the company. You could argue that this would be a fairer, more fitting remedy than quotas. But your argument wouldn’t center on sex differences. It would center on traits that can be found, albeit unevenly, in both sexes.
I wish Damore had articulated his ideas that way. Perhaps, after further conversation and reflection, he will. But you don’t get there by being silenced. You get there by listening and by being heard.
William Saletan is Slate’s national correspondent. He is the author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
