Damore made the mistake of failing to realize that an American place of employment is not the agora. Given a couple opportunities to adjust his flight plan, he decided to stay the course. He was free to do so but he became a walking Title VII violation when he did and too much of a liability for Google to continue to employ.

On the plus side, I hear he landed on his feet so it all worked out in the end.

And I don't believe a reasonable person can conclude that someone believes things like "women score higher on the psychiatric test for neuroticism" and then sets that belief aside when evaluating the behavior or performance of women on their team.

I mean, yeah of course, in a way statistics give us bias about everything. Just like a woke kind of bias will also affect someones perception. That's just always going on. But that doesn't mean we can't realise that every individual is unique, and can be a unique asset in a company / project / whatever?

Zeroth, statistical results like this are not at all like the "scientific racism" of the past. They are well accepted across a broad field of study and have shown themselves to be useful in understanding human behaviour. (Admittedly, a psychiatric evaluation is not a precise measurement. But it is not fundamentally based on a flawed assumption, and it is not being conducted by people with an axe to grind.)

First, OCEAN traits are basic material in psychology. By your argument, nobody with a relevant degree should be allowed to be employed anywhere; but they learn (not "believe") these things exactly because it makes them more qualified for their intended career path. It's the same as how doctors nowadays are expected to understand how culture mediates responses to pain, or how men's and women's health care facilities have proven themselves necessary (as has the need to disentangle what's caused by physiology or hormones from what's caused by psychology).

Second, Damore obviously understood the material he presented reasonably deeply. Nobody who looks into the psychiatric tests on that level would misunderstand what they mean. And, I mean, really, this is such an incredibly tangential thing to actual work. If I thought you belonged to a group with more propensity to self-doubt (I'm still not exactly being scientific here, but that's closer to what I've understood from my own reading), are you really saying that this would prevent me from fairly "evaluating your behaviour or performance"? The quality of your code doesn't change because of how you felt about it when you committed it.

Third, this is a claim that Damore fully understands as a statistical claim about the general population. He knows very well, and he makes it very clear that he knows very well, that this does not transfer to "women on one's team"; and furthermore he didn't argue that trait neuroticism makes people unfit for purpose (as above). The entire point of the argument is to explain why women disproportionately don't apply for the job, and thus relieve Google of the moral burden of correcting for that. (But he even offered suggestions for what they could do instead!)

Throughout all of that, Damore makes it abundantly clear what he's trying to debunk — the idea presented in the tl;dr: "Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression". If disparities in representation aren't caused by something purely external to the group (what "oppression" means), then they must be caused by something at least partially internal: i.e., a statistical group difference. And Damore is really making the mildest possible arguments about such differences. If you consider this objectionable, then logically you require everyone to believe that every group is statistically identical to every other group in every aspect except the one that defines the group (or at least: in every aspect relevant to performance in any job, etc.); that this is something that must be true a priori and cannot in principle be falsified even by actually doing the statistical work; and that disagreement is thoughtcrime. This is not a strawman; your argument requires this level of absolutism, because otherwise it is not fairly engaging with what Damore actually said.

Quality of code is by no means the only, or even dominant, evaluation metric for Google performance reviews. There is significant opportunity for bias in how those evaluations work, and that is by design; an engineer that puts out pristine code but shirks oncall duties, responds poorly in performance reviews, is hostile to their coworkers, or pushes blame while pulling credit, is not ready for higher ladder rungs. It's one of the reasons performance reiviews are done by peers, so that being stuffed in a team with a bad manager is less likely to hamstring one's career. But, that does mean that if you're on a team with someone perceived to be sexist (here, I mean "believes different sexes have different inherent natures of behavior"), it sows a lot of doubt in their ability to objectively evaluate you.

I don't think Damore intended to create an uncomfortable working environment, but he did, sadly.

There's an interesting book, "The Myth of the Rational Voter," that touches upon how higher education (in economics, in the case of that book) influences one's political views. Damore may not have been scientifically wrong, but if he's expected to keep working with people who haven't been read-in on the science and don't agree with it even when they are... He made a career-limiting mistake suggesting that the company's approach should pivot to that avenue of research's conclusions. I think he made the mistake honestly, but it was incompatible with his continued employment and he didn't back down when that was made clear.

To answer your question more directly: "Yes. If I were working with a coworker that I know has publicly and thoroughly quoted science that indicates men are categorically more impulsive than women and he gives me, a man, a bad performance review, I would wonder if he did because he doesn't think men have the self-control to make good leaders." That's the hostile work environment, sadly.

> He knows very well, and he makes it very clear that he knows very well, that this does not transfer to "women on one's team"

Two issues with this in practice:

1) If it doesn't transfer to women on one's team, then why was it relevant?

2) If it applies specifically to the general population, than why was it relevant? Google already isn't hiring from the general population.

If that's actually the argument he put on the table, he committed a category error that undermined the whole exercise, which makes it more suspicious when he doesn't back down.

> If you consider this objectionable, then logically you require everyone to believe that every group is statistically identical to every other group in every aspect except the one that defines the group (or at least: in every aspect relevant to performance in any job, etc.); that this is something that must be true a priori and cannot in principle be falsified even by actually doing the statistical work; and that disagreement is thoughtcrime.

You have the meat of the situation yes. Title VII does make that assumption, and does not tolerate working protected-category differences into how employees are treated. I believe Damore was trying to make an argument merely regarding Google's diversification initiatives, but the argument he made had immediate implications for the current workforce (it's not like individuals from the categories with the personality traits Damore's manifesto suggests magically stop being of that category when they are hired, and I think reasonable people made that inference whether it was intended). There is a non-specious argument to make that the Civil Rights Act is behind the science (although, as I've noted previously, any claim it is should be treated with maximum scrutiny given where "the science" has led society in the past in this problem domain).

... but it is the law of the land, and as consequence, one cannot be "just asking questions" about protected categories in an employment environment without career risk.

1. Okay. So the psychologists deserve a lifetime of unemployment for daring to choose that major. Understood.

2. This is, as far as I can tell, the same form of argument as: "Yes. If I were working at a company that I know has publicly discussed and implemented DEI policies that argue for hiring people on the basis of traits other than their ability to do the job, and I saw a coworker do a bad job, I would wonder if that coworker were an unqualified 'diversity hire'." This is, to my understanding, one of the arguments that got Charlie Kirk shot; as it's one of the ones people cite when trying to justify the shooting.

But that argument is more coherent, because it considers the effect of hiring policy on hiring, rather than the effect of statistical traits of the general population on hiring. And because it considers job performance as evidence of job aptitude, rather than misrepresenting a statistical difference as a "categorical" one and then making an interpretation about personality traits as they correspond to job aptitude. (Part of the memo was specifically about how to prevent personality traits from interfering with job aptitude, coming from a belief that they don't inherently.)

> one cannot be "just asking questions" about protected categories

Again: his feedback was explicitly solicited. It is extraordinarily unjust to solicit feedback but punish people for saying things you don't want to hear. This is in fact a hallmark of the sorts of authoritarian regimes Damore complained about.

> it's not like individuals from the categories with the ... traits ... magically stop being of that category when they are hired

No, but if the trait is relevant to job performance, then they do stop having that trait when they are hired, because the hiring process filters for it. That's the point. Damore repeatedly, explicitly stated throughout the memo that such stereotyping is inappropriate. It represents ignoring evidence you already have. "You are in a group that tends to X, therefore you are X" is false logic that Damore calls out as false logic. It is being projected onto him by the complainants. Reasonable people did not make that inference, because the inference is not reasonable — because it is not backed by logic, nor is it compatible with the principle of charity that is expected of reasonable people. Coming to these sorts of conclusions requires many unreasonable acts, such as repeatedly ignoring explicit disclaimers.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." People who have studied psychology and wish to work in an American workplace are welcome to do so. If they suggest modern psychological science indicates that Title VII is based on flawed reasoning and their coworkers have reason to believe they will act on that belief in an official capacity, that creates a hostile work environment. American businesses are not the places to lab-test OCEAN trait averages as policy guidance.

You have stated several times that Damore stated that wasn't his intent. I know he stated that (sidebar: one of the reasons this topic triggers my interest is I was there). I think, unfortunately for him, his protests failed the credibility test, fair or unfair that may be. He hadn't earned a benefit of the doubt from his colleagues (to be fair to him, "colleagues" is a very wide net the way Google organized itself back then; they were still acting like a small company in terms of organization when they employed over 50,000 people, and I think the experience with Damore was a nail in the coffin for their "big company with small-company ideals" model).

> publicly discussed and implemented DEI policies that argue for hiring people on the basis of traits other than their ability to do the job

I've seen this criticism in a couple of dimensions and I won't claim it doesn't happen, but (perhaps surprisingly) I agree with you to an extent. I'm not in favor of hiring people who can't do the job because they have other traits. Broadly speaking though, DEI initiatives are predicated on the core notion that most candidates are actually interchangeable, and if you don't back-stop in your company culture regular human biases, companies will hire more people who look, act, and think like them over equally-qualified people from different backgrounds. That's not the same thing as intentionally hiring unqualified people for a role; for most roles, strict stack-ranking of candidates is actually impossible because the responsibility domain is too broad.

> Again: his feedback was explicitly solicited

You are 100% correct, and I think Google as an org learned a valuable lesson about message channels in this story. There is also the dimension worth noting that the decision to keep it in house was taken out of both Google and Damore's hands because someone leaked the whole topic to the public, which thoroughly tied Google's hands; Damore's conduct in the public eye read worse than it did internally, so Google was faced with significant blow-back if they decided to go to bat for the guy at that point. It is entirely possible one of his coworkers did that on purpose, and that can be interpreted as malicious (... on the other hand, if the story is "Once the public knew about it, Google couldn't do anything but fire him..." Maybe the conduct was firing-worthy? All subsequent formal inquiry seems to concur it was).

> Reasonable people did not make that inference, because the inference is not reasonable

I think you make a reasonable case here, but unfortunately, I don't think the public agrees and we end up on the rocks of "reasonable person principle" again. If most of the public's interpretation doesn't fit the "reasonable person" standard, democracy as an experiment is a bit failed, yeah?

> such as repeatedly ignoring explicit disclaimers.

If you believe the disclaimers, you arrive at different conclusions than if you don't. Sadly for Mr. Damore, I think most people just didn't.