Actually I found his piece to be distinctly unscientific.
It parades as scientific, for sure. But when you break it down, and consider the whole of the message it imparts... at it's core, it was very unscientific.
And I bet that those at Google who decided to terminate his employment felt pretty much the same way.
He was very good at sourcing almost every single one of his claims with references to published scientific studies.
Your statement on the other hand has zero quotes to support your claim.
I know which one I will consider "unscientific".
The last part is "the message" of a scientific publication (the "why I worked on/wrote this").
Why was his memo unscientific? 1. His choice of data presentation was almost exclusively for his side of the hypothesis, of the form "women are biologically inclined to X" without including any of the (vast corpus of) counter-studies* that directly offset many of his core supporting arguments.
2. Even if his arguments were sufficiently sound (which is unlikely as per 1.), his conclusions were a bit of a quantum leap from his "sourced" claims to "this is unfair, divisive, bad for business" (as per the TLDR). He pretty much just decided that for himself. There were few or no studies/data/observations to support that crucial step.
*going to piggyback off the sources linked in this slate article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/08/07/the_google_a...
I think the standard that you have set for the author expressing these opinions is unfairly high, and the bar that you have set for yourself for criticizing him for expressing that is unfairly low. You criticize that the author has cherry-picked his sources; you now have to support that claim by showing the deluge of counter-studies that show that it is not true that women are inclined to X personality. I've checked the Slate article and it doesn't link to sources that show that. In fact, the first paragraph of the article links to articles that agree with that WSJ article and with the author that discrim. leads to gender strife.
> the sources linked in this slate article
I couldn't find any counter-studies in the article you linked. I tried traversing the sources, but those sources don't have any studies either. Is that the link you intended to post?
I'll grant that I had a kneejerk reaction of "that can't be accurate" and assumed there must be lots of literature to back me up, but it isn't easy to find it. Personally I neither support nor oppose this manifesto, but I think given the very expectable backlash and damage potential, drawing such concrete conclusions without stronger grounds was a bit too risque to be considered scientific.
Whether a claim (or other statement) someone makes is "scientific" or not is, fundamentally, a matter of the soundness and logical coherence of the overall argument they're making. And about the aspects of the issue they sidestep and ignore (and this guys ignores a whole lot in his manifesto, actually) as much as the aspects they cite.
Not the number of footnotes, quote or diagrams it has.
This is a dangerous level of indirection. "The whole of the message". Sounds like you are reading into what it says, finding things that it doesn't actually say - without acknowledging that you are doing so.
The paper demonstrates that the author values diversity, open dialog, and science.
And many people at Google declared they were unwilling to work with such a person.
Those are the people who should have been fired, for creating a hostile, intolerant work environment.
No, it's called "assessing it qualitatively as well as quantitatively".
Which is a very useful skill, actually.