Neurotic, as he uses it, is not the same way it is used in everyday parlance.
Neurotic is part of the Big 5 personality traits, for which there is substantial academic evidence. The traits are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.
"A study of gender differences in 55 nations using the Big Five Inventory found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."
Eh. He's using the psychological/clinical definition, but then draws conclusions on no scientific basis.
This is what he said in the memo:
> [Women, on average, have more] neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance): This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
And this is a quote from the person who actually did the meta-analysis which Damore cites (emphasis is mine):
> These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.
> It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
Also, and fact check me on this, does accounting for 10% of variance (aka 0.1 * sig^2) mean accounting for sqrt(0.1) * sig, aka 32% of the standard deviation?