Did he fail a critical vibe check / badly fail to read the room? Sure. Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired.
But is everyone already forgetting what things were like?
He was fired because he placed himself in a position where at least half the company would refuse to work with him.
It didn't matter if he was wrong or right, his mistake was entertaining the notion that people would entertain an earnest (if misguided) discussion when in fact that whole topic was taboo.
Did you read his memo[1]? That's not really what he's saying. He's ham-handedly trying to look for reasons that explain the gender gap in engineering. His thesis is that fewer women want to do that kind of work than men, not that those who do take the job are worse at it.
> That person has to be fired (directly into the sun, when practical).
Meow!
[1] https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
I think the fact that people have to resort to misunderstanding and misleading about what people like him say is very telling about the "religious" status of these beliefs. You see the same type of apologetics when Christians try to attack atheism.
NB: This post is not an endorsement of anything Damore said.
This is not even remotely what the memo said. The thesis of the memo is that not every gender disparity is due to bias or discrimination, and that directives to achieve equitable outcomes run a real risk of causing discrimination.
If someone said that men make up 90% of murder convictions not because the courts and police are biased against men, but because men commit 90% of murders, is that sexist against men?
How did they measure who didn't want to work with him, did they survey the entire company?
So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.
A better writer with more experience could have written a doc that was basically "some aspects of the training in our DEI classes is not scientifically supported, but is being used as a cudgel to change people's behavior" with a few examples.
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
His writing is very clear. He is talking about the Ideological Echo Chamber at Google. He is not railing against women.
Studying the literal fundamental nature of reality doesn't seem like a waste of time to me.
Damore said that women tend to choose to work with people rather than things. He said that, therefore, a way to increase women in the workforce is to enhance the peopleness of it, by incorporating more pair programming and collaboration.
He did not say that women were a poor fit for software engineering, nor that they were hired over more fitting men. Those words are from a bogeyman of your own imagination.
Closer, but still wrong. His point is that women are less likely to enter the field of software or engineering. Not that the subset of women who do enter those fields are less capable than men.
Imagine someone demands that we address the inequitable murder convictions with outcome based goals on the gender distribution of murder convictions. If I say that I believe that the disparity in murder convictions stems from the fact that men commit more murder, not bias in police or courts, does that make me a misandrist?
If women make up ~18% of software developers, why would we expect a non discriminatory hiring process to hire more than 18% women in software development roles?