As a woman, (according to the State Department) a minority, and an individualist, I feel the need to weigh in on the whole James Damore controversy.
I feel like what’s being discussed isn’t even close to what is actually going on. In fact, as with many things that are cherished by the left, I feel their “diversity” isn’t diversity at all, and their social engineering attempts fail because they’re not doing what they say they’re doing.
First, and before I get into details here, James Damore did not say what most people think he said. He did not say women are unsuited for tech jobs. He did not say women only have tech jobs due to affirmative action. That is all bullshit piled on by those mau-mauing him, in an effort to expel someone whose questioning made them uncomfortable.
Why it made them uncomfortable is the fascinating part of all this.
It makes them uncomfortable because it shatters the brittle shell of their enforced narrative, which can only be kept by keeping everyone from saying anything against it. It is very much a “the king is naked” situation. If James Damore is allowed to say men and women are different, the entire project of feminism shatters.
And yet everyone who doesn’t live in academia or in a social justice echo chamber knows that men and women are different.
I am not a biologist by profession, but for my writing I read a lot about brain chemistry/development/genetics and I have a group of “sources” who are professional researchers or scholars.
Recently a trans friend told me that she/he knew he was always meant to be a male, because the testosterone made his thinking so much clearer. And I was shocked. Not at what he said, but because this person, undergoing this intrusive a process, hadn’t been told that IS an effect of testosterone.
To simplify to a horrible degree, testosterone makes people think more quickly, more directly, and from point to point, while estrogen makes people think more deeply and more connectedly — and their thinking looks more like a series of decision branches and looping-back sub-branches (amply obvious to anyone who reads my posts).
Now, “men” and “women” are such broad classes that you’ll find no man and no woman fits the stereotype exactly (which allows idiots to become convinced there are fifty genders because they think we’re each a can whose contents much match the stereotypical label). When I say something like “men are larger than women,” this will fail if the man is from a small breed and the woman from a large breed. Or not, because every breed has sports.
That said, there are ranges, and if you do not recognize that they’re ranges, you’re as blind as those who see only the label and not the exceptions.
Most males have more testosterone than most women. Most men have had this – with exceptions for abnormal pregnancies, etc. – going on since they were in the womb. It has formed their brain. Most women have more estrogen than most males. Most women have had this since they were in the womb. This has shaped their brains in certain ways.
And most men are better at math – as we teach it – than most women. And most women are better at verbal skills – as we teach them – than most males. Yeah, this doesn’t describe any specific individual, and very few fit the extreme of “engineer who speaks in grunts” and “verbally gifted HR employee who can’t count to three.” There probably are some. And some aren’t even of the “right” genders for this.
Then there are family and cultural expectations. In my family, regardless of our sex, we were expected to do well at the “important” stuff: math, physics, chemistry, history, languages, and Portuguese (obviously that was our primary language).
However, culture or not, ability/interest for STEM subjects or not, no serious brain researcher can tell you men and women are exactly alike.
What they will tell you instead is that men and women have, in general, different abilities.
Which brings us back to Google and the defenestration of James Damore.
As a technological society, we cannot survive if we don’t admit the difference between men and women and don’t discuss how to take advantage of that difference.
Shallow talk of diversity that consists of pretending men and women are exactly the same and that’s why we need both in a project fails the most basic of logical tests
If you say it is because Suzie, who wants to be an engineer and is kept from it, is being discriminated against, and that’s why we must give her preference over Bobbie, who also wants to be an engineer, then you must answer me why — both of them being absolutely equal other than external sex organs — I should keep out Bobbie, who wants to be an engineer, so I can give preference to Suzie, who also wants to be an engineer. What is there to be earned by discriminating against an individual in favor of another, in law and official company policy, when both individuals are exactly the same?
On the other hand, if both are not alike, is there a valid reason to bring more women into the workplace? Would a woman worker on the project be able to identify blind spots that escape the way groups of men reason?
A priori there would seem to be.
But because we can’t admit men and women are different, this is not what affirmative action does.
Because the project of affirmative hiring is designed to put women in men roles, and to displace men with women, FOR THE SAME JOBS done in the exact same manner.
Now, you’re going to find women who want and are able to do that as well or better than a man. Remember: No group is homogeneous and there’s great variation. Those women need no affirmative action. However, knowing the nature of the group, it won’t surprise you that these women are a minority. When you are forcing women into male roles, fewer women will even want to do it
Not all the push, not all the affirmative action, nothing will bring about absolute equality when you’re requiring not only that women reason exactly as men, but behave exactly as men, including in competition and social interaction.
That is because men and women aren’t equal. Which was the whole point of the memo James Damore wrote. The whole purpose was to try to find new ways to bring women into the workplace and take advantage of their unique characteristics, instead of forcing women to be men.
But in the world of feminism, feminine characteristics cannot be encouraged. The ideal woman of feminism is a male with a vagina. The ideal role for a woman is man manqué.
Because “feminists” such as they are hate women and everything women stand for. And they created a philosophy to eliminate them while claiming loudly to be fighting for them.
This was why James Damore had to be silenced. He pulled back the curtain and revealed the anti-human project behind the curtain.
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