Another rebuttal guilty of misrepresenting and being dismissive of the original memo, and just being wrong on certain details. Her reasons for outrage: > 1) F

Another rebuttal guilty of misrepresenting and being dismissive of the original memo, and just being wrong on certain details. Her reasons for outrage: > 1) Fatigue She claims women 'feel as the legitimacy of [their] presence is constantly questioned.' Of course I'm not going to argue this, I'm sure it's true, but it's also not a reason to ignore his arguments. > 2) Women's resistance to the "divide and conquer" strategy. Trying to paint Damore as attempting to undermine females as a group and turn them against each other. I certainly got none of that from reading the original memo. Because some women might actually agree with some of Damore's points, he's trying to divide the gender against each other? Not buying it. She again is misinterpreting Damore's claim that there may be a reason why women might prefer not to work in IT aside from male sexism as 'skepticism and condescension' of women's ability in general. > 3) The author cites science about "averages." But Google isn't average. First off, her claim that Stanford at 30% and Harvey Mudd at 50% female CS graduates is irrelevant when the average across the US as of 2014 is 18%[1], a percent less than Google's 19% female workforce. Those figures are just cherry picked data and useless unless we have statistics on where Google hires from. Second, she's trying to undermine his claim that the diversity initiatives may actually be doing harm to the company by making it a foregone conclusion that they are "Google's attempts at creating a fair and broadly welcoming working environment." Lots of saying "Artificial diversity good, Damore bad" without attempting to consider what he's suggesting or even addressing it or rebutting his individual points at all. Just glossing over his claims using citations of scientific studies as 'dispassionate facts [with] no rigorous connection to [average women].' It seems if she could have constructed an argument against these she would have. She again misses the point by claiming that "it wouldn't be some abstract concept of 'average' that doesn't get a scholarship, it would be an actual individual woman." Of course making changes to diversity programs would affect individuals. But right now, Damore is claiming that they're already affecting individuals negatively by stifling speech outside the list of culturally whitelisted opinions and giving individuals with (possibly) less merit more opportunities over others. Considering the alternative seems to never have entered the author's mind. > 4) Race Though Damore's essay is primarily about gender, he also mentioned race because Google's diversity initiatives (and usually whenever diversity is discussed in general) also are aimed at achieving a more equal gender and race representation. I actually ctrl-f'd 'race' in the memo and every time it was used it was also accompanied by 'and gender'. I see no reason to accuse him of being a racist because of this. > 5) The author says he’s open to diversity, yet no real-world diversity-enhancing program meets his standards It's like she didn't even read the memo. Diversity-enhancing programs are bad according to Damore when they give opportunities to one group of people over another based on their gender (or race). He's suggesting we step back one level of causation and consider that there may be another reason besides sexism that causes there to be a gender imbalance. Based on this article, I don't think the author ever did that. I will agree with her that his suggestions for alternatives are lacking and vague. However, the memo still has merit for drawing attention to the problem. A suggestion I might make (and has been made many times and more articulately by much smarter people than me) is while cutting back on the forced diversity initiatives, we increase cultural acceptance of girls in STEM starting in preschool. This won't yield results in the short term but I believe it is at least a part of the long term answer. [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/study-computer-science-gender-gap-widens-despite-increase-in-jobs https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/st...