There have been a flurry of articles and commentary recently about how Google recently evaluated the salaries of its employees for evidence of discrimination and gave pay raises to more men than women.

Quite a few of the comments have boiled down to: “But that’s not what we meant! you were supposed to give the women pay raises”

Plus of course lots of commentary about how Google is still being discriminatory based on the 2017 lawsuit that claimed:

“Google has channeled and segregated, and continues to channel and segregate, women on the basis of their sex into lower compensation levels and into less-compensated and less-favorable job ladders and levels,”

Lost in all this is the question of whether Jamie Damore was right. Just possibly Jamie Damore’s thesis that women tend to prefer jobs/roles that are less technical and command lower salaries is correct. Note that this does not mean that some women do not want to do the highly technical highly paid work 16 hours a day jobs that command the highest salaries but merely that this kind of job appeals more to men than women and that therefore more men will apply for it and more men will turn out to be good at it and get promotions/pay raises based on their performance.

Oops never mind

In a similar vein there’s this tweet:

Consider the outrage if someone said the reverse, or worse wrote something like this:

Look Some of my best friends are African American. I’m married to one, but African Americans make up less than 15% of the population and 5% of the fiction market.



Why spend time catering to such a niche market?



It is conceivable that the original quote is intended to be sarcastic, but I don’t think so and if you read the responses to the original tweet the idea that this is discriminatory to men seems to be missed. Certainly even if the original twit was being sarcastic most of those responding seem to have no concerns about that at all. For example

Mr Stross’ advice is pretty good but it would be nice if he followed it himself. I can’t help recalling that someone 2000 years ago had a story about motes and beams in eyes that seems applicable even if he were a Jewish male.



In fact, given that there have been any number of articles about the decline in the number of men reading fiction a smart marketing kind of person would look at the statistics quoted and think “market opportunity” because in the relatively recent past men read a lot more fiction than they do now. Thus a smart market savvy author would think “underserved market” and go out and deliberately write books that appeal to men.

Of course that author would have to Indie publish the book because the publishing establishment seems to agree with the original twit and prefer to market to the majority. Not to mention of course the likely bias from the fact that traditional publishing has become an almost entirely female profession. And talking of that, one wonders whether would-be male editors etc. are discriminated against in the hiring process or whether they don’t apply – and if the latter, why?

By the by, as a thought experiment you are invited to imagine the reaction of the twitterati and other woke folks to the establishment of a publishing house devoted to providing books that straight men want to read. And once you’ve done that you might want to compare it to the likely reaction to a hypothetical publishing house serving the LGBT readership, the Hispanic readership etc. (we don’t have to worry about one serving straight women, you ladies have Harlequin romances and so much more).

Going back to the Damore hypothesis, just possibly men and women have on average different motivations and different abilities. The same may also apply to humans different genetic lineages. If so the correct reaction is not enforced diversity where every team has one or each – or equal numbers of each, or numbers proportional to their proportion in society as a whole – but to ensure that everyone is able to follow their desired career so long as they have the ability to do so (thus 5 foot high basket ball players need to be discouraged from seeking a career in the NBA but there should be no discrimination except that of ability between players who are 6’6″ or taller).

Sexual discrimination may be a problem in some regions but I don’t think it’s a large problem in most of the US (and Western Europe) and it certainly isn’t a problem in high tech industries. I’m fairly sure that the same applies to other kinds of discrimination too. Of course this is not something that is welcome news to HR departments and governments because if it were generally held to be true a large number of diversity officers and other related jobs would be lost, but it would likely be a major boost to the profits of the companies that removed their diversity infrastructure and the removal of the related regulations (and bureaucratic enforcers) would also, likely, significantly improve economic growth. Ah well a man can dream.