When a story like the Google diversity debacle unfolds, it comes in waves. It is like being six years old in the ocean and never getting a chance to stand up fully before the next breaker knocks you over and blasts seawater up your nose. First came Google’s dismal internal diversity report, published June 29 alongside the announcement that the company had hired Danielle Brown as Vice President of Diversity. Then came the buzz about how dismal those stats really were: a 31 percent/69 percent gender split in favor of men, and a 56 percent white workforce. Then came employee James Damore’s internal memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” decrying the very principle of gender equality. Then the memo became public, and then its author was fired.



Everything about this rollercoaster has been predictable, because actions have consequences. And just as things that go up must come down, people on the right are mad that Damore has been given the boot. In a statement, Danielle Brown described Damore’s internal memo as “incorrect.” Rich Lowry at National Review responded that her argument “would have been much stronger if she had actually rebutted any of the author’s statements about sex differences—assuming that she could.” Damore is on his way to conservative martyrdom, another victim of the leftist-feminist dogma that squishes free speech under its women-loving heel.

But Brown doesn’t have to engage with Damore’s arguments. His memo contained a bunch of “red-pill” nonsense about biological differences between men and women. The gender gap, according to Damore, may not be all down to “implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases,” as Google’s leadership claimed in its diversity report. Instead, he wrote, “On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways.” These biological differences—which are the product of evolutionary psychology, that most legitimate of all sciences—lead men to enjoy coding more than women.

Arguments that cite innate biological differences between the minds of men and women are incorrect, and they’re not an acceptable part of a public discourse about gender. Misogynists feed each other this stuff online because it makes them feel like righteous victims of feminism instead of privileged people who have to make concessions if we are to make progress towards equality. Taking Damore’s claims seriously would have done nothing more than make Brown look stupid. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s note to employees succinctly put it, “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”

Whether or not Damore’s views should have led to his firing is a different matter. He violated Google’s code of conduct pretty explicitly. But then again, people believe all kinds of poisonously crazy stuff, like vaccines causing autism, without being fired.