A male person at Google has had just about enough of their diversity policy, and wrote a ten page memo to explain about it. Surprise plot twist: it’s because women just aren’t as good.

In the memo, which is the personal opinion of a male Google employee and is titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the author argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” he writes, going on to argue that Google’s educational programs for young women may be misguided.

The post comes as Google battles a wage discrimination investigation by the US Department of Labor, which has found that Google routinely pays women less than men in comparable roles.

Which, it turns out, is only reasonable, because women just are different, in the sense of worse.

Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation.

Fortunately, fortunately, he happens to have all the necessary facts and reason for the job. He knows everything, and explains it lucidly.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:

• They’re universal across human cultures
• They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
• Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
• The underlying traits are highly heritable
• They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

Personality differences

Women, on average, have more:

• Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
• These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
• Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
• This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.
• Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

Fascinating. I feel more in possession of facts and reason already – though also, of course, more open toward feelings, more agreeable, more reluctant to speak up, and way way way more neurotic.

We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.

Status is the primary metric that men are judged on[4], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.

I’ve noticed that. There’s nothing like being a coal miner or a garbage collector to satisfy the lust for status.

Why we’re blind

We all have biases and use motivated reasoning to dismiss ideas that run counter to our internal values. Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change) the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ[8] and sex differences). Thankfully, climate scientists and evolutionary biologists generally aren’t on the right. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social scientists learn left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap[9]. Google’s left leaning makes us blind to this bias and uncritical of its results, which we’re using to justify highly politicized programs.

What luck that Mr Memo is immune to any kind of bias.

The bracketed numbers by the way lead to more of his thoughts on the subject, not to sources. There ain’t no sources. Real men are Leaders, and they don’t need no stinkin’ sources.

Guest post by Josh Spokes.

The gay community’s historical project of sexual liberation was something very different than what I thought it was when I was a young man coming into that world in the late 80s and early 90s. I see now, of course, that it was an almost entirely male “community.”

The pleas for acceptance for “radical sexualities” that seemed so innocent to me, so reasonable, then—-these were just the seeds that have bloomed into today’s lesbian-bashing, misogyny, pedophilic interest in children’s bodies, and much worse.

Sarah Boseley at the Guardian today takes up the story of Mary Beard and the eruption of enraged goons.

She said the tone of the debate left her dispirited. “It feels very sad to me that we cannot have a reasonable discussion on such a topic as the cultural, ethnic composition of Roman Britain without resorting to unnecessary insult, abuse, misogyny and language of war, not debate.”

Beard, a classicist at Cambridge University, who is well known for her robust responses to Twitter trolls, was one of those who pointed to evidence that there was at least some ethnic diversity in Britain under Roman rule.

There followed, she said in her blog in the Times Literary Supplement, days of attacks on Twitter, which she described as “a torrent of aggressive insults, on everything from my historical competence and elitist ivory tower viewpoint to my age, shape and gender [batty old broad, obese, etc etc].”

It is dispiriting. We’ve probably gotten somewhat hardened to it over time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dispiriting; of course it is. It’s hugely dispiriting that we can’t use social media to talk about things like the demographics of Roman Britain without risking yet another dip into the sewer of abuse.

The abuse got worse, she wrote, when Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of risk analysis in the US and author of the best-selling book The Black Swan, joined her critics.

Beard told Taleb on Twitter that this kind of family in Roman Britain was unsurprising. He questioned her scholarship and accused her of “talking bullshit”.

And when Simon Singh and Nick Cohen defended Beard he called them names too. He considers himself a scholar but he carries on like any random Twitter troll.

Imbecile, I said is insulted in language for imbeciles. And don't try to fuck with me in Ancient languages.https://t.co/6I23OwMyPk

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 5, 2017

2) I guess from your "scholarship" you are so trained to bullshit your way out of situations.
You're a fraud.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 5, 2017

In June there was Sarah Bond.

Earlier this month, Bond published an article in the online arts publication Hyperallergic saying that research shows ancient Western artifacts were painted in different colors but have, over time, faded to their base light marble color — giving the false impression that white skin was the classical ideal.

Uh oh. We know where this is going.

“Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted,” she wrote. “Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white and brown, among other colors.”

While today’s scholars have accepted this as fact, she said, the general public is another story. Part of the problem is that most museums and art history textbooks continue to contain “a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi.”

The “assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region,” she continued. “The Romans, in fact, did not define people as ‘white’; where, then, did this notion of race come from? … The equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe.”

Bond suggests this misunderstanding has perpetuated or been used to support racism over time, saying that “how it continues to influence white supremacist ideas today [is] often ignored.” Groups such as Identity Europa, for example, use classical statuary “as a symbol of white male superiority,” she added. “It may have taken just one classical statue to influence the false construction of race, but it will take many of us to tear it down.”

Unpossible. There’s no such thing. What we see and hear has no influence whatsoever on what we think. Our thoughts come directly from God, or from the energy of the cosmos if that’s what you prefer to call it – but in no case do they come from what we experience in our environment. Our sacred free will and original thinking depend on this well-established fact, and I defy any mere classics scholar who would attempt to challenge it.

We make up our own thoughts out of our own heads; we do we do we do! We’re miraculous that way. We have souls, and internal essences, and Identities, and those are where our ideas come from – not from what we read or see or hear said.

Conservative sites like National Review and Campus Reform were on the case.

Campus Reform included some lengthy quotes from Bond’s piece and contacted her for comment. She complied, saying that “Greeks and Romans actually added color to their art and thus white marble was often the canvas rather than the finished product.” The “exalting of white (and unpainted) marble was then an 18th century construct of beauty rather than representative of the classical view,” she added in an email to the website. But the coverage there and elsewhere, plus an additional mention by conservative talk radio host Joe Pags, was enough to prompt online threats of violence and calls for her termination, she says. There was additional heckling and harassment, including anti-Semitic references (Bond is of Jewish descent).

“What they want to believe is that there is a liberal professor that is so sensitive to race issues that she will make race issues out of anything,” Bond told ArtForum. “They want to make me an example of the hyperliberalization of the academy.”

They’re making America great again.

Ari Berman notes an anniversary:

53 years ago today bodies of Goodman, Chaney & Schwerner found in Mississippi. We must continue fight for voting rights in their name pic.twitter.com/iJLlhFfdHg

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) August 5, 2017