By David Futrelle
The good folks at The Federalist — the clickbaity tradcon site known for its nuclear-level hot takes — have done it again: They have managed to come up with what may be the dumbest possible take on the Google Manifesto and its author, James Damore.
And somehow, it involves N.W.A.
Yes, N.W.A., the rap group that broke up more than a quarter century ago, but which is apparently the only rap group or rap artist that anyone at The Federalist can name off the top of their head.
In a post titled “What James Damore, Formerly Of Google, Can Learn From N.W.A,” the Federalist’s Rich Cromwell notes that the aforementioned rap group managed to survive criticism over the misogyny in the lyrics of its 1988 debut album “Straight Outta Compton.” Even though N.W.A. used words like “bitch.”
And if N.W.A., nearly 30 years ago, got away with calling women “bitches,” Cromwell suggests, then surely Damore should be able to get away with suggesting that women are biologically less suited for tech than men.
At least I think that’s what he’s arguing. Cromwell’s article is so clotted with inexpertly wielded sarcasm it’s sort of hard to tell exactly what he’s arguing.
Here’s what seems to be Cromwell’s thesis:
Damore, in the spirit of N.W.A., had the temerity to suggest, in the most foul-mouthed way possible, that there’s an inclusion problem at Google. Except actually he was very measured in the infamous memo that 99 percent of people upset about it didn’t read. …
Whereas N.W.A. created a whole lot of outrage with “Straight Outta Compton,” some of it was warranted. They were not nuanced in how they discussed the differences between men and women, but brutal and ruthless. But it was harder to take them down in August 1988 because people had to actually type letters and make phone calls and that’s a whole lot more work than a status update. People did the work, though, and N.W.A. persevered.
Damore should do the same, particularly as he wasn’t calling women b-tches or proclaiming their only use is as sex objects. He may be facing the Internet lynch mob, but he doesn’t have to do it sitting down. …
Stand up, Damore, and don’t let this … take you down and bite your tongue, but rather let it serve as a launch-pad, much as it did for N.W.A.
That is some Scott-Adams-level “persuasion” right there. My head hurts.
Oh, and did I mention that the picture of N.W.A. that The Federalist uses to illustrate the article is not actually a picture of N.W.A at all? Nope! It’s a picture of the actors who portrayed N.W.A. in the 2015 movie “Straight Outta Compton.”
But I guess all rappers and people portraying rappers look the same, huh?
Considering that people treat boy and girl babies differently immediately upon birth, it’s so difficult to make any kind of claim that a behavior is inherently gendered.
You’d almost have to set up an isolated community where babies and toddlers are raised in a completely gender neutral environment to really be sure.
I mean…
http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/shirtcollage3a.jpg
@epronovost
Lots of recent neurobiology says, “No meaningful (or in many cases, detectable) difference in male/female brains”. In another thread, 32 pages (and counting), there’s some useful info, but good luck finding it in the noise. None of the links you cite are peer-reviewed journals. HBR _might_ be the least biased, but it’s hard to tell, business journals tend towards the right most of the time.
Science journalism is generally behind the times on science by quite a bit. Newspapers love to sensationalize everything, so whatever they state as being the “conclusion” in a scientific study is generally way off from what the authors of the study actually said.
The quillette article? It’s not useful, because even IF the science is right, the way he brought it to his coworkers attention was wrong-headed. People working generally want to get the job done, not discuss the reasons that sexism exists in their workplace. This is settled case law in the US. It’s known as “creating a hostile work environment”, and anyone who does that at any large company stands a good chance of being let go. You perpetuate gender stereotypes in a company memo, you’ll at least get called in to HR, probably demoted, and worst, fired for cause.
ughhhhh
That’s really the heart of it. Brains are plastic, they change based on what they’re exposed to. And when this is a child’s tee shirt?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-67hZ9kClF5U/U4SFhYnA9qI/AAAAAAAAAEE/KJ3T-OfeUE4/s1600/enhanced-22631-1401111468-8.jpg
You don’t get to say “genetics!” if that girl grows up thinking that math isn’t for her.
fffffhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes
Just a quick note, I am familiar with the study you have linked and it has been severly criticised due to its methodology. Several similar studies have then been conducted and presented the exact opposite results, even reinforcing the evidence of major difference between the neurological construct of men and women. Here is an example of this critique which amounts tp the point of debunking (watch out, its a bit dense).
http://cogprints.org/10046/1/Delgiudice_etal_critique_joel_2015.pdf
In other the study you linked is generally considered pretty weak if not completly wrong headed. From what I can grasp from Google Scholar there is neurological difference between men and women, but exactly what that means in terms of human capacity and interest is extremely blurry. Afterall, the human brain is probably the most efficient ”swiss knife tool” in nature. I do think that many of those articles on neuroscience and gender difference have the tendency of under-estimating a lot the impact of environment (thus culture and and socialisation) in the creation of those network. Here is an example of well known gender difference and how to cut it down.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01990.x
PS: Those pictures makes me want to scream of rage sometime.
The Google CEO’s response to this was perfect.
There were certainly some valid points made shouldn’t be swept aside.
But a large chunk of it was couched in typical MRA language where they pretend to be non biased but not really. My version had no supporting references. There were contradictions (we shouldn’t have programmes that target particular groups as this is unfair to individuals, but we should recognise that there are observations that can be made about groups as an average. If that is true then why not targeted programs?)
There were weird irrelevant digs at women (women spend more money…do they? And so what?) Weird comments about dating preferences (relevant to the office how?) and a tendency to argue whether it would be damaging to seek equality due to those “biological differences”.
All in all it’s like he was trying to hide his sexism in some mealy mouthed (I am not at all sexist – honest! Language.)
My baby girl is getting a top with this on it for her next birthday:
http://www.giantitp.com/Images/CafePress2013/UnicornPrincess.png
(I’d link to the product, but cafepress appears to be broken right now)
Apparently the tidal wave of pretty pink princess bullshit is practically impossible to avoid once they go to school and start wanting to conform with their peers, but I’ll be damned if I let that happen without a fight…
Huh, that’s weird. It no longer shows up, and I can’t even do a normal direct link to the image; the comments system just kills it off. I wonder if its some anti spam mechanism that occasionally eats images.
@Steph
Sorry I don’t have a source for this, but I believe women do indeed spend more of the family’s money. They also spend less on themselves.
Who usually gets the enormous privilege [/sarcasm] of buying the food and the kids’ clothes and school books and booking vacations?
I do mean *usually*, not always.
@Sheila
Well that’s it. The comment about women’s shopping habits was utterly irrelevant to the rest of the memo.
It’s a common meme among men who dislike women. They comment on how women spend more money than men but never offer info on what it’s spent on.
@epronovost
Maybe I can help. While I am not a professional, I have more of a development and anatomy based focus that implicitly involves social psychology. The masters in Cell and Molecular Biology was a good foundation for this, and being the person with the condition helps (as well as touching base with others with TS).
While you were unfortunately the victim of one of my occasional “short-circuits” ( I believe a combination of TS intensity fueled, ADHD hyper-focusing on parts while missing context, I’m better at sensing when it happens than I used to be), the overall form of what I was doing is still a genuine challenge to someone like our troll guests. I’ve had to grapple with how sex and gender apply to something like Tourette’s Syndrome where the make and female people share most features like the aggression issues. The differences that remain are consistent with socialization based differences (slightly more OCD in female people with TS and interestingly more gender dysphoria than average, and slightly more tics in male people with TS).
If you can rephrase your questions with my experience in mind I may he able to help.
@Scildfreja
I can’t recall ever seeing a men’s t-shirt that said anything like “Girls Are Better Than Books.” That suddenly bugs the hell out of me, and I’m not even sure why. It’s something you could almost imagine a wide variety of men wearing–a popular teen at high school making his teachers roll their eyes, an MRA scoffing about intellectualism making you a beta, a journalist wearing it ironically…
PS:
T H I S
H
I
S
@banned
I love how so many privileged people think that tone is the only thing that can be offensive. Actually that somewhat explains our pearl-clutching trolls.
@epronovost, I don’t debate that there are issues with Joel’s paper – there are lots of contesting replies in her citations after all! I don’t have time to dig too deeply into them, unfortunately, but I don’t disagree with that. She has replies to that contestation also. My point was that we shouldn’t be taking a particular side while they’re sorting it out, and we certainly shouldn’t be using evidence to craft corporate or public policy.
(There’s no method used by the “there are sex differences in brains” crowd to determine whether those differences are brought about by social influences, either, which is an incredibly important part of determining whether those differences are inherent to sex or if they’re just societal. That’s a diversion from the point, though.)
I’ve no energy to get into this point right now, unfortunately. I end up having this argument with MRAs and MRA-adjacent all the time, and I really don’t have the blood glucose for it here too. I ain’t contesting the point! It just needs a big asterisk beside it, and should only be brought up in environments where we can be relatively sure that doods won’t use the conflict in the literature as a weapon.
I found that shirt picture and immediately my eyes vomited.
I don’t know how they did, but they did.
Damore was also somewhat subtly ableistic as shit as well. He chastised Google for “having compassion for the weak”, which almost always translates to a general dislike of people who do not fit in or who have mental disabilities. As a person with legitimate Asperger’s Syndrome (and not the self-diagnosed kind that these people use to justify their misanthropy and bigotry), I’ve had plenty of co-workers laugh behind my back. I even won a disability discrimination case against one of my employers.
I’ve experienced plenty of assholes in STEM who think that any form of assistance to those who are oppressed or in need of some genuine welfare is a form of legislated inequality against them and whine like little babies about it, despite the fact that most under-represented minorities in STEM are on average far better than their non-URM counterparts.
Why?
Because we need an emotional resilience on par with Hercules to deal with these mother fucking asswipes who believe us to be inferior all the while them being annoying, inferior slime.
Most of these chucklefucks are “libertarians”, a word they hijacked from the far-left (to the point noted racist cretin Murray Rothbard openly gloated about it). A funny thing about them is they think themselves to be uber-rational yet many of their arguments are laughably absurd. Many of them hate statistical analysis and deem it to be useless (Austrian school garbage) yet do not hesitate for a minute to use ridiculously bad statistical analysis.
Most of them fashion themselves as brave defenders of liberty yet most totally don’t mind having those in need of a social safety net be ground down under their jackboot.
Ever wonder why most of the most persistent and annoying anti-feminists are libertarians? Because libertarianism’s individualistic thinking is designed to be an aritificially designed cop-out for them not to analyze societal biases and oppressive structures. Everyone is an individual. If you are less than another, it’s either you’re lying, you’re lazy or you’re biologically inferior.
Silicon Valley was founded by these types and this attitude continue to this day. Compare that to Washington Metro, where affirmative action and compassion reigns. Racial and gender diversity abounds.
The Valley is rotten to its core and needs diversity quotas. No whining about affirmative action. No making pointed queries about the intelligence of people who aren’t able-minded white men. Quotas. Now.
If you take the literature that claims to show evidence of neurological difference, it doesn’t get anywhere near supporting the policy changes people want it to support.
A common statistic I heard going around ten years ago was that boys get higher scores on AP exams while girls get higher grades in the AP class but lower scores on the exams. This is supposedly evidence that there’s no gender bias against women in education, and that the reverse is true (boys get lower grades, but then the test shows that the boys have a better understanding of the material). But it isn’t, it just shows that people have different learning styles and the tests are probably unintentionally biased in favor of white males, while girls are more responsible about trying hard and getting work done. My high school tried to correct for both disparities, you got a B if you got a 4 on the test and an A if you got a 5, and there were workshops focusing specifically on the exam format and taking practice exams.
@Scildfrega
Would my offer to epronovost end up unsightly? If this is one of those intent-independent things I have no problem retracting my offer.
@ scildfreja
This might interest you. London cabbies have to take a test called ‘The Knowledge’. It’s notoriously difficult. Takes years to prep for. If you’ve ever noticed people in London driving around on scooters with an A to Z fastened to the handlebars, that’s what they’re doing.
Anyway, turns out it does actually cause changes in the brain.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16086233
Looks like the freedom feminist Christina Hoff Sommers is already sucking the mighty Republican cock and spouting her usual gender essentialist garbage.
https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/895642769242411008
@History Nerd
Cishet able-minded white males score better = Natural Order
Under-represented minorities score better = Affirmative Action Gone Mad
Subtle bigotry in its purest form
Oh gosh, Brony, not unsightly at all. Go to! I’m just bein’ cranky today I think. Sort of getting it from all sides. That’s me, and not you. And not you either, @epron! I feel like I’ve been hard on you, and I don’t mean to be. I’m sorry about that.
@Alan, I didn’t know about that (I was five yours old when I was last in London 😮 ) but it doesn’t surprise me! Brains are plastic and change all the time. Differences in brains between men and women are real, but there’s very, very little evidence that those differences aren’t mostly just social influences.
@History Nerd, oh gosh testing outcomes and gender disparity. It’s so frickin’ complicated, and these doorknobs use the blather of science journos as weapons. Makes me so angry.
IQ tests are a terrible measure of intelligence. Tests in general are a terrible measure of intelligence. The modern school system benefits boys over girls by way of varying teacher attention. Society infl – argh you guys know all this 😉 I’m just frustrated with humans and want to go live under a hill somewhere, that’s all. Im’a go back to work!
I’ll just repeat my point that the only thing they’re testing is whether you’re the sort of person who enjoys those puzzle books you buy on holiday.
Anyway, didn’t Eysenck say they were useless? And he pretty much invented the bloody things.
@Scildfrega
That’s good. My short-circuit is actually a warning sign that I’m hitting a limit somewhere and this is the sort of thing I need to watch for.