Why We've Been Responding Wrong to the Google Manifesto

James Damore’s “Google Manifesto” has been taking the Internet by storm. Officially titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the memo spells out Damore’s position on gender inclusion in the workplace. The real reason more women aren’t in tech, Damore says, is that they are biologically different from men in ways that predispose them to struggle in highly competitive and analytical fields. The backlash from Damore’s treatise was swift -- Google fired him, and the Internet exploded with everything from gut reactions to carefully articulated responses. To combat Damore’s limited view of gender, many commentators emphasized that men and women are really not all that different.

But even though Damore’s argument perpetuates inequality, so does the opposite extreme. The idea that men and women are identical implies that all genders should be equally capable of succeeding without any intervention. Responses to Damore that depicted gender differences as largely arbitrary, like this one, run the risk of pressuring women to transform themselves (“With some practice playing the right sort of video game, women can boost their spatial reasoning skills to match those of boys.”) It’s an argument that ends up placing the responsibility on women to change their behavior, instead of indicting company culture.

While the article linked above isn’t wrong, it’s also not working to transform the tech world for women. By only telling part of the story, simplified arguments about how the genders are indistinguishable from one another might be taken to mean that culture change is unnecessary. As a result, women may be pressured to interrupt more, be more assertive, prioritize work over family … in short, to become more masculine. Emphasizing sameness begins in a well-intentioned effort to promote equality, but it eventually glorifies whatever culture already exists in the environment. In tech, that culture is overwhelmingly masculine.

Of course, Damore’s original argument also minimizes the importance of company change by placing the blame on biology. As many commentators have pointed out, his ideas about biologically gendered predispositions are flawed. Columbia University professor Adam Galinsky wrote that Google made the right call in firing Damore because “Biological explanations for sex differences create a clear and present danger to inclusion,” a danger that overrides Damore’s appeal to freedom of speech. 

On the scientific side of things, we don’t have good evidence that gender preferences are innate, but we have plenty of evidence that interests change when the environment shifts. In other words, a person’s surroundings have more power to drive their preferences than the gender they were assigned at birth. Northwestern University professor Alice Eagly pointed out that while early androgen exposure can foster some differences, “biology has multiple pathways by which its influence may be exerted on human psychology … There are many unknowns.” In this article on Damore’s manifesto, Wired argued that Damore’s evidence centers on evolutionary psychology, a problematic field that leverages the idea of evolutionary pressures to explain all sorts of “essential” gender differences. It’s too easy to use evolution as an excuse for lack of evidence, starting with an idea about gender roles and theorizing backwards until you hit something that sounds like science.

Gender differences are real. But instead of the simple biological affair Damore makes them out to be, they are a complex combination of nature and nurture. Our culture’s tendency to promote masculine traits and disadvantage feminine ones means that we have to acknowledge the current differences between men and women if we want to implement real change. Damore’s insistence that programs geared toward helping women succeed are “discriminatory” against men doesn’t bring us any closer to a solution. Neither does the idea that empowerment requires women to become more like men. Both of those positions let company culture off the hook and reinforce a strong preference for masculinity. Instead, we need to rebalance the tech environment so that all genders can be feminine, masculine, or any combination of the two without fear of negative repercussions.

Posted by Ella J. Lombard
Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash