‘Just wait till those campus snowflakes enter the real world—that’ll
shape ’em up!” So goes a typical response to totalitarian hysteria at
colleges. The firing of a Google engineer last week for questioning the
company’s diversity ideology exposes that hope as naive. The “real
world” is being remade in the image of college campuses with
breathtaking speed.
A conveyor belt of left-wing conformity runs
from the academy into corporations and the government, so that today’s
ivory-tower folly becomes tomorrow’s condition of employment. Google’s
rationale for firing
James Damore
perfectly mimics academic victimology—the equation of politically
incorrect speech with violence, the silencing of nonconforming views,
the refusal to hear what a dissenting speaker is actually saying.
After
attending a diversity training session, Mr. Damore wrote a 10-page memo
titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” He observed that
“differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in
part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and
leadership.” Among those traits are assertiveness, a drive for status,
an orientation toward things rather than people, and a tolerance for
stress. He acknowledged that many of the differences in distribution are
small and overlap significantly between the sexes, so that one cannot
assume on the basis of sex where any given individual falls on the
psychological spectrum. Considerable research supports Mr. Damore’s
claims regarding male and female career preferences and personality
traits.
Mr.
Damore affirmed his commitment to diversity and suggested ways to make
software engineering more people-oriented. But he pointed out that
several of Google’s practices for engineering diversity discriminated in
favor of women and minorities. And he called for greater openness to
ideas that challenge progressive dogma, especially the “science of human
nature,” which shows that not all differences are “socially constructed
or due to discrimination.”
Mr. Damore’s fate was foreshadowed by
the sacking of Harvard president
Larry Summers
in 2006. At a conference the previous year, Mr. Summers had
hypothesized that the unequal distribution of the highest-level
mathematical abilities may contribute to the sex disparity of science
faculties. Numerous studies have confirmed that men predominate at the
farthest reaches of math skills (high and low).
Mr. Summers’s
carefully qualified speculation infamously provoked MIT biology
professor
Nancy Hopkins
to flee the room and tell reporters she “would’ve either blacked
out or thrown up” had she stayed. Mr. Summers issued a groveling
retraction and ponied up a cool $50 million for more gender-diversity
initiatives, but his tenure as president was doomed.
Google CEO
Sundar Pichai
employed the same bathetic language of injury in his response to
Mr. Damore. “The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom
are hurting and feel judged based on their gender,” he asserted in a
memo of his own.
Yonatan Zunger,
a recently departed Google senior engineer, claimed in an online
essay that the speculations of Mr. Damore, a junior employee, have
“caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the
company’s entire ability to function.” He added that “not all
conversations about ideas even have basic
legitimacy” (emphasis his).
Ironically,
Google is making even stronger claims about its lack of bias against
women than Mr. Damore is. U.S. Labor Department auditors allege that the
company’s salary differentials reflect sex discrimination; Google
strenuously denies it. “We remain committed to treating, and paying,
people fairly and without bias with regard to factors like gender or
race,”
Eileen Naughton,
vice president of “people operations,” said July 17. “We are
proud of our practices and leadership in this area.” But typical of the
cognitive dissonance affecting every diversity-obsessed company, Google
puts its workers through “implicit bias” training on the theory that
such biases inevitably cloud their ability to judge female and minority
employees and job applicants fairly.
The
corporate world is even mimicking academia in its inhospitality to
nonconforming speakers. Earlier this year, a Google employee asked me if
I would be interested in speaking there about the police. The employee
ultimately abandoned the idea, however, citing “personal/professional
matters.” An affiliation, however remote, with someone who challenges
the Black Lives Matter narrative is apparently a job hazard at Google.
Don’t
assume that the discipline of the marketplace will prevent this
imported academic victimology from harming business competitiveness.
Google sets managerial goals for increased diversity. Mr. Damore wrote
that he has observed such goals resulting in discrimination. That is
fully believable. A comment on an internal anonymous discussion app
warned that more Google employees need to stand up “against the
insanity. Otherwise ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ which is essentially a
pipeline from Women’s and African Studies, will ruin the company.”
America’s
tech competitors in Asia are not yet infected by identity politics. The
more resources U.S. companies spend on engineering diversity while
competing firms base themselves on meritocracy, the more we blunt our
scientific edge. Employees are thinking about leaving Google because of
its totalitarian ideology, Mr. Damore said in an interview after his
firing. While the prestige of elite companies may outweigh the burden of
censorship for now, there may come a point when the calculus changes.
Eric Schmidt,
chairman of Google parent
Alphabet
Inc.,
told a June shareholder meeting that Google was founded on the
principle of “science-based thinking.” It says a lot about the corporate
world that it makes universities look like an open marketplace of
ideas. Research into biological differences may be unwelcome in much of
academia, but it proceeds on the margins nevertheless. In the country’s
most powerful companies, however, it is enough to disparage a scientific
finding as a “stereotype” to absolve the speaker from considering the
question: But is it true?
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops” (Encounter, 2016).
Appeared in the August 15, 2017, print edition.
