On CNBC, an entrepreneur named Marcus Lemonis was asked what kind of people he prefers to hire for his businesses. Here's what he said: "We look for more females than males, by design. I happen to believe that females, particularly in the sales oriented positions, are better. They're more empathetic. They're better listeners."
Ho hum.
But if he had said, "We look for more males than females by design because men are better," there'd be demands from the intolerant left that CNBC never allow such a monster on TV ever again.
Exaggeration? Well, you tell me.
At Google, an engineer named James Damore, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard, just had a run-in with the intolerant left. He wrote an internal 10-page memo that basically said the reason there are more men than women working in Silicon Valley has less to do with sexism than it does with fundamental differences between the sexes.
He said the gender gap was partly due to biology; that men have a "higher drive for status" and that women are "more prone to anxiety."
How crazy do you have to be to believe that women are more prone to anxiety? Except a publication called Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Review states that, "female-biased conditions include depression, anxiety disorder, and anorexia nervosa."
Note: "female-biased conditions." But hey, they're only scientists. What do they know about these things? Besides, it's a generalization. It's not about (SET ITAL) all (END ITAL) women. You can say men generally are taller than women but that doesn't mean some women aren't taller than some men.
In any case, when the internal document was leaked -- and went viral -- Damore got canned.
And before anybody goes yelling about "free speech," employees of private companies have no such rights. Google had every right to fire Damore.
Recommended
But let's not pretend that if he had instead written a 10-page document saying that Google should hire more women because they make better engineers than men, he not only would not have been fired, there's a good chance he would have been promoted.
You don't have to agree with anything James Damore wrote to notice that in some liberal quarters certain views are just not tolerated. Try delivering a conservative speech on a liberal college campus sometime and let me know how it goes.
Liberals may not like generalizations about gender, but they have no problem generalizing about inequality -- figuring that it's usually linked to discrimination. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it isn't.
Here's an inconvenient piece of information that the holier-than-thou crowd might want to think about. When women get Masters degrees, by and large, they're not in computer engineering, which would go a long way if you want a job in Silicon Valley.
Take a look at this list of the Top 10 Masters degrees for women (as compiled by College Atlas):
--Business Administration and Management
--Education.
--Social work.
--Elementary education.
--Curriculum and instruction.
--Education leadership.
--Special education.
--Counselor education.
--Nursing.
--Reading teacher education.
But the Top 10 Masters degrees for men include:
--Electrical engineering.
--Computer sciences.
--Mechanical engineering.
--Computer and information sciences.
There's something else Damore wrote in his internal document, which was titled, "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber."
"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50 percent representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business."
By "discrimination to reach equal representation" he means outreach programs that target women and other groups whose numbers in the workforce don't comport with their numbers in the general population.
And he says, "Open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow."
If Google had fired Damore for being naive, they'd have a case. But they didn't. They fired him for having an unacceptable opinion, and that just can't be tolerated at such an open-minded place as Google, a place that welcomes a wide array of points of view -- as long as they're acceptable liberal points of view.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member