If only we had some sort of technology for checking facts from two or three months ago.

This is pretty shocking. From Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far by Nellie Bowles. Ms Bowles covers tech and digital culture for the New York Times. In this article she covers the resistance among some individuals in Silicon Valley to a range of corporate policies related to diversity and social justice.

What is shocking is her characterization of the argument made by James Damore in his now celebrated/reviled memo - Google's Ideological Echo Chamber: How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion.

Bowles summarizes his 10 page memo in the following paragraph.

But those who privately thought things had gone too far were given a voice by James Damore, 28, a soft-spoken Google engineer. Mr. Damore, frustrated after another diversity training, wrote a memo that he posted to an internal Google message board. In it, he argued that maybe women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering. Google fired him last month.

The shocking thing is that characterization - "women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering."

That is not what he said at all. At the beginning of his memo he had a TL;DR of five points for those unwilling to work their way through the ten pages of science.

• Google's political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety. But shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
• This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
• The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.

o Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
o Authoritarian. We should discriminate to correct for this oppression

• 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.
• Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

It is clear that his argument is a management/process argument - we are not looking at the science in order to figure out how to best foster diversity and inclusion, goals which he explicitly endorses.

To equate "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women" to women "were biologically less capable of engineering" is almost willfully ignorant. Worthy of Ben Rhodes'

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

A profile which closely matches that of Bowles.

The extra shocking thing is that Bowles's characterization was a frequently repeated meme in the first few days after the Damore's memo became public. Frequently repeated until people started asking where there was evidence in the memo for that statement that women were biologically incapable of engineering. The death knell for the mischaracterization would have seemed to have been when mainstream and well respected researchers addressed Damore's actual statements and compared them to the known and accepted research. There are always points whose stress or emphasis can be questioned. There are points where there are multiple sources of respectable research which reach opposite conclusions.

The scholars did multiple reviews of Damore's memo and incorporated links to all the basic research in The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences? by Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt. That link takes you to their first review.

In conclusion, based on the meta-analyses we reviewed and the research on the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, Damore is correct that there are “population level differences in distributions” of traits that are likely to be relevant for understanding gender gaps at Google and other tech firms. The differences are much larger and more consistent for traits related to interest and enjoyment, rather than ability.

I am not claiming Damore was entirely and irrefutably correct in all his statements and conclusions. No such certainty exists in the world of science, particularly social science. I am claiming that Damore had reasonable evidence to support that the basic science suggests that disparate representation has its roots elsewhere than in simple discrimination based on bigotry and that therefore Google's efforts to increase female representation by focusing only on bias were likely to fail. And that there were many high profile and reputable sources available to Bowles to realize that Damore was not making the ignorant claim that women are biologically incapable of science and that Damore had well established evidence to make most the claims he made.

So how could Bowles make such a grievous error? Well, she is a Ben Rhodes model journalist. And she is a product of an Ivy League school steeped in postmodernist critical theory social justice. And the Times has been firing its fact checkers. And its editors. Perhaps the internet was not working when she was researching for the article. Perhaps she did not actually read Damore's memo but relied on its characterization by her friends. Perhaps . . .

So a lot of things that could go wrong, did go wrong. But all the possible causes are still there for the next article and the next shockingly wrong reporting about things that readers in less than three minutes or with a normally functioning memory can recall from just two or three months ago.

Nothing gets better by deliberately or accidentally misreporting the facts and nothing gets better when social/corporate policies are based on emotional ideologies rather than informed science. Such policies are likely to continue failing and damaging those whom the policies are intended to benefit. We can, and should, do better than this sort of muddle headed approach to things.