Want greater diversity? Try being less fair

In its hasty dismissal of James Damore, Google showed a worrying disregard for one of the most important freedoms within a company — the freedom to ask: ‘What if we’re wrong?’

A business culture that can attract and accommodate people with complementary talents benefits everybody. So even if you don’t believe Damore’s theories (in which case you probably shouldn’t hire any systems geneticists), he’s surely right to speak up if he believes the complex question of diversity has been hijacked by wishful dogma. It should be the province of first-rate scientific inquiry, not second-rate social theory. If the diversity agenda is pursued badly, the cure may well be worse than the disease.

Tellingly, among the millions of words written about this affair, no one asked the ratio of male to female applicants for technology jobs at Google. Surely, if there are four times as many male applicants as female applicants for certain jobs, you might expect such departments to be 80 per cent male; such a ratio might not be evidence of bias in hiring, but the opposite. It would also suggest that any action to increase gender diversity significantly needs to start outside the company, not inside.

Only 18 per cent of computer science majors are female. Is this solely the result of male prejudice? To give one counter-theory, people may be influenced most by the opinions of same-sex peer groups — so female reluctance to study STEM subjects could be driven more by the prejudices of their fellow women. Such things are never simple. One scientific paper even suggested women were less likely to pursue STEM careers not because they are worse at those subjects, but because they are better at the humanities; it seems pupils, male and female, who are good at both science and arts overwhelmingly choose to study the latter.