As reported on Ars Technica, the National Labor Relations Board’s Office of General Counsel, released a memo about James Damore’s complaint against Google after they fired him over his controversial memo. As I wrote on Reddit:
The NLRB memo concludes, “[His] statements about immutable traits linked to sex—such as…men’s prevalence at the top of the IQ distribution—were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment notwithstanding… references”.
Imagine a male firefighter said (with citations to legitimate research), “Studies show that, on average, men have more upper body strength than women. That is a cause, other than bias, which could explain why there are more male firefighters than female firefighters, despite all of the fire department’s diversity efforts.” Can that be legitimately construed as discriminatory and constituting sexual harassment?
Imagine the firefighter further says, “While there are limits, we can change some aspects of how the work is performed to reduce the upper body strength required. This would help reduce the gender gap in a non-discriminatory way. This is more fair than having programs, mentoring, and classes only for women firefighters.” Does that help or hurt his position?