He didn't directly, but if you believe his main point that differences in gender balance of developers is due to preference and natural aptitude, then it's an unavoidable conclusion that a company trying to both hire the best developers in the world and have a 50-50 gender split has to lower the bar.
He didn't say it because he didn't have to, it's an unavoidable conclusion.
That is absolutely incorrect. First off he never said anything about natural aptitude. That is patently false. You didn’t read the article or you read it poorly.
He said change the nature of programming jobs. Make it more social, more collaborative (ie pair programming), better work life balance, etc. Having people sitting in a chair for 8-10 hours a day 7 days a week with high stress and terrible work life balance is the type of job that many women will naturally not be attracted to. It’s exactly what OP was complaining about.
Take the types of jobs that naturally appeal to many women and change the nature of programming jobs to fit those attributes and how you can achieve 50/50 balance.
This is a pretty aggressive tone, and it's kind of unwarranted. I did read it, and well.
Saying that women have higher innate neuroticism is saying that they have less natural aptitude for stressful jobs.
Saying that men have a wider bell curve in abilities is saying that you'll find less women at the extreme end of the aptitude curve necessary to work at Google (and be as good as the mean).
There will never be a time that working at Google or whatever the Google equivalent is isn't stressful and doesn't require off the end of the bell curve ability (which he's saying will be much rarer in females).
He also explicitly refers to a risk of lowering the bar.
You didn’t read it well. You are misrepresenting what he wrote and propagating lies.
“Higher neuroticism” and “natural aptitude” doesn’t mesh. Maybe you don’t understand what “aptitude” or “neuroticism” means, but neuroticism is a clinical term. It means the tendency to have negative feelings. It is entirely orthogonal to aptitude. So your conclusion is false.
You are confusing “traits” with “aptitude”. Again, maybe you don’t understand what the term “aptitude” means. Nowhere does he say women have less aptitude for programming. Traits are different from aptitude.
He never said men have a wider bell curve of abilities. He said men have a different distribution of traits than women. You clearly didn’t comprehend what he wrote.
Please read what he wrote more carefully. You are a clear example of how fake news propagates. Taking a precisely written article and then twisting what was written and then believing you actually understood it, and the propagating your misunderstanding, is exactly what causes fake news.
As I said, I don’t agree with what James Damore wrote, but I actually do understand what he wrote precisely. The biggest problem with his article is that people like you don’t read what he wrote properly and then argue on points he never actually made.
maybe you're getting angry because you're assuming the I'm using definition of aptitude as "quickness to learn" and not "suitability". I was using the word to mean "suitability", and it's kind of unarguable that saying that a job is very stressful and a person has a low tolerance for stress is saying that to some extent they're unsuitable for the job.
He did say that men have a wider bell curve of abilities, here is the precise line which you can find on his site:
Among most psychological characteristics, including IQ, populations of men have higher variance than women even when the average is the same: there are more men on both the top and the bottom of the curve.
I'm going to stop replying now as I've had my fill of being called a stupid liar for the day.
He didn't say it because he didn't have to, it's an unavoidable conclusion.