> Do you think it's acceptable for someone to circulate a manifesto that argues that conservatives are unlikely to make good engineers, because they are more authoritarian, and authoritarians are less creative, and are less likely to challenge the status quo?

Lefty shrinks churn out studies finding that conservatives are authoritarian, wet the bed, kick puppies, you name it, we've heard it all. So I doubt your premise since I've seen the reaction to this stuff being published, and it's usually more bemusement than anything else.

But nothing Damore wrote was personally insulting to women like calling them "authoritarian." His larger point was that women have, in aggregate, different interests than men.

Say, for the sake of argument, that there are some distinctly masculine priorities and distinctly feminine priorities. If so, our base assumption should be that they are equally morally valid.

And there's plenty of evidence, e.g. college graduation rates, that professional women are somewhat more capable than men at identifying their interests and acting on them.

That means that if men and women pursue occupations to different degrees, our default assumption should be that they're intelligent and capable and making decisions in their best interest, not that they're victims.

That could all be true and it's still possible that engineering is an unfriendly climate for women. The hard fact is there used to be a lot more women programming and it declined in the '80s.

But to whatever extent there's a real feminine preference, we ought to respect women expressing such a preference and not try to save them from it.

> And propose some policy changes that the company should take in its outreach to, and hiring of conservatives?

If, as Damore was, the manifesto is entirely supportive of the effort, it's hard to see why it would be unacceptable. If the company has set out to do a thing, and someone wants to help them do it, you can't fire them for that.

> Even if it comes with citations to out-of-context, misunderstood, or under-reproduced political psychology studies

No, you can't fire them for it even if they do poor work. Especially when, like Google, you still have trouble hiring as many women in engineering as you want.

Damore's interpretation of the data may have been amateurish, but he's presenting some analysis that could be improved upon to figure out a better strategy to achieve those goals.

You're claiming a double standard, but if Google was serious about employing more women, they'd act on these ideas, even if the action was to dig into them and say "nope, this stuff is wrong." Not fire the guy.

The picture the firing of Damore paints is that Google was more interested in showing that they cared about hiring more women than actually succeeding in hiring more women.

> I'll tell you what would happen if someone did that - the right wing media would have a field day with blasting both the author of such a manifesto, and the company that employs them.

The right-wing media is as garbage as any other media.

Even if the press were good, you've a cacophony of opinions, so you can't make them all happy. You're better off sticking up for your employees.