Are Men and Women Really Different?

Some months ago, James Damore rose to infamy with his awful-terrible-no-good-very-bad-anti-diversity-misogynistic memo. If the name doesn't sound familiar, he was a successful software engineer at Google who, upon invite from the company's HR department, wrote a 10 page paper on how to better improve diversity in the tech field. Google then fired him for it.

Why, exactly?

Because he had the gall to suggest that men and women are different.

Heresy. I know.

Damore is in the news again because he and another ex-employee are now in the process of suing Google for discrimination. Apparently, Google didn't realize that giving preferential treatment to people based on things like race and gender is bad. The Labor Board rejected the claim he filed with them, saying that Google had the right to fire him for wrongthink, but the class action lawsuit is still in play.

We'll see where that goes.

Anyway, the reason I bring all of this up is because I want to take a moment or two to address the premise of Damore's original memo: Men and women are different.

Well, are they?

DUH.

Of course men and women are different.

That shouldn't be news. Men and women have known this for millennia. Little boys and little girls act differently. They grow into men and women who act differently. They have different interests, different desires, and this manifests in observably different behavior. It's been the punchline of every sitcom since the dawn of time. This is common sense.

And for decades now, we've been able to investigate these differences scientifically. We know that men's and women's brains are wired differently. We know that baby boys are hit by waves of testosterone in the womb, weakening some parts of the brain and enhancing others. We know that there are at least 1,500 genetic markers that are unique to one sex and not the other.

And that's a good thing.

In Genesis, we see that God made men and women to compliment one another. A man is to leave his father and mother, marry a woman, and the two are to become a team of equal but different partners. They work well together because they are different. One's weakness is the other's strength. Where one is blind, the other sees. Together, they not only create a more complete image of their Creator, they are a force to be reckoned with.

Interestingly, this is one area in which fundamentalist Christians and evolutionary biologists find agreement. They both attest to the fact that men and women have unique and complimentary functions. The Bible speaks clearly to this, as does the data.

Now, back to Damore.

Almost every attack against Damore's "Google memo" is based on a total misrepresentation of what he said. The claim is usually that he argued that women aren't suited for tech, or some such nonsense.

He did not.

What he did say is that women are generally more interested in people and men are generally more interested in things. And that's extremely well documented. Not every person fits the mold, of course, but it would be silly to expect this not to be reflected in the numbers.

That's not stereotyping. That's just how the data plays out.

I guess all of this is to simply to say that there's a weird lie going around in our culture that it's a sin to call a spade a spade. And as Christians, I think we sometimes fall prey to this. We do so out of the best intentions. We want to be a good witness and reach people for Christ. We want to be quick to apologize, quick to give grace, and try our hardest not to offend unnecessarily.

And those are good things.

But we just need to be careful that, in so doing, we don't lose sight of truth. After all, we literally worship a guy who identified as The Truth. It's probably important.

Maybe the church could use a James Damore or two.