Silicon Valley's weapon of choice against women: shoddy science Angela Saini

Sexism has long been recognised as a problem in Silicon Valley. But a lengthy memo written by a Google software engineer, and leaked online, has laid bare the ugly underbelly of how some in this male-dominated world think about women. The "manifesto" (which at the time of writing remains anonymous) uses scientific evidence in an attempt to explain that women are, on average, biologically different from men, in ways that make them less likely to work in the same jobs. "Women generally have a stronger interest in people rather than things," the software engineer writes. A portion of his argument is indeed based on published science. In particular, there is a school of neuroscience that tries to popularise the notion that male and female brains are distinct.