This is a reasonable point in the abstract, but it doesn't account for the current reality in which "Look, I found a heretic" affords such outsized rewards in karma (or social cachet, or the personal satisfaction of having taken down a baddie, or whatever you want to call it).
Fifty years ago, you could say women are too dumb to program computers and still keep your job and be invited to dinner parties, and now you would be fired and shunned. Progress, right? The problem is, that power - the power to destroy careers of people who have done something bad - is not being wielded consistently or sparingly. We're aiming it at misogynists and homophobes, and also their defenders, and also people aren't defending them per se but kinda sound like they are if you only read the headline.
(But the point of the essay is not that Brendan Eich and James Damore shouldn't have been fired; it's that the "Brendan Eich and James Damore should be fired" position has caused a chilling effect on open dialogue.)
Nitpicking here, but your example was somewhat ironic, as 50 years ago, Computer were predominantly programmed by women [1] , so the heretical idea would have been to say that men should be programming computers.
"Programmer" was a data entry job that we automated away. They were basically compiling flowcharts that were written by "systems analysts" doing the work we would call programming.
It's like an "EPROM programmer", which is a tool to make the hardware run the software.
Fifty years ago, you could say women are too dumb to program computers and still keep your job and be invited to dinner parties, and now you would be fired and shunned. Progress, right? The problem is, that power - the power to destroy careers of people who have done something bad - is not being wielded consistently or sparingly. We're aiming it at misogynists and homophobes, and also their defenders, and also people aren't defending them per se but kinda sound like they are if you only read the headline.
(But the point of the essay is not that Brendan Eich and James Damore shouldn't have been fired; it's that the "Brendan Eich and James Damore should be fired" position has caused a chilling effect on open dialogue.)