I agree with you that the numbers are very skewed, but I agree with the parent in that, of the few outspoken conservatives I've worked with, I have not seen anyone's career suffer for their politics.
The treatment of women in tech is a very well documented issue, to the point where one would have to be willfully ignorant of the issue. The biggest “evidence” of the War on Christmas is a coffee cup, and companies simply acknowledging the fact that many other faiths and cultures have celebrations during that time of year.
Looking at 2016 voting habits in the Bay Area, Donald Trump got double digit election returns in every county. That’s not even factoring "never Trump" conservatives who voted 3rd party or stayed home. So there are a fair amount of conservatives here. For comparison there are more Trump voters in San Francisco than African Americans.
Five years ago I felt my political views were pretty mainstream for the tech industry, for the Valley (although I did not live there). I'd have described myself as a centrist or maybe centre-left.
These days my views have shifted, I can feel myself getting more conservative with time. It's not an age thing. It's more that I've started to notice the sort of tactic you used above - faced with someone making conservative arguments you disagree with you didn't bother debating the points he made. Instead you just lied about what he said and then attacked a straw man.
This is consistently how Damore is treated. There are liberal arguments that can be made about what he wrote - people could point out methodological errors in his studies, or logic errors in his arguments. But they never seem to do that. Whether it's in the media (who love calling what he wrote an "anti diversity memo" even though it praises diversity and has ideas for how to increase the number of women in tech), or on Hacker News, the tactic is always the same - pretend he claimed women are worse than men and then viciously attack him on a personal level. And it's just totally false.
The same tactic crops up in other similar contexts. Jordan Peterson being interviewed on Channel 4 is a recent notorious example. The guy made debatable but essentially conservative arguments about how men and women are not the same, the gender pay gap has multiple causes and so on. And Cathy Newman (the interviewer), who clearly isn't really interviewing him at all but rather sees her job as destroying the ideological enemy, just constantly twists his words. The entire interview consists of her exclaiming, "So what you're saying is ..." followed by some absurd straw man that bore no resemblance to what the guy just said.
It got so insane that by the end of the interview, after Peterson made a long and complicated point about the biological roots of social hierarchies using the nervous system of lobsters as an example, she replied "So what you're saying is, we should organise our society along the lines of the lobsters" and the guy doesn't even blink or miss his stride. He just gets right on with correcting her, because by that point the lying and distorting of what he just said has become so predictable:
https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s
It's one of the most astonishing TV interviews I've ever seen and that sort of debating "tactic" is everywhere.
I described the argument as a straw man because it is one. Damore verifiably did not say he thought women at Google were inferior. I'm not surprised you're tired of people saying "straw man!" in discussions about Damore: as I note, nobody seems to be able to argue that he's wrong, so they just attack things he didn't say, and then other people have to point that out. If you dislike that, then point out strawmen yourself. Perhaps eventually people who dislike Damore's perspective will then stop strawmanning him.
It reminds me of all of the issues in the Ferguson shooting. Instantly we had "Hands up, Don't shoot" and "Criminal" being called by both sides. The stuff that is divisive goes viral and people on both sides shout about it.
Alas, because it was imperfectly said by Damore, it is no longer safe to openly discuss if the gender gap in tech might be influenced by biology.
Whether he may be a conservative or liberal is irrelevant to me and to the discussion.
Does that sound unfamiliar? If so, it’s probably because you never read what he actually wrote, and instead just accepted unquestioning the media propaganda.
Many news sources also spread the same lie you are, so I assume you’re just parroting the headlines (like many of us are guilty of). The problem is, the dishonesty of this propaganda does real harm.
* Evolution isn’t an atheist fact vs some religious alternate truth; evolution is a scientific fact.
* Personality differences (note: not to be confused with IQ or proficiency!) between male and female isn’t a conservative fact vs some liberal alternate; it’s a scientific fact.
Damore suggested we use these well established cross cultural personality differences to inspire positive improvements to the workplace that will allow women and men alike to more naturally be attracted to this line of work, and to thrive in it!
But because the scientifically uncontrovertial truths he quoted to formulate his argument are not currently considered “politically correct”, he was basically “crucified” and made an example of.
Scientific consensus is not conservative or liberal, religious or atheist, etc. Scientific consensus is the best unbiased reflection of reality we have.
Of course, any use of the words “fact” or “truth” must be qualified with the appropriate level of uncertainty — not even the best scientific establishments can reach fully 100% confidence — but may established scientific “facts” are called such because our uncertainty levels of them can become so incredibly low. The law of gravity, the claim that the world is not flat, and many others are clear examples of this.
We MUST stop politicizing the notion of “fact”, unless you really want to enter a post-truth world where unjustified opinions and feelings hold equal truth to scientific facts established with literal mountains of evidence and broad consensus.
If observing scientific fact creates a “hostile workplace” and is a fireable offense, then we have truly entered an Orwellian age of Wrongthink and Thoughtcrime, where we must all constantly police our own thoughts and utterance so as not to contradict the ideology of The Party.
He wasn’t even quoting scientific fact for hostile purposes; it appears entirely benevolently motivated, out of a desire to create an engineering culture more compatible with feminine personalities (which even many males have, as he points out!)
But because it touched a topic of political sensitivity and quotes a scientific fact that was “politically incorrect”, the truth of his argument, and even the well intentions of it, were made irrelevant. He was crucified, to make an example to all of what truths must never be spoken.
And this is why we can’t have nice things. Now we can’t even speak about making the workplace more suitable to women, because to discuss that would imply that there’s a difference in personality between women and men — and such a thing now can get you fired.