“Women, on average … have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men…” 

- "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber" (aka the “Google Memo”) by James Damore

[A] “small but unified pocket of support for Mr. Damore highlights how much easier it is in the internet age for people to find validation for their ideas, and to amplify and legitimize even damaging, fringe viewpoints.”

 -  “Troubling trend behind sexist memo at Google” Science Christian Monitor

"Sex-linked interest preferences are not mere artifacts of socialization: The problem with this “blank slate” interpretation of gender differences is that it doesn’t jibe with results of developmental studies. Newborn girls prefer to look at faces while newborn boys prefer to look at mechanical stimuli (such as mobiles). When it comes to toys, a consistent finding is that boys (and juvenile male monkeys) strongly prefer to play with mechanical toys over plush toys or dolls, while girls (and female juvenile monkeys) show equivalent interest in the two. (See this for summary of this research.) These sex-linked preferences emerge in human development long before any significant socialization can have taken place. And they exist in juvenile non-human primates that are not exposed to human gender-specific socialization efforts.

It is not difficult to see how such early emerging preferences can end up shaping career choices later on: Women tend to gravitate toward fields that focus on living things and agents, men to fields that focus on objects."

- Denise D. Cummins, April 17, 2015 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-careers/

"Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d _ 0.93) on the Things–People dimension."

- Su, Rounds and Armstrong (2009) Men and things, women and people: A meta-analysis of sex differences in interests. Psychology Bulletin 135:859–884.

Dr. Cummins is research psychologist and fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She is not fringe.

Founded in 1904, the Psychology Bulletin is a peer-reviewed journal owned by the American Psychological Association.  It is not a fringe publication.

Next: Even if the science isn't fringe, should the Google engineer have been fired anyway?