For example, one can observe that fewer women are in high-powered roles that require long hours because they report that they prefer more work-life balance. But in the absence of a citation on the growing body of evidence that work-life balance for women actually means work at home — work at work balance, you draw bad conclusions from incomplete data. The fact that men can rely on the unpaid labor of women to project manage their houses and the lives of their children cannot be ignored. This is especially evident in data showing that it is when women have children that their career trajectories diverge from those of women without children and men (with or without kids). Any peer reviewer would point out this glaring lack of contextual data and send the paper back to the author for editing.

As another example, he notes that women have higher levels of stress as a fact but does not address where that stress comes from. Black people in the US also report higher levels of stress than white people. It is incorrect and erroneous to suggest that this must mean we are biologically predisposed to having lower stress thresholds and thus cannot manage stressful jobs. There is a massive body of evidence that notes women and people of color in the US live vastly more stressful lives because of external stressors we face that white men do not.

Another example: we know that women are discouraged in STEM fields. They are ridiculed, belittled, interrupted, and proactively held back in career advancement for speaking more (an activity which is cited as a desired trait in men), disagreeing, or asserting their leadership. We also know there is a disturbing amount of straight up sexual harassment in these fields. To suggest that women don’t go into these fields out of choice ignores this data and is a stupid conclusion drawn from a shallow analysis of available information.

Ignoring these bodies of data is cherry-picking one’s facts. So to a lazy person, a person predisposed to believe that women are biologically designed for certain roles, or a person who hasn’t had access to the kind of training that would teach them to ask probing questions of the conclusions in the document, this paper appears to be a strongly written evidence-based memo. What it is in reality is a steaming pile of shit only thinly hiding behind the veneer of data literacy.

Perhaps this little boy didn’t get fired for having an unpopular view but for demonstrating on a surprisingly public stage how poor his reasoning skills are.