There is nothing good about someone who has a "sufficiently loud voice" -- if that loudness comes not from principle and merit, but from emotional toxicity.
After awhile, onlookers catch onto the fact one is spending all of their time moving the goalposts.
Short people, ugly people, fat people, disabled people... The list of discriminated against populations is practically endless and you can’t let it tear you up or drive you crazy if you’re one of them.
Why is it important that they have a sufficiently loud voice "as a class?" This seems backwards to me. The whole point of liberation is liberation to be treated as an individual not as a member of a class based on something contextually irrelevant like your biological sex.
Empowering the individual is a noble goal, but that is a separate battle with a different front.
I think it's made to seem that way by media coverage and political propaganda(especially from the left) more than it actually is. The problem is that it's easy to analyze something by arbitrary groups but in doing so often if not usually miss things (indeed this was one of Damore's key themes in his original essay).
The rhetoric may be actualizing, but I still think it's more a case of bad analytical generalizations than actual decision-making. Although, it's getting worse, as the whole drama with Jordan Peterson last year over pronouns demonstrated. At the core of his concern seemed to be he growing number of increasingly narrow and increasingly arbitrary suspect class definitions (or whatever they call it in Canada).
The original concept of a suspect class in the US was codified to serve as a legal guidelines for determining whether discrimination had taken place. The idea was to balance the ideal of democratic freedom to enact laws with the political reality that some clearly identified recognized groups (mainly Black Americans) had not been allowed to participate in the democratic process that produced the laws under which they had to conform. Many of those laws were shown to be prima facie discriminatory and evidence suggested plenty more were intended to be discriminatory in practice. And by virtue of minority status, they'd be unable to effectively challenge those discriminatory laws through democratic means. Women classified as a quasi-suspect class by virtue of historical disenfranchisement, despite their not being a minority.
But, it has been at least century since women were granted the right to vote. "Women as a class" have been one of the strongest political factions in the United States for decades. Roe v. Wade was 1973, a decade before any Millenial was even born. Pandering to women is pervasive in US politics on both sides.
The narrative that women had no voice, political will, or influence until Last Thursday is persistent and massive historical revisionism.
It also saddens me that a number of Damore's suggestions to make the workplace more "nurture-trait-friendly" got overshadowed by those dubious extrapolations. It seems interesting and fruitful to me to explore the work dynamics and psychology present in more "nurture" fields and see how well they translate to software development and collaboration.
There is a silver lining to all this for me: it shows that whereas women used to have little voice in the public sphere, "American women" as a class now have a sufficiently loud voice that even its less-well-thought-out ideologies have traction and influence in civil society (along with all that entails, including having possibly self-proclaimed representatives and "thought leaders").