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The logic doesn't work that way. The proposition Randall makes is "dowsing works" => "companies would use it". If that statement is true (let's just say it is), then the contrapositive "companies don't use it" => "dowsing doesn't work" is also true. But your proposition is the converse of Randall's, which is not automatically true when the original proposition is true.
My personal favorite implication which Randall almost certainly didn't intend (and I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of those @Folamh3 has in mind) is that his logic disproves the gender pay gap (as stated by feminists anyways). If companies could in fact hire equally effective women for 70% of male wages, they would hire only women if at all possible. Every company would jump at the chance to cut their labor costs by 30% with no drawbacks! But they don't, which means that there is some drawback to hiring women, which means the gender pay gap isn't explained by just sexism.
Sure – the implication is there, though. It seems to me that Randall is nudging readers towards believing that relativity and quantum electrodynamics are true. And Randall doesn't put the check-mark next to the dowsing (or the hexing/cursing!) even though, arguably, he should.
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Very close. What I was actually thinking was that it disproves a particular variety of the "female underrepresentation in STEM" claim. If women are just as interested in pursuing careers in STEM as men, but are systematically turned away from jobs in those fields because of a culture of entrenched sexism, then those companies are leaving money on the table by refusing to avail of great talent. Any company which made a point of hiring female coders would make a killing by hiring all the talent that their competitors are turning away for stupid reasons.
Suffice to say, I don't think there is any persuasive evidence that there are millions of talented female CS grads who can't find work as coders or similar because the hiring managers in STEM companies walked in off the set of Mad Men (a particularly implausible claim given the gender breakdown of human resource managers). To my knowledge, tech companies are champing at the bit to hire female talent, if only as project managers, product owners etc.. Female underrepresentation in STEM could still hypothetically be caused by other kinds of institutional sexism (e.g. women applying for CS programs but being turned away by sexist course coordinators, women being passed over for career advancement because tech is an old boys' club etc.), but the claim that female underrepresentation in STEM is caused by sexism at the hiring stage essentially requires us to believe that STEM companies collectively are more committed to misogyny than they are to making money. Which I find rather incredible.
Oh yeah that's a good one too! And:
This is absolutely correct in my experience. Having a vagina is pretty much a cheat code for your career, from what I have seen. You aren't guaranteed to get jobs just because of that, but you have an automatic edge over everyone else. Ditto if you are black, and I would imagine the effect stacks if you're a black woman.
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