Interview pass criteria are not based on the gender/race of the candidate. The criteria are the same for all candidates for the same role. The goal of diversity/inclusion programs is to find more diverse candidates to interview in the first place.
Damore asserts that it is actually affected by gender.
I used to be at Google. I heard the same thing from recruiters themselves. That a woman could fail an interview but still make it through to the next rounds. Their justification for this was like so:
1. This isn't discrimination because the final hiring decision by the committee takes into account all interviews, so the bar is equal at that point.
2. Our lawyers say this is totally OK.
I heard this many years ago, when I first joined Google and was learning how to be an interviewer. It disquieted me a little but I didn't challenge it - I figured, if the lawyers say it's OK, then it's OK. And the logic that in the end, the final decision was unbiased was something I accepted.
Well, I was young and naive. If men are being dropped and women are not, then more women will make it through to the final hiring decision than would naturally occur, that's the entire point of doing it. This is, in effect, a way to lower the bar for women - literally, men and women can jump to the same height and one will cross the bar and one won't, based on gender.
That's what Damore meant when he said the bar was being lowered by reducing the false negative rate.
Is it illegal? I have no idea. But it's definitely not fair on men.
This is at odds with the claim that minority applications get a second pass. Even in the absense of discrimination, this provides a statistical advantage.
There are also programs to find more applicants, but this isn't critical of those programs.
Edit: referring to Google specifically