They are drawing candidates from populations. He's arguing the problem could be upstream from Google HR practices. As in, there aren't enough women applying (I don't think that's controversial). He elaborating on his answer to "Why not?"

I'm sure that is part of the hiring disparity among females and underrepresented minorities. As a black guy myself, I know the same is true among black people who simply aren't interested in engineering but Damon makes weird ability judgements based on the population.

This makes no sense as people with different interests would never bother in the first place no matter how much time and money you threw at them. So again I say why bring up the upstream problem to begin with as it being related to their abilities for engineering?

IMO, the only way his text makes sense is if you are someone looking to back up potentially racist and sexist biases by misusing science. It makes me question their ability to work with people different than themselves.

With that said I'm actually torn on the issue of the firing. Google says its a place for diversity of opinion etc etc...So on some level they should stick by it.

However, I understand why the firing may have needed to be done. The fact that a low level employee made the news for being controversial means you have to be fired. You can't send a memo out like that and expect there to be no career consequences at your company of employment. You will never be able to live it down.

The only point related to abilities I can see in the memo is

Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.

○ This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.

So Google acknowledges this difference in ability and has a program to counter it. He points out that this is unfairly generalizing when applied to individuals, thus demanding the program to be opened to men as well. I think this is a good suggestion, regardless of what I think about the rest of the memo.

> So again I say why bring up the upstream problem to begin with as it being related to their abilities for engineering?

Well, for one, if only 45% of interested applicants are women, maybe 45% female employees and managers is a reasonable goal.

> Damon makes weird ability judgements based on the population.

I remember a lot of talk about interest levels and personality types. Not much about abilities. I also think the point about multimodal distributions fairly address my concerns about possible bigotry and stereotyping. Which ability judgments concern you? And why didn't the part about multimodal distributions vs mean values assuage your concerns?