[TeMPOraL]

> he cannot possibly implicitly mean "but clearly that does not apply to every woman currently employed at Google, who were all hired because they are the best in the world at their jobs"

He clearly can, were it not for affirmative actions - if you assume perfect recruitment based on merit, you can expect everyone accepted to be suitable for the role. But in this case you'll also find, as the memo author explained quite sensibly, that the gender ratio might not be 1:1 due to distribution of interest in the population, which affects the distribution of the candidate pool.

I mean, come on, this is a pretty obvious point - and I'm starting to believe that it takes intent to misread it like you did.

> Damore asserts that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices.

Yes, that's the definition of affirmative action. It's literally discriminating in order to counter perceived discrimination in the opposite direction.

[Lukasa]

> I mean, come on, this is a pretty obvious point - and I'm starting to believe that it takes intent to misread it like you did.

I...don't think I did misread it? I said "he cannot mean this", and you appear to agree with me: due to the facts on the ground, he cannot have intended to mean that. Therefore, I have to assume he did not mean that.

So if he believes that Google employs discriminatory hiring practices, then he presumably believes that some of his colleagues are not the best possible choice for their role, and do not deserve to be there. That seems like a straightforward reading of his text. Am I wrong?

[sever5]

How do you make any business decisions when taking things this personally?

[marchenko]

I think that the media and Google itself did a horrible disservice to the memo author in mis-representing his words, and I'm fairly certain they did so on purpose and will continue to do so. However, to be charitable to googlers offended by the memo:

If the author asserted in the memo that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" is the only relevant language I encountered), wouldn't that imply that some members of Group X currently employed at Google are less qualified than the members of Group Y who were discriminated against? Otherwise it would seem we are discussing a situation where tiebreaks tend to be decided in favor of the current minority group, or recruitment efforts for underrepresented groups are more intensive. The "lower the bar" phrase would seem to imply that he believes there are different standards in effect for selecting current employees.

The memo author's point about differing interest distributions does not necessarily imply anything about ability differences in the current Google employee pool, but claiming discriminatory hiring practices might.