[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.