Their description of what recruiters do seems like discrimination. They said that recruiters would deliberately go out of their way to find diversity candidates, instead of treating everyone equal. That matches up with a leaked email where the recruiters were told to stop processing candidates who weren't diversity hires.
Google and where i work both benefit greatly from having increased diversity. It massively improves business outcomes over the monoculture culture we used to strive for.
My take is that when you optimize for equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity you break something at the opportunity end (its either or, not both.)
Regarding a or b, this is mostly b, lowering the bar. But its also a, sexual discrimination.
If you think its not, please explain how you think it would go down if google was focusing hiring efforts to hire white males because they wanted to match the current male to female ratio seen in engineering schools and currently have too many females in the office.
Because i fail to see how aiming to hire more females than the industry schools can bare simply because there are too many men in the office is anything but sexist.
Maybe one day people can stop looking at immutable physical characteristics like sex and skin color. Until then it's all discrimination by another name.