I'm glad that Google's reasons for their diversity efforts are supported better research than one guy found in his free time. That said, [1] says in its abstract "... the overall difference in outcomes between men and women was small ..." which reminds me of the point about distributions and averages made in the memo. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a long tail of men who fall below the average woman for a variety of reasons (e.g. autism?).

> Furthermore, no one's arguing because studies show women to be less effective negotiators than men that we should give up.

I'm sure a lot of people would argue that, but since neither I nor you nor Damore seem to argue that, I agree with the connotation.

> initiatives that have no basis in science and are mostly just bad ideas like "more pair programming", "more part time work", and "make work less stressful".

There seems to be a lot of science on the benefits of pair programming (although maybe not in a gender context). I read https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/16/interactions-of-individu... just today. I don't know about part time work and making work less stressful, but they don't seem like universally bad ideas either.

> liberals often argue for fairness of outcome, conservatives often argue for fairness of approach

I'm not sure where I'd place myself on the liberal-conservative plane, but I'm definitely arguing for fairness of outcome here. If you observe that some people are worse negotiators than others, then to achieve fairness of outcome, you have to offer them help. (Alternatively, sabotage the good negotiators, but I don't support that.) Helping only women is better than nothing, but it is not optimal, because you are adjusting the wrong variable.

> I think you can't treat people fairly unless you take into account their ascribed statuses.

If someone is already taking their status into account, sure, you need to take that into account to counteract their biases. But that's a kludge and hard to balance correctly, if you can instead remove the influence of that person altogether, you should do that.

> For example, if we return to entirely gender-blind hiring practices, we'll see the gender gap skyrocket (see 538's article on affirmative action [3]).

The article is about racial bias and not the gender gap, the alternative is not completely race-blind, and it doesn't show any skyrocketing. In fact, the effect is much weaker than I'd have expected. The situation for Hispanics looks more like noise. Maybe there aren't many affirmative action programs for Hispanics even in states that allow them?

Personally, I think that affirmative action in college admissions shouldn't be based on race either. As I understand it, most racial differences in the distribution of applicants are due to economic reasons. In that case, it would be more appropriate to support students from low-income households, rather than sorting them into arbitrary buckets based on ethnicity.

> To ignore or not adjust for these biases is what's unfair here.

I agree that biases shouldn't be ignored, but I don't like it when the countermeasures assume that disadvantages only happen across a few categorizations. There are all kinds of reasons some people have worse outcomes than others, and to only pay attention to them when they coincide with membership in one of your favorite protected groups, is a kind of bias in itself.