>Say a company introduces a policy that when men pass all the interviews, the company flips a coin and if heads they get an offer and no offer if it's tails. Women just get an offer after passing the interviews. Does this discriminate in favor of women? Absolutely. Does this make the women who got offers less qualified? Only if you consider luck to be a qualification.

This example is completely made up and does not appear on the memo. There is no reason to think Damore was thinking about examples like this when he was talking about "lowering the bar", nor is it clear what he meant by "reducing the false negative rate". "Reducing the false negative rate" in a way that doesn't involve "lowering the skill bar" is either an admission that Google hires its applicants in a completely nonsensical way past a certain interview stage and that doesn't transpire at all from the memo. It could be true, but there's no reason to think he thought this, at all.

>Yet again, in the second purported implication you're trying to claim that Damore wrote that female employees are less fit. This is not correct on two points. One, Damore wasn't writing about Google employees or women in tech. He was writing about all women, worldwide. And second, he didn't write that they are less fit to be in high stress roles. He claimed that these thoroughly studied differences in personality make the average woman less likely to want to be in those roles. Again, Damore wrote about preferences - the things that affect the choices that people make - not fitness.

I didn't claim "Damore wrote that female employees are less fit". I claimed he strongly implied that female employees were less likely to be fit. (Talk about putting words in other people's mouth.) Again, I don't see how that could not be the case given the previous two assertions. And again, that's not just my opinion, but the opinion of the National Labor Relations Board.

>Let me put this in simpler terms: The majority of both men and women don't go into tech. Say 99% of men go into fields other than tech, and 99.75% of women go into fields other than tech. Men and women are nearly identical, almost all of them don't go into tech. Saying that small minority that do is larger among men as compared to women due to innate preferences is an explanation as to why we have 99% vs. 99.75%. It is making no statement, whatsoever, about the capability of the 0.25% of women and 1.0% of men that do go into tech.

Thank you I took statistics 101 too and got that the first time, but it's not the reason his firing was justified. I admit that "innate differences" is the part that got the most people riled up (partly because of the underlying sexism, mostly for the bad science; notice how not a single evolutionary biologist - not psychologist - agreed with him) but it was mostly ignored in the decision of the NLRB.

>Saying "men are more likely to be a rapist" is not at all the same thing as saying "you're more likely to be a rapist" to individual men.

If you can't possibly imagine why saying "people with an innate quality you possess are more likely to be bad" could be offending, you probably need to hone up on your social skills. If someone explains over ten pages how people with innate quality X are more likely to be bad, with only a little disclaimer that the magical words "statistically" and "populations" make it all okay to say, and it doesn't raise any red flags, you definitely need to pause and ask yourself: "Is everyone collectively mad and only I am correct, or did I mess something up?" I mean it, sincerely.