No, he said quite clearly that Google was hiring too many women and minorities (and also that said women and minorities suck at tech jobs, though not in so many words). It's the specifics of the argument that got him in trouble. Bland abstract stuff like you paraphrase above wouldn't get anyone fired.
> - Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
> - Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
> - Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
He is saying quite a bit more than that Google is hiring too many women and minorities: he's claiming, in straightforward terms, that Google is illegally discriminating when doing so.
Yes, in theory there's a world in which he's right (I'm pretty sure that's not this world) but he is definitely making the claim either way.
The programs are "set asides" for specific groups of people unrelated to "merit". Is that not a fair way to describe that?
That's _not_ to say that those who go are meritless, but that the programs differentiate on factors unrelated to merit for the purposes of admission to said program. Is that a factually incorrect description of those programs? Do they not differentiate "applicants" on characteristics unrelated to merit?
FWIW, he has said this more directly in an interview: https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw?t=331
"They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity."
"What kind of practices?"
"Well, basically, treating people differently based on what their race is, or gender --"
"Oh, you mean racism."
"Yeah, basically."
"Mmhmm, I see. And it was ultra-secret and unrecorded in what manner?"
"So-- most meetings at Google are recorded, anyone at Google can watch it, we're trying to be really open about everything, except for this. They don't want any paper trail for any of these things."
"Whoa, okay, why?"
"Because, I think, it's illegal. I mean, as some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percent of people that agreed with me on the document. And so if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism."
https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/focusing-on-diversi...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-firms-borrow-football-play...
https://www.google.com/diversity/
https://qz.com/604723/when-google-increased-paid-maternity-l...
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/technology/google-diversity-...
Google has long prided itself on rejecting large numbers of qualified candidates. Since decreasing the false-negative rate inherently means "hire a greater quantity of qualified candidates", I fail to see how the bar was lowered.