No, the argument is that there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job _in the quantities desired by Google and every other tech company_.
They are trying to create a workforce with roughly proportional amounts of women, men, blacks, etc. when men are awarded ~80% of CS degrees and blacks are awarded, what, 2% or so? You can't move the needle in employee demographics when that's the pool you're working with unless you fudge your system a bit. Hell, given how universities already do this[1], why wouldn't Google?
[1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race...
> Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.