>it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women.
I cannot speak for Google and I haven't been following their recruitment efforts.
However, I will say I'm a little tired of this notion that such companies are aiming for 50%.
I know one company that has really ramped up hiring of minorities (mostly women, though). And everyone is criticizing them for targeting 50% when there is a problem in the supply.
Except they never said they were targeting 50%. Not once. What they did was look at their different grade levels' skills, and compared that to the number of women in the market who should qualify, and compared that to the proportion in the company.
Example: They found that 20% of PhDs in a relevant field that they hired from were women, whereas in the company only 10% of PhDs hired were women. So their recruitment efforts are to hit 20%.
Not 50%.
Any time someone says 50%, they are likely invoking a strawman.