In your "counter" example you highlight my point. Asians, on average, might be shorter, but if you come in with that knowledge and then present the conclusions that asians in professional basketball perform worse than others (exactly what this individual attempted to do with women) would be insane since the asians that do play basketball professional tend to be just as tall as everyone else that does [As an aside, basketball is huge in china and they placed 6th at the last Olympics so it's a nonsensical example anyway]. And it's relevant because it's his fundamental thesis.

As for the field of engineering as a whole, he completely ignores the fact that ratios in other high stress high prestige professions such as medicine and law [0][1] (which have dramatically higher barriers to entry than technology while also having a much stronger historical precedence for being male dominated [we forget that programming was female dominated until the 70s]), while not even, hover at around 2:1[0][1] as opposed the 4 or 5 :1 we see in technology.

He made no verifiable claims that the women in tech were performing at any lower level just attempted to use global stats (questionable ones at best as noted above) to justify painting diversity initiatives as unnecessary.

The sad thing is there are some kernels of not terrible ideas burred at the bottom of all the pseudo science bullshit. I'd love to see more programs opened up to all engineers, because again, just because the average male is more assertive doesn't mean the average male software engineer at google is.

[0]http://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gende...

[1]https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/m...