> he cannot possibly implicitly mean "but clearly that does not apply to every woman currently employed at Google, who were all hired because they are the best in the world at their jobs"

He clearly can, were it not for affirmative actions - if you assume perfect recruitment based on merit, you can expect everyone accepted to be suitable for the role. But in this case you'll also find, as the memo author explained quite sensibly, that the gender ratio might not be 1:1 due to distribution of interest in the population, which affects the distribution of the candidate pool.

I mean, come on, this is a pretty obvious point - and I'm starting to believe that it takes intent to misread it like you did.

> Damore asserts that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices.

Yes, that's the definition of affirmative action. It's literally discriminating in order to counter perceived discrimination in the opposite direction.