How is it similar?
I worked with a guy circa 2002 who emigrated from Russia in the 1990s. He was from a fundamentalist Christian sect who had _all_ his teeth knocked out by the butt of a gun in a Russian prison. This would have been sometime in the 1990s.
He was a good engineer but pretty abrasive, and ended up leaving on his own accord. But even _if_ he was fired for expressing his unorthodox political or religious ideas at work, I doubt he'd equivocate it with the treatment he received in Russia.
All these senseless equivocations do everybody harm. Supposedly liberal college students do something similar with their micro-aggression framing device; it's not reasonable in that context, either.
We can debate Damore's points endlessly. But at the end of the day plenty of women still suffer old-school sex discrimination across the board. As that disappears, I'm pretty confident we'll have less reason to discuss more abstract discrimination issues.
Basically, if you disagree with some of the approaches utilized by the left for addressing discrimination (and there's plenty that reasonable people could disagree with), then the most constructive reaction is to redirect the discussion to more concrete, historical manifestations of discrimination.
Most ideologies on the right and left are constructed of poor equivocations and metaphors. And the so-called culture war is just an endless escalation in the sophistication and depth of equivocation and metaphor.
It's like in programming. Most debate is pointless bike shedding once the discussion is divorced from a reproducible bug or well-articulated pain points. Which isn't to mean if it's not clearly reproducible that a problem can't exist; just that if the problem isn't yet empirically grounded you can't have productive discourse. Equivocation rarely helps in this regard. If you have to resort to equivocation you've all but conceded that the problem lacks the necessary qualities which make it amenable to solving.
If you can't have productive discourse, then there are better ways to spend your time. There's no dearth of reproducible bugs or well-articulated pain points, in programming or in society. And people are always free to put in the hard work of empirically grounding a debate. Unfortunately, discrimination research is inherently tendentious because of the nature of the problem, which compounds all the other shortcomings of economic, sociologic, and psychological methodologies. But it's not impossible and we should encourage people to take up the challenge. Part of that encouragement is to criticize pointless equivocations; to make it clear that they're not an acceptable substitute.