> There is absolutely no evidence that there is a biological imperative that prevents women from being as effective as men at software development.
The memo doesn't make this claim.
The memo doesn't make this claim.
In other words, he was saying there is something in tech culture which is inherently less palatable for the average woman than the average man. He never claimed that the culture was good and the women were deficient. Instead he said the culture should change instead of artificially trying to fill it with equal ratio hires.
To me this says very obviously that women can and are intellectually superior to men on individual cases. But we would not expect an even 50/50 distribution of tech interest among genders.
Feel free to refute that as a separate claim, but if your take from the memo was "all women are biologically inferior and cannot match or be better than men," then I would say you were not being intellectually honest when reading it.
And that less women being interested in CS has _some_ basis in biological differences.
Whether you agree with that or not (the research does support it pretty strongly, but is certainly not settled), it is a reasonable argument.