What pg actually said was, "We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years."
Lessin is saying removing "these" doesn't change the meaning. I think that's absurd, to put it mildly.
A1: There's nothing we can do to help women become hacker-founders.
A2: To help women become hacker-founders, we have to start with the group we'd be admitting in 10 years.
the "these" changes it from: "women can't be helped" to "you can't fix the problem for this generation, you can only fix the problem for the next generation"
One says "it's a problem of gender" the other says "it's a problem of sequencing"
The second one says 1) solutions may exist and 2) they require lead time.
The first one says solutions don't exist.
The second one implies that it is or might be a solvable problem. The first one implies that it is an innate gender difference.