FWIW, he has said this more directly in an interview: https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw?t=331
"They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity."
"What kind of practices?"
"Well, basically, treating people differently based on what their race is, or gender --"
"Oh, you mean racism."
"Yeah, basically."
"Mmhmm, I see. And it was ultra-secret and unrecorded in what manner?"
"So-- most meetings at Google are recorded, anyone at Google can watch it, we're trying to be really open about everything, except for this. They don't want any paper trail for any of these things."
"Whoa, okay, why?"
"Because, I think, it's illegal. I mean, as some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percent of people that agreed with me on the document. And so if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism."
The programs are "set asides" for specific groups of people unrelated to "merit". Is that not a fair way to describe that?
That's _not_ to say that those who go are meritless, but that the programs differentiate on factors unrelated to merit for the purposes of admission to said program. Is that a factually incorrect description of those programs? Do they not differentiate "applicants" on characteristics unrelated to merit?