Note that he says they are "described as", not that they are actually gender specific. The quotes also make it clear that he is referencing Damore's argument and pointing out an interest issue with it. He is not claiming that position as his own.

No. He's all but saying it. Mincing words may give a free pass in your book. Not in mine.

How is that "mincing words"? He spends several paragraphs arguing those differences are not supported by science (right or wrong), then proceeds to allow them as a base assumption to point out the argument still falls apart, even if you allow the faulty premise.

He explicitly says near the start of his article that he disagrees with the views on gender differences that the memo espouces, and that he's not getting into then because others are more qualified to do so.

> Good thing the original memo author has a PhD in biology then.

Your appeal to authority is pretty transparent... While the original memo author's work with various strains of yeast is indeed interesting, I'm not sure how it's relevant to the topic at hand...

An argument should stand on its own merits, not on a piece of paper on the author's wall.

His PhD is in "Systems Biology", isn't it? Which is more about computational approaches to understanding biological systems than, at the risk of simplifying horribly, "messy" biology.

> making people feel bad at their job is inappropriate (even though the memo did no such thing)

Say you've got red hair and someone sent a memo around saying that they'd heard that everyone with red hair was more of a fuzzy people person than a real coder. Would you agree that people with red hair may well feel targeted?

[Apparently he doesn't have a PhD at all and has been misrepresenting this. Tch.]

"It’s true that women are socialized to be better at paying attention to people’s emotional needs and so on — this is something that makes them better engineers, not worse ones."

Doesn't sound like a claim that women naturally possess these skills to me.

I would give Zunger a pass, since he states very clearly that he wouldn't have made that statement were he still employed at Google.