But wasn't he arguing the opposite; that Google's efforts to comply with US law were working to the detriment of men? I thought the US' case was essentially "Google is overwhelmingly White and Asian men", and Damore's case is "policies that decrease the numbers of men have got to go".

It's like the government is indicting you for making gingerbread houses, and one of your employees argues against your policy prohibiting gingerbread in the workplace. Isn't it?

EDIT: Oh it's gender pay, not diversity. Then I really don't at all get the relevance, Damore only mentioned the pay gap in a footnote that was totally unrelated to Google.

From the memo:

to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices

[...] Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination​ [6]

[6] Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.

> But wasn't he arguing the opposite; that Google's efforts to comply with US law were working to the detriment of men?

And illegally so.

I worked at Google. I've seen this before. "Desired" candidates (women, especially black and Hispanic) were hired on two occasions where the interviewing team gave them an average of 2s. Upper management took the "best" they could get of a certain "highly desired" demographic...I'm not sure how these two individuals made it past the hiring committee but they did...

Hmm, but aren't these reverse discrimination arguments? Fisher v. University of Texas makes those a long shot at best.