Those people are right. The full text of the memo is readily available. The author not only didn't say this, but repeated numerous times that this was explicitly not what he was trying to communicate. There is no reasonable, charitable way to interpret those who misrepresent him.
I think this brings up an important point. Some people insist on painting this as a "diversity champions vs blithering racists/sexists" issue, ignoring the numerous legitimate criticisms for the current approach to diversity.
The politics instantly put the memo squarely at one side of the current cultural / political wars. With the current binaries in American politics right now, such will never lead to sober discussion.
Note that it doesn't imply or conclude that a given female applicant is less qualified than a given male candidate nor that the pipeline of female applicants is less qualified in aggregate than the pipeline of male applicants (because there's no reason to assume that the pipeline has the same distribution as the overall population).
It merely suggests that (assuming pertinent biological causes) we shouldn't expect a fair process to result in parity of outcomes.
Whether or not there are pertinent biological causes is a question I leave to scientists, but I do want to note that (contrary to Damore's critics), science has established biological sex differences that may be pertinent, and lots of scientists have validated Damore's position (that biological differences may explain some of the gender distribution in tech). https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201711/the-truth-ab...
The latter, yes (in the sense that the question was relevant to the memo, not so much that the memo coherently attempted to address it), but it wasn't the memo I was referencing here here—it was other posts, either in internal social media or on external forums with clear links to employees.
In your opinion, did the google memo touch on similar topics? Many represented it as saying "women are inferior engineers to men", but a crux of the argument seems to be that many say this is not what the memo said.
Also, there are tangential topics that are often phrased similar to the above so as to make it seems like we're in a Carthaginian scenario when it isn't necessarily the case. For example, the main argument seemed to be about trans-people using certain bathrooms, that touched on the topic of "trans validity" (or dragged conversation into that), but was also also a separate, related argument about bathroom usage that precipitated that.