The biggest issue with the memo is that James Damore attached politics to it. Basically a fair bit of the last part of the memo was an open accusation that Google is leftist and is "alienating conservatives", together with several standard tropes from the populist conservative realm that did not advance his argument very much ("universities are leftist" trope, a strangely oversimplified ding at communism / Marxism, mentioning "political correctness" and violent PC protesters, etc.)

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.

Granted, but I want to take care to point out that this doesn't validate the claim that Damore's memo asserts that women < men.

(In case you are referring to me, the commenter above, as "those who misrepresent him", I'd like to make it clear that I am not referring to Damore at all - and also that if I were, I'd be arguing that the questions he asked are absolutely work-relevant, and Google should not shut down discussion on the grounds that they're work-irrelevant.)

I wasn't referring to you :). There are lots of people who explicitly assert that Damore's memo claimed that women are inferior to men.

"I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." I'm not sure how to interpret that as not sexist. Prefacing it with "Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are 'just.'" doesn't really help.

While I can see how that statement could be abused to sexist ends, nothing about it is sexist nor prescribes any sort of discriminatory treatment.

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...