>To translate this into practical language, if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees,

>To translate this into practical language, if the Google Manifesto was correct, then you would expect to see that Google was full of mediocre female employees, who had been hired by a process biased in their favour despite being inadequate to the task. Whatever the author of the manifesto thinks, Google does not believe this to be the case and as far as I can tell from industry blogs, it isn’t – female employees in tech are generally very good. This would, of course, be consistent with the hypothesis that the current selection process is biased against them. I was sort of with the author until this point. He misunderstands the goal that the memo stated was at the heart of the issue, and thus his model is too simple to be accurate. The missing element was Google's false negative rate. This isn't a case of selecting (for purposes of analogy) all gems above some certain quality, it is the case of selecting the best gems on an assembly line guaranteed to reject 90% of gems. If we reject 80% of yellow gems and 95% of green gems due to the fact that we have more green gems, we have created a lower standard of entry for the yellow gems, even if our gems are all top quality. His analogy only works under the assumption that google has a reasonable applicant to hire ratio, but we know this to not be the case. Google isn't taking average (by Google metrics) Men or Women, and that's why the Women are very good.