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Indeed, the world at large seems to have read "the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes" as "all women are naturally crap at coding and only men can do it" which is totally not the point he was making.

His point is perfectly valid in the sense that there are biological differences between men and women when looked at in a broad statistical way, such as spatial awareness, upper body strength, and the brain's ability to handle different kinds of problem.

This doesn't mean no women are capable of being coders, or that no men are capable of being musicians or artists or poets. It simply means that in general you will likely see a gender bias in each of these areas, and there is no reason to consider this a "bad thing".

What is a "bad thing" is to turn down women for coding jobs because they're female, or equally to turn down men from being midwives because they're men.

But equally bad is picking a woman for a coding job, or employing a man as a midwife to even out your gender balance in the work place regardless of whether another applicant of the other gender was better.

He also points out that because less women want to be coders, the available pool of potential female employees is smaller and therefore as a result the number of good female candidates is smaller. This is also a perfectly reasonable point. Dinner ladies (lunchtime assistants, sorry) tend to be ladies because in general more women choose to stay at home to look after children and therefore are more likely to look for part time work, often nearby and in their community. Should schools employ unemployed single men with no childcare experience instead in order to balance the numbers?

Certainly we should be encouraging kids of both genders to pursue whatever they want in school, and make sure all opportunities are equally presented and available to boys and girls, and perhaps in the longer term this will result in the gender bias of tech industry balancing out a bit. But if you tried to put as much focus on getting more men to be midwives as their currently seems to be on getting women into tech, people would call you an idiot or worse.

Trying to make companies demonstrate that they're equal opportunity employers by ensuring they have an equal number of male and female employees in every role completely misses the point of gender equality, and achieves nothing but discrimination of another form.

If companies force themselves to employ people because of their gender, race or other protected characteristic in order to fill out numbers in that area, rather than because of their ability to do the job then not only do they reduce the effectiveness of the company but as the ex-Googler pointed out they may well demoralise the existing staff who see new colleagues coming in who were not the best choice for the job.