I liked that Economist article, and then I read the comments.... sigh....
I read the original memo. It was the general, usual cherry picking. But what really made me roll my eyes was this:
Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX.
As a developer, I know this one. I spent a fair whack of my early days resisting being pushed into front end/test stuff (luckily, I'm very good, and I often enough had bosses that were very good, and who could see that I would be better used writing code in the guts rather than only do the bits the other developers didn't want to do). And not that these things aren't important - a good tester is worth their weight in gold, decent requirements and good UX design can save an otherwise mediocre program - it's just not where my strengths lie - and I hate that it's somehow seen as the women's realm in so many teams.
A woman has been promoted above him, or rejected his pull request, or got a peach project that he wanted and he doesn't think she's qualified for, and he's lashing out. He wants women away from the stuff that he does - not in my backyard.
He was employed at google, he must have been good (I've not worked for them, but I've been offered a job at Amazon which has similarly stringent hiring processes) - he got annoyed, and thinks that expending resources to find a diverse range of employees means that they're letting other people in who aren't as good as him, when those two things aren't related.
White male devs are as easy to find as brown stones on the beach, whereas you have to search a bit to find the pink or white ones - doesn't make the brown stones naturally better, doesn't mean that you're accepting substandard white or pink ones, just means that you have to search a bit harder to find them.