I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and
women approach engineering problems differently
(i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence
of this?
That's not incompatible with rejecting the belief that one gender/race/whatever is "better" at something.
It's not really a question of believing one gender/etc... is better at something here it seems to be a question of not believing it as the author seems to think "cognitive diversity" can be achieved simply by adding women to your dev team.
Etsy needed women because their customers were women. They needed engineers that would help them understand or uncover the point of views of their customers. At the end of the day you are serving people, not machines, and it makes more sense to optimize for the needs of customer, instead of assuming every programmer with git experience make a good engineer for Etsy.
I would think it's controversial when applied to
engineering. This implies that the basic tools of
software development are somehow viewed/used
differently by people of various genders/ethnicities/etc
I understand software engineering to encompass much more than just using "the basic tools of software development." Within that scope, you're definitely right: I don't think one gender can use Eclipse (or vim, or whatever) better.
I'm thinking of a broader definition of software engineering that involves understanding problems and choosing from many viable solutions, each with their own trade-offs in terms of implementation difficulty and end-user experience. There are a lot of people who feel that process, and our industry as a whole, would benefit from having a greater variety of perspectives.
the author seems to think "cognitive diversity" can be achieved
simply by adding women to your dev team.