SAN FRANCISCO — In a Facebook Live conversation, Katie Benner and Nellie Bowles, technology reporters at The New York Times, discussed the now infamous Google memo — a Google engineer’s lengthy argument that there are biological differences between men and women that explain why fewer women succeed in the tech world.

Viewers wanted to know why the engineer was fired by Google, whether there was a way to have these sorts of difficult conversations at work, and why the memo struck such a chord in the tech world. Asked one viewer, Laurie Witters-Churchill, “How can I encourage my daughter in tech? She’s already discouraged after only a few years.”