When you want to prove a paper wrong you don't need delve on every nuance, you just need to prove the base premise is flawed. Not sure why Damore deserves a different treatment, when clearly he's trying to build an argument and proposes "solutions" based on it.
> One could argue though that Damore should have expected this
Oh, I'm pretty sure he was looking for this.
Even if so, that assumes that the base premise actually has been correctly identified.
His base premise was not "women are worse engineers than men". Yet this is what most critics and media argued against.
His base premise was about differences in the average distribution of traits, which is a completely different thing, doesn't say anything about abilities of an individual, and actually is not that flawed. There is plenty of scientific evidence pointing towards that direction. It's not total consensus but describing it as "flawed" would be pretty ignorant, as far as I can interpret the scientific status quo.
But understanding this base premise required that people actually would have put some own thought into what they read, and were open to nuance.
(That's an honest question, BTW, not trying to be inflammatory)
I read the memo 3 times over several days just to make sure that I don't miss a key thing (and I'm still no fully sure). But I bet a hell lots of people who commented on it didn't even read it thoroughly once.
One could argue though that Damore should have expected this (but maybe he actually did. I can totally imagine that he had mentally prepared himself before to get fired over this).