To be fair... How often do you create "a rigorous paper" before you engage in an internal discussion at your company? Is that the standard? And if so, when do you have time to do actual work?
Try at least not to have completely unreasonable expectations.
So it was incumbent upon Damore to do a lot of work, and come up with something both rigorous and novel. If he didn't, and he still thought that rehashing a whole bunch of stuff that had been discussed before was sufficient to "advance the conversation" about such a controversial topic he is an idiot who deserved to be fired and forgotten.
The nicest way to say this is the way one of the women the TFA put it: 'a general lack of consideration for his female colleagues.' Then again, she has a lifetime of politely dealing with male chauvinist idiots, and has learned that calling them out doesn't get her far.
[1] Source: my own life experience.
If you are going to write on such a controversial topic and don't want to be seen as a self absorbed attention seeking polemicist [1], you ought to be more careful. In other words, you need to hold yourself to a higher standard than normal office write-ups. Otherwise, you take an unnecessary risk drawing the wrong conclusions and do a lot of inadvertent harm to your fellow human.
[1] Still learning to politely deal with male chauvinist idiots.
Nor does Damore.
In Damore's memo, the table of left vs right bias was ridiculous, even if we agree on those biases, which we don't, I'd argue why use those, and why pick n number of biases and leave out others? This isn't a rigorous paper.
The toy hypothetical following the table is such a overly simple contrivance, are we supposed to be taking this seriously? So many assertions...
Perhaps the bar is too low at Google.