The firing was necessary, because not firing someone who creates a hostile working environment opens you to lawsuits from every single other person employed in your company. [1] Anyone who's taken training on sexual harassment would understand this.
His essay is not scientific, or evidence-based. It's ten pages of micro-facts, followed by his biases or misunderstands, followed by enormous leaps of logic to macro-conclusions. It wouldn't pass as a bloody undergrad essay. [2]
(It is a poster child of a techie looking at a complicated problem that they don't understand, and saying 'I'm smart! This is easy! You guys are all wrong!')
At least a few psychology professors [seem to disagree with that assessment][1]:
> Graded fairly, his memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course. It is consistent with the scientific state of the art on sex differences.
I'm sure you can probably find lot of opinions on both sides of the debate though, and that's fine. As the memo stated:
> Of course, I may be biased and only see evidence that supports my viewpoint. In terms of political biases, I consider myself a classical liberal and strongly value individualism and reason. I'd be very happy to discuss any of the document further and provide more citations
Instead of "discussing the document further" though, they fired him.
And in more than one way too : 1) he didn't discuss "performance" but "affinity" 2) there was supporting evidence linked, before Gizmodo conveniently stripped it away.
His essay is not scientific, or evidence-based. It's ten pages of micro-facts, followed by his biases or misunderstands, followed by enormous leaps of logic to macro-conclusions. It wouldn't pass as a bloody undergrad essay. [2]
(It is a poster child of a techie looking at a complicated problem that they don't understand, and saying 'I'm smart! This is easy! You guys are all wrong!')
[1] https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/895071933666017280
[2] https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...