It was only a "PR mess" because his co-workers leaked the memo to the eager press and Google fired him over what was basically a paper attempting to explain why

It was only a "PR mess" because his co-workers leaked the memo to the eager press and Google fired him over what was basically a paper attempting to explain why women might be underrepresented in engineering. If a famous company fires someone over something so trivial, of course the media will be all over it. Had none of that happened, none of us would be still discussing this because it's not like the paper's particularly groundbreaking or anything.