All of their demands seem pretty reasonable. It looks like the big gripe is that basically there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. To draw an analogy, this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.
> there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office.
There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.
Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace, and that includes protection from sexual abuse.
A lot stuff that counts as sexual harassment in the work place is not a crime.
You don't sue people who perpetrate crimes, you prosecute them. You're asking the victims of sexual harassment to persuade police to investigate and prosecutors to prosecute, and we know that they won't because we know they already don't.
You're also saying that no action can be taken without meeting the very high criminal burden of proof - that this thing happened beyond all reasonable doubt. That's going to leave harassers free to continue.
Maybe you just meant that sexual harassment is unlawful and employees have an existing remedy through civil courts, but this would be pisspoor management. If your company employs people who reduce productivity of others in the workforce by sexually harassing them it's in the organisation's best interest to manage those people so they stop the harassment or leave the company.
I think you're being too rigid. There are situations where one employee forces themselves on another at the christmas party. In that situation obviously the right call is to report it to the police and to have a disciplinary process internally for gross misconduct. But there's a million smaller examples of harassment that just need to be tackled by the organization. For example, if a man repeatedly makes comments about a woman's appearance, there needs to be a process where the woman can report that, be heard and have the issue addressed - it may be as simple as the employee's boss pulling the into a room and saying "stop being a creep". Not everything is solved by law suits.
However, obviously if things do escalate, access to the law should be guaranteed and the binding arbitration should clearly be dropped.
Prosecution is one method of deterring thieves from robbing my store blind. I have also tried locked doors, security cameras and not leaving the store unattended.
I like your argument that it is cheaper to just let people rob me blind and then burn time and energy catching them, prosecuting time, and hoping for a conviction as a deterrent.
With any luck using your system crime will magically disappear on it’s own.
I am going to put my fingers in my ears now and make noises and ignore the worlds problems. It is certainly easier to not take responsibility. Good advice.
> There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,
Except that, under the law, the company’s response (including the absence or inadequacy of any process) to certain situations is part of what determines if they are sexual harassment.
> sexual harassment is a crime
No, it's not, and if it were the process would not be for employees to sue, because crimes are prosecuted exclusively by the government in the U.S. legal system.
forced arbitration has been the bane of combatting anything legally. it basically is now used to completely remove any employee or consumer ability to sue. This is used for literally everything. Every employer does this now, every software product, every hardware.
I'm not trying to troll you, but it's a voluntary "denial of justice". No one compels or coerces people to seek employment there. They apply, go through several interviews, and then voluntarily agree to whatever it is they agree to before day #1 of work. As long as people are willing to work there under XYZ conditions, people will continue to work there under XYZ conditions.
>employees should be able to sue, that's the process,
See eh. Does money fix the issue "biotic 1 told biotic 2 'nice lady bits why don't you sit on my man bits' now they want 2 amounts of monies" how does money fix the issue? How does money repair the damage? Is money a Men in Black neuralizer? Does it selectively delete the negative emotions from the event? Is it fair that shareholders in the case of Google, or the owner in a small business where some rogue employee decided he wanted to play grabass without the owner's consent or even knowledge, to have to shell out large sums of money that won't actually undo the damage?
I don't think suing is a good solution here. If you are denied a job and have EVIDENCE it was based on your gender or sexual orientation, then suing somewhat makes sense however aside from lost wages there isn't much that would be productive here. If you sued for the actual job then everyone knows you as that person that got the job because a court of law said you get it and not necessarily because your skill and history make you the best candidate.
>sexual harassment is a crime,
Somewhat. Quid Pro Quo is a crime, not rectifying a hostile work environment (not reassigning the alleged offender, not investigating and terminating the alleged offender etc) is a crime. But biotic 1 telling biotic 2 that they have nice reproductive bits and bobs, is not an actual crime (perhaps it should be?)
>they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.
Money /= justice. If someone demands sexual favors, or regularly says sexually explicit things to you, a check doesn't give you justice, especially if it's from the employer.
Take Google as an example. Google is owned, in part, by likely hundreds of millions of people (index funds, direct stock purchase, etc). Google has a board, it has various rungs of corporate management, then more localized management. Chances are none of those people have said "hey Don Draper, make sure you grab Megan's ass today when she comes in to dictate for you today and tell her what you want to do to her on your desk" and while Google does need to do something to employees that think such behavior is acceptable, and carry it out, why should they have to cut a check for hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars, for something a rogue employee did?
Perhaps there should be some sort of penalty/tax that companies, when sufficient evidence is found to support a claim, they have to pay to an NGO that deals with rights equality and safe workspaces? Money doesn't undo the situation so I don't think the victim should be seeking large sums in damages, companies (unless supporting the behavior) shouldn't be penalized for large sums of money because of an employee that has free agency, however if an incident is reasonably provable perhaps they should have to cut a check, based on some sort of scale, say 100k$ for a company like Google to a regularly audited group that provides resources for victims to reach out to for both any required treatment and for help dealing with any potential workplace discrimination as a result of their claim.
They definitely have a process in place (they advertise their process a lot during orientation) but the demands I saw explicitly say they aren't good enough.
> this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.
Because, Google is a company that builds products. I am interested in their products and in the fact that their products work, not much in the behaviour of the people building them- given the fact that they are located in a supposedly civilized country anyway, where serious misconducts should be prosecuted by law. The internal squabbles and complaints of the company are of very little relevance for their users, as it should be.
It's worth noting that one of their demands is dropping the binding arbitration that essentially forces employees to forgo their right to legal recourse for civil matters. Not every instance of unacceptable behaviour is a criminal matter.
If you're not interested in the internal workings of Google, then why bother? There are people who are, and they are the ones driving this conversation. Let them spend their energy and effort figuring it out while you enjoy the result of their work.
The salient difference is that outages are measurable.
In contrast, "harassment" is an extremely controversial subject that nobody agrees upon, for example, in some legislations,
calling a person with XY chromosomes "him" rather than "her" is considered a hate crime, a dramatic change from labelling conventions of just a few years ago. Indeed what constitutes harassment is a major point of contention between different parts of the political spectrum, and a core part of the culture wars.
In addition, harassment is easily lied about. Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
If I was a Google competitor, and Machiavellian in moral outlook, I'd feed those flames to weaken Google, and hope that nobody did it to my organisation.
And only a few short decades ago I could fire someone for being gay, or forbid my wife from opening a bank account. And it was a mere century ago that women literally couldn't vote.
I don't see why the fact that social mores change invalidates the social standard we have today.
Furthermore, why do you folk always jump straight to the "b..b..but false harassment!" argument? All it does is demonstrate that you actually don't care at all about the original problem.
Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
So why are you willing to throw 90-98% of harassed women to the sharks, in order to protect 2-10% of accused men? Plus there's the whole strawman that allegations are always believed. Of course there should be fact checking. In fact, even in the #metoo era, men almost never face repercussions for false allegations (and often not for real ones.)
Your statement that unfounded harassment claims do not lead to repercussions is flat out false. There is no company that would not discipline someone for bringing a harassment claim that was demonstrated to be false.
In short: this argument demonstrates that what you really want to do is only to preserve the status quo and do in fact not give a shit about a major problem in our culture.
> what downsides are there for false harassment claims
There are major downsides to making true harassment claims: you get denounced as a liar and a slut. This is the main reason why so many claims went unreported, and the #metoo movement is one of solidarity which makes it possible for people to actually report true claims without ruining their career. Actually deliberately making a false harassment claim is potentially career suicide.
> Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
Many people who get harassed opt to change teams, companies, or professions rather than actually pursue a formal complaint against their harasser. Perhaps they are mistaken (I don't think so), but they seem to believe that there are real downsides to filing even true harassment claims, to the extent that the aforementioned career upheavals seem easier.
Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? You think all harassment claims should be automatically dismissed as false instead?
You do a chromosomal analysis on everyone before you use a gendered pronoun to describe them? Because you can't tell what their chromosomes are just by appearance.
"A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously"
Can anyone help me understand the rationale behind the anonymous part, with respect to due process and how the framework for anonymous accusations can be abused by bad actors?
Edit-
I have a question about the anonymous nature of reporting to HR, with respect to due process for the accuser and accused, maybe some of you can shed light on how you've seen it work in your experiences.
I've heard stories in the past, with details I'm not privy to, where coworkers were let go based on anonymous HR sexual misconduct allegations. I really hope that due process is involved for the accused and not just a "guilty until proven innocent" situation. What I mean is that evidence by the accuser is judged along the lines of probable cause that our police force uses to arrest or judges use to prosecute e.g. inappropriate advances caught on tape, unwanted email/text/chat messages in line with allegations, eye witness statements corroborated by fellow co-worker, etc.
There are a lot of introverted, socially awkward personality types in technical roles (on the spectrum?) with traits that can be perceived incorrectly, even negatively by neurotypical individuals and I fear the power of anonymous, "guilty until proven innocent" allegations standard that HR might start using to police the accused and trample on their right to due process since employment is at-will and you can be terminated for any reason, at any time, but in this situation you are ineligible for unemployment if it's recorded as misconduct.
Maybe they're referencing something like Callisto (YC Nonprofit W18):
"Founders will be able to use Callisto to securely store the identities of perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault. These identities will be encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view. If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on their options for coming forward, including the option to share information with other victims of the same perpetrator." Source: https://blog.ycombinator.com/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on...
> Can anyone help me understand the rationale behind the anonymous part…
In general, 21% of workers who report misconduct suffer from retribution (source: National Business Ethics Survey).
An estimated 75% of workplace harassment victims experience retaliation when they speak up (source: US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission government agency).
That 75% number is not from the EEOC study. It is something the EEOC study cited. The original is from:
Lilia M. Cortina & Vicki J. Magley, Raising Voice, Risking Retaliation: Events Following Interpersonal
Mistreatment in the Workplace, 8:4 J. OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH PSYCHOL. 247, 255 (2003).
I can't make sense of these numbers. Can you report misconduct without speaking up? Or is there a lot of retaliation that doesn't induce any suffering, or...?
I have trouble imagining truly complete anonymity being helpful. This is an invitation to abuse the system. Abuse could result from personal conflicts and office politics, or even people who wish to undermine the system itself by entering bad data.
The point of an anonymous system is to encourage people to speak up without a first-mover problem, because in every case of ongoing sexual harassment there is never just 1 victim - it's always a pattern of behavior.
Someone receiving exactly 1 report is probably not a problem. Someone who accumulates reports continuously as team members change probably is.
Total anonymity for accusers is indeed a concerning policy, but partial anonymity (i.e. from one's own team) isn't unreasonable. It ought to be possible to properly investigate misconduct allegations while minimizing the potential for gossip and recriminations.
Outside of civil service jobs, in the US there are no “due process” rights in employment decisions; what process is due is a matter of employment contract (which for non-unionized rank-and-file, and even non-executive management, employees usually means no process is due, because of “at-will” employment.)
Given that, and given that employers are legally bound to prevent retribution against reporters, anonymity for reporters is strongly incentivized.
Due process would certainly be nice when it comes to letting people go, but introducing it makes it much more difficult for a company to move quickly and adjust to market conditions. If a company faces lawsuits every time it makes any decison, it’ll be far more difficult to make any decison and will make that company far less dynamic. Sometimes that’s worth it, but there are cons to introducing due process too.
Until you replace 'men' with any other sex, race, gender, etc. Calling valid, if perhaps overblown concerns is just 'bingo squares' maybe you need to consider your own bias.
Harassment is rarely the case of a single incident. Instead, people who harass other usually have a long history of harassing lots of people.
An anonymous complaint could be used not to determine guilt, but instead to trigger an investigation.
And if the person is guilty, then the investigation will almost certainly have a very easy time finding somebody, likely many, who will go on record with their incident of harassment.
So the first demand is "A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequality"
I'd like to see the actual data behind this constant inequality claim. I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men, I've also heard that the data is never accurate because it doesn't compare the same jobs.
I want to see some actual numbers so people can figure out where the issue actually lies.
Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism, had an article about this http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/ , which had more hard-facts than anyone else I've seen, but the conclusion was that most of the claims made by the wage gap supporters are cherrypicked and false. Although, if Google specifically has a problem with it, I'd definitely be willing to listen. If they are protecting people like Rubin, it does seem plausible that other things could be going on.
> Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism
Although Christina Hoff Sommers does have a noticeable bias/axe to grind since she's pretty anti-feminism and considers there to be a "war against boys". Also she works for the AEI which is a conservative think tank.
UK Office for National Statistics publish good data for the UK.
My impression (based on 2016 stats [0]) is that as most C-suiters are men, and they can get 100s or 1000s of times the money that ordinary employees get, that in the UK this likely accounts for most of the effect that's not accounted for by career breaks (childcare, for example). To reiterate, this is my _impression_ when looking at the data.
Men who work part-time get lower wages; no one cares, it seems.
As an example, company of 100, 50 women. Boss is paid £500k, everyone else gets UK median £35k. Whichever sex the boss is they now show a 26% gender pay gap.
If the boss gets 3x the median, that's a 4% gap.
I'd like to see analysis which looks at same qualified people and charts their progression with attempts to understand why their wage changed and whether those changes have any discernible sex bias.
Men seem to fall across a wider distribution (both higher and lower paid), as appears in other characteristics.
"Another stunning but perhaps unsurprising finding was that 63% of the time, men were offered higher salaries than women for the same role at the same company. The report found that companies were offering women between 4% and a whopping 45% less starting pay for the same job. "
At a casual glance, the 4-45% statistic also applies in the inverse direction, so it's fairly meaningless when discussing gender inequality.
The more appropriate statistic would be that "on average, women are offered 4% less" which seems to have been produced by integrating an estimation of the probability density, and looking at the non-symmetry of the distribution. It seems most of that difference is concentrated within 10% on the mean.
So (roughly) if you're a man, you had a 50% chance of being offered 4% more than a woman, and maybe a 30% chance of being offered 4% less than a woman.
> to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
What if the pay is equal for like-for-like jobs, but for the higher paying jobs one sex is vastly underrepresented? Not saying it is, just that discrimination and bias often runs deeper than some simple comparison.
Then that would be the point of the data. At the moment people are acting on claims of differences in pay across a number of sectors and roles and it's way too vague to pinpoint what the actual issue is.
If the data found an actual issue like this, the it would need to be addressed, but at the moment simply claiming that women are paid less doesn't offer any solution apart from paying women an extra 20% across every single job.
>I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men,...
It's not just arguing for higher salaries but being trusted to follow through when "the going gets tough".
Display of confidence is hard to distinguish from actual capability. Confidence is often mistaken for "can-do-spirit" or "positive attitude" and therefore always favored.
Women are more honest than man about their abilities in the workplace. They are more honest about previous experience in a job interview, and more reluctant to "fake it until they make it":
Excessive confidence displayed by men regarding their ability to follow through even their chances of success are equal to women, leads later to the assumption that the man knew what they were doing (and knew in advance that they will succeed) and hence men are seen as having been in full control the whole time. But actually it's hindsihgt-bias.
A lot of replies to ChrisRR's comment go out to the global level, but Google can't fix that. The interesting question is "what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs" at Google. That's what they can address. Does it exist?
If it does exist, that's a very serious problem, because if Google can't and/or hasn't attained pay parity that would satisfy the people writing this, then pack it in; there's no way it's ever going to happen. Google is just about the best possible environment for parity to happen in, with an almost uniform culture that would support it from top to bottom and enough money that it can pursue almost any parity policy it wants without a serious problem, and a long time frame in which this all should have been true.
If there is still systematic, unsatisfactory bias at Google, what hope is there for these ideas in the rest of the world?
One of the issues is that Google is rather reactive in its compensation - e.g. it only provides high-compensation offers to those who obtain competing offers. This essentially ensures that the highest offers go to those who prioritize being able to get high compensation. In my experience, a lot of software engineers tend to prioritize things other than compensation, and don't really care to try to extract higher compensation if they get to do work they find meaningful or work for a company they think is good. And for whatever reason, a much higher proportion of my male peers have prioritized high compensation compared to my female peers.
I suspect that if Google wanted to remove pay differences between men and women, they would need to start making strong offers to all their candidates - not just those who obtain competing offers and try to negotiate.
__If__ it's really a problem, the only way to actually fix this would be to remove any kind of negotation, because two people with identical CVs might settle on vastly different salaries and it's highly unlikely that the employer is going to overcompensate them.
However, I've heard people argue that a right to ask for a lower pay is also an advantage in labour market because it's yet another axis of competitiveness.
How would you remove any kind of negotiation though? Say that it's illegal for an applicant to say "You have to pay me X or I won't accept the offer"? Or for an employee to say "Give me a raise of Y, or I'm leaving"? What if they already have an offer from a different company for more money? Can they tell their current employer? And if they do, can the employer offer to increase their wage to keep them? And if they can't, can they offer the employee a "new" higher paid position so it technically isn't a raise/negotiation?
The most rational, fact-based reporting I've seen on the wage gap comes from Freakonomics. They have several episodes [0], [1] that dive into the current research.
The TLDR, if I remember correctly, is: Yes, there is a wage gap between genders. It is smaller than most headlines claim, but real. Lots of factors go into this, but it is probably a mix of: companies _can_ pay women less, so they will, and women tend to value some things greater than salary. However, there is no smoking gun we can point to as a definitive root cause.
So I've come to develop a nuanced opinion on this.
I used to fully believe what you said, on the grounds that willingness and ability to negotiate have no bearing on how valuable the employee will be (at least for engineering jobs - it could be different for something like sales where dealmaking ability actually matters).
However, one counterpoint I've come to realize is that if an employee doesn't value higher salary that much, it's a waste of money to pay them more. Thus, by only paying higher salaries that put time and effort into arguing for higher salaries, you make sure to only spend that money on the employees that will actually value all the extra money you're throwing at them.
> I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
There really aren't any differences. Just do a simple mental exercise.
Imagine if the gender gap is real. Male programmers demand $100K while female programmers demand $77K for the same exact quality of work. What would this mean? It would mean all tech companies would only hire females.
For comparison look at seasonal farm work. Imagine if migrant workers deman $7.70 per hour while citizens demand $10 per hour for the same quality of work. What do you think the composition of the labor foce on farms would be? I'd imagine it would be mostly migrants. Right?
If the wage gap truly existed, clever feminists would start companies exclusively composed of women and would be putting everyone out of business because they have a 23% profit margin built in.
Sigh.. I've seen this argument so many times I have to wonder if the people peddling it has ever sat on a hiring panel.
The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value. Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech, where compensation packages are routinely so large and supported by large VC funds that those of us who do hire can see those salary differences as negligible. And, even if I were sensitive to those differences, I would not hesitate to pay 30-50k in order to get the right person for the role.
The question here is: are we doing a good job of finding the right person for the role? That is why the Google women are demanding "opportunity equity." Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
People keep saying this, but it assumes that companies are completely rational actors in hiring, unaffected by human bias. Which is clearly bullshit. For one thing, you can simply prove this by considering the existence of discrimination in the other direction - surely, if companies were hell bent on optimizing their hiring for optimal return on investment, we wouldn't have some of the most profitable companies in the world engaging in the kinds of hiring practices that, e.g., Arne Wilberg is suing about?
Why make assumptions? I'm an engineer and I make decisions based on data and information presented to me, and try to avoid guess work and assumptions as much as possible.
Combining "pay inequality" and "opportunity inequality" makes it more difficult to discuss the issue.
We know already that "pay inequality" is fictitious at this point.
So by elimination, that leaves opportunity - however as anyone who has ever worked in a large company knows, it is very difficult, except in a very regimented corporate culture like the military, to have equivalent opportunity spread around evenly. I somehow think Google has a corporate culture that is not very regimented.
How are you defining "pay inequality" while claiming it isn't real?
If I interpret "pay inequality" as "the average pay for women ages 20-60 is less than it is for men 20-60 in the US in 2018" then I've seen data suggesting it is real.
Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this. Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts. Having a private entity that has a vested interest in the events seem...unwise.
Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead?
Like, if it's someone who said something slightly inappropriate/gray area to another and just needs a stern talking to, sure. Have a process/HR deal with it. But so many occurrences are so much worse than that...
Not the same situation at all, but similar reasoning: I once had a colleague corner me in the office because of a disagreement in a meeting earlier in the day, where they threatened to "meet me outside to settle things". I mentioned it to my boss/HR/etc, and sure enough, they told me to just talk it out with them and were generally useless. I ended up having to quit. In hindsight, it wasn't my boss I needed to talk to, it was the freagin cops. (Not, of course, cops are frequently useless too, and that's a separate problem...but if we have to change the world somewhere, maybe pushing it all on private entities isn't the best thing to do in this case).
The police are not primarily there to solve civil disputes and disagreements. There is a pretty wide area where things are not illegal and possible to convict, but you would probably want to do something.
The police’s mindset (at least the ones I’ve interacted with) is one of three things:
1. Deterrance from crimes to be committed (doesn’t apply here)
2. Achieve convictions for crimes (would also not apply in your situation)
3. Deploy force to break up ongoing altercations (also doesn’t apply)
2 is interesting. Talk about a specific alleged crime with a police officer and they will not be discussing whether it was a crime or not much, nor if the person committed it, they will be discussing whether it can be proven in a court of law or not that a criminal act was committed by a specific person, beyond reasonable doubt. It is a purely pragmatic operation of “how can I provide proof that something occurred that is against this list of rules”.
The police are in no way useless, most people just misunderstand what their job is. Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.
In your specific situation it sucked, but from a police point of view what would they do? Is there a crime? Maybe. Would they be able to present a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred - most assuredly not. Would a conviction, however unlikely, achieve something meaningful? Nope, the guy would get a fine at most, but would still be working with you.
On the other hand, an employer is fully within their right to fire someone for a situation like that. They do not have the same burden of proof, they can refer to previous records of incidents, and the consequences would better match what you’d want (removal of the hostile environment).
>Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.
This shouldn't be the job of HR either.
What you describe is what civil courts are for. From societal perspective, it is their exact purpose: to dispense justice and prevent revenge. If they don't work, they need to be made to work, instead of relegating this function to random people with random training and random incentives following random policies that are ultimately designed to safeguard companies, not employees.
The question the parent comment made was not if the law allows an employer to fire someone for a situation like that, but if we want employers to investigate and prosecute crime when the police drop a case. Is that the role that employers should have in society, yes or no?
> They do not have the same burden of proof
That is a key point. At the same time we want the legal system to have a high burden of proof, but then when someone goes free we want someone else with lower burden of proof to step in and let the hammer fall on the guilty. If we changed the law and gave the police the power to fire someone without having a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt (this which we are asking the HR departments to do), then I would personally trust the police to do a better job with less bias than a HR department of a large company. It would also create a better political environment where the justice system would be discuses without extrajudicial punishment being used openly as an accepted alternative when we find the legal system lacking.
The point of a company investigation is to investigate violations of company policies; law enforcement doesn't get involved in determining if company policies were violated, it's simply not in their purview.
If during an investigation they find criminal behavior they can (and usually should) turn over their evidence to law enforcement and let them do their job, which is investigating violations of criminal law.
Violations of company policies and violations of criminal law have huge differences in burden of proof.
People sometimes confuse the two and say things like "they should have never been punished at work because they weren't convicted in a court of law." But that's not exactly how it works, the burden of proof for work punishment is simply a large magnitude lower than legal punishment.
Most workplace harassment is not criminal. Most violations of company policy aren't criminal.
In these situations, companies aren't sued for harassment, but for having a hostile work environment; allowing harassment to persist (e.g. by retaining harassing employees). If an employer has effective mechanisms to deal with cases of harassment, then it shouldn't be liable.
Even if a harasser was prosecuted or sued successfully, if the company retained them, that would create a hostile work environment for the harassee, and make the employer liable.
There's also the case of quid pro quo harassment, where a superior makes someone's career progression tied to the harassment, in which case it may be harder to distinguish the company's liability from the harasser. But even in such cases, an effective system to report such behaviour can mitigate the company's liability. In such cases, claims often surround retaliation for reporting harassment (e.g. employee transferred, demoted or fired in response to a harassment report.)
I'm surprised at how many other responses here are saying "because the police don't have the resources to investigate" and similar.
This reply gets to the more fundamental point: companies are doing a different thing than police investigations or even civil suits over harassment. They can't undo the harassment, they can't punish the harasser (beyond termination with cause), or force the harasser to compensate their victim.
Rather, the goal is to create a workplace where employees are not harassed. This is good for both legal reasons (hostile work environment suits) and obvious moral (harassment is bad) and practical (people will quit) reasons.
If a coworker mocked or punched me every day at work, it might or might not produce a complaint to the police or a civil suit against the coworker. But it would certainly be something that made my employment untenable and a reasonable employer would react to that. People are in general not demanding that employers act in place of the police, they're demanding that they act to stop sex-related hostility at least as thoroughly as they would act against other hostility. It's the purview of the company because it's a completely different task than what courts or police would do.
> ...why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this...Having a private entity that has a vested interest in the events seem...unwise.
All other issues aside: the company should want to make an environment where good people want to work and can work without "distractions" (using the word very broadly and generically, not dismissing people's important concerns!!!). So it's in their self interest to deal with them well.
This line of argument isn't that different from the GP's analogy to site uptime.
> Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this.
Because sexual harassment is a form of illegal sex-based employment discrimination by the company. Individual unwelcome acts that don't rise to that level aren't sexual harassment (legally), but may be warning signs that if not corrected rise to the level of an offense by the company.
> Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts.
And for those, the company’s responsibility as regards harassment does not negate the role of law enforcement as regards the criminal violation. The police are not pushed aside in favor or private action. In addition, harassment events, whether or not a crime is involved, can be directly reported to federal, or usually also state (who will dual-file with the federal EEOC), anti-discrimination authorities; the employer process mostly if a mechanism to catch conduct before it reaches the level of discrimination and to manage the company's exposure when it did reach that level.
> Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead?
That's not an “instead” or “better”, because the options aren't mutually exclusive; where a criminal accusation is involved,law enforcement retains their usual role in investigating and prosecuting crimes, including compulsory process which can be directed at parties with relevant information, including employers.
The reason is that the bar is simply too low. Or rather, the bar for taking legal action is so high that it would not in a million years create an acceptable work environment at Google.
Think about it from another perspective. If Google wants to cherry-pick the brightest and best educated people from society, they're going to have to meet a higher standard themselves. Would you want that standard encoded in law for the rest of the state? If so, how would you, in a democracy, impose a standard crafted by a subset of the cultural elite for themselves on the rest of the state or the country? Changing cultural norms drag the law behind them, not the other way around. The legal standard will lag behind for a long time, and Google's employees are part of the force that will be leading it forward.
Sadly the police don’t have the resources to go “investigate” every time someone said let’s settle this outside. Where do you drawn the line for stern talking and police investigation. Your idea sounds good in theory but in practice doesn’t work.
wow. that sounds like a really bad situation. i mean, did you quit because of an ongoing threat of violence from this individual? the company should have offered other remedies before it came to that.
As you point out, the cops are often useless too. Now imagine you call the cops on your boss and they show up to talk with him/her. How might your boss be treating you after this?
This entire protest would have generally been a non-event if the company hadn't sent out a memo telling managers to accommodate people who want to participate, ensure there is no retaliation or penalty, be flexible with schedules, etc., effectively advertising the event to everyone in the process. So then it looks like employees are being unsupportive of their co-workers if they don't participate. Which sort of shuffles the understanding of a "walk out" to be a far cry from the sort of thing that happened in the union days, and puts this firmly in the Just Google Things category, where even protesting the company becomes an activity that the company officially supports.
One view is that management knows that and did it anyway.
Perhaps they felt it was worth letting it be a bigger event and taking a PR hit if in return what they get is that the employees feel that the company supports them.
Good Machiavellian way to oust competing managers as well. Personally, that would be a horrible thing to do to another person, but then again, we know at least some of these managers kept silent during this whole fiasco; we're not talking about saints here.
Very disappointed with mainstream media coverage here.
The walkout is being headlined as a complaint against harassment. It's not. It's a complaint against the company (rightly so) valuing its corporate reputation in the world in which we live vs standing behind the victims as if they were family, and going medieval (eg excommunication) on the harassers.
Certainly there's a balance and perhaps google is on the wrong side of it, but don't kid yourself, google isn't going to take your insignificant side of it when the other side is a $100MM liability to an executive.
That a walkout like this only happens at Google and not, say, microsoft, where surely sexual harassment also occurs and is also brushed aside, is telling about the employee culture at Google. It's sad that the media coverage is so trivial and can't look deeper.
And to the organizers: you should have recruited tech workers at all FAANG to support this walkout. You missed a moment.
> That a walkout like this only happens at Google and not, say, microsoft, where surely sexual harassment also occurs and is also brushed aside, is telling about the employee culture at Google.
There's a much simpler explanation than you are implying. The trigger for Googlers is the story from last week in the NYT about a former Google exec.
Yes of course. I recognize that, but I don't understand your argument. Are you saying that from the cause of mainstream media (NYT) exposure of this payment, to the effect of a walkout, there is no aspect of Google-specific culture that makes this a unique Google occurrence? This was primed by previous walkouts such as the protest against the Trump immigrant travel ban nearly 2 years ago, and previous Google-internal petitions against things such as G+ real names (which people actually quit over) and the now infamous Damore memo.
Your comment seemingly argues that the story is just a simple one and I'm a fool (rhetorically) for thinking there's anything deeper.
I submit, again, that there is a deep story here that was missed.
The last reported (2017) makeup of $MSFT in the US was 75% male, overall, and 81% for tech workers. 63000 employees in the US and 131k worldwide.
Do you really think that in an org that size with a demographic overwhelmingly skewed male, that there isn't sexual harassment going on? And lots of it unreported and lots of it dismissed?
How is this handled at other biggies in the valley - Apple, Microsoft etc? Do they also have the arbitration thing?
There was an awesome site on the front page yesterday, that compared career levels in the companies. Someone should make one comparing these companies on things like - treatment of women/minorities, age discrimination, side project policies, access to upper management etc
I have never understood why employees accept the restrictive clauses which assign ownership for any side projects to the employer. I am not a lawyer, but this has always struck me as amounting to a type of serfdom. If you are seen as a 24/7 unit of the company, and anything at all that you creatively produce can be claimed by the company, then your working capacity and creative capacity is essentially owned entirely by the company while you are employed there. You are not being paid just for your time and the work product you produce during that time. Rather you are literally selling an aspect of yourself. Does that sound reasonable at all? (of course, California has some protections against this. but that's just one state)
I would really like to see people rallying against many more things like this.
Maybe for a lot of the higher end HN devs out there, they can walk and be reasonably certain they'll pick up work in under a month. Personally, I've known a LOT of people (some in software too) that need 6-9 months to find any work in their field. Yeah, Uber and pizza delivery make some ends meet, but for a 'real' job with a 401k and benefits, it can take a LONG time. And at the end of that timeline, they can offer you really anything and you know you have to take that offer.
Anecdata: I'm in biotech and got offered 55k on the Peninsula at the end of about 2 months of interviewing for that particular company. They were the only people that would interview me over ~9 months of applying (caveat: biotech isn't doing well right now). The minimum wage of my 'stop-gap' auto mechanic job in a particular city is 60k. The biotech company would not budge at all.
a recent change in California law: Governor Brown recently signed Senate Bill 820 which prohibits secret settlements and non-disclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases.
in other words, if a private settlement is agreed to, the victim's name may be kept confidential, but not the perpetrator’s.
There is no will from upper management to handle these issues appropriately, which is part of why Google as an organization is in its current state. Google has been able to paper over issues with copious amounts of money thus far, but that is breaking down as time goes on.
I think it is more than that: there is a will from upper management to actively prevent such issues from being handled appropriately.
> Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later.
> Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
> H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
If you read Larry and Sergey’s original paper that they wrote at Stanford, where they talked about creating a search engine, they specifically said that advertising was wrong and bad and it would inherently corrupt the search engine if you sold advertising.
I'd wager that the walkout was over the $2,000,000 a month paid to Rubin.
Also, people claimed that the payment was to keep Rubin from working with competitors... But some others say that it was to buy his silence over what others might have been doing...
I do wonder if any reporting process at a company can ever really be trusted to have the employee's interests in mind. HR, legal, and etc all are there to protect the company. They're not there for your standard employee.
Again, not disagreeing with having a process, I just wonder if a process handled by the typical parties really can be trusted. I've never felt that HR, legal, or any of those departments are there FOR me. Rather they are there to prevent any problems the company may have, and that is not likely to be in my interests if I were to make a complaint about something.
They aren't there for you but for the company. They are really only there for you in any way that protects the company. Having a neutral third party would be one idea. It would have to be funded by employee and employer contributions though. Outside of that you have the EEOC in the US that has some authority.
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told staff he supports their right to take the action.
"I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel," he said in an all-staff email. "I feel it as well, and I am fully committed to making progress on an issue that has persisted for far too long in our society… and, yes, here at Google, too."
If someone at the top is sincerely interested in resolving this satisfactorily, why the walk-out? I don't get it.
Yes. He can put actions behind his words, or his reply is just hot air.
Plus, by endorsing it as a Google-sanctioned event, he's effectively taking power away from those walking out from disrupting normal business as usual (e.g., allowing managers to reschedule meetings).
So is grandstanding by people with well paid, cushy as hell jobs who are happy to point fingers.
My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you." What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc?
Because all the policy in the world can't per se fix a shitty culture. Shitty culture is as shitty culture does and it is perpetuated by every single individual in the organization and their individual choices.
I'm not impressed with people who point fingers. They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.
Hopefully to more people in tech joining unions. Plenty of other well-paid professions are unionised (eg. doctors). For full disclosure I've been a member of Prospect, a non-affiliated union in the UK, for a few years. One of the advantages is free access to legal advice about employment issues.
The unionisation of doctors in America is one of the reasons that the American healthcare system is so bad though. Maybe we shouldn't encourage any industry to increase its inefficiency by unionizing, and instead just offer a set of universal regulations that keep workers (both skilled and unskilled alike) from getting shafted?
It takes, weeks to get a sysadmin up to scratch. You can't get scabs in if you go on strike. If the employees turn off google.com for 5 minutes, management will talk.
How is this different from other industries? How long does it take an aerospace machinist to get up to speed? 10 years ago, the strike at Boeing lasted 8 weeks and cost an estimated $100M per day.
This is the most under rated comment in this thread.
Don't know what the Google management is thinking at this point in time. But I'm damn sure, unless you are making it rain hundreds of millions in dollars, and you are a part of these pre-unionizing exercises- You are very likely getting marked up as a trouble maker, and may be already a part of purge lists.
This is also a small industry. You don't want your name to smeared as a person who comes with a high trouble/contribution ratio. Nobody wants to hire people to do their jobs, and get employees running their part time political projects with their fellow colleagues in paid office time, on office issues.
There are also a huge range legal landmines you are likely to step over even without active knowledge that you are.
> Nobody wants to hire people to do their jobs, and get employees running their part time political projects with their fellow colleagues in paid office time, on office issues.
So the press reaction was as expected.
Wall Street Journal was all over the strikers, with sexist and "snowflake" comments, demands the protestors be fired. Even comparing them to the coal miners. Remember the great coal-miner strikes? The company running the mines had the idea that they are above the law, that state law doesn't apply to their workers, that the company creates and observes their own laws on their ground with their own workers. The miners demanded that the state law be obeyed. Very similar to todays arbitration clauses, the very first point in the google workers demand. Or todays social media censorship, violating most countries constitutions.
The DeVaul guy from Division X actually made sexual advances towards someone being interviewed for a job where he'd have been the manager. Has called it "an error in judgement".
I'm sorry, DeVaul, but that's not "an error in judgement", that is pure harassment, and I'd pay $2000 to watch you try your "moves" on someone who'd knock your teeth in for that.
Interesting to contrast this story with Damore's claims of left-wing bias and overemphasis on diversity and inclusion. It's uncomfortable exercise to put myself in the shoes of a young woman considering applying to Google; the prospect of unwanted advances from higher-ups and suspicions from the occasional peer of being hired for my gender might be enough to put me off completely.
The interesting thing is that the #MeToo movement naturally targeted a lot of liberals, because almost everyone in Hollywood is liberal. The right also has some issues with harassment, etc. but the left is far from immune to having it and in some ways has more trouble. I'm not sure why that is, but the "free love" and unrestrained sexual expression type culture of the left might have something to do with it.
As you can see, the divide is becoming greater between ones who “believe” and ones who “don’t”, and the audience is massively imposing a bias here in this thread. We’ve lost our ability to listen to each other, and it’s sad that it happened on a topic which is still very easy to judge using science.
These people should be fired, not because they want equal pay but because they refuse to do the job they were hired to do.
Different genders deserve equal pay, people of different races deserve equal pay, people with various disabilities deserve equal pay.
HOWEVER, you want to walk out of work? You should be terminated. If I walked out of work, I would be fired. If I organized several people to walk out of work with me, we would be fired. This is the case at my current job and at every single job I've ever had.
You don't change things by striking, in my book this is effectively corporate terrorism "hey we have demands, if you don't meet them we aren't working!" If someone strikes, you can never trust that employee again. Ever. You can not count on that employee in any situation because they've demonstrated that they will happily stop working when it serves their desires.
What you do is you make the issue publicly known, you do it in a positive way, you do it in a polite way. You ask for change and if change won't be given, you find an employer that will even if that means moving or starting your own business.
I'm all for equal rights, I'm all for equal pay, I'm not for people holding businesses hostage by refusing to do the job they were paid to do.
Unless they're bombing buildings the word you're looking for is extortion, not terrorism.
Striking has changed a good amount of business's in the history of the U.S . public outcry and worker cooperation is the halmark of workers rights.
The reason protest is required is because the company will not change without a better force. 'asking nicely' doesn't go anywhere when the bottom line is money and image.
Employee collaboration for workers rights does not automatically mean they're against the company. They're against parts of it's operations, but still have wants to do their work. That's, again, been all apart of the last 100 years of workers rights. You should perhaps look into how companies can possibly stay afloat even when there's unions. Not that I agree with unions typically, but if there can be no trust and workers just dont care about the company then it should all fail.
>Unless they're bombing buildings the word you're looking for is extortion, not terrorism.
You don't have to blow up a building to be a terrorist. You don't have to carry out an act of violence, or even suggest one, to be a terrorist. Organizing a walk out is intimidation,
ter·ror·ism
/ˈterəˌrizəm/
noun
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
Do you realize that all the things that make your current job bearable like 8 hour workday, weekends and safe work environment are only possible because people in the past had the spine to strike and demand better conditions for themselves and their fellow workers?
People repeat this line ad nauseum but i find it hard to believe work conditions would not improve over time if not for the presence of unions, look at highly unionised countries vs less unionised countries and compare the quality of life / workplace for an example.
>In the UK, the 1970 Equal Pay Act was triggered by the Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968.
And 1970 might as well have been 1870. The 21st century is an entirely different world.
Most of the jobs that triggered actual labor reform in the 19th and 20th centuries just don't exist any more. The factories of the 1800's wouldn't survive a single day of business today because modern, largely automated, equipment would leave them sitting in the dust when it came to profitability.
In this case you list, same thing. There aren't sewing machinists like that now, that stuff is largely automated. Very few automotive manufacturers use people to do the sewing and when they do it's a highly skilled artisan job that involves hand stitching for luxury vehicles, not machines.
I do not deny unions reformed working conditions, most of it however was many, many, decades ago in a world that doesn't begin to resemble today's world.
Fact is, unions are dying in the western world. Union membership is free-falling. Who needs a union when you have a cell phone and organizations like OSHA here in the US that you can directly file safety violations to for investigation.
Unions made changes with striking. Striking is no longer a useful tool and no longer needed.
If you strike now, especially if you aren't in a union, you should be fired. For each of those people that strikes over this, there's probably 50 people that would ecstatically take their job in the city they are in.
Striking isn't going to do jack for discrimination/harassment. We don't live in the 20th century anymore. Documenting and reporting incidents will bring change, not walking out of work like a child throwing a temper tantrum.
You are lucky that someone else risked their jobs to put you in a position where you can spout this. If it weren't for unions and strikes, the common worker would have been much worse off.
You realize most of the labor unions that made meaningful reform were in factories yes? Factories that simply would not exist today because most of the work has been replaced with automation and equipment orders of magnitudes more efficient, yes?
Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".
Absolutely, employees should have the right to get better conditions at work. The problem is that there are massive disagreements in this case whether e.g. quota-based diversity hiring, and penalising workers for mere accusations of harassment, rather than substantial, and credible proof of harassment, are better work conditions, or the opposite thereof.
No. If you are still a crybaby, you should not pursue the profession. Weak and entitled people have no position at the top. Your competitor will otherwise eliminate you.
If you cannot solve the issue a bit of harassment without creating a drama, you cannot rise to the top where the world is even more cruel. Emotionally weak people have no place. If you cannot give favors or something when other are, no one will pick you.
If someone is the CEO of a multi billion crop, and have 10 people on who could become the manager or VP, 5 are men 5 are women with everything being equal, who do they give the seat? The one who gives them a favor.
> Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".
Doesn't the employer have the right to fire them for any reason in any "at will job"?
Why is being in line your first argument? I can understand somewhat if you're used to that in a country that does not respect humans as individuals, but nobody with a grasp of 1st world liberty should agree with it. You treat people as you wish to be treated. If those people are wrong, say good reasons why, but when you jump to an argument similiar to fascism it sounds like you're projecting your issues.
They'd be firing people for exercising their democratic right to protest and displaying solidarity for coworkers past, present and future.
Google aren't exactly a bastion of humanistic values, but I'm sure they'd be loath to dispose of a significant part of their workforce while looking fascistic and authoritarian in the process.
Typically that kind of evidence doesn't just make itself available due to the nature of the crime. If employees themselves are orchestrating protests, they probably have information we don't. You can't just start dropping names and slandering.
No, if it's one person leveling an accusation and there is no corroborating evidence (either physical or more witnesses), it's not enough. Otherwise it would be within anyone's power to have people fired or put away for rape without evidence.
Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor.
Honestly, I can imagine that being less troublesome even outside of attempting to be fair an equitable regardless of race / gender / sexual orientation.
My point is - there's zero guarantee that a "logical" algorithm would be "fair". Just like if you trained an ML algorithm on the database of people currently in American prisons it would most likely conclude that black=more likely to be a criminal, which is obviously an unfair assumption to make.
The problem is that it can turn out men are more aggressive when it comes to getting counter offers which has a much larger impact than anything else. If that's the case then what do you propose, ban people from negotiating and lose everyone good enough to get competing offers?
In short; yes. I think it's fair to say that google aren't going to run out of engineers if they implemented a completely rigid payment structure. Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry and secondly they attract the best engineers by reputation more than anything else.
> Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor.
You mean, the kind of thing basically every public sector employer has, where alleged gender pay gap is never an issue?
Yes, of course that’s easy to do.
OTOH, private sector employers like to have personal productivity be a factor, but don't have good objective metrics for that, so they let subjective assessment play a major role, such that the biases of managers become a substantial factor in setting pay.
I think this is part of the perception that machine learning is magical. This problem is as difficult as getting an accurate IQ.
If you’re going to base pay- something really serious- on such an algorithm, it must be open and reproducible.
Google is really good at this and that it doesn’t exist in a useful way is a signal that there is no algorithm. It would be extremely valuable to companies to know this like a credit score.
I think when there are natural incentives, resources, and open problem it means that we don’t really have resources or doesn’t exist and needs more time and innovation to solve the problem.
That's why I specifically excluded deep learning stuff. I was imagining something much simpler only marginally more complex than title base salary + x * years experience + y * years at google. Where the factors are initially chosen to get close to the current state.
Write a contrarian opinion - get publicly fired zero tolerance style, coerce for sex using the force of your position - get quietly paid $90M.
Looks like Google thinks that the former is much worse than the latter. Either that, or they apply different sexual harassment policies for rank-and-file employees and executives.
Google needs to stand firm against these policies. Making the "chief diversity officer" answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations to the board of directors is an absurd demand. They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage.
> They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage.
I'd like to know how you envision this happening. Like, China calls Google's CDO and says "We'd love to see more Chinese hires, we might consider sending you a welcome-back invitation"?
Botnets of fake social media accounts for starters. You think if they are currently manipulating political elections they won't ever try and use similar tactics to tank a company?
China: "Google give us user data!"
Google: "No way!"
China: "PLA Unit 61398, hurt the Google! Make accusations! Lots of accusations! Many many many accusations!"
----
China: "State media, run articles about how the evil uncivilized Google makes a hostile environment for female/gay/green cardigan wearing employees!"
---
China: "Movie studios, make this romantic comedy but be sure to vilify a company identical to Google!"
---
China: "People's Worker, scour the internet for any controversial quote from any corporate member of Google, great, yes, that! PLA Unit 61398, have an account 'discover' this quote and use the botnet to get it trending!"
I support this but I also wish other companies would be under the same scrutiny as Google. I've been at companies where women not only were paid much much less but also more or less objects that were openly treated as such.
There would be management meetings about rating the sexiest coworkers and who could lay down the most (obviously not a single woman in whole of management and they had no chance of moving even close to it in their career). All sanctioned from the highest level and not a single person would dare to question it. I was not actively participating but also part of the problem since I didn't say anything.
This was not even done in secret and more or less public knowledge. The communication from management had a lot of sexist jokes and pictures and anyone questioning it "had no humor".
Mind you, this was not a tech company per say and I believe the further you get from tech the worse it gets. I think it's sad that the huge problem affecting 99% of women gets reduced to a single company which probably is one of the few in the world that even has a code of conduct against this stuff.
"there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. ...why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website."
there is an interesting tendency that many psychologists pointed out: in many professions for some reason psychopaths tend to get to the top an stay there. Specifically CEOs tend to be people with most psychopathic traits:
All of their demands seem pretty reasonable. It looks like the big gripe is that basically there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. To draw an analogy, this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.
> there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office.
There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.
Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace, and that includes protection from sexual abuse.
A lot stuff that counts as sexual harassment in the work place is not a crime.
You don't sue people who perpetrate crimes, you prosecute them. You're asking the victims of sexual harassment to persuade police to investigate and prosecutors to prosecute, and we know that they won't because we know they already don't.
You're also saying that no action can be taken without meeting the very high criminal burden of proof - that this thing happened beyond all reasonable doubt. That's going to leave harassers free to continue.
Maybe you just meant that sexual harassment is unlawful and employees have an existing remedy through civil courts, but this would be pisspoor management. If your company employs people who reduce productivity of others in the workforce by sexually harassing them it's in the organisation's best interest to manage those people so they stop the harassment or leave the company.
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I think you're being too rigid. There are situations where one employee forces themselves on another at the christmas party. In that situation obviously the right call is to report it to the police and to have a disciplinary process internally for gross misconduct. But there's a million smaller examples of harassment that just need to be tackled by the organization. For example, if a man repeatedly makes comments about a woman's appearance, there needs to be a process where the woman can report that, be heard and have the issue addressed - it may be as simple as the employee's boss pulling the into a room and saying "stop being a creep". Not everything is solved by law suits.
However, obviously if things do escalate, access to the law should be guaranteed and the binding arbitration should clearly be dropped.
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Prosecution is one method of deterring thieves from robbing my store blind. I have also tried locked doors, security cameras and not leaving the store unattended.
I like your argument that it is cheaper to just let people rob me blind and then burn time and energy catching them, prosecuting time, and hoping for a conviction as a deterrent.
With any luck using your system crime will magically disappear on it’s own.
I am going to put my fingers in my ears now and make noises and ignore the worlds problems. It is certainly easier to not take responsibility. Good advice.
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> There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,
Except that, under the law, the company’s response (including the absence or inadequacy of any process) to certain situations is part of what determines if they are sexual harassment.
> sexual harassment is a crime
No, it's not, and if it were the process would not be for employees to sue, because crimes are prosecuted exclusively by the government in the U.S. legal system.
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forced arbitration has been the bane of combatting anything legally. it basically is now used to completely remove any employee or consumer ability to sue. This is used for literally everything. Every employer does this now, every software product, every hardware.
I don't understand how this is even acceptable.
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I'm not trying to troll you, but it's a voluntary "denial of justice". No one compels or coerces people to seek employment there. They apply, go through several interviews, and then voluntarily agree to whatever it is they agree to before day #1 of work. As long as people are willing to work there under XYZ conditions, people will continue to work there under XYZ conditions.
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>employees should be able to sue, that's the process,
See eh. Does money fix the issue "biotic 1 told biotic 2 'nice lady bits why don't you sit on my man bits' now they want 2 amounts of monies" how does money fix the issue? How does money repair the damage? Is money a Men in Black neuralizer? Does it selectively delete the negative emotions from the event? Is it fair that shareholders in the case of Google, or the owner in a small business where some rogue employee decided he wanted to play grabass without the owner's consent or even knowledge, to have to shell out large sums of money that won't actually undo the damage?
I don't think suing is a good solution here. If you are denied a job and have EVIDENCE it was based on your gender or sexual orientation, then suing somewhat makes sense however aside from lost wages there isn't much that would be productive here. If you sued for the actual job then everyone knows you as that person that got the job because a court of law said you get it and not necessarily because your skill and history make you the best candidate.
>sexual harassment is a crime,
Somewhat. Quid Pro Quo is a crime, not rectifying a hostile work environment (not reassigning the alleged offender, not investigating and terminating the alleged offender etc) is a crime. But biotic 1 telling biotic 2 that they have nice reproductive bits and bobs, is not an actual crime (perhaps it should be?)
>they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.
Money /= justice. If someone demands sexual favors, or regularly says sexually explicit things to you, a check doesn't give you justice, especially if it's from the employer.
Take Google as an example. Google is owned, in part, by likely hundreds of millions of people (index funds, direct stock purchase, etc). Google has a board, it has various rungs of corporate management, then more localized management. Chances are none of those people have said "hey Don Draper, make sure you grab Megan's ass today when she comes in to dictate for you today and tell her what you want to do to her on your desk" and while Google does need to do something to employees that think such behavior is acceptable, and carry it out, why should they have to cut a check for hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars, for something a rogue employee did?
Perhaps there should be some sort of penalty/tax that companies, when sufficient evidence is found to support a claim, they have to pay to an NGO that deals with rights equality and safe workspaces? Money doesn't undo the situation so I don't think the victim should be seeking large sums in damages, companies (unless supporting the behavior) shouldn't be penalized for large sums of money because of an employee that has free agency, however if an incident is reasonably provable perhaps they should have to cut a check, based on some sort of scale, say 100k$ for a company like Google to a regularly audited group that provides resources for victims to reach out to for both any required treatment and for help dealing with any potential workplace discrimination as a result of their claim.
Maybe they should unionize? They could then elect representatives and have a seat at the table with management.
> Maybe they should unionize? They could then elect representatives and have a seat at the table with management.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_VL4gqrCHc&t=392
But if they did that, they be giving up control over their careers and the right to deal with their problems with their supervisors, one on one. /s
They definitely have a process in place (they advertise their process a lot during orientation) but the demands I saw explicitly say they aren't good enough.
> this would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable, so why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website.
Because, Google is a company that builds products. I am interested in their products and in the fact that their products work, not much in the behaviour of the people building them- given the fact that they are located in a supposedly civilized country anyway, where serious misconducts should be prosecuted by law. The internal squabbles and complaints of the company are of very little relevance for their users, as it should be.
It's worth noting that one of their demands is dropping the binding arbitration that essentially forces employees to forgo their right to legal recourse for civil matters. Not every instance of unacceptable behaviour is a criminal matter.
If you're not interested in the internal workings of Google, then why bother? There are people who are, and they are the ones driving this conversation. Let them spend their energy and effort figuring it out while you enjoy the result of their work.
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The salient difference is that outages are measurable.
In contrast, "harassment" is an extremely controversial subject that nobody agrees upon, for example, in some legislations, calling a person with XY chromosomes "him" rather than "her" is considered a hate crime, a dramatic change from labelling conventions of just a few years ago. Indeed what constitutes harassment is a major point of contention between different parts of the political spectrum, and a core part of the culture wars.
In addition, harassment is easily lied about. Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
If I was a Google competitor, and Machiavellian in moral outlook, I'd feed those flames to weaken Google, and hope that nobody did it to my organisation.
Divide et Impera!
And only a few short decades ago I could fire someone for being gay, or forbid my wife from opening a bank account. And it was a mere century ago that women literally couldn't vote.
I don't see why the fact that social mores change invalidates the social standard we have today.
Furthermore, why do you folk always jump straight to the "b..b..but false harassment!" argument? All it does is demonstrate that you actually don't care at all about the original problem.
Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
So why are you willing to throw 90-98% of harassed women to the sharks, in order to protect 2-10% of accused men? Plus there's the whole strawman that allegations are always believed. Of course there should be fact checking. In fact, even in the #metoo era, men almost never face repercussions for false allegations (and often not for real ones.)
Your statement that unfounded harassment claims do not lead to repercussions is flat out false. There is no company that would not discipline someone for bringing a harassment claim that was demonstrated to be false.
In short: this argument demonstrates that what you really want to do is only to preserve the status quo and do in fact not give a shit about a major problem in our culture.
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> what downsides are there for false harassment claims
There are major downsides to making true harassment claims: you get denounced as a liar and a slut. This is the main reason why so many claims went unreported, and the #metoo movement is one of solidarity which makes it possible for people to actually report true claims without ruining their career. Actually deliberately making a false harassment claim is potentially career suicide.
(Jacob Wohl thought it would be easy to bribe people into making false harassment claims, and this blew up in his face: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/robert-mue... )
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> Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
Many people who get harassed opt to change teams, companies, or professions rather than actually pursue a formal complaint against their harasser. Perhaps they are mistaken (I don't think so), but they seem to believe that there are real downsides to filing even true harassment claims, to the extent that the aforementioned career upheavals seem easier.
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Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? You think all harassment claims should be automatically dismissed as false instead?
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You do a chromosomal analysis on everyone before you use a gendered pronoun to describe them? Because you can't tell what their chromosomes are just by appearance.
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"A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously"
Can anyone help me understand the rationale behind the anonymous part, with respect to due process and how the framework for anonymous accusations can be abused by bad actors?
Edit- I have a question about the anonymous nature of reporting to HR, with respect to due process for the accuser and accused, maybe some of you can shed light on how you've seen it work in your experiences.
I've heard stories in the past, with details I'm not privy to, where coworkers were let go based on anonymous HR sexual misconduct allegations. I really hope that due process is involved for the accused and not just a "guilty until proven innocent" situation. What I mean is that evidence by the accuser is judged along the lines of probable cause that our police force uses to arrest or judges use to prosecute e.g. inappropriate advances caught on tape, unwanted email/text/chat messages in line with allegations, eye witness statements corroborated by fellow co-worker, etc.
There are a lot of introverted, socially awkward personality types in technical roles (on the spectrum?) with traits that can be perceived incorrectly, even negatively by neurotypical individuals and I fear the power of anonymous, "guilty until proven innocent" allegations standard that HR might start using to police the accused and trample on their right to due process since employment is at-will and you can be terminated for any reason, at any time, but in this situation you are ineligible for unemployment if it's recorded as misconduct.
Maybe they're referencing something like Callisto (YC Nonprofit W18):
"Founders will be able to use Callisto to securely store the identities of perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault. These identities will be encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view. If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on their options for coming forward, including the option to share information with other victims of the same perpetrator." Source: https://blog.ycombinator.com/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on...
It's hard to imagine something more illegal than this when it comes to personal data protection.
Thank you for offering this. This is far more helpful than a truly anonymous system.
> Can anyone help me understand the rationale behind the anonymous part…
In general, 21% of workers who report misconduct suffer from retribution (source: National Business Ethics Survey).
An estimated 75% of workplace harassment victims experience retaliation when they speak up (source: US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission government agency).
That 75% number is not from the EEOC study. It is something the EEOC study cited. The original is from:
Lilia M. Cortina & Vicki J. Magley, Raising Voice, Risking Retaliation: Events Following Interpersonal Mistreatment in the Workplace, 8:4 J. OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH PSYCHOL. 247, 255 (2003).
I can't make sense of these numbers. Can you report misconduct without speaking up? Or is there a lot of retaliation that doesn't induce any suffering, or...?
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I have trouble imagining truly complete anonymity being helpful. This is an invitation to abuse the system. Abuse could result from personal conflicts and office politics, or even people who wish to undermine the system itself by entering bad data.
The point of an anonymous system is to encourage people to speak up without a first-mover problem, because in every case of ongoing sexual harassment there is never just 1 victim - it's always a pattern of behavior.
Someone receiving exactly 1 report is probably not a problem. Someone who accumulates reports continuously as team members change probably is.
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Total anonymity for accusers is indeed a concerning policy, but partial anonymity (i.e. from one's own team) isn't unreasonable. It ought to be possible to properly investigate misconduct allegations while minimizing the potential for gossip and recriminations.
I think that due process should include the right to face your accuser.
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> I really hope that due process is involved
Outside of civil service jobs, in the US there are no “due process” rights in employment decisions; what process is due is a matter of employment contract (which for non-unionized rank-and-file, and even non-executive management, employees usually means no process is due, because of “at-will” employment.)
Given that, and given that employers are legally bound to prevent retribution against reporters, anonymity for reporters is strongly incentivized.
Due process would certainly be nice when it comes to letting people go, but introducing it makes it much more difficult for a company to move quickly and adjust to market conditions. If a company faces lawsuits every time it makes any decison, it’ll be far more difficult to make any decison and will make that company far less dynamic. Sometimes that’s worth it, but there are cons to introducing due process too.
It's probably meant to alleviate fear of retribution.
I guess you missed the part of the question referring to due process
Maybe they mean privately, not anonymously?
"What about the men?" is a bingo square not an argument.
Until you replace 'men' with any other sex, race, gender, etc. Calling valid, if perhaps overblown concerns is just 'bingo squares' maybe you need to consider your own bias.
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This worry is unfounded.
Harassment is rarely the case of a single incident. Instead, people who harass other usually have a long history of harassing lots of people.
An anonymous complaint could be used not to determine guilt, but instead to trigger an investigation.
And if the person is guilty, then the investigation will almost certainly have a very easy time finding somebody, likely many, who will go on record with their incident of harassment.
And if they are innocent? That investigation will come with an impact to the accused. A serious one.
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So the first demand is "A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequality"
I'd like to see the actual data behind this constant inequality claim. I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men, I've also heard that the data is never accurate because it doesn't compare the same jobs. I want to see some actual numbers so people can figure out where the issue actually lies.
Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism, had an article about this http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/ , which had more hard-facts than anyone else I've seen, but the conclusion was that most of the claims made by the wage gap supporters are cherrypicked and false. Although, if Google specifically has a problem with it, I'd definitely be willing to listen. If they are protecting people like Rubin, it does seem plausible that other things could be going on.
Working link: http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/
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I feel if anyone has enough employees with similar roles, at similar levels to pull together this kind of data, it's a big company like Google
> Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism
Although Christina Hoff Sommers does have a noticeable bias/axe to grind since she's pretty anti-feminism and considers there to be a "war against boys". Also she works for the AEI which is a conservative think tank.
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Time magazine is absolutely a right-of-center publication. Here’s a nice piece they published last week calling for more nationalism in the US: http://amp.timeinc.net/time/5431089/trump-white-nationalism-...
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UK Office for National Statistics publish good data for the UK.
My impression (based on 2016 stats [0]) is that as most C-suiters are men, and they can get 100s or 1000s of times the money that ordinary employees get, that in the UK this likely accounts for most of the effect that's not accounted for by career breaks (childcare, for example). To reiterate, this is my _impression_ when looking at the data.
Men who work part-time get lower wages; no one cares, it seems.
0 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
1 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
As an example, company of 100, 50 women. Boss is paid £500k, everyone else gets UK median £35k. Whichever sex the boss is they now show a 26% gender pay gap.
If the boss gets 3x the median, that's a 4% gap.
I'd like to see analysis which looks at same qualified people and charts their progression with attempts to understand why their wage changed and whether those changes have any discernible sex bias.
Men seem to fall across a wider distribution (both higher and lower paid), as appears in other characteristics.
Here's one example of the ONS data: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
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Men under 30 earn much less than women under 30. No one cares either.
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"Another stunning but perhaps unsurprising finding was that 63% of the time, men were offered higher salaries than women for the same role at the same company. The report found that companies were offering women between 4% and a whopping 45% less starting pay for the same job. "
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/2018/04/04/by-the-num...
Report referenced: https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report
At a casual glance, the 4-45% statistic also applies in the inverse direction, so it's fairly meaningless when discussing gender inequality.
The more appropriate statistic would be that "on average, women are offered 4% less" which seems to have been produced by integrating an estimation of the probability density, and looking at the non-symmetry of the distribution. It seems most of that difference is concentrated within 10% on the mean.
So (roughly) if you're a man, you had a 50% chance of being offered 4% more than a woman, and maybe a 30% chance of being offered 4% less than a woman.
> to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
What if the pay is equal for like-for-like jobs, but for the higher paying jobs one sex is vastly underrepresented? Not saying it is, just that discrimination and bias often runs deeper than some simple comparison.
What if one gender has a higher variance than another gender? Just don't say that to Google or you may get fired.
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Then that would be the point of the data. At the moment people are acting on claims of differences in pay across a number of sectors and roles and it's way too vague to pinpoint what the actual issue is.
If the data found an actual issue like this, the it would need to be addressed, but at the moment simply claiming that women are paid less doesn't offer any solution apart from paying women an extra 20% across every single job.
What if one sex is statistcally proven to work more overtime than another sex?
What if one sex takes more paternal leave than another so the other sex spends more time in the office improving skills?
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Then that's not the same problem at all and it needs to be addressed as such.
>I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men,...
It's not just arguing for higher salaries but being trusted to follow through when "the going gets tough".
Display of confidence is hard to distinguish from actual capability. Confidence is often mistaken for "can-do-spirit" or "positive attitude" and therefore always favored.
Women are more honest than man about their abilities in the workplace. They are more honest about previous experience in a job interview, and more reluctant to "fake it until they make it":
Excessive confidence displayed by men regarding their ability to follow through even their chances of success are equal to women, leads later to the assumption that the man knew what they were doing (and knew in advance that they will succeed) and hence men are seen as having been in full control the whole time. But actually it's hindsihgt-bias.
>I want to see some actual numbers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517651...
you mean more honest people who don't fake it should be paid more? What about meek men then
A lot of replies to ChrisRR's comment go out to the global level, but Google can't fix that. The interesting question is "what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs" at Google. That's what they can address. Does it exist?
If it does exist, that's a very serious problem, because if Google can't and/or hasn't attained pay parity that would satisfy the people writing this, then pack it in; there's no way it's ever going to happen. Google is just about the best possible environment for parity to happen in, with an almost uniform culture that would support it from top to bottom and enough money that it can pursue almost any parity policy it wants without a serious problem, and a long time frame in which this all should have been true.
If there is still systematic, unsatisfactory bias at Google, what hope is there for these ideas in the rest of the world?
One of the issues is that Google is rather reactive in its compensation - e.g. it only provides high-compensation offers to those who obtain competing offers. This essentially ensures that the highest offers go to those who prioritize being able to get high compensation. In my experience, a lot of software engineers tend to prioritize things other than compensation, and don't really care to try to extract higher compensation if they get to do work they find meaningful or work for a company they think is good. And for whatever reason, a much higher proportion of my male peers have prioritized high compensation compared to my female peers.
I suspect that if Google wanted to remove pay differences between men and women, they would need to start making strong offers to all their candidates - not just those who obtain competing offers and try to negotiate.
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That's what they're asking for too: more data.
If any company has the data, it's Google. If they had a good story to tell, I think they'd be sharing that data.
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__If__ it's really a problem, the only way to actually fix this would be to remove any kind of negotation, because two people with identical CVs might settle on vastly different salaries and it's highly unlikely that the employer is going to overcompensate them. However, I've heard people argue that a right to ask for a lower pay is also an advantage in labour market because it's yet another axis of competitiveness.
How would you remove any kind of negotiation though? Say that it's illegal for an applicant to say "You have to pay me X or I won't accept the offer"? Or for an employee to say "Give me a raise of Y, or I'm leaving"? What if they already have an offer from a different company for more money? Can they tell their current employer? And if they do, can the employer offer to increase their wage to keep them? And if they can't, can they offer the employee a "new" higher paid position so it technically isn't a raise/negotiation?
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It actually says "inequity" which has a different meaning than 'inequality'.
It actually says "inequity" which has a different meaning than 'inequality'.
Src:
https://mobile.twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/105780420389...
great, now we have to figure out if the authors know the difference between inequality and inequity.
The most rational, fact-based reporting I've seen on the wage gap comes from Freakonomics. They have several episodes [0], [1] that dive into the current research.
The TLDR, if I remember correctly, is: Yes, there is a wage gap between genders. It is smaller than most headlines claim, but real. Lots of factors go into this, but it is probably a mix of: companies _can_ pay women less, so they will, and women tend to value some things greater than salary. However, there is no smoking gun we can point to as a definitive root cause.
[0] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
[1] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about...
Why should spending your time and effort arguing for higher salary entitle you to a higher salary? Surely, just the opposite.
So I've come to develop a nuanced opinion on this.
I used to fully believe what you said, on the grounds that willingness and ability to negotiate have no bearing on how valuable the employee will be (at least for engineering jobs - it could be different for something like sales where dealmaking ability actually matters).
However, one counterpoint I've come to realize is that if an employee doesn't value higher salary that much, it's a waste of money to pay them more. Thus, by only paying higher salaries that put time and effort into arguing for higher salaries, you make sure to only spend that money on the employees that will actually value all the extra money you're throwing at them.
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> I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
There really aren't any differences. Just do a simple mental exercise.
Imagine if the gender gap is real. Male programmers demand $100K while female programmers demand $77K for the same exact quality of work. What would this mean? It would mean all tech companies would only hire females.
For comparison look at seasonal farm work. Imagine if migrant workers deman $7.70 per hour while citizens demand $10 per hour for the same quality of work. What do you think the composition of the labor foce on farms would be? I'd imagine it would be mostly migrants. Right?
If the wage gap truly existed, clever feminists would start companies exclusively composed of women and would be putting everyone out of business because they have a 23% profit margin built in.
Sigh.. I've seen this argument so many times I have to wonder if the people peddling it has ever sat on a hiring panel.
The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value. Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech, where compensation packages are routinely so large and supported by large VC funds that those of us who do hire can see those salary differences as negligible. And, even if I were sensitive to those differences, I would not hesitate to pay 30-50k in order to get the right person for the role.
The question here is: are we doing a good job of finding the right person for the role? That is why the Google women are demanding "opportunity equity." Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
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People keep saying this, but it assumes that companies are completely rational actors in hiring, unaffected by human bias. Which is clearly bullshit. For one thing, you can simply prove this by considering the existence of discrimination in the other direction - surely, if companies were hell bent on optimizing their hiring for optimal return on investment, we wouldn't have some of the most profitable companies in the world engaging in the kinds of hiring practices that, e.g., Arne Wilberg is suing about?
See also Dan Luu's discussion of this argument: https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/
Why make assumptions? I'm an engineer and I make decisions based on data and information presented to me, and try to avoid guess work and assumptions as much as possible.
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Why would you pay people who walk out the same as those who don’t?
Combining "pay inequality" and "opportunity inequality" makes it more difficult to discuss the issue.
We know already that "pay inequality" is fictitious at this point.
So by elimination, that leaves opportunity - however as anyone who has ever worked in a large company knows, it is very difficult, except in a very regimented corporate culture like the military, to have equivalent opportunity spread around evenly. I somehow think Google has a corporate culture that is not very regimented.
How are you defining "pay inequality" while claiming it isn't real?
If I interpret "pay inequality" as "the average pay for women ages 20-60 is less than it is for men 20-60 in the US in 2018" then I've seen data suggesting it is real.
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Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this. Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts. Having a private entity that has a vested interest in the events seem...unwise.
Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead?
Like, if it's someone who said something slightly inappropriate/gray area to another and just needs a stern talking to, sure. Have a process/HR deal with it. But so many occurrences are so much worse than that...
Not the same situation at all, but similar reasoning: I once had a colleague corner me in the office because of a disagreement in a meeting earlier in the day, where they threatened to "meet me outside to settle things". I mentioned it to my boss/HR/etc, and sure enough, they told me to just talk it out with them and were generally useless. I ended up having to quit. In hindsight, it wasn't my boss I needed to talk to, it was the freagin cops. (Not, of course, cops are frequently useless too, and that's a separate problem...but if we have to change the world somewhere, maybe pushing it all on private entities isn't the best thing to do in this case).
The police are not primarily there to solve civil disputes and disagreements. There is a pretty wide area where things are not illegal and possible to convict, but you would probably want to do something.
The police’s mindset (at least the ones I’ve interacted with) is one of three things:
1. Deterrance from crimes to be committed (doesn’t apply here)
2. Achieve convictions for crimes (would also not apply in your situation)
3. Deploy force to break up ongoing altercations (also doesn’t apply)
2 is interesting. Talk about a specific alleged crime with a police officer and they will not be discussing whether it was a crime or not much, nor if the person committed it, they will be discussing whether it can be proven in a court of law or not that a criminal act was committed by a specific person, beyond reasonable doubt. It is a purely pragmatic operation of “how can I provide proof that something occurred that is against this list of rules”.
The police are in no way useless, most people just misunderstand what their job is. Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.
In your specific situation it sucked, but from a police point of view what would they do? Is there a crime? Maybe. Would they be able to present a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred - most assuredly not. Would a conviction, however unlikely, achieve something meaningful? Nope, the guy would get a fine at most, but would still be working with you.
On the other hand, an employer is fully within their right to fire someone for a situation like that. They do not have the same burden of proof, they can refer to previous records of incidents, and the consequences would better match what you’d want (removal of the hostile environment).
>Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.
This shouldn't be the job of HR either.
What you describe is what civil courts are for. From societal perspective, it is their exact purpose: to dispense justice and prevent revenge. If they don't work, they need to be made to work, instead of relegating this function to random people with random training and random incentives following random policies that are ultimately designed to safeguard companies, not employees.
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The question the parent comment made was not if the law allows an employer to fire someone for a situation like that, but if we want employers to investigate and prosecute crime when the police drop a case. Is that the role that employers should have in society, yes or no?
> They do not have the same burden of proof
That is a key point. At the same time we want the legal system to have a high burden of proof, but then when someone goes free we want someone else with lower burden of proof to step in and let the hammer fall on the guilty. If we changed the law and gave the police the power to fire someone without having a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt (this which we are asking the HR departments to do), then I would personally trust the police to do a better job with less bias than a HR department of a large company. It would also create a better political environment where the justice system would be discuses without extrajudicial punishment being used openly as an accepted alternative when we find the legal system lacking.
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The point of a company investigation is to investigate violations of company policies; law enforcement doesn't get involved in determining if company policies were violated, it's simply not in their purview.
If during an investigation they find criminal behavior they can (and usually should) turn over their evidence to law enforcement and let them do their job, which is investigating violations of criminal law.
Violations of company policies and violations of criminal law have huge differences in burden of proof.
People sometimes confuse the two and say things like "they should have never been punished at work because they weren't convicted in a court of law." But that's not exactly how it works, the burden of proof for work punishment is simply a large magnitude lower than legal punishment.
Most workplace harassment is not criminal. Most violations of company policy aren't criminal.
In these situations, companies aren't sued for harassment, but for having a hostile work environment; allowing harassment to persist (e.g. by retaining harassing employees). If an employer has effective mechanisms to deal with cases of harassment, then it shouldn't be liable.
Even if a harasser was prosecuted or sued successfully, if the company retained them, that would create a hostile work environment for the harassee, and make the employer liable.
There's also the case of quid pro quo harassment, where a superior makes someone's career progression tied to the harassment, in which case it may be harder to distinguish the company's liability from the harasser. But even in such cases, an effective system to report such behaviour can mitigate the company's liability. In such cases, claims often surround retaliation for reporting harassment (e.g. employee transferred, demoted or fired in response to a harassment report.)
I'm surprised at how many other responses here are saying "because the police don't have the resources to investigate" and similar.
This reply gets to the more fundamental point: companies are doing a different thing than police investigations or even civil suits over harassment. They can't undo the harassment, they can't punish the harasser (beyond termination with cause), or force the harasser to compensate their victim.
Rather, the goal is to create a workplace where employees are not harassed. This is good for both legal reasons (hostile work environment suits) and obvious moral (harassment is bad) and practical (people will quit) reasons.
If a coworker mocked or punched me every day at work, it might or might not produce a complaint to the police or a civil suit against the coworker. But it would certainly be something that made my employment untenable and a reasonable employer would react to that. People are in general not demanding that employers act in place of the police, they're demanding that they act to stop sex-related hostility at least as thoroughly as they would act against other hostility. It's the purview of the company because it's a completely different task than what courts or police would do.
> ...why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this...Having a private entity that has a vested interest in the events seem...unwise.
All other issues aside: the company should want to make an environment where good people want to work and can work without "distractions" (using the word very broadly and generically, not dismissing people's important concerns!!!). So it's in their self interest to deal with them well.
This line of argument isn't that different from the GP's analogy to site uptime.
> Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this.
Because sexual harassment is a form of illegal sex-based employment discrimination by the company. Individual unwelcome acts that don't rise to that level aren't sexual harassment (legally), but may be warning signs that if not corrected rise to the level of an offense by the company.
> Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts.
And for those, the company’s responsibility as regards harassment does not negate the role of law enforcement as regards the criminal violation. The police are not pushed aside in favor or private action. In addition, harassment events, whether or not a crime is involved, can be directly reported to federal, or usually also state (who will dual-file with the federal EEOC), anti-discrimination authorities; the employer process mostly if a mechanism to catch conduct before it reaches the level of discrimination and to manage the company's exposure when it did reach that level.
> Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead?
That's not an “instead” or “better”, because the options aren't mutually exclusive; where a criminal accusation is involved,law enforcement retains their usual role in investigating and prosecuting crimes, including compulsory process which can be directed at parties with relevant information, including employers.
The reason is that the bar is simply too low. Or rather, the bar for taking legal action is so high that it would not in a million years create an acceptable work environment at Google.
Think about it from another perspective. If Google wants to cherry-pick the brightest and best educated people from society, they're going to have to meet a higher standard themselves. Would you want that standard encoded in law for the rest of the state? If so, how would you, in a democracy, impose a standard crafted by a subset of the cultural elite for themselves on the rest of the state or the country? Changing cultural norms drag the law behind them, not the other way around. The legal standard will lag behind for a long time, and Google's employees are part of the force that will be leading it forward.
Sadly the police don’t have the resources to go “investigate” every time someone said let’s settle this outside. Where do you drawn the line for stern talking and police investigation. Your idea sounds good in theory but in practice doesn’t work.
>Sadly
*Thankfully
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> I ended up having to quit.
wow. that sounds like a really bad situation. i mean, did you quit because of an ongoing threat of violence from this individual? the company should have offered other remedies before it came to that.
As you point out, the cops are often useless too. Now imagine you call the cops on your boss and they show up to talk with him/her. How might your boss be treating you after this?
The same is true for HR; that's why there is additional rles around retaliation.
This entire protest would have generally been a non-event if the company hadn't sent out a memo telling managers to accommodate people who want to participate, ensure there is no retaliation or penalty, be flexible with schedules, etc., effectively advertising the event to everyone in the process. So then it looks like employees are being unsupportive of their co-workers if they don't participate. Which sort of shuffles the understanding of a "walk out" to be a far cry from the sort of thing that happened in the union days, and puts this firmly in the Just Google Things category, where even protesting the company becomes an activity that the company officially supports.
One view is that management knows that and did it anyway.
Perhaps they felt it was worth letting it be a bigger event and taking a PR hit if in return what they get is that the employees feel that the company supports them.
Good Machiavellian way to oust competing managers as well. Personally, that would be a horrible thing to do to another person, but then again, we know at least some of these managers kept silent during this whole fiasco; we're not talking about saints here.
Oh. So they're not all going to be fired.
Very disappointed with mainstream media coverage here.
The walkout is being headlined as a complaint against harassment. It's not. It's a complaint against the company (rightly so) valuing its corporate reputation in the world in which we live vs standing behind the victims as if they were family, and going medieval (eg excommunication) on the harassers.
Certainly there's a balance and perhaps google is on the wrong side of it, but don't kid yourself, google isn't going to take your insignificant side of it when the other side is a $100MM liability to an executive.
That a walkout like this only happens at Google and not, say, microsoft, where surely sexual harassment also occurs and is also brushed aside, is telling about the employee culture at Google. It's sad that the media coverage is so trivial and can't look deeper.
And to the organizers: you should have recruited tech workers at all FAANG to support this walkout. You missed a moment.
> That a walkout like this only happens at Google and not, say, microsoft, where surely sexual harassment also occurs and is also brushed aside, is telling about the employee culture at Google.
There's a much simpler explanation than you are implying. The trigger for Googlers is the story from last week in the NYT about a former Google exec.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
Yes of course. I recognize that, but I don't understand your argument. Are you saying that from the cause of mainstream media (NYT) exposure of this payment, to the effect of a walkout, there is no aspect of Google-specific culture that makes this a unique Google occurrence? This was primed by previous walkouts such as the protest against the Trump immigrant travel ban nearly 2 years ago, and previous Google-internal petitions against things such as G+ real names (which people actually quit over) and the now infamous Damore memo.
Your comment seemingly argues that the story is just a simple one and I'm a fool (rhetorically) for thinking there's anything deeper.
I submit, again, that there is a deep story here that was missed.
How do you know sexual harassment at Microsoft is brushed aside? (I haven't heard reports either way.)
I don't know it for fact, but let's not be naive.
The last reported (2017) makeup of $MSFT in the US was 75% male, overall, and 81% for tech workers. 63000 employees in the US and 131k worldwide.
Do you really think that in an org that size with a demographic overwhelmingly skewed male, that there isn't sexual harassment going on? And lots of it unreported and lots of it dismissed?
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>is telling about the employee culture at Google.
How so? They have risked nothing by participating because Google isn't a high school where you break a rule by going outside.
How is this handled at other biggies in the valley - Apple, Microsoft etc? Do they also have the arbitration thing?
There was an awesome site on the front page yesterday, that compared career levels in the companies. Someone should make one comparing these companies on things like - treatment of women/minorities, age discrimination, side project policies, access to upper management etc
I have never understood why employees accept the restrictive clauses which assign ownership for any side projects to the employer. I am not a lawyer, but this has always struck me as amounting to a type of serfdom. If you are seen as a 24/7 unit of the company, and anything at all that you creatively produce can be claimed by the company, then your working capacity and creative capacity is essentially owned entirely by the company while you are employed there. You are not being paid just for your time and the work product you produce during that time. Rather you are literally selling an aspect of yourself. Does that sound reasonable at all? (of course, California has some protections against this. but that's just one state)
I would really like to see people rallying against many more things like this.
Because the rent is due and I have no money?
Maybe for a lot of the higher end HN devs out there, they can walk and be reasonably certain they'll pick up work in under a month. Personally, I've known a LOT of people (some in software too) that need 6-9 months to find any work in their field. Yeah, Uber and pizza delivery make some ends meet, but for a 'real' job with a 401k and benefits, it can take a LONG time. And at the end of that timeline, they can offer you really anything and you know you have to take that offer.
Anecdata: I'm in biotech and got offered 55k on the Peninsula at the end of about 2 months of interviewing for that particular company. They were the only people that would interview me over ~9 months of applying (caveat: biotech isn't doing well right now). The minimum wage of my 'stop-gap' auto mechanic job in a particular city is 60k. The biotech company would not budge at all.
They tolerate it because it’s largely unenforceable.
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Microsoft used to require arbitration but got rid of it earlier this year after the deserved outcry. Apple still has it AFAIK.
a recent change in California law: Governor Brown recently signed Senate Bill 820 which prohibits secret settlements and non-disclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases.
in other words, if a private settlement is agreed to, the victim's name may be kept confidential, but not the perpetrator’s.
This is one (imperfect) source of info I've used during my search for potential new employers: https://www.teamblind.com/surveys/2017
There is no will from upper management to handle these issues appropriately, which is part of why Google as an organization is in its current state. Google has been able to paper over issues with copious amounts of money thus far, but that is breaking down as time goes on.
I think it is more than that: there is a will from upper management to actively prevent such issues from being handled appropriately.
> Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later.
> Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
> H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...
This is pretty explosive. I had no idea of this. Is there an alternate source to the claims?
another interesting excerpt from that article:
If you read Larry and Sergey’s original paper that they wrote at Stanford, where they talked about creating a search engine, they specifically said that advertising was wrong and bad and it would inherently corrupt the search engine if you sold advertising.
holy shit. i hadn't seen that before. HR seems to have been completely captured by the forces it was supposed to resist.
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Another article:
We’re the Organizers of the Google Walkout. Here Are Our Demands
https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-exp...
I'd wager that the walkout was over the $2,000,000 a month paid to Rubin.
Also, people claimed that the payment was to keep Rubin from working with competitors... But some others say that it was to buy his silence over what others might have been doing...
To clarify I'm not disagreeing with the walk out.
I do wonder if any reporting process at a company can ever really be trusted to have the employee's interests in mind. HR, legal, and etc all are there to protect the company. They're not there for your standard employee.
Again, not disagreeing with having a process, I just wonder if a process handled by the typical parties really can be trusted. I've never felt that HR, legal, or any of those departments are there FOR me. Rather they are there to prevent any problems the company may have, and that is not likely to be in my interests if I were to make a complaint about something.
They aren't there for you but for the company. They are really only there for you in any way that protects the company. Having a neutral third party would be one idea. It would have to be funded by employee and employer contributions though. Outside of that you have the EEOC in the US that has some authority.
I don't understand this at all.
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told staff he supports their right to take the action.
"I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel," he said in an all-staff email. "I feel it as well, and I am fully committed to making progress on an issue that has persisted for far too long in our society… and, yes, here at Google, too."
If someone at the top is sincerely interested in resolving this satisfactorily, why the walk-out? I don't get it.
Are they saying they don't really believe him?
Right words are one thing (and welcome). Right actions are another thing (also welcome).
disclosure: Google employee
Yes. He can put actions behind his words, or his reply is just hot air.
Plus, by endorsing it as a Google-sanctioned event, he's effectively taking power away from those walking out from disrupting normal business as usual (e.g., allowing managers to reschedule meetings).
source/disclosure: am google employee, didn't walk though
The way it's organized, it's also kind of a social event. Lot of folks didn't just walk out, but went to B40 to specifically walk out there.
They probably saw it as an opportunity to meet others and share thoughts on the topic. Find solidarity and get support
To make this the top priority for the day. You may as well ask why people negotiate anything if everyone has such good intentions.
Words are cheap.
and so are walkouts
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So is grandstanding by people with well paid, cushy as hell jobs who are happy to point fingers.
My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you." What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc?
Because all the policy in the world can't per se fix a shitty culture. Shitty culture is as shitty culture does and it is perpetuated by every single individual in the organization and their individual choices.
I'm not impressed with people who point fingers. They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.
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Sounds like pre-unionizing to me. Wonder where this will lead to...
Hopefully to more people in tech joining unions. Plenty of other well-paid professions are unionised (eg. doctors). For full disclosure I've been a member of Prospect, a non-affiliated union in the UK, for a few years. One of the advantages is free access to legal advice about employment issues.
Most tech offices (google included) already give all employees free access to legal resources. It's called an EAP (Employee Assistance Program)
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The unionisation of doctors in America is one of the reasons that the American healthcare system is so bad though. Maybe we shouldn't encourage any industry to increase its inefficiency by unionizing, and instead just offer a set of universal regulations that keep workers (both skilled and unskilled alike) from getting shafted?
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It takes, weeks to get a sysadmin up to scratch. You can't get scabs in if you go on strike. If the employees turn off google.com for 5 minutes, management will talk.
How is this different from other industries? How long does it take an aerospace machinist to get up to speed? 10 years ago, the strike at Boeing lasted 8 weeks and cost an estimated $100M per day.
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The power of the tech workforce is massive. It's like the dockworkers of the modern era. I really hope we start to see this realised.
Agreed. Unionization would solve a lot of the problems. It might create others but overall I think it would be a good idea.
Let's hope to swelling membership in the Tech Worker's Coalition for one.
This is the most under rated comment in this thread.
Don't know what the Google management is thinking at this point in time. But I'm damn sure, unless you are making it rain hundreds of millions in dollars, and you are a part of these pre-unionizing exercises- You are very likely getting marked up as a trouble maker, and may be already a part of purge lists.
This is also a small industry. You don't want your name to smeared as a person who comes with a high trouble/contribution ratio. Nobody wants to hire people to do their jobs, and get employees running their part time political projects with their fellow colleagues in paid office time, on office issues.
There are also a huge range legal landmines you are likely to step over even without active knowledge that you are.
> This is also a small industry. You don't want your name to smeared as a person who comes with a high trouble/contribution ratio.
What you are suggesting is called "blacklisting." You may be interested to learn that in many states it is illegal behavior itself. See https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-....
> Nobody wants to hire people to do their jobs, and get employees running their part time political projects with their fellow colleagues in paid office time, on office issues.
Union organizing is not a "part time political project," it is a legally protected right. See https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i....
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> You are very likely getting marked up as a trouble maker, and may be already a part of purge lists.
This is also extremely illegal in the EU. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36242312
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You're underestimating how many people are involved in these walkouts. Well over a thousand participated in the NYC office one, for example.
And even if this were true, some things are worth taking risks over.
So the press reaction was as expected. Wall Street Journal was all over the strikers, with sexist and "snowflake" comments, demands the protestors be fired. Even comparing them to the coal miners. Remember the great coal-miner strikes? The company running the mines had the idea that they are above the law, that state law doesn't apply to their workers, that the company creates and observes their own laws on their ground with their own workers. The miners demanded that the state law be obeyed. Very similar to todays arbitration clauses, the very first point in the google workers demand. Or todays social media censorship, violating most countries constitutions.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/quick-thoughts-googl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
The DeVaul guy from Division X actually made sexual advances towards someone being interviewed for a job where he'd have been the manager. Has called it "an error in judgement".
I'm sorry, DeVaul, but that's not "an error in judgement", that is pure harassment, and I'd pay $2000 to watch you try your "moves" on someone who'd knock your teeth in for that.
https://twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/1057804203895283712
^ Might be a better source article.
this is why we are all going to be replaced by machines.
Interesting to contrast this story with Damore's claims of left-wing bias and overemphasis on diversity and inclusion. It's uncomfortable exercise to put myself in the shoes of a young woman considering applying to Google; the prospect of unwanted advances from higher-ups and suspicions from the occasional peer of being hired for my gender might be enough to put me off completely.
Easily enough explained by Google talking a lot and not actually doing anything until something blows up.
On the other hand, your chances of being hired would be higher...
The interesting thing is that the #MeToo movement naturally targeted a lot of liberals, because almost everyone in Hollywood is liberal. The right also has some issues with harassment, etc. but the left is far from immune to having it and in some ways has more trouble. I'm not sure why that is, but the "free love" and unrestrained sexual expression type culture of the left might have something to do with it.
It's called white knighting, you see it a lot with feminist men who are often the abusers.
> overemphasis on diversity and inclusion.
Perhaps Google is overcompensating for allowing sexual harassment.
"A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity"?
I'm confused here. Are they demanding that preferential hiring and advancement practices and programs for women and certain minorities be stopped?
no, they want that next to forced diversity, women and minorities to receive a 20% bonus to their pay
As you can see, the divide is becoming greater between ones who “believe” and ones who “don’t”, and the audience is massively imposing a bias here in this thread. We’ve lost our ability to listen to each other, and it’s sad that it happened on a topic which is still very easy to judge using science.
Most reasonable people on HN stay out of these threads. You're not going to change anyone's mind at this point.
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>a topic which is still very easy to judge using science
So how would you do that?
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By science do you mean like phrenology?
Allow people to defend their or their relatives honour without punishment and most of the harrasment will be ni more.
These people should be fired, not because they want equal pay but because they refuse to do the job they were hired to do.
Different genders deserve equal pay, people of different races deserve equal pay, people with various disabilities deserve equal pay.
HOWEVER, you want to walk out of work? You should be terminated. If I walked out of work, I would be fired. If I organized several people to walk out of work with me, we would be fired. This is the case at my current job and at every single job I've ever had.
You don't change things by striking, in my book this is effectively corporate terrorism "hey we have demands, if you don't meet them we aren't working!" If someone strikes, you can never trust that employee again. Ever. You can not count on that employee in any situation because they've demonstrated that they will happily stop working when it serves their desires.
What you do is you make the issue publicly known, you do it in a positive way, you do it in a polite way. You ask for change and if change won't be given, you find an employer that will even if that means moving or starting your own business.
I'm all for equal rights, I'm all for equal pay, I'm not for people holding businesses hostage by refusing to do the job they were paid to do.
>corporate terrorism
Unless they're bombing buildings the word you're looking for is extortion, not terrorism.
Striking has changed a good amount of business's in the history of the U.S . public outcry and worker cooperation is the halmark of workers rights.
The reason protest is required is because the company will not change without a better force. 'asking nicely' doesn't go anywhere when the bottom line is money and image.
Employee collaboration for workers rights does not automatically mean they're against the company. They're against parts of it's operations, but still have wants to do their work. That's, again, been all apart of the last 100 years of workers rights. You should perhaps look into how companies can possibly stay afloat even when there's unions. Not that I agree with unions typically, but if there can be no trust and workers just dont care about the company then it should all fail.
>Unless they're bombing buildings the word you're looking for is extortion, not terrorism.
You don't have to blow up a building to be a terrorist. You don't have to carry out an act of violence, or even suggest one, to be a terrorist. Organizing a walk out is intimidation,
ter·ror·ism /ˈterəˌrizəm/ noun the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
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Do you realize that all the things that make your current job bearable like 8 hour workday, weekends and safe work environment are only possible because people in the past had the spine to strike and demand better conditions for themselves and their fellow workers?
People repeat this line ad nauseum but i find it hard to believe work conditions would not improve over time if not for the presence of unions, look at highly unionised countries vs less unionised countries and compare the quality of life / workplace for an example.
while i'm sure unions were involved i doubt they were the only reason we started reducing work hours and improving work conditions, here's a good history of the 40 hour work week: (https://www.businessinsider.com.au/history-of-the-40-hour-wo...)
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Your line of thinking is alien to people in the UK and Europe.
> You don't change things by striking
In the UK, the 1970 Equal Pay Act was triggered by the Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968.
>In the UK, the 1970 Equal Pay Act was triggered by the Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968.
And 1970 might as well have been 1870. The 21st century is an entirely different world.
Most of the jobs that triggered actual labor reform in the 19th and 20th centuries just don't exist any more. The factories of the 1800's wouldn't survive a single day of business today because modern, largely automated, equipment would leave them sitting in the dust when it came to profitability.
In this case you list, same thing. There aren't sewing machinists like that now, that stuff is largely automated. Very few automotive manufacturers use people to do the sewing and when they do it's a highly skilled artisan job that involves hand stitching for luxury vehicles, not machines.
I do not deny unions reformed working conditions, most of it however was many, many, decades ago in a world that doesn't begin to resemble today's world.
Fact is, unions are dying in the western world. Union membership is free-falling. Who needs a union when you have a cell phone and organizations like OSHA here in the US that you can directly file safety violations to for investigation.
Unions made changes with striking. Striking is no longer a useful tool and no longer needed.
If you strike now, especially if you aren't in a union, you should be fired. For each of those people that strikes over this, there's probably 50 people that would ecstatically take their job in the city they are in.
Striking isn't going to do jack for discrimination/harassment. We don't live in the 20th century anymore. Documenting and reporting incidents will bring change, not walking out of work like a child throwing a temper tantrum.
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You are lucky that someone else risked their jobs to put you in a position where you can spout this. If it weren't for unions and strikes, the common worker would have been much worse off.
You realize most of the labor unions that made meaningful reform were in factories yes? Factories that simply would not exist today because most of the work has been replaced with automation and equipment orders of magnitudes more efficient, yes?
> You don't change things by striking,
Traditionally union action including strikes has been the only way to make changes in big employers.
I've never worked for a unionized company yet hey, I've been treated fairly.
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Google should just fire all of the employee protesters. This is getting out of hand.
There are plenty of other people who are in the line and wont make a drama for the company.
Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".
Absolutely, employees should have the right to get better conditions at work. The problem is that there are massive disagreements in this case whether e.g. quota-based diversity hiring, and penalising workers for mere accusations of harassment, rather than substantial, and credible proof of harassment, are better work conditions, or the opposite thereof.
No. If you are still a crybaby, you should not pursue the profession. Weak and entitled people have no position at the top. Your competitor will otherwise eliminate you.
If you cannot solve the issue a bit of harassment without creating a drama, you cannot rise to the top where the world is even more cruel. Emotionally weak people have no place. If you cannot give favors or something when other are, no one will pick you.
If someone is the CEO of a multi billion crop, and have 10 people on who could become the manager or VP, 5 are men 5 are women with everything being equal, who do they give the seat? The one who gives them a favor.
> Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".
Doesn't the employer have the right to fire them for any reason in any "at will job"?
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Well, that's a way of being remembered forever while also having other employees quit in solidarity.
(Edit into this dying thread: reports of the walkout in Google Dublin: https://twitter.com/evelyn_orourke/status/105795687016449228... )
Not to mention users and customers.
Some people really are unwilling to see the value of self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Why is being in line your first argument? I can understand somewhat if you're used to that in a country that does not respect humans as individuals, but nobody with a grasp of 1st world liberty should agree with it. You treat people as you wish to be treated. If those people are wrong, say good reasons why, but when you jump to an argument similiar to fascism it sounds like you're projecting your issues.
I'm pretty sure firing employees because they are involved in a "concerted activity" to improve their working conditions violates US law.
It would be legal to "replace" them with new employees, but that's not practical (or warranted) for a one-day walkout.
They'd be firing people for exercising their democratic right to protest and displaying solidarity for coworkers past, present and future.
Google aren't exactly a bastion of humanistic values, but I'm sure they'd be loath to dispose of a significant part of their workforce while looking fascistic and authoritarian in the process.
What can you do.
Parent was edited from “Let's see evidence of misconduct before rushing to judgment.”
It was reported. Penalty of differing opinion.
But why is it flagged? That is a reasonable comment.
Also, what's with the rampant brigading here. Every reasonable comment here seems to get immediately and automatically downvoted.
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Typically that kind of evidence doesn't just make itself available due to the nature of the crime. If employees themselves are orchestrating protests, they probably have information we don't. You can't just start dropping names and slandering.
A big mistake to believe those protestors are acting rationally. I'm not saying they are not, but assuming that they are is a mistake.
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How can we see the evidence if the victims are silenced by their contract (forced arbitration)?
Do the eyewitness accounts of your female peers and friends not count as evidence?
No, if it's one person leveling an accusation and there is no corroborating evidence (either physical or more witnesses), it's not enough. Otherwise it would be within anyone's power to have people fired or put away for rape without evidence.
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That's how we got the Salem witch trials and why mere accusations aren't usually enough.
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Eyewitness evidence is the least reliable kind of evidence there is.
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How do these protestors know the facts of the matter better than the people who investigated?
If you haven't noticed humans are yet to value facts over emotions.
The facts are not in dispute by the people who investigated. They found the allegation credible.
> The facts are not in dispute by the people who investigated
That is not established.
> They found the allegation credible.
“Credible” is not “true”; it is quite possible to find both a claim and it's negation to be credible.
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...and then they went back in, got a free massage, some lovely free gourmet food, and back to work.
Should they ask for the immediate termination of all past abusers and how high they should they go in the company?
Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor.
Honestly, I can imagine that being less troublesome even outside of attempting to be fair an equitable regardless of race / gender / sexual orientation.
Blind hiring can have the exact opposite effect:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
My point is - there's zero guarantee that a "logical" algorithm would be "fair". Just like if you trained an ML algorithm on the database of people currently in American prisons it would most likely conclude that black=more likely to be a criminal, which is obviously an unfair assumption to make.
doesn't that mean that women have already artificially high wages? Genuinely curios
The problem is that it can turn out men are more aggressive when it comes to getting counter offers which has a much larger impact than anything else. If that's the case then what do you propose, ban people from negotiating and lose everyone good enough to get competing offers?
In short; yes. I think it's fair to say that google aren't going to run out of engineers if they implemented a completely rigid payment structure. Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry and secondly they attract the best engineers by reputation more than anything else.
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How do you quantify experience? It cannot be empirically measured in all the ways that it matters.
Do you think even the most basic measure, say number of years, is any worse than the current process?
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> Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor.
You mean, the kind of thing basically every public sector employer has, where alleged gender pay gap is never an issue?
Yes, of course that’s easy to do.
OTOH, private sector employers like to have personal productivity be a factor, but don't have good objective metrics for that, so they let subjective assessment play a major role, such that the biases of managers become a substantial factor in setting pay.
I think this is part of the perception that machine learning is magical. This problem is as difficult as getting an accurate IQ.
If you’re going to base pay- something really serious- on such an algorithm, it must be open and reproducible.
Google is really good at this and that it doesn’t exist in a useful way is a signal that there is no algorithm. It would be extremely valuable to companies to know this like a credit score.
I think when there are natural incentives, resources, and open problem it means that we don’t really have resources or doesn’t exist and needs more time and innovation to solve the problem.
That's why I specifically excluded deep learning stuff. I was imagining something much simpler only marginally more complex than title base salary + x * years experience + y * years at google. Where the factors are initially chosen to get close to the current state.
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Amazon used software to try and hire people without discrimination, instead they unintentionally discriminated against women https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-built-ai-to-hire-peop...
Write a contrarian opinion - get publicly fired zero tolerance style, coerce for sex using the force of your position - get quietly paid $90M.
Looks like Google thinks that the former is much worse than the latter. Either that, or they apply different sexual harassment policies for rank-and-file employees and executives.
The first (Damore) was an engineer. The second (Rubin) was an executive.
To Google, executive >> engineer hence the outrage by rank and file.
Don’t act like most of those rank and file support Damore in any way. There was a mob abrewing within that very group right before he was fired.
Google needs to stand firm against these policies. Making the "chief diversity officer" answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations to the board of directors is an absurd demand. They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage.
> They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage.
I'd like to know how you envision this happening. Like, China calls Google's CDO and says "We'd love to see more Chinese hires, we might consider sending you a welcome-back invitation"?
>I'd like to know how you envision this happening
Botnets of fake social media accounts for starters. You think if they are currently manipulating political elections they won't ever try and use similar tactics to tank a company?
China: "Google give us user data!"
Google: "No way!"
China: "PLA Unit 61398, hurt the Google! Make accusations! Lots of accusations! Many many many accusations!"
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China: "State media, run articles about how the evil uncivilized Google makes a hostile environment for female/gay/green cardigan wearing employees!"
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China: "Movie studios, make this romantic comedy but be sure to vilify a company identical to Google!"
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China: "People's Worker, scour the internet for any controversial quote from any corporate member of Google, great, yes, that! PLA Unit 61398, have an account 'discover' this quote and use the botnet to get it trending!"
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I support this but I also wish other companies would be under the same scrutiny as Google. I've been at companies where women not only were paid much much less but also more or less objects that were openly treated as such.
There would be management meetings about rating the sexiest coworkers and who could lay down the most (obviously not a single woman in whole of management and they had no chance of moving even close to it in their career). All sanctioned from the highest level and not a single person would dare to question it. I was not actively participating but also part of the problem since I didn't say anything.
This was not even done in secret and more or less public knowledge. The communication from management had a lot of sexist jokes and pictures and anyone questioning it "had no humor".
Mind you, this was not a tech company per say and I believe the further you get from tech the worse it gets. I think it's sad that the huge problem affecting 99% of women gets reduced to a single company which probably is one of the few in the world that even has a code of conduct against this stuff.
"there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. ...why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website."
there is an interesting tendency that many psychologists pointed out: in many professions for some reason psychopaths tend to get to the top an stay there. Specifically CEOs tend to be people with most psychopathic traits:
https://www.businessinsider.com/professions-with-the-most-ps...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Saints-Killers-S...
Now consider for a second, if you have psychopaths with money running the companies - why would they be interested in well being of their employees?
I am not saying every CEO is a psycho, but many are (as research shows):
https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis...