https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-wa...
So to clarify, both of the female Google employees who lead/organized the protests have now left because they say they faced retaliation. That looks very bad for Google.
> In an email to colleagues, Whittaker said her Google manager told her to "abandon [her] work on AI ethics" and blocked a request to transfer internally.
From the aforelinked Guardian article:
> In the letters, Stapleton said that two months after the walkout, she was demoted and “told to go on medical leave” despite not being sick. The demotion was reversed after she hired a lawyer, she said.
>In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be “changed dramatically.” Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
>Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. “My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I’m not sick,” Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer, the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion. “While my work has been restored, the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day,” she wrote.
Both are now gone.
Of the walkout organizers alone, four out of seven have now left.
Retaliation or not, there would be some change. So any change, not sure I buy is/isn't retaliation.
> Google soon nixed the board.
> Whittaker said her Google manager told her to "abandon [her] work on AI ethics" and blocked a request to transfer internally.
If anything it sounded like they disagreed with the company's business direction. Leaders listened, made some changes.
They still disagreed...this time with leadership not feeling a change was necessary.
they then quit as they disagreed with the company's direction.
Regardless of how, as long as what your protesting the right things everything else doesn’t matter?
The only trace I can find of that group/team/whatever is that she leads^Wled it. What does it do?
> in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon” her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.
So side gigs need approval, and if there's a conflict of interest (such as: preventing your employer from building something that looks similar to your side gig) you'll be asked which side you're on. Sounds pretty normal to me.
Instead demanding a forced transfer.
Could be wrong here, but that's how it was presented internally by Meredith herself.
That's retaliation.
It said no such thing. manager asked her to focus on her day to day job. Her ai ethics work was not aligned to the job she was hired for.
Organising protests takes management and leadership skill. Regardless of retaliation, multiple people, predominantly women, who publicly demonstrated this skill are opting not to put it to use at Google.
When competent people leave, it’s worth asking why and what further effect those departures might have.
What's surprising is that now these reprisals are trying to push that back to make Google more like other normal companies and organizational structures.
If Google fired someone for speaking up against an incident of harassment that would be a huge story in the media.
The rhetoric in the article actually implies that this was an existing thing that only became a problem once she started protesting about google's generous severance package to an employee who was found to be sexually harassing co workers, and the lack of resources to the victims of sexual assault/harassment at the google workplace.
EDIT: To clarify, Google's reaction isn't the disqualifier, it's that the employee's action of staging a political walkout isn't legally protected since it conflicts with contractual duties and isn't a typical case of utilizing good faith channels for whistleblowing illegal activity. That type of channel is typically what's protected from retaliation. Not to mention working with someone accused of a crime isn't illegal. Association is a freedom and lobbying to change it is purely political.
And if you listen to what they're actually saying, they're alleging retaliation, not merely disagreeing with the direction the company is going on.
I also don’t like being told I support sexual harassment because I don’t think highly politicized work environments (note I said work environment not society) are a healthy environment. That’s a dirty tactic.
She probably was given a nice comp package just so she would leave and STFU about internals.
Unions. SV needs unionizing to give employees stronger voices.
Corporations do not care about gender, it's all about power and control, and they do not care about the gender of those who they have to dismantle to keep it.
The Canadian Documentary "The Corporation" is a good example of how corporations behave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw
Dividing Media narratives help to keep people from realizing who's their common enemy.
Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_pay_for_equal_work
That's the thing about retaliation. Unless the retaliator is really bad at this, it is always going to look gray-area, because you're shading available policy to reach a desired outcome.
You want to do it that way precisely because it plays on some peoples' preconceptions, completely aside from not breaking black-letter law.
A lot of folks will see a enviable company, assume the Powers that Be must get most of it right, and assume the person they already knew was a troublemaker (they were contradicting their betters, weren't they?) was also bad at their job.
(IANAL.) Gender discrimination, and sexual harassment in the workplace are against the law in California. I believe the law also protects against retaliation for claims of violations of these things. This is hardly "bringing politics to work".
And saying corporations do not care about gender is just wrong. Because corporations protect people who harass women. I'm rather baffled by all of the outrage going on because the article mentioned the person was a woman.
I appreciate the economic arguments you are hinting at, but they are not incompatible with the notion that sexism was at play. We know, factually, that executives Google broke the law and then we're paid large sums of money to leave.
You cannot easily disentangle these power dynamics. Nor should you, because corporations are just large groups of people with special legal permissions from the government. The idea that interpersonal conflict would go away and such an environment seems to contradict the facts and hand.
So far, we've seen quite a bit of the former and very little of the latter. Google's work culture seems to have become politically divisive to a rather surprising extent - if this is what "entitlement" boils down to, surely a more "normal" structure (though I'd settle for just a marginal increase in professionalism, similar to what we see in other "grassroots-led" organizations) can't be all that bad!
I have no problem with the claim in the face of evidence. I just don't see any here.
The victories are small and recent. The exposure of executive sexism, The push back against military contractors, and the recent pride petitions are modest victories at best, and they've come with a heavy price.
Still, many other major tech companies lack a list at all, despite every indication of facing similar issues.
are you asking for evidence that there was high profile examples of sexism at Google? That essentially went unpunished? That's all the matter public record.
Are you asking for evidence that the people who have been forced out helped organize the women's march?
Violence on the other hand also has no place in the work environment. Which is why harassment of all forms isn’t tolerated.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/01/google-ka...
[1] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/04/google-employees-call-on-...
[2] https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/04/leftist-googlers-kay-cole...
[3] https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/05/google-drops-heritage-fou...
[4] https://www.newstarget.com/2019-04-06-leaked-emails-suggest-...
It's true that it is not normal for employees to be able to speak against their company (or express strong opinions publicly).
Yet Google has always prided itself on being different in having outspoken employees.
This is why it looks bad for Google when it's just business as usual everywhere else.
Yes, there is: women stepped forward.
> Have male leaders of similar protests been treated better?
Men either haven't experienced the same, or they are keeping their mouth shut.
In both scenarios, women should be supported. If men step forward, so should they. They didn't so far (or at least, not in large enough numbers for such a protest to be reported), so based on the data we have available to us, the problem affects women way more than it affects men.
This has nothing to do with transparency and speaking out against your employer. The issue is not that they have a voice, it’s how they choose to use it.
On the other hand, if you're organizing a walkout, you're probably pretty fed up already. How far are you from quitting at that point? Probably not very. If you organize the walkout and nothing changes, even if there is zero retaliation, do you quit?
At a minimum, this probably indicates that there was not enough improvement, fast enough, at Google.
Note well: I am not saying that there was not retaliation. I am saying that this, by itself, does not prove retaliation.
Nobody is entitled to be paid to do what they choose. If you want to do something for your own personal reasons, do it off the clock.
Whether the organizers were covered by the NLRA is another matter; those with direct reports are likely excluded by the 'supervisors' exemption, which has been expanded over the years to cover pretty much anyone in a managerial role. For those who are covered, Google's actions could absolutely meet the legal definition of retaliation.
As an aside, the legal standards for what constitutes 'retaliation' are not the only ones that matter. They may manage to avoid a lawsuit, but they will suffer harm to their reputation regardless. I, for one, could not care less whether the law allows them to retaliate against the protest organizers. To me, this is just one in a long line of reasons why I scratched Google off my "short list" of potential employers.
So it doesn't seem like a "small minority" unless you know a hell of a lot of people.
I'm sure there is another side to this story. Nobody has an infinite amount of time or effort. If you're spending your time organizing protests rather than doing the job you're actually paid to do, you shouldn't be surprised that your coworkers and manager would be upset that they have to pick up the slack and try to replace you.
But to answer your question, yes. If enough women were affected that they felt compelled to step out, and men didn't, that's clearly a gender bias issue.
How dissatisfied? I'd guess pretty bad. Dissatisfied to the point that you're willing to do something that has some possibility of costing you your job. So they want to stay, and yet they're not that far from being fed up enough to leave. (Or so it seems to me, someone who is not at all in that situation...)
I agree with your aside as well. Public Relations are always in play.
These people, regardless of what they thought they were doing, weren't blowing the whistle on anything because they failed to highlight any illegal behaviour.
Remember that Google is the company that initiated a massive review of pay to try and uncover this supposedly widespread sexist underpaying of women. It discovered it was underpaying men and had to adjust men's pay upwards.
Likewise their big walkout was triggered by the fact that Andy Rubin was fired, but also paid money, after a woman he was in a consensual relationship with discovered he was cheating and made an (unverifiable) accusation against him. But this isn't Google tolerating sexual harassment in any legal sense of the term.
So what makes you think the law has anything to do with their protests?
One way to fill the blank is to assume in good faith what the person is saying. And if you do, Google does look bad IMHO. Of course, I've seen people leave and badmouth companies when its their own fault for causing the situation. Its only people who are involved in the situation who can confirm all the specifics. As outsiders we can only assign some kind of probability here.
In the specific case of Meredith Whittaker, she's joining "AI Now Institute" a social policy institute affiliated with NYU.
Didn't Google just discover that they actually paid men less than women? Oopsie.
This part of Google culture is long dead. It used to exist, but it doesn't anymore. There's no transparency anymore, and large factor of ending it was strategic leaks by employees, who hoped to achieved their goals by getting media attention. The entitlement is also gone in the era of cost-cutting by ruthless Ruth. The company you're thinking about entered senescence somewhere around 2012-2013 and died in 2015-2016.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...
The main criticism of equal compensation is listed in the Wikipedia page in the first sentences under the title Criticism: the methodology by which the gap is measured.
For example, a common argument is that together with a pay gap there is a similar gap in worked hours, about 1hr on average for full time employees in the same workplace for the same job. Then people tend to dip into discussions about gender roles and bit by bit move the discussion further into the realm of politics.
Equal compensation is thus politics. Not because people disagree on the principle, nor because we don't have a data, but because people will disagree on the interpretation and then jump into political topics in order to support their interpretation.
And others are entitled not to pay you to do things they don't want you to do.
Nobody is forced to do things they don't want.
Nobody is forced to pay money to others.
But employment is an agreement between people. The employer agrees to pay, and the other agrees to follow directions of the employer (within the limits of their specific agreement).
If you go to a restaurant and order a burger, and they instead bring you a cake, you'd be well within your rights to refuse payment and complain. The fact that the chef wanted to make a cake is irrelevant, because the chef is being paid by you. (In contrast, if you were to go to friend's house, and he gave you a cake, you could not complain because you're not paying for it.)
I worked for the White House as Press Secretary and got an email from Trump drunkenly claiming he ran someone over.
I worked as senior advisor to the Shadow Health Secretary in 2020 and helped leak internal communiques covering numerous malpractice suites.
Blah blah blah. It's all words until you show evidence. It's hypocritical to demand evidence from someone else without showing your own. If you don't have any to show, then that's your problem, not theirs.
When did you leave? Because you know, people switch jobs, and her role at Google at the time of leaving was leading the Open Research Institute, which you might imagine has nothing to do with drive.
But no I'm not going to share confidential information just because you don't believe me.
Her manager apparently disagreed. I can easily imagine that the AI bias work could have been a 20% project which she spent way more than 20% time on, and now the manager decided that enough is enough.
If you were up-front about this, you'd say "harassment and discrimination are political issues that shouldn't be organized around". Of course, that argument wouldn't carry well here. But it'd be more intellectually honest.
I feel pretty comfortable with how representative the people I talk to are of Google product security and vulnerability research, for whatever that's worth to you.
I get the impression we'd agree on that point much more today than we did then.
I guess my biggest surprise was that there wasn't a second, more severe "walkout" or "strike" after Google declined to respond adequately. The Walkout made news but it wasn't nearly a strong enough action to really say it was all they could do. Most of the people who walked out went right back to their desks after work and kept working.
When I got back I was on the performance improvement plan, told any attempt to transfer would be blocked, and so I just stopped showing up. Never heard from them again. (I was there for 6 years and my last performance review was "Superb". Probably not the type of person they want to drive away. But it was time.)
This is a silly thread, but for what it’s worth, I have not talked to anyone at Google in a security role about this issue.
I’ll be more blunt. I am highly skeptical that anyone in security there quit their job over the protests. But, I have no reason to doubt that your sample supports the protests.
Do keep in mind though that most people who don’t support them are keenly aware that going near any activism topic, especially at Google, is personal and professional jeopardy. Many people think they can’t even debate these things without running the risk of being on the receiving end of the scorched earth tactics employed by activists. And I’m not even talking about conservatives (of whom I know very few in tech, if any).
It’s not that they think it’s great that Rubin got dumptrucks of money, but the mentality is that if you take any issue with any of the demands or tactics, or the frequency with which they dominate the focus of employees trying to do their work, you’re suddenly a misogynistic transphobic racist enemy of the people.
I just fixed a bug involving a typo in a regular expression. Do you think that was political? If so, I'd like to see how. If not, I'd like to know how to tell what is political apart from what is not political.
Protesting against something doesn't magically turn you into a superior person that is exempt from mundane things like being fired or being disliked.
Ignoring one aspect over the other won't lead to lasting solutions. Since more men are leaders than women (men are naturally inclined to be leaders), the percentage of men enriching themselves at the expense of women is accordingly.
Google Protest has also been going on for many things that aren't related to gender, for example AI and their China project.
Then again, a surprisingly large number of Google employees don’t seem to understand that they work for an advertising company.