Google staff walk out over women's treatment | Hacker News Reader

Google staff walk out over women's treatment

bbc.co.uk

383 pointsoneeyedpigeon435 comments

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.

> Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace

Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California. You have the right to quit anytime, not much else.

> Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California.

They aren't covered by special, workplace-specific laws; there are, however generally-applicable civil laws that apply to them.

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.

It's odd how on one hand, the consensus here is that the quality of the work environment is very important to the productivity and the wellbeing of employees. And on the other hand, people argue that this type of misconduct should not be punished unless it's literally illegal.

I think a lot of the hesitation is people fear kangaroo courts and termination without due process due to false accusations or exaggerations. Much as the extra legal stuff that goes on in college.

In other words, people here are more concerned with a phenomenon that is measurably rare relative to the downright epidemic that people are seeking to counteract. I think that says a lot about one's values.

Whether a phenomenon is rare has a lot to do with how common it is. People getting shafted by kangaroo courts is rare when kangaroo courts are rare. What happens when you make kangaroo courts common?

In my experience "cry-bullying" is not as rare as you make it out to be.

How rare false accusations are is completely irrelevant. If the goal is justice, then due process is non-negotiable. Period.

The goal is not justice. The goal is to limit the damage done by misbehaving employees, as cheap as possible.

No justice, no peace

What you have is an epidemic of powerful employees abusing their position to take advantage of junior employees.

What seems to be suggested to fight it are tools that would be extremely effective against other junior employees (even if the allegations are untrue), but only middlingly effective against the real problem of powerful employees.

That will understandably lead to push back from junior employees who fear abuse. Offer solutions which would primarily work against powerful employees and would be ineffective against other junior employees and I think there would be much more support.

> 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.

That’s actually not true, it varies by state, but many allow private criminal prosecutions to occur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution

Many? From the list I count six where the wording implies that a prosecution can occur without permission from the executive branch.

I wonder how often this actually happens? In any case this is interesting.

“Many” seems unwarranted (especially when it comes to prosecution of a charge rather than entry of a complaint or pursuit of an indictment), but, yes, that was an overgeneralization. But, it is by far the dominant rule.

it's a different country, but ... in India in 2013 some types of sexual harassment were deemed criminal and punishable by time in prison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_(Amendment)_Act,_...

In the US, many types of sexual harassment are also crimes, but sexual harassment, per se, is a particular civil wrong, not a crime.

yes. i understand.

also: some types of sexual harassment that are not crimes in the US are crimes in India.

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.

Comparing sexual assault to a store robbery in a tone of sarcasm is at best a poor judgement call.

I agree that assaulters need to take responsibility for their actions. However, when they don't, the law needs to be there to protect the victims.

Only if the law can prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime happened, which is often difficult and why it makes sense to metaphorically secure the premises through an internal HR process as well.

I think it is poor judgment to create an organization that does nothing to secure its people from sexual harassment. Not sure why you would disagree but if that is what you intended I do not want to work for you.

Youre being incredibly unfair: That's not at all what I said, and your post I responded to also made no claim along these lines. You're misrepresenting my and your past statements.

What we were talking about is ending forced arbitration (the "process" referred to by the person you responded to) so that the law can be used to protect victims. That doesn't mean protections at work suddenly go away. It also doesn't mean suddenly employers will let sexual harassment run rampant either. It's not a binary either-or choice at all. So why not all protections.

The post I replied to implied that the criminal justice system is the only solution to these problems:

"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,"

Notwithstanding the unbelievable confusion of law in that post is a whole other conversation.

I argued that companies should also have a plan in place to prevent sexual harassment at work by using an analogy to robbery, also a crime, that we use preventative measures to stop despite there being a criminal system punishing robbery.

Your response was claiming I was expressing poor judgment for arguing that companies are responsible for not creating environments rife for sexual harassment.

"Comparing sexual assault to a store robbery in a tone of sarcasm is at best a poor judgement call."

I don't agree. I think it's a reasonable demonstration of the absurdity of the position I'm replying to.

I don't know what else you wrote, but that's what I replied to.

Re-read his post: people should be able to sue in lieu of forced arbitration, they're never advocating for "create an environment for sexual assaults". Nowhere and no one is arguing for creating an environment for sexual assaults in this thread. The reason it seems like an absurdity is because you're setting it up to be one when no one is advocating it, which is the definition of a strawman.

Sorry, but if you're still going to stick on this point then this'll be the last thing I say on the matter.

This is a frustrating thread. Everyone is trying to outdo themselves. Feels like the Peoples front of Judea

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.

Because it doesn't actually do that. Only in the u.s. do people believe that suing over anything and everything is an efficient or effective mechanism of justice

"Sue it out" is probably the least effective possible conflict resolution mechanism along almost any axis.

The underlying goal of arbitration is to ensure effective resolution of non-complex situations and reserve the courts for actually complex cases, instead of now, where they are used because people hope they can make a bunch of money.

The only thing I'm aware of is people complain of bias of arbitrators using the proxy of how often business wins relative to people in courts (with no evaluation of whether people should be winning as much as they do in court).

Otherwise I have seen nothing that suggests that arbitration is not in fact very effective and efficient at reducing the cost and time involved.

the primary thing about arbitration

- it prevents class-action lawsuits

- it is funded typically by the company, and is very likely to agree with the company

Maybe suing constantly is an american thing, but if that is to be addressed it should be by congress not by individual companies wanting to circumvent civil law.

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.

People voluntarily entered into indentured servitude once upon a time, too.

They didn't have options - every single Google employee(past and present) has options. They selected this one, voluntarily. Indentured servitude is not a valid analogy.

Most indentured servitude in the US was a voluntary agreement [1] although all such agreements are now illegal by the 13th amendment.

Also, there exist the concept of a so-called "unconscionable contract." I'm not saying this proposition is true, but I'm submitting for evaluation: is the act of submitting to private investigation processes that may be used as evidence against you in civil or criminal courts unconscionable?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude_in_the_...

They do not have any options where forced arbitration is not one of the conditions. Pretty much every corporation does this, so there are no realistic options for avoiding it.

There may be a very small number of cases where an employee successfully negotiated against this clause, but it probably requires the candidate to be a true outlier in terms of talent and skill set for the company to even consider it.

By the same token, employees are allowed to advocate for change once they are working there.

> 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.

> why bother?

Because I'm a bit annoyed by what seems to me a growing push towards confusing the judgement of someone's work with their moral qualities. I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists, or arians; a literary masterpiece isn't diminished by the fact that its author was an anti-semite, or sadist; a great movie director remains a great director even if she did horrible things in her private life. Very little of our past science and philosophy and arts would still be standing if we were to apply these criteria, and I very strongly doubt we'd gain something better. Every single time "political" criteria have been used to judge the value of intellectual products, it's been the indicator of serious troubles, both for the society doing it and for the overall quality of the disciplines.

That is your personal choice, and is fine. But I think you can happily coexist with these other people:

- Those who care about influencing their culture and want to do what they can to change it.

- Those who are concerned with where their money goes and whether or not they think that that is the most effective use of their money.

Feel free to ignore the concerns of those groups and do what you want. But I don't think that wading into a conversation you fundamentally don't want to be a part of is effective.

> I don't think that wading into a conversation you fundamentally don't want to be a part of...

I was replying to a comment that claimed that

"no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office [..] would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable"

This to me is clearly a confusion between two completely different things: what Google produces, and what are Google's internal ethics. iPhones are not worse products because working with Steve Jobs was a nightmare. I value the distinction.

>I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists

The ethics of science does exactly this. A common question which has been asked for much of the 20th Century is: should we use scientific results that are the product of non-consensual human experimentation. an extreme but often used example experiments that were carried out by the Nazis at concentration camps. Outside of science consider the debate over the works of Wagner [0], Knut Hamson [1], or Heidegger [2]. Ethics matters when judging intellectual output. For

These are fundamental questions of ethics which have a long intellectual history of debate and discussion. You are welcome to hold your own opinions on them, but I don't think the way in which you are framing the debate is helpful, e.g. "a growing push", "confusing the judgement", "fundamentally anti-intellectual", etc... Ethical questions which have received this much thoughtful discussion and examination should be treated with respect.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_controversies

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/books/28hams.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger_and_Nazism#Th...

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.

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

"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.

It's probably meant to alleviate fear of retribution.

I guess you missed the part of the question referring to due process

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...

Thank you for offering this. This is far more helpful than a truly anonymous system.

It's hard to imagine something more illegal than this when it comes to personal data protection.

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.

In the courts, yes, but in an office?

EDIT: I should add that I am 100% for eliminating sexual harassment from the workplace (and in life), but unfortunately there's nothing that forces a company to give employees due process. I would guess that in most cases, even the appearance of inpropriety is enough to warrant termination for at-will employees.

[re: claim that due process includes the right to confront accuser]

> In the courts, yes

In the US, this is only true in criminal courts. Even when it reaches beyond company process to the courts, sexual harassment is a civil matter.

In the USA, that right applies to criminal prosecution but not civil cases.

What if the facts can be independently verified ?(existence of material proof or witnesses etc)

I imagine the right process would be to receive a claim and investigate it. The initial report doesn’t need to pinned to a specific employee, and it can even be a bystander that way. If enough evidence rise from the investigation, outing the reporter doesn’t bring much to the table.

You’re right that it’s more tricky when it’s a “he says she says” situation, those would warrant more direct confrontation I guess ?

It’s not a criminal trial.

Meaning that people shouldn’t be treated fairly if prison time is not on the table?

There are principles that are only binding to the government, but worth following outside of the courtroom in a civilized society. Innocent until proven guilty is one of them.

Maybe they mean privately, not anonymously?

> 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).

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...?

"speaking up" means "not staying silent about harassment."

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).

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.

If they are innocent then nothing will happen to them as the investigation won't find anything.

That's how it should work. If someone gets accused of something, there should be an investigation. And if they did something wrong it will be outstanding obvious. If they didn't, then they won't find anything.

It is ridiculous to complain about an investigation, which should be the entire goal. To investigate and figure out what happened.

The problem here, in this naive view, is how you define an "investigation." The moment that "investigation" goes public around the topic of sexual harassment (or worse), the accused is done. That's the real world. I've seen it, several times over. That's important. You shouldn't have the power to significantly wreck someone's life by just making an accusation. There needs to be as much protection for the accused as there is for the accuser.

> If someone gets accused of something, there should be an investigation. And if they did something wrong it will be outstanding obvious. If they didn't, then they won't find anything.

Reading this genuinely frightens me.

Our legal system, with due process and "beyond reasonable doubt" and all the rest, regularly convicts people who are later found to be innocent. And, of course, regularly acquits people who are later found to have been clearly guilty. Even in countries with fewer complaints of bias and bad faith than the US, miscarriages of justice are not exceptional.

And here's this reply, suggesting that HR departments will simply get it right all the time. We're talking about people not trained in investigating anything, operating with minimal oversight under rules that have probably never been scrutinized, who in almost every case will face biases and incentives that would recuse any judge and strike any juror.

Discovering the truth is genuinely hard. If someone did something wrong, it will be "outstanding obvious"? What guarantees us a world so convenient and just that no one ever harasses in private and leaves only "he said, she said"? If someone did nothing wrong, investigations will find nothing? How have we gotten free from DARVO and coordinated dishonesty and all the other things that produce wrongful convictions (quite often of victims, on their attacker's word) in actual courts?

The certainty that every investigation will react a decisive conclusion, that official decisions are automatically trustworthy, that people who are found innocent are never harmed by public knowledge that they've been investigated. It's a display of faith in authority (any authority) that I truly don't understand - are people extending this same sort of blind confidence when police forces, churches, and politicians investigate themselves?

This seems to be an argument against investigating anything ever.

> HR departments will simply get it right all the time.

They weren't getting it right when they were letting harrassers off the hook.

It's not about truth or justice. It's about corporation trying to get rid of pesky humans doing human things. Harrassing, accusing. Until recently sweeping things under the rug was the best way to deal with it. Winds changed. Now it's cheaper to kick out men even if they possibly did nothing.

Woman reporting harrasment was a problem and was silenced or fired. Now man getting accused is the problem, gets aame treatment as women got earlier because now it's more efficient to get rid of him.

Perfect justice is never efficient.

What I am saying is that if someone is genuinely harassing other people, then there will be lots of complaints.

If there is one complaint, then it will be easy to find a dozen of them.

And what I am saying is, a company should only punish someone if they find a dozen of them.

It is not he said she said. It is instead he said and a dozen people said otherwise.

This is what the investigation is for. I am saying that there is nothing wrong with a company punishing the outstandingly obvious cases, which is almost all cases, and then giving the benefit of the doubt to the rest of them.

IE, nobody should ever be punished for a single anonymous complaint. Instead that single anonymous complaint should be used to talk with other people, and to determine if there are instead a dozen of them.

Let the edge cases go unpunished, and target the obvious harrassers, which is almost all of them.

Let's give a similar example. Imagine someone was going into meetings and just yelling slurs at other employees. And they did this mutiple times. Do we need to police to be called to fire this guy? No. We don't.

Do we have to worry about false accusations of this guy yelling slurs at meetings? No. We don't. There will be a dozen people who will easily be able to verify that yes this guy did this thing, mutiple times, and there is no danger in firing him.

And you should also notice that this isn't necessarily even illegal, therefore it makes no sense to call the police.

Part of this is due to incentives. Police and elected officials have an incentive to appear tough on crime.

Theres no particular reason a priori, to assume that HR has the same incentives. In fact if anything, the current state of affairs may imply the opposite.

They do: risk of lawsuit. Risk of the PR hit of a Twitter mob descending on the company.

There's a risk of lawsuit from either side though (sexual harrassment/workplace safety vs wrongful termination).

> If they are innocent then nothing will happen to them as the investigation won't find anything

This is just willfully ignorant. Look at Steven Galloway, or Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim at McGill. Investigation revealed that neither had credible claims of harassment against them. Both of them had irreparable damage done to their careers - the former pushed to the brink of suicide.

> 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.

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.

> Someone who accumulates reports continuously as team members change probably is.

No. If the system is truly anonymous, then people outside the team can submit reports. Continuous accumulation would not indicate there is probably a problem with the accused, given the motive and opportunities for abuse of the reporting system.

Elsewhere in this thread the difference between anonymous and private is discussed, along with semi-anonymizing strategies for achieving privacy protection, which I believe would be helpful for the outcome you describe.

> in every case of ongoing sexual harassment there is never just 1 victim - it's always a pattern of behavior.

citation please

That's straight up hyperbole, and probably is totally false. But it's unprovable anyway.

I'm genuinely confused by the apparently incredulousness at the idea that workplace sexual harassment is generally going to perpetrated (at it's roughly ~30% incidence rate) by "everyone" and not "a small but relatively powerful group of people who are generally not discovered".

This was ultimately the pattern at Uber, it was the pattern at Fox News, it was the pattern in Hollywood.

This is a good point. What about a person who has a pattern of accusing multiple people over time? If each of the accused individuals are all not accused by others, would this undermine the accusers credibility?

I wish this was hypothetical, but I once worked with a person that had 3 individuals over 2 years fired for this. Eventually they went too far and HR had to come to grips with an obvious mental illness being the root cause. This person was a great engineer and a good friend, which made it even harder for me and others to admit to ourselves the delusional nature of the claims.

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.

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.

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.

Google has refused and insisted "It's too hard" to release this data.

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.

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

Working link: http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/

Thank you and sorry. Updated it now

> 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.

When she talks about the "war against boys", she's talking about the school system. Schools overmedicate and overpunish boys. The system drives boys out of school and as a result, only 40% of college students are male. If an inequality like this went the other way, there would be national outrage.

But it's not exactly a "conservative" issue. Plenty of liberals have written about it too:

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/stop-penal...

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the...

https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2015/...

Agree. When you perform an online search for articles on the "wage gap myth," the majority of the articles seem traceable back to her.

It's because even though there is no data to support the wage gap, it's very unpopular to question it. Christina Hoff Summers is a pioneer in the field of gender equality and has paid a huge price by actually investigating these issues. It's a risky position to take in today's political climate so not many have followed her footsteps.

>there is no data to support the wage gap

This is false.

https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-a...

>it's very unpopular to question it.

Also false, it's very popular (and almost cliché) to dismiss it.

>Christina Hoff Summers... has paid a huge price by actually investigating these issues.

And what price would that be? She seems extremely successful.

http://www.aei.org/scholar/christina-hoff-sommers/

From your link:

"$3.27 less per hour than men. The median hourly wage is $15.67 for women and $18.94 for men.

The gender wage gap is a measure of what women are paid relative to men. It is commonly calculated by dividing women’s wages by men’s wages, and this ratio is often expressed as a percent, or in dollar terms. This tells us how much a woman is paid for each dollar paid to a man. This gender pay ratio is often measured for year-round, full-time workers and compares the annual wages (of hourly wage and salaried workers) of the median (“typical”) man with that of the median (“typical”) woman; measured this way, the current gender pay ratio is 0.796, or, expressed as a percent, it is 79.6 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2016). In other words, for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes about 80 cents."

It's meaningless to compare different positions pay to each other. "Typical" men vs "typical" women doesn't tell us anything about potential discrimination.

Oh, FFS, c'mon.

There's over 12,800 words in the article and 67 citations. It includes sections such as "How do work experience, schedules, and motherhood affect the gender wage gap?", "How do education and job and occupational characteristics affect the gender wage gap?", "Does a woman’s race, age, or pay level affect the gender gap she experiences?", and "What role do 'unobservables' like discrimination and productivity play in the wage gap?" yet you choose to ignore all of it and argue against something from the introduction that's expanded upon further down.

You're arguing on bad faith here.

It's an argument against adjusted wage gap calculations or comparing salaries in the same roles. I fundamentally object to the very premise.

> You're arguing on bad faith here.

No, I just disagree with you.

"Christina Hoff Sommers does not agree with my positions on issues therefore is biased and cannot be trusted, compared to people who do agree with my positions on issues, who are not biased and can be trusted."

"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."

This strikes me as "poisoning the well."

There is a war against boys. We medicated an entire generation with psychotropic drugs to make them more passive.

The phrase strikes me as hyperbolic, but I agree there is a real problem underlying it.

My point was that people should base their opinions on CHS' claims on her evidence and arguments, rather than who she associates with.

What would you call it then?

For me personally, I would try to talk about the specific issues and describe them, as you did in the second part of your comment. I understand there is a definitely place for using a simple phrase to characterize a larger pattern of inequality. Even using dramatic, colorful phrases which capture the imagination also have their place in the world.

Edit: I'm not trying to change your approach, I'm just being blunt about my opinions. I appreciate your open mindedness.

But the problem is systemic and it needs to be named directly. Skirting around the edges of the problem, trying to be indirect, will not be effective.

>considers there to be a "war against boys"

How is there not? Literally every modern school system favors activities that disproportionally disadvantage young boys. Boys and young men are dropping out of school at a far larger rate than women, and literally nobody cares. It's a travesty.

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-...

No it's not. You cherry picked an editorial written by an outside contributor. At the bottom you have:

>TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

You cannot label an entire outlet conservative or liberal because they bring in people of opposing views to write editorials unless there is an established bias over time (which you have not shown.)

It took me all of twenty seconds to find a liberal leaning editorial: http://time.com/5431836/dna-transgender-history/

Which part of the wage gap article do you disagree with?

Left of Center Bias

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/time/

__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?

I don't think it's really feasible, for the reasons you mentioned, among others. Nevertheless, there are countries which try to govern (or at least suggest) the min-max salaries that you can expect given your profession/experience/skill, e.g. Germany.

Like many people replying to the OP, I'd like to see some data that looks at it from different perspectives, tho, instead of just picking a side and arguing for it - "there's a wage-gap" vs "look, there actually isn't".

> 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.

Then that's not the same problem at all and it needs to be addressed as such.

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?

Both of those can be seen as a cultural problem.

A cultural issue perhaps, and one mediated by biology at that. I very much doubt that you go around telling the women in your life that the time they spend outside the office, and lack of vocational ambition, are a social problem that need a political solution.

What if one gender has a higher variance than another gender? Just don't say that to Google or you may get fired.

or to Harvard

The measured difference in distributions is very small.

And if we believed that this was the cause, you'd need to think that Googlers were wildly off the norm in terms of ability. They've got like 90000 employees. They aren't exclusively hiring mega geniuses.

90k out of a population of 7 billion. There's plenty of room for differences in distribution to take effect.

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...

Here's one example of the ONS data: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

Cool, I'll have to look at the new data clearly, a priori it contradicts my analysis - I only recalled one situation previously where discrimination appears to give higher wages to women (over 30, working full-time), 15% is quite the gap did it make headlines?

Note they don't compare like roles here, just same industry sector IIRC.

The largest gap is 95% in favour of female archivists; that must be anomalous.

Not only is the data missing variance, but the small print also say that it excludes overtime.

Could I please see the variance in the data which is a very simple, important and often missing aspect when presenting data? I would also like to see the average amount of work hours (and overtime) per industry and gender, the average amount of flex time and other non-income benefits, and common known sources for wage differences such as how often a person changes job. All this is missing, but again the lowest hanging fruit is the variance which make any dataset completely useless (and I stand by this statement) for any complex dataset.

Men under 30 earn much less than women under 30. No one cares either.

Yes, younger women friends post on Facebook how they're stopping work for the year in October (?) to make up for the pay-gap. I assume maybe that's true to some extent in USA -- they're certainly sold on the idea all the men around them are getting an easy deal.

Doesn't that just mean they'll widen the pay gap by not getting paid in October? Then next year they'll need to take two months off, and so on.

At least they'll have plenty of time to post about it on Facebook :)

It's a meme "we should stop working in October [IIRC] because we are only paid for 10 months compared to a man's full year". It's not an actual plan.

I've seen this specific meme a few times; dozens of posts about gender pay gap including from under-30 part-timers who have a good chance - according to the available stats - of being paid more than men in an equivalently skilled role.

Isn't that contradicted in Fig. 3 of parent's [0]?

Might have been true until 2015 but not anymore.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

I have interviewed for jobs and have interviewed others for positions on my team. Both startup and traditional 9-5 tech jobs.

> 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.

It's a bit of both.

> 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.

Is it society or nature? Also, society socializes males to be less aggressive. So I don't agree with your claim.

> Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech,

Because in the tech world, aggression is what is sought?

> Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.

If that is the case, why don't these women create companies and hire only women ( who are supposedly doing the same job for 77% pay of their male counterpart )?

Maybe in construction work or farm work, male traits are highly preferred. But in programming and tech world, it's pretty much what you can do.

You really didn't address my point. If what you are claiming is true, why don't you start a search engine company and hire only women? You would put google out of business in a few short years given your built in 23% profit margin.

Do you realize how significant a naturally embedded profit margin of 23% is?

So I'll ask again. What is preventing you or any other person from starting companies and hiring women if women truly make 77% of a man's wage for the same exact work?

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.

What about the assumptions you haven’t identified?

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/

>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

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.

When corrected for all factors there is no pay inequality.

In some instances, such as Hooters waitresses and associate lawyers, women earn slightly more.

You can search for "pay inequality myth" and figure out which argument makes the most sense. Both sides are presented in the search engine I used.

Myself, I think that the issue that pay varies specifically because of the choices that are made is very valid.

> When corrected for all factors there is no pay inequality.

This just isn't true, but I think the problem here is a semantic one. It is true that the more finely tuned your analysis is, the less reasonable it is to conclude that sexism or so called "patriarchy" plays any kind of role.

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.

It is, of course, reasonable to make a "waste of money" argument if you are a pure capitalist.

In any case, this does not constitute an excuse for paying women less.

"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.

Why would you pay people who walk out the same as those who don’t?

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...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

You're probably more correct, I was trying to empathize with OP but I do agree I don't think the police are the right party for this mediation.

What if we created a new government organization to fill where we find that the police is not the right party to address illegal behavior. We could call them peace officer which mediate in disputes with power to fire and discipline people with the exact same requirement and behavior that we want out of the perfect HR department. This way we would raise the standard to be equal for all people that are employed regardless of company.

Civil court?

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.

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.

Going through the civil courts is very time-consuming and expensive for all parties involved.

Focusing specifically on the company's perspective, it's also a terrible option from a risk management perspective. It leaves them exposed to the possibility of a very expensive judgment. (Especially if it's a big well-known company that the courts might want to make an example of.) If they can resolve the dispute internally in a quick and satisfactory manner, then that is very much in the company's interest.

Which is exactly why it typically ends up being HR's job. And why it should officially be someone's job.

Framing it this way, I guess the company's internal culture being less dysfunctional because these sorts of problems are more likely to be addressed instead of being allowed to fester is just a happy side effect, but it bears mentioning, all the same.

I mean, Id argue that is exactly the way the system is designed, and it mostly does the job it is designed to do, not just a side effect.

Defining what makes a non-hostile workplace is hard, enforcing it on individuals is harder, so instead delegate that responsibility to each individual company and take action on the company if it does not do that.

In no way is it a perfect system (cue tons of excessively formalized training etc), but it is the best system I know of.

Allowing companies to remove the external force of "If you do not do this, you may face civil action" breaks the model though, so I completely understand why Googlers would like to remove forced arbitration. The risk of that is a contributing factor towards compliance.

Yeah, 100% agreed. Sorry - I was responding specifically to the question of whether HR should be in the loop, and didn't intend to suggest that the civil courts shouldn't also be part of it.

I wouldn't shed a tear if forced arbitration were banned. I can't really see it as not being at least partially an attempt to wiggle out from under the rule of law.

Why do you think the alternative is a conjunction of randomness at every level? Why not

* the people are HR

* trained in sexual harassment prevention and response

* following a transparent policy approved by the board and a union vote (or something like it, for instance an employee rep on the board like they are asking for)

Maybe this isn't the best alternative. I'm just saying, it's not like the choice is between (a) the government works it out and (b) everything is random.

There are lots of things that are inappropriate for the work place and yet aren't illegal.

And employer is absolutely responsible for dispering judgement on inappropriate, but legal things that happen while at work.

If I go to a co-worker and start yelling slurs at them, I should expect the be fired, even if my behavior wasn't illegal. The same is true for inappropriate sexual actions.

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.

I would argue that allowing the police to fire individuals from companies would be an egregious violation of human rights on par with disallowing free speech.

Do you think that the average HR department would do a better job at it, and if so why?

What would the optimal system be when we want punishment for crimes when the police drops it because there isn't enough proof.

Companies have their own internal regulations, code of conduct, and cultural norms, and HR is ostensibly knowledgeable of these factors, as well as being trained specifically in employment law. Besides that, there are jurisdiction issues that HR aren't bound to -- e.g. if the alleged violation happened during a work trip to Kentucky or overseas, the complainant isn't required to travel to that court (or deal with the feds) to get the matter adjudicated.

But beyond that, I'm curious why you think the police are the gold standard for handling all of society's disputes? Again, let's ignore that the people and groups who constitute the "police" vary significantly depending on jurisdiction; and also, of course, that the police do not make the ultimate decision to press and pursue charges (that would be the prosecutor's office). The police have the power of government authority and protection behind their decisions and actions, but that is orthogonal to whether they are trained and equipped to come to the right and/or optimal decision.

It's no different than a company hiring private guards for security -- guards who are not only willing to do, well, guard duty, but also are familiar with the company's culture and regulations etc, and are (we would hope) specifically and better-trained for the attack vectors that the company faces. It would be absurd to argue, "Well, that company must not have real security threats if they didn't contract with the police to guard their workplaces"

I don't live in the US so maybe this is cultural, but do you really want the legal outcome of crime to be based on local policy and norms? When I hear about sexual assault give jail time in one town and only a slap on the wrist on an other then that sound like injustice. I have always believed that a sign of a healthy legal system in any nation is when common laws are being enforced equally regardless of local provincial customs, norms or policy. If we apply this to internal process of a company it looks odd that one company should have completely different outcome to an other when an employee commits a crime.

And we don't need to use the police. We could invent a new group called peace keepers with different training, but the key point is that crime is defined in a democratic process that is uniformed applied to every citizen and thus the outcome of crime should be equally uniformed.

Private guards has a very clear line between the domain of the police and what they can do, just like the clear line between the military and the police. Private guards do not investigate crime, do not handle evidence, and is not considered part of the legal system. Similarly it seems natural to me that cases which society defines as crime should not be handled internally by any company. Having overlaps where private guards and the military stepping in as police sounds as a terrible outcome and a sign that something is broken in the legal system. Better to then discuss what is broken and fix it so we can return to equal outcomes for all citizens.

> I don't live in the US so maybe this is cultural, but do you really want the legal outcome of crime to be based on local policy and norms?

This isn't about legal outcomes or crimes.

This is about crime. Threating someone with violence is a offense that society in a democratic process has define as illegal with an legal outcome. Sexual assault is a offense that society in a democratic process has define as illegal with an legal outcome.

There is a very clear line between crime and non-crime.

I'll apologize for my confusion. I was working from the context of u/jlb's comment [0]. and from the context of the posted article, in which none of the Google execs have been accused of a clear-cut crime. But the comment from u/shados that started this thread, and to which you are referring to, was talking about "downright criminal acts" [1].

So when we're talking about a "downright criminal act" -- violent assault, robbery, rape, threats to safety, fraud, etc. -- yes, the police should be brought in, for their powers of investigation and arrest, among other things. But then we're basically arguing a tautology -- "Should the police, whose job is to deal with criminal acts, be called in when a criminal act has occurred?"

What I read in u/shados's question, and subsequent comments, was: if an accusation isn't good enough for police standards, why should a company/HR use it as the basis of firing someone? So my line of argument is mostly irrelevant if you believe that companies have the right to fire people for non-criminal accusations. But I guess the bigger discussion is about the line between what constitutes a criminal act, vs. a civil dispute.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355200

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18353824

> If you believe that companies have the right to fire people for non-criminal accusations.

I agree with that. Let the legal system deal with criminal acts, the HR department deal with the policy violations by employees, the unions/department for workers deal with regulative violations by employers, and teacher/medical/ectra boards deal with professional violations. It is when one of those start to overrule the factual findings of each other that we need to discuss if something is broken and need to be fixed.

To connect back to the article and Google execs, here in Sweden we have an additional rule for public positions. A person can be fired from such position if they simply loose enough public trust regardless of factual events. In return for such weak employment protection they usually get payouts if they get fired without evidence of fault. This has the benefit that you don't need to debate if the accusation is true, but rather if the public trust (from media and so on) has been lost. In those cases where the legal system do find someone guilty they simply don't get the payout. I wonder if such system would work nicely to deal with execs in large corporations.

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.

> 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.

> ...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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Oh. So they're not all going to be fired.

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.

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?

I assume there is harassment going on. I have no idea how much of it is and reported or dismissed. I worked there and saw absolutely none for four years, although that is not dispositive. Being old and a citizen of the USA I believe in the old-fashioned notion of innocent until proven guilty.

>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.

> 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 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

Microsoft used to require arbitration but got rid of it earlier this year after the deserved outcry. Apple still has it AFAIK.

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.

They tolerate it because it’s largely unenforceable.

That is one reason.

Many people aren't even aware of such draconian policies they are signing up for. And companies are probably counting on it too.

It is also possible that even the owners of the company (especially small, family owned companies) aren't aware of these dumb policies. They just trust their lawyers to write up the contracts. There was a comment recently on HN - employee reads up the contract, goes to the owner to ask about some clause, and the owner himself is surprised and calls the lawyer to sort it out.

Big companies that spend shit ton of money on lawyers have no excuse - they're likely doing all this intentionally.

It’s like they select a box for “maximum liability protection” not realizing some of it provides no protection at all

My understanding (from working with lawyers in the past) is that it is enforceable in some states and unenforceable in others. I'm not a lawyer, though, and so don't really know first-hand.

I had one success simply not signing a non-compete I was handed on orientation day. I returned the packet of docs without that one and never heard a thing about it.

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.

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?

holy shit. i hadn't seen that before. HR seems to have been completely captured by the forces it was supposed to resist.

HR is never there for the employee. They exist to protect the Company. They give lip service to protecting and nurturing the employees and our people are our most precious asset BS. The only time HR will go after any of the big boys is when they are on the outs with the board. Example: Mark Hurd when he was forced out at HP.

What is most noteworthy is that these facts were pretty widely known but never publicized by the media until recently.

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.

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?

Words are cheap.

and so are walkouts

are they? I'm sure someone could put a dollar figure on the productivity lost to Google by this action.

Whatever loss of productivity would be immensely offset by the optics of taking actions against such a walk out.

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.

What? You asked, essentially, "why would they walking out if their CEO supports their cause?"

Although I thought the answer was a bit obvious, I answered... Words are cheap and the employees want to see action.

Your response is to talk about pointing fingers? I don't understand your point.

What do you have against Google employees making demands of their managers?

My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you."

I'm pretty sure employees know that fingers are being pointed at them. Employees are constantly evaluated, and management places expectations on them (both work related and cultural) that those employees must meet, at penalty of termination.

It seems like you're questioning the idea that the fingers should point both ways... by saying that the fingers point both ways.

Yes, "words are cheap" is so obvious, it goes without saying. It doesn't add anything substantive to the discussion.

So saying that to me really doesn't cast any light whatsoever on this situation for me.

If someone at the top is sincerely interested in resolving this satisfactorily, why the walk-out? I don't get it.

That just sounds so naive. If I knew what your real disconnect with this was, I'd try to help you understand.

Let's walk through the basics:

* Employees have a problem with management.

* Management says "we'll work on it" like they always do.

* Employees may or may not believe, but they want to see action taking place. Employees feel secure enough at their privileged jobs to make a statement by "walking out", with the explicit threat of further action if demands aren't met.

* Management encourages the employees... And will have to decide if they mean business, in part based on the walk-outs.

That just sounds so naive.

I appear to be the top ranked woman on HN. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard here (under a different handle). Historical surveys suggest the membership was possibly as much as 98% male at one time.

I get nothing but crapped on when I say that. I get nothing but mocked when I suggest that is indicative of personal competence on my part. People mostly admit to recognizing me at all in order to say something dickish. It's relatively rare that I get genuine support.

I got to the leaderboard by not grandstanding, not pissing on all the guys here, etc.

I'm not naive, though I may well be on my way out the door because I've been thrown off of plenty of other forums for saying "The emperor has no clothes." It's generally a socially unacceptable thing to do.

But it doesn't come out of naiveté by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever.

I don't know anything about you. The statement is naive. Perhaps it was just poorly phrased. I never implied it had anything to do with you as a person.

I don't really care about your prowess at "winning" at HN. I don't have any clue what you're going on about.

Edit: oh, and if you regularly get kicked off of forums, perhaps it had to do with situations like these? You seem to be overreacting in a very strange and hard to follow way, that comes off kind of aggressively.

Exactly. The walk-out is supposedly to support "women's rights." I'm a woman right here, right now, giving my opinion. I'm being downvoted, shouted down, dismissed as naive, etc ad nauseum by people (mostly men, some of whom have a known track record of pretending to be pro women's rights while treating me personally like absolute crap) defending the folks who walked out at Google.

Color me unimpressed. Methinks if all these good guys were so interested in women's rights, it would be possible for me to get a smidgen more respect here.

But, no. And pointing that out gets further dismissed as "I don't have any clue what you're going on about."

Par for the course. And it's a big part of why I am highly skeptical that anything will actually be changed by this walk-out. If men at Google really wanted to change the culture, they could start right here, right now, in this very discussion with actually taking my questions seriously and treating me with respect instead of piling on to stomp me into the ground for saying "I don't get it. Seems to me there's maybe a better way to approach this."

Anyway, before the mods* decide that my comments here somehow constitute bad behavior for baldly saying some of the things that people the world over never like having said to them about blatantly obvious hypocrisy, I think I'm done with this utterly pointless discussion.

* Not an attack on the mods here. They've been awesome. Just long experience tells me that pushing it too much is nothing but downside.

edit:

Ah, yes, let's blame the woman in the overwhelmingly male forum and say she's just behaving badly by suggesting that the guys could actually be respectful to an actual woman if they actually think women's rights are important. Bonus points for this bit of "la la la not listening at all to a word she's saying."

> What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc?

Part of the reason to go to the walkout was to find out what to do. People didn't just stand there doing nothing. They listened to women speak about their experiences and ask for specific, concrete actions from attendees that would lead to less sexual harassment, bias, and associated garbage.

Okay, cool. Is there some reason this piece couldn't be done after hours? (Or, alternately) Is there some reason this couldn't be framed as "We are taking time off to discuss this amongst ourselves and better understand the problem space" without it being framed as a walk-out with a flyer left on the desk filled with their opinion?

Do these things have to go hand in hand?

The company created a problem. It makes sense that their employees are using company time to work on fixing it.

Yes, and the comment you are replying to allows for that as a possibility without it being framed as "a walk-out."

I'm not suggesting they shouldn't take company time. I'm wondering why this can't be done differently. And so far the replies I'm getting don't actually address such inquiries.

> What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc?

By handling interactions I have with women at work cognizant of the many ways in which their experience in the workplace differs from mine.

Also, I think about my daughter, and how I'd want her to be treated if she worked here.

> They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.

I can't personally fix the problem of (IMO wrong) decisions made by management on these issues. But I can help increase the pressure (public and internal) on them to make concrete changes.

That escalated quickly, to the extent that it reflects poorly on your original question.

You aren't anyone I particularly care to hear criticism from of me personally for any reason whatsoever, especially not publicly on HN.

It's not a criticism of you personally. The last time we had a conversation was before you created this HN account and I didn't look at you bio before reacting to your comment.

I don't care what your justification or excuse is.

If you* can't figure out that Mz and Her First Name and Middle Name are the same person, you aren't paying attention. And that means your criticism is completely vacuous on the face of it, even before we get into other reasons I have no interest in your opinion that would likely be verboten here as some kind of personal attack.

* You personally, not the general "you".

I was not paying attention, and frankly Michele (the only name of yours I recall) is not exactly uncommon. It has taken me nearly a year to notice you were using a different HN account, since I have no interest in mounting personal attacks against you.

Right words are one thing (and welcome). Right actions are another thing (also welcome).

disclosure: Google employee

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.

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).

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.

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?

Very few American doctors are unionized. If you're referring to the AMA, it is specifically not a union.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... well, let me quote the Atlantic's Matthew Stewart:

>You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market.

Most tech offices (google included) already give all employees free access to legal resources. It's called an EAP (Employee Assistance Program)

Is that access to company legal resources or vouchers to independent lawyers? There is a big difference, especially when the legal issue is employment related.

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.

> 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

And of course it's practised all over. Also in Europe.

That's ridiculous though. You can't prove that I, having looked at some super-secret "purge list" and proceeded to not hire you, did it because of the "purge list"?

I'll just say you weren't a good fit for the "company culture" and that'll be that.

Having the blacklist at all was deemed to be a violation of data protection law.

> 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....

Nobody ever gets interview feedbacks in this industry.

What you are saying is true, but its always impossible to establish intentions. And either way you have to sue. All the best ever getting a job if you are known to do legal fights against prospective employers.

>>Union organizing is not a "part time political project," it is a legally protected right.

One believes in these things only until they become managers themselves. And every one aspires to be one in this industry.

> One believes in these things only until they become managers themselves.

The law isn't Tinker Bell, it doesn't require you to believe in it to exist.

> And every one aspires to be one in this industry.

It's difficult to think of anything sadder than a person who assents to his own exploitation in the hopes that maybe, someday, he will get to exploit someone else.

I rest my case, sir.

I also wish you the very best with your activism.

so all managers are exploiters?

> One believes in these things only until they become managers themselves. And every one aspires to be one in this industry.

Oh god no, not even close to everyone in this industry aspires to be a manager.

Personally, even if I end up becoming a manager I don't think my opinion on unions will change. Ten years ago people told me that my opinion on taxes would change once I made more money too and if anything I support higher taxes even more now.

> And every one aspires to be one in this industry.

This is so far from the truth that I don't know how to make sense of your claim. Either you are living in a bubble or in a place which provides no career path to engineers (thus forcing them to want to be managers) or you are interpreting the data you are faced with incorrectly.

There are so many people in this industry who never want to be a manager that this claim of yours is frankly absurd!

>What you are suggesting is called "blacklisting." You may be interested to learn that in many states it is illegal behavior itself.

Sadly, impossible to prove.

I can choose to not hire for you a plethora of reasons. I can just give you a few bullshit questions that you can't answer correctly and use that as an excuse.

This is the reason protests like this are needed. Free exercise of bias is a feature built right into the current hiring process, and managers openly admit it.

>What you are suggesting is called "blacklisting." You may be interested to learn that in many states it is illegal behavior itself.

If only the fact that it's illegal actually stopped it from happening.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many other industries don't require people with lots of experience, like waiters, or front line customer service support or delivery drivers.

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.

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.

On the other hand, your chances of being hired would be higher...

> overemphasis on diversity and inclusion.

Perhaps Google is overcompensating for allowing sexual harassment.

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.

Easily enough explained by Google talking a lot and not actually doing anything until something blows up.

"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?

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.

I think it is true that you wont change most people's minds. (When I discovered the psychological concept of schema, I was literally horrified)

But some of us are discovering that what we thought of as "normal" (and thus forms the basis of many of of our value judgements) is quite narrow, so we have to adjust our expectations and that changes a lot of things... getting perspectives from others is a necessary and tedious process.

Im in my early 40s and despite thinking I was pretty liberal on most social issues I've spent the last 10 years discovering I've been wrong, poorly informed, and/or ignorant on a lot of details. At this rate, I dont expect to be done with these self-updates anytime soon, and reasoned arguments and shared experiences, fears, concerns, and hopes are essential for me to re-determine where I now stand, each and every day.

Just as an example, another comment made an argument about why the market would theoretically prefer underpaid staff. (Which would then not make them underpaid). A good point, but irreconciable with pay gap data...how do I resolve that? Ah, someone replied with a decent response about the issue BEING perceived value. Armed with these positions I can now spend a few minutes of much more effective research, and have better chances of noticing details in my day-to-day life.

For people who are tired of rehashing the same old arguments with data and answers that are out there for anyone serious to find...it's actually quite hard to find if you dont really know the question, and as unfair as it is, there is a limit to how much time and effort will people will spend grasping at straws about how they themselves might be reinforcing terrible systems. Implicit bias is IMPLICIT and thus it is hard to find out what your biased thoughts are. Effective arguments dramatically reduce that time and effort, and even if most wont take them for that final step, some of us are trying, and are grateful to those that are willing to once again rehash the "obvious" with those that are unlikely to change their minds.

> A good point, but irreconciable with pay gap data

> For people who are tired of rehashing the same old arguments with data and answers that are out there for anyone serious to find...

It's funny that you say that since there is no data supporting the pay gap. In fact there are people posting data in this thread contradicting the pay gap.

If you say data is available to support your argument, you should link to it.

> It's funny that you say that

I think you misunderstood my point in the "answers that are out there for anyone serious to find" - I'm saying it's worth restating your arguments even if you think people "should" know the "obvious" and "proven". Nothing in that position makes it ironic that I also stated my understanding of things (Be that understanding right or wrong).

> If you say data is available to support your argument, you should link to it.

I've chased this rabbit hole before - assuming you are sincere, I'll point to Wikipedia and let you follow their citations, but there's lots out there:

> In the US the average woman's unadjusted annual salary has been cited as 78% to 82% of that of the average man's. However, after adjusting for choices made by male and female workers in college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave, multiple studies find that pay rates between males and females varied by 5–6.6% or, females earning 94 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts. The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from gender discrimination and a difference in ability and/or willingness to negotiate salaries.

I'll be conservative and take the lowest difference and assume that college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave are 100% by un-pressured choice: 95 cents to the dollar doesn't sound like a lot, until you ask yourself if a 5% raise is significant, particularly since the amount of money in question takes effect every single year. My anecdotal experience suggests the conservative assumptions for that are not reasonable, but YMMV.

Even the wikipedia article says there's no citation given to backup the claims (see first paragraph).

> The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from gender discrimination and a difference in ability and/or willingness to negotiate salaries.

So according to wikipedia, men may have higher ability or be better negotiators? I don't see a gender pay gap here.

Here's a good article on the subject:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/04/12/dont-buy...

> Here's a good article on the subject:

How so? The article rants about the 78% claim, without addressing that (a) even correcting for the concerns they state a pay gap exists, and (b) those "choices" men and women make aren't always free choices (witness who takes parental leave in the US vs in more egalitarian countries.

> men may have higher ability or be better negotiators? I don't see a gender pay gap here.

I fail to see how not knowing the source of a gap disproves the gap.

And men having more frequent and successful negotiations is a pretty tested topic itself. When perceived aggression garners one gender respect and another disdain, it's an inevitable result.

By science do you mean like phrenology?

>a topic which is still very easy to judge using science

So how would you do that?

There is no scientific study about wage gap for equivalent work. If it had been reported properly by newspapers, we wouldn’t be talking about it.

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.

Yes, but even if the specic allegation was not true, his whole relationship with someone he had power over was highly inappropriate. Unfortunately though, given that the senior leadership had a history of engaging in such inappropriate relationships, Google’s action here is to be expected.

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.

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?

Of course! Have you never met a programmer who had ~20 years of experience but actually was extremely weak at programming? Even the most basic of interviews would disqualify them from the job, but an ML algorithm can give them huge points on the "experience" alone.

I too have encountered developers with many years of experience and little programming skill. But in those cases I'd not hire them; or if they made it through the net I'd put them on a performance improvement plan and begin the process of firing them.

I don't know where you live, but at least in EU the cost of hiring the wrong person is monstrous. Unless they were literally caught stealing and you can fire them for gross negligance, you are looking at months of "performance improvement plans", when both of you know that it won't actually improve anything. All while you are paying them full salary, national insurance, tax etc, and also sinking in the time of another employee who now has to deal with the situation. It's extremely critical to not hire those people in the first place, and I would not trust an algorithm to do that.

Sorry, I guess we've got our wires crossed somewhere. I'm not suggesting that the hiring process be automated. Just that the compensation offered is fixed along a completely rigid structure.

I do, some people can do the same job for decades and somehow never improve their skills or personally develop.

I'm not just interested in pure technical skills from somebody, I want somebody who has the common sense and risk aversion to keep their projects running steadily and effectively without needing to put out fires weekly.

I also appreciate people who have something that I like to call "applied laziness", that being an aversion to repeating the same task over and over or building things that will require constant attention down the line. People with this skill are happy to put as much effort in as necessary in the short term to ensure that they don't have to expend needless effort in the future.

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.

What happens in a few years when the best engineers start leaving because they can negotiate higher pay elsewhere? If they start to get a reputation as merely good, but not the best, not where the exciting work happens?

That is one possible outcome. I'm not convinced it's the most likely outcome though. I guess it depends on how well correlated engineering talent is with negotiation skills.

Personally I wouldn't imagine those things are well correlated at all. In my experience the best engineers have stayed around long after it was obvious that they could get considerably more by changing jobs (and sometimes changing back again).

That aside, I think it would be entirely possible to set this up transparently enough that an engineer can see their future compensation and thus see how many years ahead they are jumping and can make their own judgement about whether it's worth moving to a company where their future compensation will likely change in the usual haphazard way.

> Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry

As evidenced by the lowball they just tossed me.

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.

How about standardised bands for competency? E.g. a software engineer level 3 step 2 has mentored three people, been the tech lead/written the OKRs for a 6-month project, and has X years of experience on other projects (in the earlier levels)?

Then it would be a simple HR policy to assign that engineer to whichever compensation band covered those levels when they joined a new company.

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.

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...

> 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.

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!"

----

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!"

... but some of these examples happen already. How is a CDO reporting to the CEO going to amplify any already magnified negative PR and force action?

>How is a CDO

By existing. If you make a 'chief diversity officer' then you make an ideal candidate to compromise access to their accounts. Any policy discussion, any reports, any internal discussion of incidents become excellent ammunition for a campaign.

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...

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