Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo
vice.com
vice.com
On the "evil point haired boss" level it seems these types of things like their internal message boards cause a lot of trouble for the company.
On the less evil side it seems like employees waste a lot of time on these internal sites and all the internal social justice stuff.
Maybe Google just seems to get it's dirty laundry aired out. I've been working in this field for 20 years not including my internships in college and I've never worked any company that seemed to have as much of this weirdness as Google seems to.
Maybe it's an artifact of them having a money printing machine and then a ton of employees who seem to work on items other than the money printing machine which don't really matter to the company's bottom line.
From the outside it just seems like a never ending series of stories about ultra-toxic management.. all of which greatly exceed anything I've seen in my career.
It is hard to understand how someone can spend significant time in the office fomenting internal protests (even if they are for a good cause) and actually be getting their job done.
Tends to happen in large organisations.
On one side, the internal social justice campaigns are incredibly pervasive due to large usage of internal message boards. On the other side, Google is one of the few companies that allows this level of internal airing of dirty laundry. I've heard stories of similar incidences at Microsoft which were swiftly shut down.
The problem is that when you encourage internal dialogue and communication at a huge company like this, you'll never have people with different opinions pitching in. You'll mostly get people with the most 'acceptable' opinions, the others being silent as they value their jobs. It's a huge risk to be singled out as someone who thinks Damore was right or that Maven should've been continued. As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press.
Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made. Google was built on principles of open company-wide communication and sharing of information, and while it clearly doesn't work as intended anymore, there's too much inertia to change the course.
Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made.
It's not just scale in numbers of people. It's also scale in terms of the potential value which can be captured by viral campaigns and media attention. When a "scene" is out of the way and non-mainstream, there can be a high degree of trust. However, when the "scene" gets hot, and there's some serious money and power to be gained, the sociopaths and other bad actors start coming out of the woodwork.
That place was actually Evil enough I quit within a year to go back to another small company but it was nothing like what you read about Google. A different axis of evil.
Stuff like being able to call a Town Hall Meeting to criticize the decisions of upper management seems unique to Google though. Imagine that happening at some place like Oracle!
Maybe like the cells in the body of a criminal and those in the body of the saint aren't really different, per se, and it's more about the state between them. I don't know how to put this well, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a word for how something can behave very differently if you rearrange its parts, or excite them in a different order, etc.
Couldn’t the same basically be said of Google/Facebook/Twitter’s public communication platforms too? :-)
I find it extremely ironic that those employees accept to be employed by the biggest censorship machine ever made, being paid close to the highest salaries in tech and then complain and plan walkouts in order to virtue signal and feel good about themselves.
And at least when I was there, ~5 years ago, Google executives really, really wanted you to choose Voice. Because the history of Silicon Valley is basically built upon talented engineers choosing Exit and creating the company that eventually replaces you. Google itself was mostly built by people who did exactly that - its early (pre-2005) employees were practically a who's-who of alumni from Xerox Parc, Western Digital, Bell Labs, JPL, Netscape, Sun, and academia.
I dunno if it's the same today - I chose Exit 5 years ago (and my grievances were a lot smaller than most of what I hear in the press today - I generally enjoyed my time there, I just didn't feel like it was a place where my professional goals could be accomplished), and a lot of the people I see Exiting recently are folks I thought were very committed to exercising their Voice when I was there. As a Google shareholder this makes me a little uneasy, but perhaps it's the nature of a corporation that internal dissent just doesn't work when you get to 100,000 employees.
Much more preferable for the company if employees complain on an internal board rather than Reddit, HN, or Blind.
In a way it is a bit like some democracy in a company rather than the usual authoritarian/dictatorial workplaces we have where usually dissent and opinions against the borg direction is stifled and attacked by the vogons.
Democracy is also a pressure release valve that looks messy but doesn't blow up like authoritarianism does eventually. Better to let the proles, sharecroppers, and feudal peasants have their airing of grievances, fix if you can, if not find ways to route around the issues.
The nerve.
Non-trivial work requires that you goof off at least half of the time.
Regarding 'it's never happened to me' arguments. Please realize that the world is varied and complex. Basic statistics will tell you that in a group of 100k people, chances are, somebody is getting harassed legitimately, let alone thinking they are being harassed or treated unfairly. Why is that at all hard to believe? Give me any 100k population and I can write articles ranging from 'great success' to 'great discrimination' indefinitely. It's just basic odds.
I work at Google, opinions are my own.
If anything, having your employees spend their time on a internal site seems like a great idea because even their fun time is spent "within" the company. It's not like the alternative is they just don't do things besides work.. the alternative is they spend that time on HN, Reddit, or Youtube
The infamous Border Patrol facebook group comes to mind.
At least Google leadership can see what people are saying.
I don't get why the Google management team allowed their team to get so... well, violently politicized.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but.. keeping politics out of the workplace worked very well for a very long time.
It also seems so counter-productive for a company that basically controls large parts of the web traffic to become so politicized. What was Larry, Sergey and Eric thinking?
Edit: Seems like I can't create new posts - I'm being rate limited. Editing this comment instead as a workaround.
I think Google's stated mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") relies on the staff being politically neutral.
That's the thing about values -- if you won't stand up for them when there's a cost, what good are they?
Pretty sure they could, at least early on. Come on, they had absolute power over company strategy. The most important people (their smartest developers, like Jeff Dean etc, by all accounts, didn't care much about stuff like this.)
> or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit?
No-one apart from you is calling this tampering.
> Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral
Or maybe all of this bias is accidental because all they cared about was freedom, and while the two founders were away jetskiing, the company grew in a very particular political direction?
Maybe early on in Google. But to influence thousands of highly opinionated people, all with their own opinions, without negative side effects, is really difficult. Did you mean early on in the employees' efforts, or early in Google?
> No-one apart from you is calling this tampering.
Sorry for the confusion -- I mean "tamping" -- that any topdown attempt to force neutrality on employees when they are agitating for not-neutrality would have negative costs. (tampering is a different word, but it's an understandable mis-communication... darn English!)
> Or maybe all of this bias is accidental...
You could be 100% correct. I have no idea, it's a viable option. My point was to answer your original question of "what could they be thinking".
My objective was just to propose a few ideas about what they could be thinking. I 100% don't know, but I think what I said could fit the limited information we have.
"Politics-free" also means "the ethical choice is what the higher-ups define", which would be difficult for me to stomach for its own set of reasons.
I regularly see elaborate arguments that non-political speech is impossible therefore employees must be allowed to talk politics at work. They're very tiresome, because ordinary people can see they're just not true. Non political workplaces are possible and desirable. Employees should ban political discussion, starting with this tedious everything-is-politics stuff.
Google's culture is uniquely subservient to politics. The organization's mission is very clearly secondary to the employee's personal activism.
Why do you feel it's required to take some stand (including whatever the majority default is) on free speech, gun rights, immigration quotas, abortion restrictions, tax laws, states' rights, welfare benefits, etc. in the workplace?
Or company policies?
"Employees here should have benefit X" or "I should get paid Y" or "Z should be promoted" aren't really political in the usual sense (it's office politics, sure).
"The government should on pain of imprisonment require everyone to X" or "political candidate Y should be elected" is politics. And creates unnecessary division in the workplace.
I think you maybe don't get the whole "don't be political at work" thing.
How is your access to a gender neutral restroom or shower facility? Do you have a quiet place to pray multiple times per day? If you need a place to breastfeed (not a restroom), is that something available? What about dilating post gender reassignment surgery? Does your workplace offer the same benefits to same sex partners? Do you have to take a badge photo, if so, what name gets used? Can you wear head coverings in your badge photo? Have you ever heard expressions like, "Let's see what's under the kimono" in a business meeting? How is wheelchair access to your site? Can I operate all the machines you use if I am blind?
All of these are 'political' issues that most people are blind to.
Religion and politics.
Both super important. Both better discussed outside the workplace.
“Politics” is absolutely a core part of the workplace where it starts to affect your rights, those of your colleagues, and the actions your employer takes in support or opposition of these.
I'd love to know how you figured that one out.
> “Politics” is absolutely a core part of the workplace where it starts to affect your rights
I am only slightly exaggerating when I say that all politics affects your rights.
Again, like religion, super important. But for a variety of reasons, the workplace makes a poor forum.
Should you not advocate for that internally?
Let's say you are an ally for someone who needs an affordance like a gender neutral facility, should you not speak up on their behalf?
Put that in the idea box all you want.
Policies follow the law first. If there are specific requirements then, like I said, that's up to the individual to discuss. These issues are not the concern of everyone else.
No company is forced to do anything beyond the law just as the individual is not forced to work for the company. If the issue is with the law then it should be changed through the appropriate avenues, not hashed out in the workplace.
Or are you talking about the washroom down the hall? That's just your typical company policy.
Quod non erat demonstandum
HR can handle this easily by following the law and drafting appropriate policies. It does not need a big battle with an "ally" at all. That's what leaving politics out of the workplace means. An individual's issues should be left to the individual.
How is your access to a gender neutral restroom or shower facility? Do you have a quiet place to pray multiple times per day? If you need a place to breastfeed (not a restroom), is that something available? What about dilating post gender reassignment surgery? Does your workplace offer the same benefits to same sex partners? Do you have to take a badge photo, if so, what name gets used? Can you wear head coverings in your badge photo? Have you ever heard expressions like, "Let's see what's under the kimono" in a business meeting? How is wheelchair access to your site? Can I operate all the machines you use if I am blind (can I navigate to facilities? Use all the machines in the breakroom? etc.)?
If you don't want to use the mens or womens, then just use the restroom with the wheelchair picture on the door. There's your gender neutral facility right there. Solved.
I see no reason why you must discuss your political opinions with everyone else when they have no bearing on the work or job responsibility. It's neither obvious nor valid to me, and seems completely unprofessional.
B. My workplace does require people to work after sundown on Friday. Orthodox Jews don't work there.
This isn't necessarily a religious thing though.
I also don't expect a vegan to work as a BBQ taste tester. AFAIK veganism per se isn't a religion.
They have to by law. If they don't take active measures to prevent their employees from talking about non-work things during work, which they don't, then by law they aren't allowed to prevent them from organizing for better working conditions during work.
They're not the only large company that does this; I think companies allow this because they know that employees will end up making memes anyways and it's a lot better that they end up on an internal board than an ad-hoc external one. (Aside: I'm not sure some of the people making those "memes" understood how they're supposed to work. The puffin one is a misuse of the template…)
Complications of pregnancy involving hemorrhage and an early C-section are serious and not really a "management style" issue, and I don't understand why this discussion instead focuses on "dirty laundry", "internal social justice stuff", "wast[ing] a lot of time on these internal sites," "creat[ing] Memes on company time".
The management has been asked about the group a few times, and they've noted it all ends up on glassdoor anyways. Old article from 2012 where it is brought up: https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-chatter-airing-of...
They did seem to get a lot of value out of that group over time. They had some people monitoring it and legitimately tried to fix some of the complaints (not always successfully, of course).
See The Circle, the Emma Watson film.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6240022-I-m-Not-Retu...
Edit - Which apparently has the document embedded, but doesn't render in Edge.
In fact, reading these stories is probably why I've never had the desire to apply to work at any of the large tech companies.
I can't say for certain what the differences are, but I think smaller companies tend of have less office politics, less ambition as there is less opportunity for promotion, more shared goals (everyone works on one product), fewer layers of management, and more personal interaction with management.
If this was a single small 25-100 person company, it would (likely) not get any notice.
Also, its not clear to me why "HR will always help the company" has to be the status quo. This is an area where I would like the laws/judicial system to improve things.
I wonder if there is a strategy that encourages openness, yet doesn't have the immediate impact of moving all the conversations behind closed doors in a buddy-buddy system.
No, it's a story of at least two different managers, and an HR department that supported them.
You should rejoice that Google is big enough that we take notice of this behavior and can then discuss of the issue as a society.
To dismiss this issue because it happened at a big company would be a mistake.
a more generous phrasing would be that insolation allows managers to take emotions out of a situation to make the most rational decisions for the business (and its shareholders).
in any case, direct relationships are a big deal for social creatures like humans, from how you treat people to who gets the benefit of the doubt to who gets the juiciest resources, like the best jobs. we employ the ideal of the meritocracy as the polar counterweight to that tendency, to varying success.
I know you're playing devil's advocate, but to be on the side of angels: that isolation doesn't promote more rational decisions, only decisions absent a perspective of the company. To the extent that low-level employees don't have valuable information for the business' success, the isolation does promote more rational thinking (where that extent is most often 0).
I've never seen a situation where low-level employee wisdom was rightly quashed by boardroom decisions.
When I've had layers of management inserted above the team I'm on, it's been because someone had too many direct reports and needed to add another someone to delegate part of their work to.
If I didn't stay an extra 3 months, my manager threatened to fire me 'with cause' so they could enforce my non-compete without paying me in New York.
So there I was working through some of the most incompetent shit from my dismal colleagues while my wife was trying to take care of our newborn baby while she couldn't walk due to delivery complications.
A week before I was supposed to go he mailed me a 25 item list of tasks to do before he would 'allow' me to quit, so I terminated my employment. After which, they claimed my non-compete was in force without pay.
Don't ever work for those fucking vultures at Tudor Investment.
I don't understand why Google and others can't be that way. It seems to me they've cultivated this stereotypical / superficial "share everything, we are one big family!" culture. And people, I am guessing mostly younger ones, really buy into it and take it at face value, then get disappointed with things go south.
The idea of an almost free-for-all internal discussion board sounds wrong and almost evil to me. It's a bit like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign - "Yes, please tell us what you disagree with so we can blacklist you easier". Out of all the executives, I can't believe nobody saw the potential issues from it? (That is why I inserted "evil" adjective there, and of course it's a jab their motto).
Was definitely dumbfounded when I heard that one, but then I realize I've run into programmers with a "Well I learned [esoteric thing], why hasn't he?" Sad that people lack that level of empathy and introspection, we're all different in different ways. Your easy thing is someone's Mt. Everest.
Google has about 100k employees and this kind of shite seems to happen a couple times a year. Let's assume once a month. This gives an incidence rate of 0.000012 per person per year. Meaning that at 100 employees, plugging into [1], after a 100 year career in a place as bad as Google you would have a 10% chance of that happening at your company.
Assuming only 1% of what happened is known, you would get a 36% chance.
Smaller companies, from what I've heard, have tons of office politics problems. You hear about it less because most small companies have no national importance, and thus do not excite the press the way a large company would.
I would almost be willing to guarantee you that an incident of gender or sex discrimination has happened at one of the companies you've worked at, at least supposing you've been working more than a year or two. Just because you didn't hear about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. These things are generally kept pretty quiet -- splashing them across the headlines is the exception, not the norm.
Some smaller companies are fine. But the ones that aren't very profitable and are older, or are a child company of a parent company, no guarantees.
But I have seen the bad kind. You think you are in a work-hard play-hard environment and it turns out it is really a "good old boys" setup.
I've seen people play football outside for over an hour some days, but then someone else gets fired for pulling out a bed and resting for 15 minutes during their lunch break. And yes there was a bed in the closet at the office.
This statement is quite telling: first HR goes to lengths to deny that there's any seriously wrong. Then they pretty blatantly acknowledge that yes, things are so fucked up that you'll likely want to take medical leave.
Having going through this type of situation (high-performer until on the wrong side of someone in management), I really didn't understand things until someone pointed something out. I was asked: who hired the manager? The purpose of a manager is to handle the details of the goals of hirer.
A musician hires a manager to handle the details book gigs, vet contracts, etc. If the musician doesn't like the work being done, the manager is fired. If the manager thinks he or she can get a better result from someone else, they fire the assistants, caterers, etc. The musician doesn't care, only that results are generated.
The senior execs hire managers for the exact same purpose: deal with the details to get projects completed for them. If you play ball, you'll get the rewards. Mess with that agenda, you'll get canned.
The biggest disappointment I had was how I was treated. They make you feel like it's you letting them down. They dangle in front of you all the ways out: "we're inclusive, we want to you have a great work environment, we have these resources for you to grow". And, I was there for all of it: the manager who would tell you exactly how to handle things only to lie in a HR meeting the exact opposite.
The big hint should be the HR title: Human Resources. A resource is explored, extracted, and exhausted. HR's job is provide for management, not the employees.
To the extent that there systemic anti-maternity bias within Google, it is certainly below the background rate of society as a whole. That's not a very high bar to clear, so I'll go further to say that Google is actively supportive of parenting and maternity in a way that few other organizations in the United States are. I can say that as someone whose spouse has had two kids there, and as someone whose teammates have had dozens of kids between them during our time working together.
Even with that, failures like these occur, because that's just what people are like, and we have not designed perfect systems to counter this type of behavior. That's not to excuse -- if the story is accurate, figurative heads should roll. And our systems should be improved.
But positing a systematic policy of abuse like this is cynical and doesn't fit with the evidence. Doing so is less like extrapolating a line from a single data point and more like drawing an entire picture from that point.
But it may very well be that they are willfully (or simply incompetently) turning a blind eye in this one particular case.
Unions are the ppl there to protect employees from abuse, not HR.
Parental leave policies in the United Nations [2]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/10/06/495839588/countries-around-th...
This isn't phrased quite accurately; I know that in Canada maternity leave is guaranteed by law but it is not paid for at all by the employer (it is paid by government insurance schemes instead).
"She says that she and her baby had potentially life-threatening complications toward the end of her pregnancy, and that she would need to go on maternity leave earlier than expected.
“During one conversation with my new manager in which I reiterated an early leave and upcoming bedrest, she told me that she had just listened to an NPR segment that debunked the benefits of bedrest,” she wrote. “She also shared that her doctor had ordered her to take bedrest, but that she ignored the order and worked up until the day before she delivered her son via cesarean section."
It is almost always better to first talk to outside legal representation to understand the landscape. If there are actual law violations, they will help properly document and possibly start preparing a case, and if not then you know you should prepare to leave the company.
EDIT: surprised at the downvotes here, this is common knowledge for workers in all industries, not just tech, and this has been discussed at length every time a similar issue arises.
Assuming you have already agreed to legally binding arbitration as is pretty much standard in all employee contracts (although thankfully a recent law banned this practice in California for employees hired in 2019 or later), how useful is it to go to a lawyer? It just seems like the system is designed to work against you.
I have never actually gone through the binding arbitration process, so my knowledge of this is very limited.
If nothing else, an informed, independent perspective should be able to help you better understand your situation, or see/know to ask about factors which you might not.
State laws trump agreements one makes with a company.
That is, often times an employee and the company share a mutual interest because of the risk of liability, and it's good to understand this, because as an employee this can help you. As jedberg said in a comment above, this is one reason maybe while going to a third party (e.g. complaining to someone else, who then brings that to HR) can help. In that case, it's not so much "you vs. your adversary", but both the person reporting to HR and HR itself share the viewpoint of "If we don't stop this person he could get us sued."
That's probably why it was downvoted. Repetition is tedious, and HN is for curiosity.
I personally witnessed a woman at work getting harassed, and she was too afraid to say anything. I reported to HR on her behalf as a witness and the harasser was quickly removed.
I think the best way to get HR to help you is to find an ally and make them aware of the wrongdoing so they can be a witness and then report it to HR for you. Then it's no longer just the word of the two people involved, and they are more compelled to act to remove the liability of the aggressor.
While I think it's unfortunate that this is usually a more successful route, I agree with you that it's no longer a "he said-she said" case (or, in the case of the article, a "she said-she said"), and since HR also has to deal with people who do (even if rarely) use the complaint process as a weapon, coming off as a "reluctant witness" seems to help. Again, want to emphasize that it's unfortunate that is the case, but I also think that's human nature.
Our customer was a government employee. Twice in my first few months, my team leader came back from her desk yelling things like "YOU ARE SO STUPID" loud enough that everyone in the office could hear. I brought this up to a coworker, and he said that this happened periodically for as long as he had been there.
In retrospect, I should have immediately reported this. Since it was my first "big boy" job, I was feeling out how to deal with it. I figured since the government was our customer, one word from the person he was berating and he'd be ejected into the sun, or maybe everyone knew and this was just how things in this office worked?
Some time later, the micromanagement reached a crescendo. I completed a learning module for an instructor as per their specification and asked to do a demo. Team Lead responded saying no, the simulator was all screwed up and he was going to personally help fix it.
For 3 days in a row my team lead spent all 8 hours of the working day sitting in a chair behind me saying things like "move that box one pixel to the right.. no.. one more.. keep going" as he "felt out" the way the UX should be. I suggested that he could take the source from perforce make these changes from his desk. Nope, he didn't want to do that.
The work product delivered by 2 salaries over 3 days was marginal changes to UI element positioning, misaligning almost all of them in weird ways. I felt like I was going crazy, was he making my projects worse on purpose?
We had an excellent CHI engineer on the team. He had a masters degree in the field. He confirmed that nothing I was being asked to do made any sense at all. Nothing about this made sense.
I asked to take some time and talk to him about his management style. This was a mistake. He started out telling me that I was incompetent, and he needed to "show me how to be a good designer" and that he was going to continue micromanaging me for as long as needed to happen to accomplish this. After about 2 hours of back and forth, he seemed to at least understand that I needed him to back off. As we parted ways, his final thought was "You know what? You need to just shut up and do what you're told."
Yeah, no. I went to my desk immediately and sent an email to the site chief, detailing my experiences with him, and all the stuff he shouted at other people in the office. Despite my belief that everyone must have known what he was doing, that apparently wasn't the case. Government employee was too scared to stand up for herself, despite the fact she had the power to make him disappear instantly. Team Leader was escorted out of the building within 30 minutes and never came back.
You can look at the suggested early medical leave as being pushed out (and it certainly could have been) but it also strikes me as a good option if you only want to work in a rock star position at a rock star pace.
I don't like how she was treated, and I don't see how introducing a manager that leaves makes sense either.
My understanding is that we have an egalitarian ideal we want to reach - for career driven wage workers - but don't have a successful business structure that remains competitive here as it predates this need completely?
Though it definitely still happens. Probably a lot.
As an aside, just another example of how our f'd up healthcare system causes all these additional negative follow on effects.
- How could a single baby born with health problems bankrupt a big aerospace company?
- A man is just as likely to have a child with severe health problems as a woman even though he'll never be the pregnant one.
Lots of companies have self-funded groups, but join onto an insurance group for negotiating power. For instance, I have a plan like this and our partner-company is Cigna so I carry around a Cigna insurance card with the $FIRM plan.
Looking at the paperwork, the most expensive plan is $67 per week, with an $8,500 max out- of-pocket. $FIRM has (rounding up slightly) 500 employees. So let's say 500 employees x 67 dollars x 52 weeks = 1.742.000 dollars into the insurance pool per year, so two $1.000.00 pregnancies in a year would be devastating. If the pool was low, possibly bankrupting(?) - I'm not actually sure what the failure mode is here, if Cigna has some obligation at that point... guess I have an HR question tomorrow.
And yes, Cigna very likely does have an obligation at some point. Most firms of your size negotiate a max per year expense for the firm and insure expenses beyond that point.
I thought this is about emotional upheaval and hating big corporations, not the law.
If it is about the law, why even discuss it, instead of waiting for the courts to sort it out?
At my last job I was a contractor and took over a retired employee's desk/duties. She has apparently quit doing any actual real work months before and was just doing a small percentage of her work and not documenting what random bits she had actually been doing, I spent 2 months just trying to sort it out with the agency complaining to my employer that I wasn't doing anything, despite the fact I had literal boxes full of printouts and every surface in my cubicle covered, including most of the floor, with stacks of spreadsheets and records trying to figure out what she'd move from what account to which accounts going through highlighters like crazy highlighting stuff once i was confident a specific line for a specific office for a specific month for a specific bill had in fact been moved out of the field office account into the main GSA account for that type of entry, all while trying to keep up on the incoming stuff.
Marry that issue with things like Project Dragonfly and that whole debacle. Now remember that the goog knows everywhere your phone has been at 4 am for the last 7+ years, a lot of your emails, and a lot of your photos too.
That 'private data' that you though was harmless is not looking to be so harmless in the hands of people that would do the kind of things that the article mentions.
Like outwardly complaining that a man is asking for paternity leave (or insinuating job consequences if they take more than a few days)? Or more subtle approaches like deliberately scheduling unimportant meetings at obscure times to interfere with parenting and childcare schedules?
That said, I've seen cases where the opposite is true. Parents are treated well but other groups aren't. I know several friends working at a large, well-known, evil gaming studio. They've had controversy in the past surrounding how they pushed employees to work insane crunch. When it became public, they (moderately) changed. Project managers would never ask women to work late, nor ask an employee who is a parent. For parents, this is great... however, they pushed all that work to others.
If you're male, single, a PM asks you to work overtime (without pay) and you decline, it will be a detriment to your career. After all, you have no kids therefore no legitimate reasons to say no. Be prepared to receive negative, nebulous feedback on your quarterly reviews.
"It doesn't feel like this employee is a team player."
"I question their commitment to the project."
"This employee seems dispassionate about their job."
I've worked with a project manager who carried a similar sentiment. In a candid conversation, he said to my face that he'd never ask women to work overtime. However, if you're male and under the age of 35, you should, "know better." If you're getting into the tech industry, you should expect to work at least 10hrs/day.
I'm very happy I don't work with him anymore.
That's not what actually happened.
Technically, yes what he said is unscientific in the sense that he didn't conduct a long-term study. However, the guy has a degree in molecular biology so it's not as if he's pulling shit out of thin air to justify his stance -- that's grossly misleading.
While I don't agree with everything he said, there's a lot that I feel is very fair. It's sad the media wrote him off as a misogynist. Misogynist don't write pages of suggestions on ways to encourage women into STEM and into leadership positions.
(See https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/26m7uq/why_ha... )
It almost seems like someone is trolling by using it. I wonder whose leg is being pulled here.
That said, I just don’t love the way the original thing was handled. A manager made some comments, it was totally feasible to just ignore them, or to make a bit of a wisecrack or say directly “hey, that feels a little harsh, no?”
Instead you go to HR.
I don’t know, people say dumb or insensitive things all the time. I would be loathe to make it a formal issue unless I really thought something harmful was going on.
Edit: obviously I wasn’t there, and I possibly don’t understand the nuances. It’s just a gut reaction.
Why? The point of view seemed to be politely presented. You disagree. I tend to disagree with you (for the limited number (call it ~10) of large company HR departments I have seen). What are the downvotes for?
Now - to your second point - companies do train managers to report. Yes. I believe that this is a containment device. I am not marketing this here, so don't call me a shill, but I'm working on a better way for employees to get their individual complaints anonymously surfaced all the way to the board. The upside is: less layers of battle-hardened defence mechanism against employees. The downside is: loss of plausible deniability. We'll see how it works out.