In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"..women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.
.. women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women.
A result: More women are being hired.
.. employees nominate themselves for promotions, but the data revealed that women were less likely to do so. So senior women at Google now host workshops to encourage women to nominate themselves, and they are promoted proportionally to men
The attrition rate for postpartum women was twice that for other employees. In response, Google lengthened maternity leave to five months from three and changed it from partial pay to full pay. Attrition decreased by 50 percent."
Not sure how the leave really works in practice though. 5 months off is a lot for someone on executive track, a lot can happen in the tech field in five months for a critical person and if the person is not that critical they probably shouldn't be executive level.
However, I certainly wouldn't say no to 5 months full paid time off for paternity leave myself and a guarantee it wouldn't affect my chances of promotion at all. I'm not sure how that could really be guaranteed though. Some men and women might have several children during their 20s and 30s, that could amount to a lot of time off for them. Surely it would affect their jobs if they, as many do, had one child a year for a streak, and took 5 months per year off.
This assumes of course that men and women are treated equally and there is 5 months leave for both parents. The article isn't clear about this, but I assume paternity and maternity leaves are treated equally.
That's an irrational assumption, given that the whole stated point of the policy change to 5 months was to retain females at the company.
If anything, depriving males of paternity leave, causing them to depart the company would achieve the gender distribution they desire much more quickly.
I don't believe anything so nefarious is at play, but it does highlight a weakness of a purely numerical approach to these sorts of problems.
That aside, I'm willing to bet a beer at an expensive Palo Alto bar that no, males do not get 5 months paternity leave or anything like it at Google.
She mistreated everyone who answered to her or met with her in a meeting for years on end, the upper-ups' patience for that understandably evaporated. They gave her the best they could manage at the time, which was to shelve her so she wouldn't keep pissing people off.
That's not a rejection of the picture painted of what it was like to work with her by (multiple) others.
I've worked with smart people who were unable to listen or otherwise interact with others. It was pure hell.
If she was like that, I'm confident most Googlers who had any skin in the game (meaning, they weren't her peer or superior to whom she was pleasant and respectful, but someone who answered to her at some level) were happy to see her go.