Published 09:44 IST, November 2nd 2018
Google Employees Leave Work To Protest Treatment Of Women
From Tokyo, Singapore, and London to New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, thousands of Google employees around the world briefly walked off the job on Thursday, November 1
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Carrying signs that included a mocking use of the company’s original “Don’t be evil” motto, thousands of Google employees around the world briefly walked off the job on Thursday, November 1, to protest what they said was the tech giant’s mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations against executives.
From Tokyo, Singapore and London to New York, Seattle and San Francisco, highly paid engineers and other workers staged walkouts of about an hour, reflecting rising #MeToo-era frustration among women over frat-house behavior and other misconduct in heavily male Silicon Valley.
In Dublin, organizers used megaphones to address the outdoor crowd of men and women, while in other places, workers gathered in packed conference rooms or lobbies. In New York, there appeared to be as many men as women out in the streets, while in Cambridge, Massachusetts, men outnumbered women by perhaps 6 to 1.
“Time is up on sexual harassment!” organizer Vicki Tardif Holland shouted, her voice hoarse, at a gathering of about 300 people in Cambridge. “Time is up on systemic racism. Time is up on abuses of power. Enough is enough!”
About 1,000 Google workers in San Francisco swarmed into a plaza in front of the city’s historic Ferry Building, chanting, “Women’s rights are workers’ rights!” Thousands turned out at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters.
Workers in Google's Mountain View campus joined their colleagues from the world in walking out to protest the tech company's mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations against executives.
The demonstrations reflected a sense among some of the 94,000 employees at Google and its parent Alphabet Inc. that the company isn’t living up to its professed ideals, as expressed in its “Don’t be evil” slogan and its newer injunction in its corporate code of conduct: “Do the right thing.”
“We have the eyes of many companies looking at us,” Google employee Tanuja Gupta said in New York. “We’ve always been a vanguard company, so if we don’t lead the way, nobody else will.”
The protests unfolded a week after The New York Times detailed allegations of sexual misconduct about the creator of Google’s Android software, Andy Rubin. The newspaper said Rubin received a $90 million severance package in 2014 after Google concluded the accusations were credible. Rubin has denied the allegations.
Women account for 31 percent of Google’s employees worldwide, and it’s lower for leadership roles. The numbers are similar elsewhere in Silicon Valley.
“I have seen friends get hurt and have their careers destroyed by this, not just at Google but everywhere,” protester J.J. Wanda, a male software engineer, said in Mountain View. “We need to show that time’s up.”
In a statement, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is reviewing all the “constructive ideas” from employees to improve policies and practices.
Beyond Google, Facebook has faced criticism over pay inequity and discrimination. The appearance of a Facebook executive behind Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings also caused rifts inside the company.
As Thursday dawned, organizers had predicted about 1,500 employees would participate in the walkouts, mostly women. But the numbers appeared to exceed that, based on media accounts and images posted on the protest’s Twitter account.
The protests at Google are the latest sign that frustrations among women are reaching a boiling point, said Stephanie Creary, a professor who specializes in workplace and diversity issues at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
“People simply aren’t willing to put up with it anymore,” Creary said. “The workers at Google seem to be saying, ‘How is it that we are still having to have this conversation?’”
Google’s CEO assured employees earlier this week that the company would support them in their protest. He also apologized for Google’s “past actions.”
“I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel,” Pichai said in an 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.”
Pichai last week sought to assure employees that the company had cracked down on misconduct, saying it had fired 48 employees, including 13 senior managers, for sexual harassment in recent years without giving any of them severance packages.
In recent months, Google and other Silicon Valley companies have also been plagued by dissension over other corporate policies, customer privacy and what some employees regard as misuses of technology.
More than 1,000 Google employees signed a letter protesting the company’s plan to build a search engine that would comply with Chinese censorship rules.
And thousands signed a petition asking Google to cancel an artificial-intelligence protect to help the Pentagon improve the targeting of drone strikes. Google later said it won’t renew the contract, according to published reports, and opted not to bid for another military contract that could be worth $10 billion.
09:44 IST, November 2nd 2018