Google employees are staging global walkouts over the firm’s treatment of women
Members of Google’s staff in over 20 offices around the world are walking out today to protest the company’s treatment of women.
Forced arbitration: Anger over how sexual misconduct allegations are handled at the tech giant has boiled over. The employees are particularly unhappy about the use of forced arbitration, which means victims forgo their right to sue.
Why now? A series of scandalous sexual misconduct cases have emerged in the press over recent days. Andy Rubin, who created the Android operating system, was paid $90 million when he left the firm in 2014, despite a “credible” allegation of sexual misconduct. On Tuesday another executive, Richard DeVaul, resigned. He’s alleged to have made unwanted advances toward a woman he was seeking to hire.
The five demands:
· An end to forced arbitration in harassment and discrimination cases.
· A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity.
· A publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report.
· A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously.
· A commitment to elevate the chief diversity officer to answer to the CEO and make recommendations to the board of directors, and to appoint an employee representative to the board.
The CEO’s response: Sundar Pichai has said he supports the employees’ right to take action. “I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel,” he wrote in an e-mail to staff, adding that he is “fully committed” to making progress on the issue. Google has sacked 48 other employees for sexual harassment in the last two years, he said.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.