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Google staff walk out over women's treatment

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#31

Post by 3jckd »

ChrisRR wrote: post #10

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…

__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.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#32

Post by anon1252 »

rwmj wrote: post #14
mike22223333 wrote: post #8

Google should just fire all of the employee protesters. This is getting out of hand. There are plenty of other people who are in the line and wont make a drama for the company.

Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".

> Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".

Doesn't the employer have the right to fire them for any reason in any "at will job"?

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#33

Post by cimmanom »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #23
slivym wrote: post #5

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.

The salient difference is that outages are measurable. In contrast, "harassment" is an extremely controversial subject that nobody agrees upon, for example, in some legislations, calling a person with XY chromosomes "him" rather than "her" is considered a hate crime, a dramatic change from labelling conventions of just a few years ago. Indeed what constitutes harassment is a major point of contention between differen…

Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? You think all harassment claims should be automatically dismissed as false instead?

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#34

Post by sheepmullet »

devwastaken wrote: post #30
kaddio wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big mistake to believe those protestors are acting rationally. I'm not saying they are not, but assuming that they are is a mistake.

Those two lines of logic don't go together. If in your opinion it's a big mistake to believe they're rational, you are saying they're not being rational. There's no neutrality there. You can assume that there is unknown information being acted upon. Unless there's proof otherwise that the protest is lying you infact can and should assume it's authenticity. Or at the least not be involved without clear knowledge.

> you infact can and should assume it's authenticity.

Why should you?

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#35

Post by ngcazz »

mike22223333 wrote: post #8

Google should just fire all of the employee protesters. This is getting out of hand. There are plenty of other people who are in the line and wont make a drama for the company.

They'd be firing people for exercising their democratic right to protest and displaying solidarity for coworkers past, present and future.

Google aren't exactly a bastion of humanistic values, but I'm sure they'd be loath to dispose of a significant part of their workforce while looking fascistic and authoritarian in the process.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#36

Post by YorkshireSeason »

rwmj wrote: post #14
mike22223333 wrote: post #8

Google should just fire all of the employee protesters. This is getting out of hand. There are plenty of other people who are in the line and wont make a drama for the company.

Shouldn't employees have the right to collectively strike to get better conditions at work? There's a lot more at stake here than "drama for the company".

Absolutely, employees should have the right to get better conditions at work. The problem is that there are massive disagreements in this case whether e.g. quota-based diversity hiring, and penalising workers for mere accusations of harassment, rather than substantial, and credible proof of harassment, are better work conditions, or the opposite thereof.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#38

Post by arethuza »

pjc50 wrote: post #17
mike22223333 wrote: post #8

Google should just fire all of the employee protesters. This is getting out of hand. There are plenty of other people who are in the line and wont make a drama for the company.

Well, that's a way of being remembered forever while also having other employees quit in solidarity. (Edit into this dying thread: reports of the walkout in Google Dublin: https://twitter.com/evelyn_orourke/status/105795687016449228... )

Not to mention users and customers.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#39

Post by Zanni »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #18
ChrisRR wrote: post #10

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…

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…

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

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#40

Post by amiga-workbench »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #25

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.
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