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Google staff walk out over women's treatment

bbc.co.uk

191–200 of 471 posts

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#191

How is this handled at other biggies in the valley - Apple, Microsoft etc? Do they also have the arbitration thing? There was an awesome site on the front page yesterday, that compared career levels in the companies. Someone should make one comparing these companies on things like - treatment of women/minorities, age discrimination, side project policies, access to upper management etc

Microsoft used to require arbitration but got rid of it earlier this year after the deserved outcry. Apple still has it AFAIK.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Time magazine is absolutely a right-of-center publication. Here’s a nice piece they published last week calling for more nationalism in the US: http://amp.timeinc.net/time/5431089/trump-white-nationalism-...

Left of Center Bias

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/time/

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#193
post #179

Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this. Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts. Having a privat…

The police are not primarily there to solve civil disputes and disagreements. There is a pretty wide area where things are not illegal and possible to convict, but you would probably want to do something.

The police’s mindset (at least the ones I’ve interacted with) is one of three things:

1. Deterrance from crimes to be committed (doesn’t apply here)

2. Achieve convictions for crimes (would also not apply in your situation)

3. Deploy force to break up ongoing altercations (also doesn’t apply)

2 is interesting. Talk about a specific alleged crime with a police officer and they will not be discussing whether it was a crime or not much, nor if the person committed it, they will be discussing whether it can be proven in a court of law or not that a criminal act was committed by a specific person, beyond reasonable doubt. It is a purely pragmatic operation of “how can I provide proof that something occurred that is against this list of rules”.

The police are in no way useless, most people just misunderstand what their job is. Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.

In your specific situation it sucked, but from a police point of view what would they do? Is there a crime? Maybe. Would they be able to present a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred - most assuredly not. Would a conviction, however unlikely, achieve something meaningful? Nope, the guy would get a fine at most, but would still be working with you.

On the other hand, an employer is fully within their right to fire someone for a situation like that. They do not have the same burden of proof, they can refer to previous records of incidents, and the consequences would better match what you’d want (removal of the hostile environment).

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism Although Christina Hoff Sommers does have a noticeable bias/axe to grind since she's pretty anti-feminism and considers there to be a "war against boys". Also she works for the AEI which is a conservative think tank.

Agree. When you perform an online search for articles on the "wage gap myth," the majority of the articles seem traceable back to her.

[deleted]

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#195
post #180
post #131

Sounds like pre-unionizing to me. Wonder where this will lead to...

It takes, weeks to get a sysadmin up to scratch. You can't get scabs in if you go on strike. If the employees turn off google.com for 5 minutes, management will talk.

The power of the tech workforce is massive. It's like the dockworkers of the modern era. I really hope we start to see this realised.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#196
post #178

Google needs to stand firm against these policies. Making the "chief diversity officer" answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations to the board of directors is an absurd demand. They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage.

> They would open themselves up to huge amounts of foreign manipulation and political sabotage.

I'd like to know how you envision this happening. Like, China calls Google's CDO and says "We'd love to see more Chinese hires, we might consider sending you a welcome-back invitation"?

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#197
post #179

Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this. Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts. Having a privat…

Sadly the police don’t have the resources to go “investigate” every time someone said let’s settle this outside. Where do you drawn the line for stern talking and police investigation. Your idea sounds good in theory but in practice doesn’t work.

>Sadly

*Thankfully

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#198
post #193
post #179

Something Ive never understood (not in the sense of I dont agree. What I really mean is I'm uneducated on the topic and would like to find out more, but my searches returned little, since it's a pretty heated topic), is why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this. Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts. Having a privat…

The police are not primarily there to solve civil disputes and disagreements. There is a pretty wide area where things are not illegal and possible to convict, but you would probably want to do something. The police’s mindset (at least the ones I’ve interacted with) is one of three things: 1. Deterrance from crimes to be committed (doesn’t apply here) 2. Achieve convictions for crimes (would also not apply in your si…

[deleted]

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#199
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.

> there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. There shouldn't be a "process" set by Google when it comes to sexual harassment, employees should be able to sue, that's the process,sexual harassment is a crime, they can't sue because Google force them into arbitration, which should be illegal for an employer to do that to an employee IMHO. this is a denial of justice.

I'm not trying to troll you, but it's a voluntary "denial of justice". No one compels or coerces people to seek employment there. They apply, go through several interviews, and then voluntarily agree to whatever it is they agree to before day #1 of work. As long as people are willing to work there under XYZ conditions, people will continue to work there under XYZ conditions.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#200
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of the hesitation is people fear kangaroo courts and termination without due process due to false accusations or exaggerations. Much as the extra legal stuff that goes on in college.

In other words, people here are more concerned with a phenomenon that is measurably rare relative to the downright epidemic that people are seeking to counteract. I think that says a lot about one's values.

Whether a phenomenon is rare has a lot to do with how common it is. People getting shafted by kangaroo courts is rare when kangaroo courts are rare. What happens when you make kangaroo courts common?
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