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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

#281

Post by alexis_fr »

jccalhoun wrote: post #217
alexis_fr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you can see, the divide is becoming greater between ones who “believe” and ones who “don’t”, and the audience is massively imposing a bias here in this thread. We’ve lost our ability to listen to each other, and it’s sad that it happened on a topic which is still very easy to judge using science.

>a topic which is still very easy to judge using science So how would you do that?

There is no scientific study about wage gap for equivalent work. If it had been reported properly by newspapers, we wouldn’t be talking about it.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#282

Post by zaccus »

danharaj wrote: post #183
gedy wrote: 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.

How rare false accusations are is completely irrelevant. If the goal is justice, then due process is non-negotiable. Period.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#283

Post by dragonwriter »

ryanmercer wrote: post #280
fuzzybeard wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how we got the Salem witch trials and why mere accusations aren't usually enough.

>That's how we got the Salem witch trials and why mere accusations aren't usually enough. That's how plenty of hard-working, innocent, Americans got blackballed and had their careers ruined by McCarthyism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities resulted in many things, but the Hollywood Blacklist alone was something like 150 names of almost entirely innocent people. Those people couldn't get work because someo…

> Those people couldn't get work

Wasn't it revealed that most on the list continued to work in Hollywood under pseudonyms?

I mean, certainly denying work was the intent of the list, but...

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#284

Post by ryanmercer »

drdeadringer wrote: post #196
vynyl wrote: 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"?

>I'd like to know how you envision this happening

Botnets of fake social media accounts for starters. You think if they are currently manipulating political elections they won't ever try and use similar tactics to tank a company?

China: "Google give us user data!"

Google: "No way!"

China: "PLA Unit 61398, hurt the Google! Make accusations! Lots of accusations! Many many many accusations!"

----

China: "State media, run articles about how the evil uncivilized Google makes a hostile environment for female/gay/green cardigan wearing employees!"

---

China: "Movie studios, make this romantic comedy but be sure to vilify a company identical to Google!"

---

China: "People's Worker, scour the internet for any controversial quote from any corporate member of Google, great, yes, that! PLA Unit 61398, have an account 'discover' this quote and use the botnet to get it trending!"

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#285

Post by astura »

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…

You do a chromosomal analysis on everyone before you use a gendered pronoun to describe them? Because you can't tell what their chromosomes are just by appearance.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#286

Post by dragonwriter »

hueving wrote: post #70
truculent wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the eyewitness accounts of your female peers and friends not count as evidence?

No, if it's one person leveling an accusation and there is no corroborating evidence (either physical or more witnesses), it's not enough. Otherwise it would be within anyone's power to have people fired or put away for rape without evidence.

> No, if it's one person leveling an accusation and there is no corroborating evidence (either physical or more witnesses), it's not enough.

Whether it is sufficient evidence is a different question than whether it is evidence. It's certainly difficult for nothing other than a victim's testimony contradicted by the accused with no other direct evidence to meet the criminal standard for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but it's equally certainly less difficult for it to meet the civil standard of preponderance of the evidence that would be applicable in court for sexual harassment claims, and for lots of other human actions, action based on evidence with a lower threshold than preponderance of the evidence for any single offense may be reasonable.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#287

Post by dragonwriter »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #24
truculent wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the eyewitness accounts of your female peers and friends not count as evidence?

Eyewitness evidence is the least reliable kind of evidence there is.

Most other evidence is necessarily less reliable than eyewitness evidence since it relies on eyewitness evidence to attest for it's provenance.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#288

Post by belorn »

jib wrote: post #243
belorn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question the parent comment made was not if the law allows an employer to fire someone for a situation like that, but if we want employers to investigate and prosecute crime when the police drop a case. Is that the role that employers should have in society, yes or no? > They do not have the same burden of proof That is a key point. At the same time we want the legal system to have a high burden of proof, but the…

I would argue that allowing the police to fire individuals from companies would be an egregious violation of human rights on par with disallowing free speech.

Do you think that the average HR department would do a better job at it, and if so why?

What would the optimal system be when we want punishment for crimes when the police drops it because there isn't enough proof.

Re: Google staff walk out over women's treatment

#290

Post by devwastaken »

ryanmercer wrote: post #277
dragonwriter wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misreading the “violence and intimidation” in that definition as if it were “violence or intimidation”; it actually contradicts rather than supports your claim.

I cited one defintion, here's one for you from Merriam-Webster "terorrism: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" If you go look at press coverage right now, it looks like there's a minimum of dozens of employees at each of many worldwide locations that have walked out. If you're telling me a company doesn't feel that, doesn't feel a hundred or possibly thousands of employees refusing to work…

You should say what you mean. Your statement can be widened to "Protest is terrorism" and if that's what you really think then you are prioritizing business over human rights. I fundamentally disagree with this logic because if you or I were in a situation we were wronged we would expect others to look out for our rights. Democracy works because people cooperate, and part of cooperation is protest.
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