Interesting to contrast this story with Damore's claims of left-wing bias and overemphasis on diversity and inclusion. It's uncomfortable exercise to put myself in the shoes of a young woman considering applying to Google; the prospect of unwanted advances from higher-ups and suspicions from the occasional peer of being hired for my gender might be enough to put me off completely.
The interesting thing is that the #MeToo movement naturally targeted a lot of liberals, because almost everyone in Hollywood is liberal. The right also has some issues with harassment, etc. but the left is far from immune to having it and in some ways has more trouble. I'm not sure why that is, but the "free love" and unrestrained sexual expression type culture of the left might have something to do with it.
Typically that kind of evidence doesn't just make itself available due to the nature of the crime. If employees themselves are orchestrating protests, they probably have information we don't. You can't just start dropping names and slandering.
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.
Because you treat others as you expect to be treated, and respect your fellow human kind. We do this because if we have an issue we want to raise to everyone there will be people to help empower that.
Given that the individuals protesting are employees about their workplace there is information we may not know, and given the history of mega corps violating rights it would be unreasonable to automatically trust the company over the workers putting themselves out there.
If you have reason or evidence against, then by all means don't support the protest, but you should look at this from their perspective and at workers rights in general.
Yeah, for determining which of six strangers in a lineup is the one who mugged you in a dark alley. IDing someone who harassed you at work seems easier.
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.
There’s substantial corroborating evidence for rape. It can be traumatic, but read through some trials of convicted rapists and review the evidence presented.
I mean I'm not saying give ultimate judicial authority to any accuser. Just that we should be able to respect our peers' opinions as being worth something more than "not at all". Granted, I should have perhaps made that clearer rather than slipping into rhetoric.
> 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.
>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 someone accused each of them of being communists, often with zero evidence.
There's a lot of comments making arguments that were basically discredited decades ago, and people have got tired of having to rebut them every single time and gone straight to the downvoting.
Hacker news voters seem to have got a lot less tolerant of this kind of tired regressive culture war stuff lately. But this article is still on the way to being flagged off the front page. There are certain subjects this site is just not capable of having a mature, informed discussion of.
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 different parts of the political spectrum, and a core part of the culture wars.
In addition, harassment is easily lied about. Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
If I was a Google competitor, and Machiavellian in moral outlook, I'd feed those flames to weaken Google, and hope that nobody did it to my organisation.
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?
> Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims?
Because it quickly becomes a witch-hunt.
It is hard enough to have a fair investigation within a proper court system and legal framework - it’s far more likely any Google process will end up as a kangaroo court than the process leading to any justice.
So you think all claims should be dismissed as false and people who are actually subjected to sexual harassment and coercion at work should have no recourse.
Which is why they merit investigation. For which there should be a process. Without an investigation process, what alternatives would you suggest for avoiding treating all claims as true or all claims as false?
> When you receive a complaint move the accuser and accused into different teams.
That's a very good way to be found liable for both later harassment by the accused and, if you move the accuser, for retaliation; and also a PR nightmare when it is discovered to have been your policy or even a common practice to move accused wrongdoers without follow-up (just ask the Catholic Church.)
> I hope you don’t think I’m suggesting a company should cover up serious crimes
You are suggesting that they should shuffle people around without investigation to quiet complaints of situations against which are obligated by law to protect their employees, including potentially involuntary reassignment of the reporting party (again, without investigation of the facts) despite the legal prohibition on retaliation.
> Have a zero tolerance policy on relationships between colleagues. This works well in smaller to mid-size companies.
This addresses only the tiniest subset of issues, and mostly the ones toward the consensual end of the spectrum. Groping; quid pro quo suggestions (subtle or explicit); coercive threats (subtle or explicit); lewd remarks; invitations to strip clubs; etc ad nauseum (and yes, they're nauseating) have nothing to do with actual romantic relationships.
> When you receive a complaint move the accuser and accused into different teams.
Due to the nature of company hierarchies, this almost inevitably punishes the person lower on the reporting chain much more than it does the one higher - both in terms of short term impacts and long term career advancement. Which often means punishing the victim, due to how the power dynamics of harassment interactions tend to work out.
It's also a pretty damn weak reaction. If your Director of X insinuates that they'll fire an engineer if the engineer won't sleep with the director, you think the only consequence for the director should be that that engineer no longer reports to them?
> This addresses only the tiniest subset of issues, and mostly the ones toward the consensual end of the spectrum.
Not at all - in practice it removes ambiguity which is where most of the issues stem.
> this almost inevitably punishes the person lower on the reporting chain
At a large company that is not true - it’s actually the opposite.
For those below director level it’s usually a privilege to be able to shift teams.
On the other hand when you are director level and up it’s usually a negative because most of your ability to operate effectively comes from the interpersonal relationships you have built up.
> It's also a pretty damn weak reaction.
It’s a weak reaction based on typically weak evidence. In fact most commonly there is no evidence at all.
What it does is it ensures any abuse is stopped.
In practice it’s one of the most effective techniques I’ve seen because it can be used to nip problems in the bud - nobody feels too bad about using the system early and often.
Your much more likely to have somewhere to reassign the lower level employee to than the higher level employee simply because there are fewer roles total at the higher level. Unless both must be reassigned, you end up punishing only the lower level employee.
It doesn’t ensure abuse is stopped. It may just expose a different set of employees to abuse. It doesn’t send a message that abuse is unacceptable or will meet with meaningful consequences. It’s only a solution to anything if the only problematic interactions are between two specific employees. If you have an employee with a boundary problem or who enjoys abusing their position or who “just can’t help themselves”, it does nothing to prevent or deter them from subjecting another report to the same unacceptable behavior. Like the molesting priests mentioned in another thread - moving them to another parish accomplishes nothing except to make it clear that they can get away with misbehavior and to expose a new set of victims to abuse.
> than the higher level employee simply because there are fewer roles total at the higher level.
Maybe at the very top - not for the majority of cases though.
> It doesn’t send a message that abuse is unacceptable or will meet with meaningful consequences.
Does sending a message that abuse is unacceptable stop abuse?
It seems to me that the only people it scares are the people who aren’t a problem in the first place.
In truth such a message seems to enable abusers although I couldn’t explain to you why.
> moving them to another parish accomplishes nothing
That might be the case when children are involved.
In a workplace context though such an approach empowers potential victims.
It empowers victims in four key ways:
1) It stops women from threatening innocent men - saying “I can make you move teams to an equivalent position” is not particularly threatening - more of a pain in the ass.
2) It limits the ability of a male manager to sexually pressure his female subordinates. Saying “you will never advance in this company unless you ...” carries a lot less weight when you can easily switch managers.
3) It empowers women to be able to voice concerns without having to worry about getting people fired.
You’d be surprised at the number of women who keep quiet about real problems because they don’t want an overzealous HR to come in and ruin people’s livelihoods.
4) It limits abuse without requiring strong evidence of abuse in a way that doesn’t result in strong backlash.
Have a zero tolerance policy on
relationships between colleagues.
Here is an interesting though experiment: Remove all humans from this planet who are the direct or indirect descendent of a couple whose relationship started at work.
No, of course not. Symmetrically, the should also not automatically accepted as true.
There should be an objective, measurable process. Given the cul-de-sac that organisations like Google have been strong-armed into, I think the obvious next step is
(1) to record all work-time interaction of all employees and store them for a long time, e.g. at least 10 years.
(2) Give a absolutely clear-cut criteria as to what counts as acceptable behaviour and what doesn't.
>No, of course not. Symmetrically, the should also not automatically accepted as true.
This. I imagine most are absolutely true, but there are some that absolutely are not. I've personally been accused by rape, online, of someone in another state that I've never even been to. Fortunately, no one took the claim serious but I imagine there are many innocent people that have been wrongly accused for whatever reason.
I also had a friend, that was using OkCupid, reject a girl very politely in the first message or two. She then went on 'cheaterville' and posted that he gave her sexual transmitted diseases/infections and made multiple accounts alleging the same, one even as him with his name. He's an actor, he was up for a role and they retracted their offer when googling his name brought the cheaterville page up on the first page. Now if these two instances have happened to 2 guys from the midwest that have no power or money, I can only imagine there are quite a few false accusations regularly. I also imagine there are many many more TRUE accusations.
We need to protect individuals regardless of race, gender and sexual orientation but at the same time we need to avoid workplace harassment turning into McCarthyism.
(1) There is simply no agreement currently on what counts as harassment.
(2) Anecdote: I've been involved in investigating a sexual harassment claim at a previous employer, at it was absolutely and categorically and provably false.
turning into McCarthyism.
Too late. That ship has sailed a long time ago. The situation has gotten so out of hand, that recording all employee interaction might indeed be the only way forward.
>(1) There is simply no agreement currently on what counts as harassment.
This is an absolutely fair observation.
>The situation has gotten so out of hand, that recording all employee interaction might indeed be the only way forward.
Yeah, I think something like bodycams is likely the most effective solution to the issue but then things get tricky for various industries, stuff like patient/client confidentiality laws, trade secrets, etc. Not to mention stuff like using the restroom, where sexual harassment could still take place.
Then audio-only wouldn't cover miming explicit actions.
It's certainly a problem with no easily actionable answer.
> what downsides are there for false harassment claims
There are major downsides to making true harassment claims: you get denounced as a liar and a slut. This is the main reason why so many claims went unreported, and the #metoo movement is one of solidarity which makes it possible for people to actually report true claims without ruining their career. Actually deliberately making a false harassment claim is potentially career suicide.
How is that a "major downside"? I've been called both, and I can't say I care. I can imagine that loosing a job to a false accusation is a "major downside".
#metoo movement
Isn't that the movement whose leader Asia Argento has been has been accused by the New York Times as a sexual harasser [1, 2]?
You know, just because you don't empathize with how in our culture and society a woman being called a "liar and a slut" can be both career and social suicide, doesn't mean that it isn't a major downside for other people...
Does the actions of a leader discredit a movement? Can one even say that #MeToo has a single leader? Do you know anything about the #MeToo movement?
> Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
Many people who get harassed opt to change teams, companies, or professions rather than actually pursue a formal complaint against their harasser. Perhaps they are mistaken (I don't think so), but they seem to believe that there are real downsides to filing even true harassment claims, to the extent that the aforementioned career upheavals seem easier.
And only a few short decades ago I could fire someone for being gay, or forbid my wife from opening a bank account. And it was a mere century ago that women literally couldn't vote.
I don't see why the fact that social mores change invalidates the social standard we have today.
Furthermore, why do you folk always jump straight to the "b..b..but false harassment!" argument? All it does is demonstrate that you actually don't care at all about the original problem.
Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
So why are you willing to throw 90-98% of harassed women to the sharks, in order to protect 2-10% of accused men? Plus there's the whole strawman that allegations are always believed. Of course there should be fact checking. In fact, even in the #metoo era, men almost never face repercussions for false allegations (and often not for real ones.)
Your statement that unfounded harassment claims do not lead to repercussions is flat out false. There is no company that would not discipline someone for bringing a harassment claim that was demonstrated to be false.
In short: this argument demonstrates that what you really want to do is only to preserve the status quo and do in fact not give a shit about a major problem in our culture.
> Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
Those numbers are specifically for rape, not sexual misconduct. I would hope that the false accusation rate for violent felonies is pretty low. Assuming this is still the case with lesser charges or non-criminal behavior is disingenuous.
The social standards we have today include that false accusations of harassment largely have no repercussions, and amount to a destruction of standards of justice. I don't want to live in a totalitarian society where hate-mobs replace argument, why do you promote one?
don't care at all about the original problem.
I care about the original problem, but believe it to be marginal in comparison with the false accusation problem, and the decline of standards of justice.
Experts place false sexual
misconduct allegations at 2-10%
The article you cite does not provide any evidence of this claim whatsoever, did you even read it?
throw 90-98% of harassed women to the
sharks, in order to protect 2-10%
You seem to think that marginal inconveniences of women (let's not forget that the Google mob was protesting because some guy hit on some woman at a party!), is more important that human rights of men?
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.
I can have an educated guess from just a brief glance -- especially if the other person doesn't actively tries to mislead me on such an important issue.
I don't care directly about chromosomes, they are put an extremely
good proxy for one's reproductive abilities, hence an extremely good
biological correlate for sex (i.e. reproductive role).
I care about fertility, because reproduction is more-or-less the
single most important duty every human has. It is also difficult a
space to navigage, therefore all indicators and heuristics that help
me appreciate his/her sex efficiently, makes navigating this difficult
space much easier, hence is a friendly gesture.
Here is an interesting question for you to ponder: Why do basic facts about human biology upset you so much, so much so in fact, that you use the act of procreation as an expletive?
> 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.
>employees should be able to sue, that's the process,
See eh. Does money fix the issue "biotic 1 told biotic 2 'nice lady bits why don't you sit on my man bits' now they want 2 amounts of monies" how does money fix the issue? How does money repair the damage? Is money a Men in Black neuralizer? Does it selectively delete the negative emotions from the event? Is it fair that shareholders in the case of Google, or the owner in a small business where some rogue employee decided he wanted to play grabass without the owner's consent or even knowledge, to have to shell out large sums of money that won't actually undo the damage?
I don't think suing is a good solution here. If you are denied a job and have EVIDENCE it was based on your gender or sexual orientation, then suing somewhat makes sense however aside from lost wages there isn't much that would be productive here. If you sued for the actual job then everyone knows you as that person that got the job because a court of law said you get it and not necessarily because your skill and history make you the best candidate.
>sexual harassment is a crime,
Somewhat. Quid Pro Quo is a crime, not rectifying a hostile work environment (not reassigning the alleged offender, not investigating and terminating the alleged offender etc) is a crime. But biotic 1 telling biotic 2 that they have nice reproductive bits and bobs, is not an actual crime (perhaps it should be?)
>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.
Money /= justice. If someone demands sexual favors, or regularly says sexually explicit things to you, a check doesn't give you justice, especially if it's from the employer.
Take Google as an example. Google is owned, in part, by likely hundreds of millions of people (index funds, direct stock purchase, etc). Google has a board, it has various rungs of corporate management, then more localized management. Chances are none of those people have said "hey Don Draper, make sure you grab Megan's ass today when she comes in to dictate for you today and tell her what you want to do to her on your desk" and while Google does need to do something to employees that think such behavior is acceptable, and carry it out, why should they have to cut a check for hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars, for something a rogue employee did?
Perhaps there should be some sort of penalty/tax that companies, when sufficient evidence is found to support a claim, they have to pay to an NGO that deals with rights equality and safe workspaces? Money doesn't undo the situation so I don't think the victim should be seeking large sums in damages, companies (unless supporting the behavior) shouldn't be penalized for large sums of money because of an employee that has free agency, however if an incident is reasonably provable perhaps they should have to cut a check, based on some sort of scale, say 100k$ for a company like Google to a regularly audited group that provides resources for victims to reach out to for both any required treatment and for help dealing with any potential workplace discrimination as a result of their claim.
Employers have a duty of care to protect employees from harm in the workplace, and that includes protection from sexual abuse.
A lot stuff that counts as sexual harassment in the work place is not a crime.
You don't sue people who perpetrate crimes, you prosecute them. You're asking the victims of sexual harassment to persuade police to investigate and prosecutors to prosecute, and we know that they won't because we know they already don't.
You're also saying that no action can be taken without meeting the very high criminal burden of proof - that this thing happened beyond all reasonable doubt. That's going to leave harassers free to continue.
Maybe you just meant that sexual harassment is unlawful and employees have an existing remedy through civil courts, but this would be pisspoor management. If your company employs people who reduce productivity of others in the workforce by sexually harassing them it's in the organisation's best interest to manage those people so they stop the harassment or leave the company.
I think you're being too rigid. There are situations where one employee forces themselves on another at the christmas party. In that situation obviously the right call is to report it to the police and to have a disciplinary process internally for gross misconduct. But there's a million smaller examples of harassment that just need to be tackled by the organization. For example, if a man repeatedly makes comments about a woman's appearance, there needs to be a process where the woman can report that, be heard and have the issue addressed - it may be as simple as the employee's boss pulling the into a room and saying "stop being a creep". Not everything is solved by law suits.
However, obviously if things do escalate, access to the law should be guaranteed and the binding arbitration should clearly be dropped.
It's odd how on one hand, the consensus here is that the quality of the work environment is very important to the productivity and the wellbeing of employees. And on the other hand, people argue that this type of misconduct should not be punished unless it's literally illegal.
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?
What you have is an epidemic of powerful employees abusing their position to take advantage of junior employees.
What seems to be suggested to fight it are tools that would be extremely effective against other junior employees (even if the allegations are untrue), but only middlingly effective against the real problem of powerful employees.
That will understandably lead to push back from junior employees who fear abuse. Offer solutions which would primarily work against powerful employees and would be ineffective against other junior employees and I think there would be much more support.
> 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,
Except that, under the law, the company’s response (including the absence or inadequacy of any process) to certain situations is part of what determines if they are sexual harassment.
> sexual harassment is a crime
No, it's not, and if it were the process would not be for employees to sue, because crimes are prosecuted exclusively by the government in the U.S. legal system.
“Many” seems unwarranted (especially when it comes to prosecution of a charge rather than entry of a complaint or pursuit of an indictment), but, yes, that was an overgeneralization. But, it is by far the dominant rule.
Prosecution is one method of deterring thieves from robbing my store blind. I have also tried locked doors, security cameras and not leaving the store unattended.
I like your argument that it is cheaper to just let people rob me blind and then burn time and energy catching them, prosecuting time, and hoping for a conviction as a deterrent.
With any luck using your system crime will magically disappear on it’s own.
I am going to put my fingers in my ears now and make noises and ignore the worlds problems. It is certainly easier to not take responsibility. Good advice.
Only if the law can prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime happened, which is often difficult and why it makes sense to metaphorically secure the premises through an internal HR process as well.
I think it is poor judgment to create an organization that does nothing to secure its people from sexual harassment. Not sure why you would disagree but if that is what you intended I do not want to work for you.
Youre being incredibly unfair: That's not at all what I said, and your post I responded to also made no claim along these lines. You're misrepresenting my and your past statements.
What we were talking about is ending forced arbitration (the "process" referred to by the person you responded to) so that the law can be used to protect victims. That doesn't mean protections at work suddenly go away. It also doesn't mean suddenly employers will let sexual harassment run rampant either. It's not a binary either-or choice at all. So why not all protections.
The post I replied to implied that the criminal justice system is the only solution to these problems:
"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,"
Notwithstanding the unbelievable confusion of law in that post is a whole other conversation.
I argued that companies should also have a plan in place to prevent sexual harassment at work by using an analogy to robbery, also a crime, that we use preventative measures to stop despite there being a criminal system punishing robbery.
Your response was claiming I was expressing poor judgment for arguing that companies are responsible for not creating environments rife for sexual harassment.
"Comparing sexual assault to a store robbery in a tone of sarcasm is at best a poor judgement call."
I don't agree. I think it's a reasonable demonstration of the absurdity of the position I'm replying to.
I don't know what else you wrote, but that's what I replied to.
Re-read his post: people should be able to sue in lieu of forced arbitration, they're never advocating for "create an environment for sexual assaults". Nowhere and no one is arguing for creating an environment for sexual assaults in this thread. The reason it seems like an absurdity is because you're setting it up to be one when no one is advocating it, which is the definition of a strawman.
Sorry, but if you're still going to stick on this point then this'll be the last thing I say on the matter.
forced arbitration has been the bane of combatting anything legally. it basically is now used to completely remove any employee or consumer ability to sue. This is used for literally everything. Every employer does this now, every software product, every hardware.
Because it doesn't actually do that.
Only in the u.s. do people believe that suing over anything and everything is an efficient or effective mechanism of justice
"Sue it out" is probably the least effective possible conflict resolution mechanism along almost any axis.
The underlying goal of arbitration is to ensure effective resolution of non-complex situations and reserve the courts for actually complex cases, instead of now, where they are used because people hope they can make a bunch of money.
The only thing I'm aware of is people complain of bias of arbitrators using the proxy of how often business wins relative to people in courts (with no evaluation of whether people should be winning as much as they do in court).
Otherwise I have seen nothing that suggests that arbitration is not in fact very effective and efficient at reducing the cost and time involved.
- it is funded typically by the company, and is very likely to agree with the company
Maybe suing constantly is an american thing, but if that is to be addressed it should be by congress not by individual companies wanting to circumvent civil law.
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.
They didn't have options - every single Google employee(past and present) has options. They selected this one, voluntarily. Indentured servitude is not a valid analogy.
Most indentured servitude in the US was a voluntary agreement [1] although all such agreements are now illegal by the 13th amendment.
Also, there exist the concept of a so-called "unconscionable contract." I'm not saying this proposition is true, but I'm submitting for evaluation: is the act of submitting to private investigation processes that may be used as evidence against you in civil or criminal courts unconscionable?
They do not have any options where forced arbitration is not one of the conditions. Pretty much every corporation does this, so there are no realistic options for avoiding it.
There may be a very small number of cases where an employee successfully negotiated against this clause, but it probably requires the candidate to be a true outlier in terms of talent and skill set for the company to even consider it.
> 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.
Because, Google is a company that builds products. I am interested in their products and in the fact that their products work, not much in the behaviour of the people building them- given the fact that they are located in a supposedly civilized country anyway, where serious misconducts should be prosecuted by law. The internal squabbles and complaints of the company are of very little relevance for their users, as it should be.
It's worth noting that one of their demands is dropping the binding arbitration that essentially forces employees to forgo their right to legal recourse for civil matters. Not every instance of unacceptable behaviour is a criminal matter.
If you're not interested in the internal workings of Google, then why bother? There are people who are, and they are the ones driving this conversation. Let them spend their energy and effort figuring it out while you enjoy the result of their work.
Because I'm a bit annoyed by what seems to me a growing push towards confusing the judgement of someone's work with their moral qualities. I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists, or arians; a literary masterpiece isn't diminished by the fact that its author was an anti-semite, or sadist; a great movie director remains a great director even if she did horrible things in her private life. Very little of our past science and philosophy and arts would still be standing if we were to apply these criteria, and I very strongly doubt we'd gain something better. Every single time "political" criteria have been used to judge the value of intellectual products, it's been the indicator of serious troubles, both for the society doing it and for the overall quality of the disciplines.
That is your personal choice, and is fine. But I think you can happily coexist with these other people:
- Those who care about influencing their culture and want to do what they can to change it.
- Those who are concerned with where their money goes and whether or not they think that that is the most effective use of their money.
Feel free to ignore the concerns of those groups and do what you want. But I don't think that wading into a conversation you fundamentally don't want to be a part of is effective.
> I don't think that wading into a conversation you fundamentally don't want to be a part of...
I was replying to a comment that claimed that
"no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office [..] would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable"
This to me is clearly a confusion between two completely different things: what Google produces, and what are Google's internal ethics. iPhones are not worse products because working with Steve Jobs was a nightmare. I value the distinction.
>I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists
The ethics of science does exactly this. A common question which has been asked for much of the 20th Century is: should we use scientific results that are the product of non-consensual human experimentation. an extreme but often used example experiments that were carried out by the Nazis at concentration camps. Outside of science consider the debate over the works of Wagner [0], Knut Hamson [1], or Heidegger [2]. Ethics matters when judging intellectual output. For
These are fundamental questions of ethics which have a long intellectual history of debate and discussion. You are welcome to hold your own opinions on them, but I don't think the way in which you are framing the debate is helpful, e.g. "a growing push", "confusing the judgement", "fundamentally anti-intellectual", etc... Ethical questions which have received this much thoughtful discussion and examination should be treated with respect.
They definitely have a process in place (they advertise their process a lot during orientation) but the demands I saw explicitly say they aren't good enough.
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".
No. If you are still a crybaby, you should not pursue the profession. Weak and entitled people have no position at the top. Your competitor will otherwise eliminate you.
If you cannot solve the issue a bit of harassment without creating a drama, you cannot rise to the top where the world is even more cruel. Emotionally weak people have no place. If you cannot give favors or something when other are, no one will pick you.
If someone is the CEO of a multi billion crop, and have 10 people on who could become the manager or VP, 5 are men 5 are women with everything being equal, who do they give the seat? The one who gives them a favor.
> 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"?
I dont think that "at will" exists in all countries - e.g. in Europe I have been told by managers I've had in various employments that it is almost impossible to fire someone in Europe without either some serious misconduct (e.g. sexual harassment), or without first going through a lot of steps to try and not-fire the employee (e.g. performance improvement plans).
I am not sure if that is true or not or if it applies to google employees, but I feel like there is a ring of truth in it.
That is true (no at will employment in at least most if not all of Europe, thankfully). And of course it applies to Google employees in the respective countries because it is the law.
In Germany sexual harassment earns you at least an adhortatory letter (the first step to a dismissal), and depending on the severity the options go up to an instant dismissal like in US at will states.
While it's harder to get fired here, it is by no means impossible. The law just provides what's basically a three strike system (one to two adhortatory letters for the same reason, then the third time the employee can be dismissed) to give the employee a chance to change behaviour.
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.
Why is being in line your first argument? I can understand somewhat if you're used to that in a country that does not respect humans as individuals, but nobody with a grasp of 1st world liberty should agree with it. You treat people as you wish to be treated. If those people are wrong, say good reasons why, but when you jump to an argument similiar to fascism it sounds like you're projecting your issues.
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.
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 compare the same jobs.
I want to see some actual numbers so people can figure out where the issue actually lies.
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 protecting people like Rubin, it does seem plausible that other things could be going on.
> 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.
When she talks about the "war against boys", she's talking about the school system. Schools overmedicate and overpunish boys. The system drives boys out of school and as a result, only 40% of college students are male. If an inequality like this went the other way, there would be national outrage.
But it's not exactly a "conservative" issue. Plenty of liberals have written about it too:
It's because even though there is no data to support the wage gap, it's very unpopular to question it. Christina Hoff Summers is a pioneer in the field of gender equality and has paid a huge price by actually investigating these issues. It's a risky position to take in today's political climate so not many have followed her footsteps.
"$3.27 less per hour than men. The median hourly wage is $15.67 for women and $18.94 for men.
The gender wage gap is a measure of what women are paid relative to men. It is commonly calculated by dividing women’s wages by men’s wages, and this ratio is often expressed as a percent, or in dollar terms. This tells us how much a woman is paid for each dollar paid to a man. This gender pay ratio is often measured for year-round, full-time workers and compares the annual wages (of hourly wage and salaried workers) of the median (“typical”) man with that of the median (“typical”) woman; measured this way, the current gender pay ratio is 0.796, or, expressed as a percent, it is 79.6 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2016). In other words, for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes about 80 cents."
It's meaningless to compare different positions pay to each other. "Typical" men vs "typical" women doesn't tell us anything about potential discrimination.
There's over 12,800 words in the article and 67 citations. It includes sections such as "How do work experience, schedules, and motherhood affect the gender wage gap?", "How do education and job and occupational characteristics affect the gender wage gap?", "Does a woman’s race, age, or pay level affect the gender gap she experiences?", and "What role do 'unobservables' like discrimination and productivity play in the wage gap?" yet you choose to ignore all of it and argue against something from the introduction that's expanded upon further down.
No, you're clearly arguing in bad faith with him and you clearly have not read the article. The sections titled "Women earn less than men at every wage level" and "How might discrimination—in the form of norms and expectations—be affecting the wage gap by constraining women’s choices?" might be enlightening to you, given your original cherry picked issue.
How am I arguing in bad faith? He responded to my comment with link to a far left think tank that uses an alternate definition of wage gap than what were talking about.
> "Women earn less than men at every wage level"
It's utterly useless to compare wage levels across different roles. I read the article, I strongly disagree with it.
Do you really think comparing the pay of people in different roles is useful? It's apples and oranges. I don't expect a nurse and an engineer to make the same amount of money. This is my argument and it's not in bad faith.
No, he responded with a 12,000 word article with over 60 references. Your reply was nitpicking a single thing that you feel is something important. Its not, the discussion is wider and deeper than that. By the way your point is dealt with in the article itself. The one you definitely read
What about citing some arguments from the article, so not everyone has to read 12000 words and wade throuh 60 references. It would be easier for everyone to check the validity of the argument then.
There has not been any counterpoint to original disputing of the citation.
"Christina Hoff Sommers does not agree with my positions on issues therefore is biased and cannot be trusted, compared to people who do agree with my positions on issues, who are not biased and can be trusted."
"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."
For me personally, I would try to talk about the specific issues and describe them, as you did in the second part of your comment. I understand there is a definitely place for using a simple phrase to characterize a larger pattern of inequality. Even using dramatic, colorful phrases which capture the imagination also have their place in the world.
Edit: I'm not trying to change your approach, I'm just being blunt about my opinions. I appreciate your open mindedness.
How is there not? Literally every modern school system favors activities that disproportionally disadvantage young boys. Boys and young men are dropping out of school at a far larger rate than women, and literally nobody cares. It's a travesty.
No it's not. You cherry picked an editorial written by an outside contributor. At the bottom you have:
>TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
You cannot label an entire outlet conservative or liberal because they bring in people of opposing views to write editorials unless there is an established bias over time (which you have not shown.)
__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.
How would you remove any kind of negotiation though? Say that it's illegal for an applicant to say "You have to pay me X or I won't accept the offer"? Or for an employee to say "Give me a raise of Y, or I'm leaving"? What if they already have an offer from a different company for more money? Can they tell their current employer? And if they do, can the employer offer to increase their wage to keep them? And if they can't, can they offer the employee a "new" higher paid position so it technically isn't a raise/negotiation?
I don't think it's really feasible, for the reasons you mentioned, among others. Nevertheless, there are countries which try to govern (or at least suggest) the min-max salaries that you can expect given your profession/experience/skill, e.g. Germany.
Like many people replying to the OP, I'd like to see some data that looks at it from different perspectives, tho, instead of just picking a side and arguing for it - "there's a wage-gap" vs "look, there actually isn't".
> to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
What if the pay is equal for like-for-like jobs, but for the higher paying jobs one sex is vastly underrepresented? Not saying it is, just that discrimination and bias often runs deeper than some simple comparison.
Then that would be the point of the data. At the moment people are acting on claims of differences in pay across a number of sectors and roles and it's way too vague to pinpoint what the actual issue is.
If the data found an actual issue like this, the it would need to be addressed, but at the moment simply claiming that women are paid less doesn't offer any solution apart from paying women an extra 20% across every single job.
A cultural issue perhaps, and one mediated by biology at that. I very much doubt that you go around telling the women in your life that the time they spend outside the office, and lack of vocational ambition, are a social problem that need a political solution.
The measured difference in distributions is very small.
And if we believed that this was the cause, you'd need to think that Googlers were wildly off the norm in terms of ability. They've got like 90000 employees. They aren't exclusively hiring mega geniuses.
UK Office for National Statistics publish good data for the UK.
My impression (based on 2016 stats [0]) is that as most C-suiters are men, and they can get 100s or 1000s of times the money that ordinary employees get, that in the UK this likely accounts for most of the effect that's not accounted for by career breaks (childcare, for example). To reiterate, this is my _impression_ when looking at the data.
Men who work part-time get lower wages; no one cares, it seems.
Cool, I'll have to look at the new data clearly, a priori it contradicts my analysis - I only recalled one situation previously where discrimination appears to give higher wages to women (over 30, working full-time), 15% is quite the gap did it make headlines?
Note they don't compare like roles here, just same industry sector IIRC.
The largest gap is 95% in favour of female archivists; that must be anomalous.
Not only is the data missing variance, but the small print also say that it excludes overtime.
Could I please see the variance in the data which is a very simple, important and often missing aspect when presenting data? I would also like to see the average amount of work hours (and overtime) per industry and gender, the average amount of flex time and other non-income benefits, and common known sources for wage differences such as how often a person changes job. All this is missing, but again the lowest hanging fruit is the variance which make any dataset completely useless (and I stand by this statement) for any complex dataset.
Yes, younger women friends post on Facebook how they're stopping work for the year in October (?) to make up for the pay-gap. I assume maybe that's true to some extent in USA -- they're certainly sold on the idea all the men around them are getting an easy deal.
It's a meme "we should stop working in October [IIRC] because we are only paid for 10 months compared to a man's full year". It's not an actual plan.
I've seen this specific meme a few times; dozens of posts about gender pay gap including from under-30 part-timers who have a good chance - according to the available stats - of being paid more than men in an equivalently skilled role.
As an example, company of 100, 50 women. Boss is paid £500k, everyone else gets UK median £35k. Whichever sex the boss is they now show a 26% gender pay gap.
If the boss gets 3x the median, that's a 4% gap.
I'd like to see analysis which looks at same qualified people and charts their progression with attempts to understand why their wage changed and whether those changes have any discernible sex bias.
Men seem to fall across a wider distribution (both higher and lower paid), as appears in other characteristics.
> I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
There really aren't any differences. Just do a simple mental exercise.
Imagine if the gender gap is real. Male programmers demand $100K while female programmers demand $77K for the same exact quality of work. What would this mean? It would mean all tech companies would only hire females.
For comparison look at seasonal farm work. Imagine if migrant workers deman $7.70 per hour while citizens demand $10 per hour for the same quality of work. What do you think the composition of the labor foce on farms would be? I'd imagine it would be mostly migrants. Right?
If the wage gap truly existed, clever feminists would start companies exclusively composed of women and would be putting everyone out of business because they have a 23% profit margin built in.
Sigh.. I've seen this argument so many times I have to wonder if the people peddling it has ever sat on a hiring panel.
The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value. Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech, where compensation packages are routinely so large and supported by large VC funds that those of us who do hire can see those salary differences as negligible. And, even if I were sensitive to those differences, I would not hesitate to pay 30-50k in order to get the right person for the role.
The question here is: are we doing a good job of finding the right person for the role? That is why the Google women are demanding "opportunity equity." Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
> Sigh.. I've seen this argument so many times I have to wonder if the people peddling it has ever sat on a hiring panel.
I have interviewed for jobs and have interviewed others for positions on my team. Both startup and traditional 9-5 tech jobs.
> The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value.
It's a bit of both.
> Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Is it society or nature? Also, society socializes males to be less aggressive. So I don't agree with your claim.
> Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech,
Because in the tech world, aggression is what is sought?
> Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
If that is the case, why don't these women create companies and hire only women ( who are supposedly doing the same job for 77% pay of their male counterpart )?
Maybe in construction work or farm work, male traits are highly preferred. But in programming and tech world, it's pretty much what you can do.
You really didn't address my point. If what you are claiming is true, why don't you start a search engine company and hire only women? You would put google out of business in a few short years given your built in 23% profit margin.
Do you realize how significant a naturally embedded profit margin of 23% is?
So I'll ask again. What is preventing you or any other person from starting companies and hiring women if women truly make 77% of a man's wage for the same exact work?
Why make assumptions? I'm an engineer and I make decisions based on data and information presented to me, and try to avoid guess work and assumptions as much as possible.
People keep saying this, but it assumes that companies are completely rational actors in hiring, unaffected by human bias. Which is clearly bullshit. For one thing, you can simply prove this by considering the existence of discrimination in the other direction - surely, if companies were hell bent on optimizing their hiring for optimal return on investment, we wouldn't have some of the most profitable companies in the world engaging in the kinds of hiring practices that, e.g., Arne Wilberg is suing about?
>I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men,...
It's not just arguing for higher salaries but being trusted to follow through when "the going gets tough".
Display of confidence is hard to distinguish from actual capability. Confidence is often mistaken for "can-do-spirit" or "positive attitude" and therefore always favored.
Women are more honest than man about their abilities in the workplace. They are more honest about previous experience in a job interview, and more reluctant to "fake it until they make it":
Excessive confidence displayed by men regarding their ability to follow through even their chances of success are equal to women, leads later to the assumption that the man knew what they were doing (and knew in advance that they will succeed) and hence men are seen as having been in full control the whole time. But actually it's hindsihgt-bias.
Combining "pay inequality" and "opportunity inequality" makes it more difficult to discuss the issue.
We know already that "pay inequality" is fictitious at this point.
So by elimination, that leaves opportunity - however as anyone who has ever worked in a large company knows, it is very difficult, except in a very regimented corporate culture like the military, to have equivalent opportunity spread around evenly. I somehow think Google has a corporate culture that is not very regimented.
How are you defining "pay inequality" while claiming it isn't real?
If I interpret "pay inequality" as "the average pay for women ages 20-60 is less than it is for men 20-60 in the US in 2018" then I've seen data suggesting it is real.
> When corrected for all factors there is no pay inequality.
This just isn't true, but I think the problem here is a semantic one. It is true that the more finely tuned your analysis is, the less reasonable it is to conclude that sexism or so called "patriarchy" plays any kind of role.
So I've come to develop a nuanced opinion on this.
I used to fully believe what you said, on the grounds that willingness and ability to negotiate have no bearing on how valuable the employee will be (at least for engineering jobs - it could be different for something like sales where dealmaking ability actually matters).
However, one counterpoint I've come to realize is that if an employee doesn't value higher salary that much, it's a waste of money to pay them more. Thus, by only paying higher salaries that put time and effort into arguing for higher salaries, you make sure to only spend that money on the employees that will actually value all the extra money you're throwing at them.
"Another stunning but perhaps unsurprising finding was that 63% of the time, men were offered higher salaries than women for the same role at the same company. The report found that companies were offering women between 4% and a whopping 45% less starting pay for the same job. "
At a casual glance, the 4-45% statistic also applies in the inverse direction, so it's fairly meaningless when discussing gender inequality.
The more appropriate statistic would be that "on average, women are offered 4% less" which seems to have been produced by integrating an estimation of the probability density, and looking at the non-symmetry of the distribution. It seems most of that difference is concentrated within 10% on the mean.
So (roughly) if you're a man, you had a 50% chance of being offered 4% more than a woman, and maybe a 30% chance of being offered 4% less than a woman.
The most rational, fact-based reporting I've seen on the wage gap comes from Freakonomics. They have several episodes [0], [1] that dive into the current research.
The TLDR, if I remember correctly, is: Yes, there is a wage gap between genders. It is smaller than most headlines claim, but real. Lots of factors go into this, but it is probably a mix of: companies _can_ pay women less, so they will, and women tend to value some things greater than salary. However, there is no smoking gun we can point to as a definitive root cause.
A lot of replies to ChrisRR's comment go out to the global level, but Google can't fix that. The interesting question is "what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs" at Google. That's what they can address. Does it exist?
If it does exist, that's a very serious problem, because if Google can't and/or hasn't attained pay parity that would satisfy the people writing this, then pack it in; there's no way it's ever going to happen. Google is just about the best possible environment for parity to happen in, with an almost uniform culture that would support it from top to bottom and enough money that it can pursue almost any parity policy it wants without a serious problem, and a long time frame in which this all should have been true.
If there is still systematic, unsatisfactory bias at Google, what hope is there for these ideas in the rest of the world?
One of the issues is that Google is rather reactive in its compensation - e.g. it only provides high-compensation offers to those who obtain competing offers. This essentially ensures that the highest offers go to those who prioritize being able to get high compensation. In my experience, a lot of software engineers tend to prioritize things other than compensation, and don't really care to try to extract higher compensation if they get to do work they find meaningful or work for a company they think is good. And for whatever reason, a much higher proportion of my male peers have prioritized high compensation compared to my female peers.
I suspect that if Google wanted to remove pay differences between men and women, they would need to start making strong offers to all their candidates - not just those who obtain competing offers and try to negotiate.
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.
Of course! Have you never met a programmer who had ~20 years of experience but actually was extremely weak at programming? Even the most basic of interviews would disqualify them from the job, but an ML algorithm can give them huge points on the "experience" alone.
I too have encountered developers with many years of experience and little programming skill. But in those cases I'd not hire them; or if they made it through the net I'd put them on a performance improvement plan and begin the process of firing them.
I don't know where you live, but at least in EU the cost of hiring the wrong person is monstrous. Unless they were literally caught stealing and you can fire them for gross negligance, you are looking at months of "performance improvement plans", when both of you know that it won't actually improve anything. All while you are paying them full salary, national insurance, tax etc, and also sinking in the time of another employee who now has to deal with the situation. It's extremely critical to not hire those people in the first place, and I would not trust an algorithm to do that.
Sorry, I guess we've got our wires crossed somewhere. I'm not suggesting that the hiring process be automated. Just that the compensation offered is fixed along a completely rigid structure.
I do, some people can do the same job for decades and somehow never improve their skills or personally develop.
I'm not just interested in pure technical skills from somebody, I want somebody who has the common sense and risk aversion to keep their projects running steadily and effectively without needing to put out fires weekly.
I also appreciate people who have something that I like to call "applied laziness", that being an aversion to repeating the same task over and over or building things that will require constant attention down the line. People with this skill are happy to put as much effort in as necessary in the short term to ensure that they don't have to expend needless effort in the future.
The problem is that it can turn out men are more aggressive when it comes to getting counter offers which has a much larger impact than anything else. If that's the case then what do you propose, ban people from negotiating and lose everyone good enough to get competing offers?
In short; yes. I think it's fair to say that google aren't going to run out of engineers if they implemented a completely rigid payment structure. Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry and secondly they attract the best engineers by reputation more than anything else.
What happens in a few years when the best engineers start leaving because they can negotiate higher pay elsewhere? If they start to get a reputation as merely good, but not the best, not where the exciting work happens?
That is one possible outcome. I'm not convinced it's the most likely outcome though. I guess it depends on how well correlated engineering talent is with negotiation skills.
Personally I wouldn't imagine those things are well correlated at all. In my experience the best engineers have stayed around long after it was obvious that they could get considerably more by changing jobs (and sometimes changing back again).
That aside, I think it would be entirely possible to set this up transparently enough that an engineer can see their future compensation and thus see how many years ahead they are jumping and can make their own judgement about whether it's worth moving to a company where their future compensation will likely change in the usual haphazard way.
I think this is part of the perception that machine learning is magical. This problem is as difficult as getting an accurate IQ.
If you’re going to base pay- something really serious- on such an algorithm, it must be open and reproducible.
Google is really good at this and that it doesn’t exist in a useful way is a signal that there is no algorithm. It would be extremely valuable to companies to know this like a credit score.
I think when there are natural incentives, resources, and open problem it means that we don’t really have resources or doesn’t exist and needs more time and innovation to solve the problem.
That's why I specifically excluded deep learning stuff. I was imagining something much simpler only marginally more complex than title base salary + x * years experience + y * years at google. Where the factors are initially chosen to get close to the current state.
How about standardised bands for competency? E.g. a software engineer level 3 step 2 has mentored three people, been the tech lead/written the OKRs for a 6-month project, and has X years of experience on other projects (in the earlier levels)?
Then it would be a simple HR policy to assign that engineer to whichever compensation band covered those levels when they joined a new company.
My point is - there's zero guarantee that a "logical" algorithm would be "fair". Just like if you trained an ML algorithm on the database of people currently in American prisons it would most likely conclude that black=more likely to be a criminal, which is obviously an unfair assumption to make.
> 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.
You mean, the kind of thing basically every public sector employer has, where alleged gender pay gap is never an issue?
Yes, of course that’s easy to do.
OTOH, private sector employers like to have personal productivity be a factor, but don't have good objective metrics for that, so they let subjective assessment play a major role, such that the biases of managers become a substantial factor in setting pay.
These people should be fired, not because they want equal pay but because they refuse to do the job they were hired to do.
Different genders deserve equal pay, people of different races deserve equal pay, people with various disabilities deserve equal pay.
HOWEVER, you want to walk out of work? You should be terminated. If I walked out of work, I would be fired. If I organized several people to walk out of work with me, we would be fired. This is the case at my current job and at every single job I've ever had.
You don't change things by striking, in my book this is effectively corporate terrorism "hey we have demands, if you don't meet them we aren't working!" If someone strikes, you can never trust that employee again. Ever. You can not count on that employee in any situation because they've demonstrated that they will happily stop working when it serves their desires.
What you do is you make the issue publicly known, you do it in a positive way, you do it in a polite way. You ask for change and if change won't be given, you find an employer that will even if that means moving or starting your own business.
I'm all for equal rights, I'm all for equal pay, I'm not for people holding businesses hostage by refusing to do the job they were paid to do.
You are lucky that someone else risked their jobs to put you in a position where you can spout this. If it weren't for unions and strikes, the common worker would have been much worse off.
You realize most of the labor unions that made meaningful reform were in factories yes? Factories that simply would not exist today because most of the work has been replaced with automation and equipment orders of magnitudes more efficient, yes?
You've only been treated fairly because of the substantial gains that unions have won for you in the past. You don't even realize how much worse it could be. Enjoying that 5-day 40-hour workweek? Without unions, it'd be a lot worse.
>You've only been treated fairly because of the substantial gains that unions have won for you in the past.
I'm treated fairly because it's the 21st century not 19th and early 20th century, when unions did most of their beneficial work. We have things like OSHA, fire marshals, etc. We have far more avenues of employment than in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well. And arguably more importantly, we have mobile broadcast platforms called cellphones that with a few taps of a screen can broadcast to a global audience to document conditions and immediately expose them.
Unions are dying, presumably because people don't want to be a part of them (can you blame them, there's countless documented instances of union corruption, in some instances with direct ties to organized crime ahem -> https://lrionline.com/mafiaunion-ties-still-strong/ )
In 2016, there were 14.6 million members in the U.S., down from 17.7 million in 1983. The percentage of workers belonging to a union in the United States was 10.7%, compared to 20.1% in 1983.
> Unions are dying, presumably because people don't want to be a part of them
Couldn't this also be down to rules against union busting being relaxed and companies like Amazon taking full advantage thus making it difficult for people to join a union even if they wanted to?
Or could it be due to the fact people don't want to give a percentage of their paycheck to historically corrupt organizations so they can be told "you can't work this week, sorry, we're striking" when people need to put food on the table and service debt...
As far as the 'evil' Amazon mention, they pay double minimum wage here in Indiana as is, people online like to whine about how unfair Amazon is yet people here fight for jobs at Amazon.
People need to wake up and realize they have better working conditions than nearly every other human being from a past age. It's called work for a reason.
>In the UK, the 1970 Equal Pay Act was triggered by the Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968.
And 1970 might as well have been 1870. The 21st century is an entirely different world.
Most of the jobs that triggered actual labor reform in the 19th and 20th centuries just don't exist any more. The factories of the 1800's wouldn't survive a single day of business today because modern, largely automated, equipment would leave them sitting in the dust when it came to profitability.
In this case you list, same thing. There aren't sewing machinists like that now, that stuff is largely automated. Very few automotive manufacturers use people to do the sewing and when they do it's a highly skilled artisan job that involves hand stitching for luxury vehicles, not machines.
I do not deny unions reformed working conditions, most of it however was many, many, decades ago in a world that doesn't begin to resemble today's world.
Fact is, unions are dying in the western world. Union membership is free-falling. Who needs a union when you have a cell phone and organizations like OSHA here in the US that you can directly file safety violations to for investigation.
Unions made changes with striking. Striking is no longer a useful tool and no longer needed.
If you strike now, especially if you aren't in a union, you should be fired. For each of those people that strikes over this, there's probably 50 people that would ecstatically take their job in the city they are in.
Striking isn't going to do jack for discrimination/harassment. We don't live in the 20th century anymore. Documenting and reporting incidents will bring change, not walking out of work like a child throwing a temper tantrum.
A lot has changed. What hasn't changed is that corporations are often motivated by profit over employee well-being, and that strikes can put pressure on them to change.
> Fact is, unions are dying in the western world. Union membership is free-falling.
Again, quite US-centric. In the UK it's been slowly increasing over the last few years. Finland, Sweden and Denmark have something like 70% trade union density.
> If you strike now, especially if you aren't in a union, you should be fired. For each of those people that strikes over this, there's probably 50 people that would ecstatically take their job in the city they are in.
The first line doesn't follow from anything you've said. The second line is the most convincing argument for trade unions in this entire thread.
Unless they're bombing buildings the word you're looking for is extortion, not terrorism.
Striking has changed a good amount of business's in the history of the U.S . public outcry and worker cooperation is the halmark of workers rights.
The reason protest is required is because the company will not change without a better force. 'asking nicely' doesn't go anywhere when the bottom line is money and image.
Employee collaboration for workers rights does not automatically mean they're against the company. They're against parts of it's operations, but still have wants to do their work. That's, again, been all apart of the last 100 years of workers rights. You should perhaps look into how companies can possibly stay afloat even when there's unions. Not that I agree with unions typically, but if there can be no trust and workers just dont care about the company then it should all fail.
>Unless they're bombing buildings the word you're looking for is extortion, not terrorism.
You don't have to blow up a building to be a terrorist. You don't have to carry out an act of violence, or even suggest one, to be a terrorist. Organizing a walk out is intimidation,
ter·ror·ism
/ˈterəˌrizəm/
noun
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
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 even 1 shift, because they are upset about how something was handled, that that isn't 'the systematic use of terror' to coerce Google to change policy then...
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.
It's over the top to invoke 'terrorism' in this context and at this point you're basically trolling. Please stop, and please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents.
Do you realize that all the things that make your current job bearable like 8 hour workday, weekends and safe work environment are only possible because people in the past had the spine to strike and demand better conditions for themselves and their fellow workers?
People repeat this line ad nauseum but i find it hard to believe work conditions would not improve over time if not for the presence of unions, look at highly unionised countries vs less unionised countries and compare the quality of life / workplace for an example.
>while i'm sure unions were involved i doubt they were the only reason we started reducing work hours and improving work conditions,
You are absolutely correct, I can give a VERY modern example. Medical residents now have capped hours, in I believe all 50 states, due to New York passing the Libby Zion Law and other states adopting similar laws. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby_Zion_Law
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.
I think it is true that you wont change most people's minds. (When I discovered the psychological concept of schema, I was literally horrified)
But some of us are discovering that what we thought of as "normal" (and thus forms the basis of many of of our value judgements) is quite narrow, so we have to adjust our expectations and that changes a lot of things... getting perspectives from others is a necessary and tedious process.
Im in my early 40s and despite thinking I was pretty liberal on most social issues I've spent the last 10 years discovering I've been wrong, poorly informed, and/or ignorant on a lot of details. At this rate, I dont expect to be done with these self-updates anytime soon, and reasoned arguments and shared experiences, fears, concerns, and hopes are essential for me to re-determine where I now stand, each and every day.
Just as an example, another comment made an argument about why the market would theoretically prefer underpaid staff. (Which would then not make them underpaid). A good point, but irreconciable with pay gap data...how do I resolve that? Ah, someone replied with a decent response about the issue BEING perceived value. Armed with these positions I can now spend a few minutes of much more effective research, and have better chances of noticing details in my day-to-day life.
For people who are tired of rehashing the same old arguments with data and answers that are out there for anyone serious to find...it's actually quite hard to find if you dont really know the question, and as unfair as it is, there is a limit to how much time and effort will people will spend grasping at straws about how they themselves might be reinforcing terrible systems. Implicit bias is IMPLICIT and thus it is hard to find out what your biased thoughts are. Effective arguments dramatically reduce that time and effort, and even if most wont take them for that final step, some of us are trying, and are grateful to those that are willing to once again rehash the "obvious" with those that are unlikely to change their minds.
> A good point, but irreconciable with pay gap data
> For people who are tired of rehashing the same old arguments with data and answers that are out there for anyone serious to find...
It's funny that you say that since there is no data supporting the pay gap. In fact there are people posting data in this thread contradicting the pay gap.
If you say data is available to support your argument, you should link to it.
I think you misunderstood my point in the "answers that are out there for anyone serious to find" - I'm saying it's worth restating your arguments even if you think people "should" know the "obvious" and "proven". Nothing in that position makes it ironic that I also stated my understanding of things (Be that understanding right or wrong).
> If you say data is available to support your argument, you should link to it.
I've chased this rabbit hole before - assuming you are sincere, I'll point to Wikipedia and let you follow their citations, but there's lots out there:
> In the US the average woman's unadjusted annual salary has been cited as 78% to 82% of that of the average man's. However, after adjusting for choices made by male and female workers in college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave, multiple studies find that pay rates between males and females varied by 5–6.6% or, females earning 94 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts. The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from gender discrimination and a difference in ability and/or willingness to negotiate salaries.
I'll be conservative and take the lowest difference and assume that college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave are 100% by un-pressured choice: 95 cents to the dollar doesn't sound like a lot, until you ask yourself if a 5% raise is significant, particularly since the amount of money in question takes effect every single year. My anecdotal experience suggests the conservative assumptions for that are not reasonable, but YMMV.
Heck, I’m at 0 HN points anyway: A male/female difference of 5% on basic criteria seems nothing, especially considering that women are nonstop drama at work when all is good, and are a legally explosive cocktail for up to 38 years if I believe the Kavanaugh accusation. I would never work with a woman anymore, plus the company loses 50% efficiency by hiring them, and then needs to hire an HR department and legal counsel. A company with women is a severely badly managed company.
I disagree with about every single conclusion you've drawn there, but I appreciate that you're willing to be clear and honest about your positions and beliefs. I won't upvote you, but I won't downvote either.
Even the wikipedia article says there's no citation given to backup the claims (see first paragraph).
> The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from gender discrimination and a difference in ability and/or willingness to negotiate salaries.
So according to wikipedia, men may have higher ability or be better negotiators? I don't see a gender pay gap here.
How so? The article rants about the 78% claim, without addressing that (a) even correcting for the concerns they state a pay gap exists, and (b) those "choices" men and women make aren't always free choices (witness who takes parental leave in the US vs in more egalitarian countries.
> men may have higher ability or be better negotiators? I don't see a gender pay gap here.
I fail to see how not knowing the source of a gap disproves the gap.
And men having more frequent and successful negotiations is a pretty tested topic itself. When perceived aggression garners one gender respect and another disdain, it's an inevitable result.
There is no will from upper management to handle these issues appropriately, which is part of why Google as an organization is in its current state. Google has been able to paper over issues with copious amounts of money thus far, but that is breaking down as time goes on.
I think it is more than that: there is a will from upper management to actively prevent such issues from being handled appropriately.
> Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later.
> Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
> H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
HR is never there for the employee. They exist to protect the Company. They give lip service to protecting and nurturing the employees and our people are our most precious asset BS. The only time HR will go after any of the big boys is when they are on the outs with the board. Example: Mark Hurd when he was forced out at HP.
If you read Larry and Sergey’s original paper that they wrote at Stanford, where they talked about creating a search engine, they specifically said that advertising was wrong and bad and it would inherently corrupt the search engine if you sold advertising.
Hopefully to more people in tech joining unions. Plenty of other well-paid professions are unionised (eg. doctors). For full disclosure I've been a member of Prospect, a non-affiliated union in the UK, for a few years. One of the advantages is free access to legal advice about employment issues.
The unionisation of doctors in America is one of the reasons that the American healthcare system is so bad though. Maybe we shouldn't encourage any industry to increase its inefficiency by unionizing, and instead just offer a set of universal regulations that keep workers (both skilled and unskilled alike) from getting shafted?
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... well, let me quote the Atlantic's Matthew Stewart:
>You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market.
Is that access to company legal resources or vouchers to independent lawyers? There is a big difference, especially when the legal issue is employment related.
This is the most under rated comment in this thread.
Don't know what the Google management is thinking at this point in time. But I'm damn sure, unless you are making it rain hundreds of millions in dollars, and you are a part of these pre-unionizing exercises- You are very likely getting marked up as a trouble maker, and may be already a part of purge lists.
This is also a small industry. You don't want your name to smeared as a person who comes with a high trouble/contribution ratio. Nobody wants to hire people to do their jobs, and get employees running their part time political projects with their fellow colleagues in paid office time, on office issues.
There are also a huge range legal landmines you are likely to step over even without active knowledge that you are.
That's ridiculous though.
You can't prove that I, having looked at some super-secret "purge list" and proceeded to not hire you, did it because of the "purge list"?
I'll just say you weren't a good fit for the "company culture" and that'll be that.
> Nobody wants to hire people to do their jobs, and get employees running their part time political projects with their fellow colleagues in paid office time, on office issues.
Nobody ever gets interview feedbacks in this industry.
What you are saying is true, but its always impossible to establish intentions. And either way you have to sue. All the best ever getting a job if you are known to do legal fights against prospective employers.
>>Union organizing is not a "part time political project," it is a legally protected right.
One believes in these things only until they become managers themselves. And every one aspires to be one in this industry.
> One believes in these things only until they become managers themselves.
The law isn't Tinker Bell, it doesn't require you to believe in it to exist.
> And every one aspires to be one in this industry.
It's difficult to think of anything sadder than a person who assents to his own exploitation in the hopes that maybe, someday, he will get to exploit someone else.
> One believes in these things only until they become managers themselves. And every one aspires to be one in this industry.
Oh god no, not even close to everyone in this industry aspires to be a manager.
Personally, even if I end up becoming a manager I don't think my opinion on unions will change. Ten years ago people told me that my opinion on taxes would change once I made more money too and if anything I support higher taxes even more now.
> And every one aspires to be one in this industry.
This is so far from the truth that I don't know how to make sense of your claim. Either you are living in a bubble or in a place which provides no career path to engineers (thus forcing them to want to be managers) or you are interpreting the data you are faced with incorrectly.
There are so many people in this industry who never want to be a manager that this claim of yours is frankly absurd!
>What you are suggesting is called "blacklisting." You may be interested to learn that in many states it is illegal behavior itself.
Sadly, impossible to prove.
I can choose to not hire for you a plethora of reasons. I can just give you a few bullshit questions that you can't answer correctly and use that as an excuse.
This is the reason protests like this are needed. Free exercise of bias is a feature built right into the current hiring process, and managers openly admit it.
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.
How is this different from other industries? How long does it take an aerospace machinist to get up to speed? 10 years ago, the strike at Boeing lasted 8 weeks and cost an estimated $100M per day.
So the press reaction was as expected.
Wall Street Journal was all over the strikers, with sexist and "snowflake" comments, demands the protestors be fired. Even comparing them to the coal miners. Remember the great coal-miner strikes? The company running the mines had the idea that they are above the law, that state law doesn't apply to their workers, that the company creates and observes their own laws on their ground with their own workers. The miners demanded that the state law be obeyed. Very similar to todays arbitration clauses, the very first point in the google workers demand. Or todays social media censorship, violating most countries constitutions.
"there's no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office. ...why aren't they treating their organisation with the same rigor they treat their website."
there is an interesting tendency that many psychologists pointed out: in many professions for some reason psychopaths tend to get to the top an stay there. Specifically CEOs tend to be people with most psychopathic traits:
Yes, but even if the specic allegation was not true, his whole relationship with someone he had power over was highly inappropriate. Unfortunately though, given that the senior leadership had a history of engaging in such inappropriate relationships, Google’s action here is to be expected.
I do wonder if any reporting process at a company can ever really be trusted to have the employee's interests in mind. HR, legal, and etc all are there to protect the company. They're not there for your standard employee.
Again, not disagreeing with having a process, I just wonder if a process handled by the typical parties really can be trusted. I've never felt that HR, legal, or any of those departments are there FOR me. Rather they are there to prevent any problems the company may have, and that is not likely to be in my interests if I were to make a complaint about something.
They aren't there for you but for the company. They are really only there for you in any way that protects the company. Having a neutral third party would be one idea. It would have to be funded by employee and employer contributions though. Outside of that you have the EEOC in the US that has some authority.
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
I have never understood why employees accept the restrictive clauses which assign ownership for any side projects to the employer. I am not a lawyer, but this has always struck me as amounting to a type of serfdom. If you are seen as a 24/7 unit of the company, and anything at all that you creatively produce can be claimed by the company, then your working capacity and creative capacity is essentially owned entirely by the company while you are employed there. You are not being paid just for your time and the work product you produce during that time. Rather you are literally selling an aspect of yourself. Does that sound reasonable at all? (of course, California has some protections against this. but that's just one state)
I would really like to see people rallying against many more things like this.
Many people aren't even aware of such draconian policies they are signing up for. And companies are probably counting on it too.
It is also possible that even the owners of the company (especially small, family owned companies) aren't aware of these dumb policies. They just trust their lawyers to write up the contracts. There was a comment recently on HN - employee reads up the contract, goes to the owner to ask about some clause, and the owner himself is surprised and calls the lawyer to sort it out.
Big companies that spend shit ton of money on lawyers have no excuse - they're likely doing all this intentionally.
My understanding (from working with lawyers in the past) is that it is enforceable in some states and unenforceable in others. I'm not a lawyer, though, and so don't really know first-hand.
I had one success simply not signing a non-compete I was handed on orientation day. I returned the packet of docs without that one and never heard a thing about it.
Maybe for a lot of the higher end HN devs out there, they can walk and be reasonably certain they'll pick up work in under a month. Personally, I've known a LOT of people (some in software too) that need 6-9 months to find any work in their field. Yeah, Uber and pizza delivery make some ends meet, but for a 'real' job with a 401k and benefits, it can take a LONG time. And at the end of that timeline, they can offer you really anything and you know you have to take that offer.
Anecdata: I'm in biotech and got offered 55k on the Peninsula at the end of about 2 months of interviewing for that particular company. They were the only people that would interview me over ~9 months of applying (caveat: biotech isn't doing well right now). The minimum wage of my 'stop-gap' auto mechanic job in a particular city is 60k. The biotech company would not budge at all.
a recent change in California law: Governor Brown recently signed Senate Bill 820 which prohibits secret settlements and non-disclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases.
in other words, if a private settlement is agreed to, the victim's name may be kept confidential, but not the perpetrator’s.
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"?
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!"
By existing. If you make a 'chief diversity officer' then you make an ideal candidate to compromise access to their accounts. Any policy discussion, any reports, any internal discussion of incidents become excellent ammunition for a campaign.
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 private entity that has a vested interest in the events seem...unwise.
Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead?
Like, if it's someone who said something slightly inappropriate/gray area to another and just needs a stern talking to, sure. Have a process/HR deal with it. But so many occurrences are so much worse than that...
Not the same situation at all, but similar reasoning: I once had a colleague corner me in the office because of a disagreement in a meeting earlier in the day, where they threatened to "meet me outside to settle things". I mentioned it to my boss/HR/etc, and sure enough, they told me to just talk it out with them and were generally useless. I ended up having to quit. In hindsight, it wasn't my boss I needed to talk to, it was the freagin cops. (Not, of course, cops are frequently useless too, and that's a separate problem...but if we have to change the world somewhere, maybe pushing it all on private entities isn't the best thing to do in this case).
As you point out, the cops are often useless too. Now imagine you call the cops on your boss and they show up to talk with him/her. How might your boss be treating you after this?
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.
What if we created a new government organization to fill where we find that the police is not the right party to address illegal behavior. We could call them peace officer which mediate in disputes with power to fire and discipline people with the exact same requirement and behavior that we want out of the perfect HR department. This way we would raise the standard to be equal for all people that are employed regardless of company.
In these situations, companies aren't sued for harassment, but for having a hostile work environment; allowing harassment to persist (e.g. by retaining harassing employees). If an employer has effective mechanisms to deal with cases of harassment, then it shouldn't be liable.
Even if a harasser was prosecuted or sued successfully, if the company retained them, that would create a hostile work environment for the harassee, and make the employer liable.
There's also the case of quid pro quo harassment, where a superior makes someone's career progression tied to the harassment, in which case it may be harder to distinguish the company's liability from the harasser. But even in such cases, an effective system to report such behaviour can mitigate the company's liability. In such cases, claims often surround retaliation for reporting harassment (e.g. employee transferred, demoted or fired in response to a harassment report.)
I'm surprised at how many other responses here are saying "because the police don't have the resources to investigate" and similar.
This reply gets to the more fundamental point: companies are doing a different thing than police investigations or even civil suits over harassment. They can't undo the harassment, they can't punish the harasser (beyond termination with cause), or force the harasser to compensate their victim.
Rather, the goal is to create a workplace where employees are not harassed. This is good for both legal reasons (hostile work environment suits) and obvious moral (harassment is bad) and practical (people will quit) reasons.
If a coworker mocked or punched me every day at work, it might or might not produce a complaint to the police or a civil suit against the coworker. But it would certainly be something that made my employment untenable and a reasonable employer would react to that. People are in general not demanding that employers act in place of the police, they're demanding that they act to stop sex-related hostility at least as thoroughly as they would act against other hostility. It's the purview of the company because it's a completely different task than what courts or police would do.
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).
>Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.
This shouldn't be the job of HR either.
What you describe is what civil courts are for. From societal perspective, it is their exact purpose: to dispense justice and prevent revenge. If they don't work, they need to be made to work, instead of relegating this function to random people with random training and random incentives following random policies that are ultimately designed to safeguard companies, not employees.
Going through the civil courts is very time-consuming and expensive for all parties involved.
Focusing specifically on the company's perspective, it's also a terrible option from a risk management perspective. It leaves them exposed to the possibility of a very expensive judgment. (Especially if it's a big well-known company that the courts might want to make an example of.) If they can resolve the dispute internally in a quick and satisfactory manner, then that is very much in the company's interest.
Which is exactly why it typically ends up being HR's job. And why it should officially be someone's job.
Framing it this way, I guess the company's internal culture being less dysfunctional because these sorts of problems are more likely to be addressed instead of being allowed to fester is just a happy side effect, but it bears mentioning, all the same.
I mean, Id argue that is exactly the way the system is designed, and it mostly does the job it is designed to do, not just a side effect.
Defining what makes a non-hostile workplace is hard, enforcing it on individuals is harder, so instead delegate that responsibility to each individual company and take action on the company if it does not do that.
In no way is it a perfect system (cue tons of excessively formalized training etc), but it is the best system I know of.
Allowing companies to remove the external force of "If you do not do this, you may face civil action" breaks the model though, so I completely understand why Googlers would like to remove forced arbitration. The risk of that is a contributing factor towards compliance.
Yeah, 100% agreed. Sorry - I was responding specifically to the question of whether HR should be in the loop, and didn't intend to suggest that the civil courts shouldn't also be part of it.
I wouldn't shed a tear if forced arbitration were banned. I can't really see it as not being at least partially an attempt to wiggle out from under the rule of law.
Why do you think the alternative is a conjunction of randomness at every level? Why not
* the people are HR
* trained in sexual harassment prevention and response
* following a transparent policy approved by the board and a union vote (or something like it, for instance an employee rep on the board like they are asking for)
Maybe this isn't the best alternative. I'm just saying, it's not like the choice is between (a) the government works it out and (b) everything is random.
There are lots of things that are inappropriate for the work place and yet aren't illegal.
And employer is absolutely responsible for dispering judgement on inappropriate, but legal things that happen while at work.
If I go to a co-worker and start yelling slurs at them, I should expect the be fired, even if my behavior wasn't illegal. The same is true for inappropriate sexual actions.
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 then when someone goes free we want someone else with lower burden of proof to step in and let the hammer fall on the guilty. If we changed the law and gave the police the power to fire someone without having a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt (this which we are asking the HR departments to do), then I would personally trust the police to do a better job with less bias than a HR department of a large company. It would also create a better political environment where the justice system would be discuses without extrajudicial punishment being used openly as an accepted alternative when we find the legal system lacking.
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.
Companies have their own internal regulations, code of conduct, and cultural norms, and HR is ostensibly knowledgeable of these factors, as well as being trained specifically in employment law. Besides that, there are jurisdiction issues that HR aren't bound to -- e.g. if the alleged violation happened during a work trip to Kentucky or overseas, the complainant isn't required to travel to that court (or deal with the feds) to get the matter adjudicated.
But beyond that, I'm curious why you think the police are the gold standard for handling all of society's disputes? Again, let's ignore that the people and groups who constitute the "police" vary significantly depending on jurisdiction; and also, of course, that the police do not make the ultimate decision to press and pursue charges (that would be the prosecutor's office). The police have the power of government authority and protection behind their decisions and actions, but that is orthogonal to whether they are trained and equipped to come to the right and/or optimal decision.
It's no different than a company hiring private guards for security -- guards who are not only willing to do, well, guard duty, but also are familiar with the company's culture and regulations etc, and are (we would hope) specifically and better-trained for the attack vectors that the company faces. It would be absurd to argue, "Well, that company must not have real security threats if they didn't contract with the police to guard their workplaces"
I don't live in the US so maybe this is cultural, but do you really want the legal outcome of crime to be based on local policy and norms? When I hear about sexual assault give jail time in one town and only a slap on the wrist on an other then that sound like injustice. I have always believed that a sign of a healthy legal system in any nation is when common laws are being enforced equally regardless of local provincial customs, norms or policy. If we apply this to internal process of a company it looks odd that one company should have completely different outcome to an other when an employee commits a crime.
And we don't need to use the police. We could invent a new group called peace keepers with different training, but the key point is that crime is defined in a democratic process that is uniformed applied to every citizen and thus the outcome of crime should be equally uniformed.
Private guards has a very clear line between the domain of the police and what they can do, just like the clear line between the military and the police. Private guards do not investigate crime, do not handle evidence, and is not considered part of the legal system. Similarly it seems natural to me that cases which society defines as crime should not be handled internally by any company. Having overlaps where private guards and the military stepping in as police sounds as a terrible outcome and a sign that something is broken in the legal system. Better to then discuss what is broken and fix it so we can return to equal outcomes for all citizens.
This is about crime. Threating someone with violence is a offense that society in a democratic process has define as illegal with an legal outcome. Sexual assault is a offense that society in a democratic process has define as illegal with an legal outcome.
There is a very clear line between crime and non-crime.
I'll apologize for my confusion. I was working from the context of u/jlb's comment [0]. and from the context of the posted article, in which none of the Google execs have been accused of a clear-cut crime. But the comment from u/shados that started this thread, and to which you are referring to, was talking about "downright criminal acts" [1].
So when we're talking about a "downright criminal act" -- violent assault, robbery, rape, threats to safety, fraud, etc. -- yes, the police should be brought in, for their powers of investigation and arrest, among other things. But then we're basically arguing a tautology -- "Should the police, whose job is to deal with criminal acts, be called in when a criminal act has occurred?"
What I read in u/shados's question, and subsequent comments, was: if an accusation isn't good enough for police standards, why should a company/HR use it as the basis of firing someone? So my line of argument is mostly irrelevant if you believe that companies have the right to fire people for non-criminal accusations. But I guess the bigger discussion is about the line between what constitutes a criminal act, vs. a civil dispute.
> If you believe that companies have the right to fire people for non-criminal accusations.
I agree with that. Let the legal system deal with criminal acts, the HR department deal with the policy violations by employees, the unions/department for workers deal with regulative violations by employers, and teacher/medical/ectra boards deal with professional violations. It is when one of those start to overrule the factual findings of each other that we need to discuss if something is broken and need to be fixed.
To connect back to the article and Google execs, here in Sweden we have an additional rule for public positions. A person can be fired from such position if they simply loose enough public trust regardless of factual events. In return for such weak employment protection they usually get payouts if they get fired without evidence of fault. This has the benefit that you don't need to debate if the accusation is true, but rather if the public trust (from media and so on) has been lost. In those cases where the legal system do find someone guilty they simply don't get the payout. I wonder if such system would work nicely to deal with execs in large corporations.
The reason is that the bar is simply too low. Or rather, the bar for taking legal action is so high that it would not in a million years create an acceptable work environment at Google.
Think about it from another perspective. If Google wants to cherry-pick the brightest and best educated people from society, they're going to have to meet a higher standard themselves. Would you want that standard encoded in law for the rest of the state? If so, how would you, in a democracy, impose a standard crafted by a subset of the cultural elite for themselves on the rest of the state or the country? Changing cultural norms drag the law behind them, not the other way around. The legal standard will lag behind for a long time, and Google's employees are part of the force that will be leading it forward.
wow. that sounds like a really bad situation. i mean, did you quit because of an ongoing threat of violence from this individual? the company should have offered other remedies before it came to that.
> ...why the company should be the primary responsible entity for this...Having a private entity that has a vested interest in the events seem...unwise.
All other issues aside: the company should want to make an environment where good people want to work and can work without "distractions" (using the word very broadly and generically, not dismissing people's important concerns!!!). So it's in their self interest to deal with them well.
This line of argument isn't that different from the GP's analogy to site uptime.
The point of a company investigation is to investigate violations of company policies; law enforcement doesn't get involved in determining if company policies were violated, it's simply not in their purview.
If during an investigation they find criminal behavior they can (and usually should) turn over their evidence to law enforcement and let them do their job, which is investigating violations of criminal law.
Violations of company policies and violations of criminal law have huge differences in burden of proof.
People sometimes confuse the two and say things like "they should have never been punished at work because they weren't convicted in a court of law." But that's not exactly how it works, the burden of proof for work punishment is simply a large magnitude lower than legal punishment.
Most workplace harassment is not criminal. Most violations of company policy aren't criminal.
> 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.
Because sexual harassment is a form of illegal sex-based employment discrimination by the company. Individual unwelcome acts that don't rise to that level aren't sexual harassment (legally), but may be warning signs that if not corrected rise to the level of an offense by the company.
> Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts.
And for those, the company’s responsibility as regards harassment does not negate the role of law enforcement as regards the criminal violation. The police are not pushed aside in favor or private action. In addition, harassment events, whether or not a crime is involved, can be directly reported to federal, or usually also state (who will dual-file with the federal EEOC), anti-discrimination authorities; the employer process mostly if a mechanism to catch conduct before it reaches the level of discrimination and to manage the company's exposure when it did reach that level.
> Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead?
That's not an “instead” or “better”, because the options aren't mutually exclusive; where a criminal accusation is involved,law enforcement retains their usual role in investigating and prosecuting crimes, including compulsory process which can be directed at parties with relevant information, including employers.
I support this but I also wish other companies would be under the same scrutiny as Google. I've been at companies where women not only were paid much much less but also more or less objects that were openly treated as such.
There would be management meetings about rating the sexiest coworkers and who could lay down the most (obviously not a single woman in whole of management and they had no chance of moving even close to it in their career). All sanctioned from the highest level and not a single person would dare to question it. I was not actively participating but also part of the problem since I didn't say anything.
This was not even done in secret and more or less public knowledge. The communication from management had a lot of sexist jokes and pictures and anyone questioning it "had no humor".
Mind you, this was not a tech company per say and I believe the further you get from tech the worse it gets. I think it's sad that the huge problem affecting 99% of women gets reduced to a single company which probably is one of the few in the world that even has a code of conduct against this stuff.
This entire protest would have generally been a non-event if the company hadn't sent out a memo telling managers to accommodate people who want to participate, ensure there is no retaliation or penalty, be flexible with schedules, etc., effectively advertising the event to everyone in the process. So then it looks like employees are being unsupportive of their co-workers if they don't participate. Which sort of shuffles the understanding of a "walk out" to be a far cry from the sort of thing that happened in the union days, and puts this firmly in the Just Google Things category, where even protesting the company becomes an activity that the company officially supports.
One view is that management knows that and did it anyway.
Perhaps they felt it was worth letting it be a bigger event and taking a PR hit if in return what they get is that the employees feel that the company supports them.
Good Machiavellian way to oust competing managers as well. Personally, that would be a horrible thing to do to another person, but then again, we know at least some of these managers kept silent during this whole fiasco; we're not talking about saints here.
I'd wager that the walkout was over the $2,000,000 a month paid to Rubin.
Also, people claimed that the payment was to keep Rubin from working with competitors... But some others say that it was to buy his silence over what others might have been doing...
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told staff he supports their right to take the action.
"I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel," he said in an all-staff 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."
If someone at the top is sincerely interested in resolving this satisfactorily, why the walk-out? I don't get it.
So is grandstanding by people with well paid, cushy as hell jobs who are happy to point fingers.
My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you." What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc?
Because all the policy in the world can't per se fix a shitty culture. Shitty culture is as shitty culture does and it is perpetuated by every single individual in the organization and their individual choices.
I'm not impressed with people who point fingers. They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.
What? You asked, essentially, "why would they walking out if their CEO supports their cause?"
Although I thought the answer was a bit obvious, I answered... Words are cheap and the employees want to see action.
Your response is to talk about pointing fingers? I don't understand your point.
What do you have against Google employees making demands of their managers?
My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you."
I'm pretty sure employees know that fingers are being pointed at them. Employees are constantly evaluated, and management places expectations on them (both work related and cultural) that those employees must meet, at penalty of termination.
It seems like you're questioning the idea that the fingers should point both ways... by saying that the fingers point both ways.
If someone at the top is sincerely interested in resolving this satisfactorily, why the walk-out? I don't get it.
That just sounds so naive. If I knew what your real disconnect with this was, I'd try to help you understand.
Let's walk through the basics:
* Employees have a problem with management.
* Management says "we'll work on it" like they always do.
* Employees may or may not believe, but they want to see action taking place. Employees feel secure enough at their privileged jobs to make a statement by "walking out", with the explicit threat of further action if demands aren't met.
* Management encourages the employees... And will have to decide if they mean business, in part based on the walk-outs.
I appear to be the top ranked woman on HN. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard here (under a different handle). Historical surveys suggest the membership was possibly as much as 98% male at one time.
I get nothing but crapped on when I say that. I get nothing but mocked when I suggest that is indicative of personal competence on my part. People mostly admit to recognizing me at all in order to say something dickish. It's relatively rare that I get genuine support.
I got to the leaderboard by not grandstanding, not pissing on all the guys here, etc.
I'm not naive, though I may well be on my way out the door because I've been thrown off of plenty of other forums for saying "The emperor has no clothes." It's generally a socially unacceptable thing to do.
But it doesn't come out of naiveté by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever.
I don't know anything about you. The statement is naive. Perhaps it was just poorly phrased. I never implied it had anything to do with you as a person.
I don't really care about your prowess at "winning" at HN. I don't have any clue what you're going on about.
Edit: oh, and if you regularly get kicked off of forums, perhaps it had to do with situations like these? You seem to be overreacting in a very strange and hard to follow way, that comes off kind of aggressively.
Exactly. The walk-out is supposedly to support "women's rights." I'm a woman right here, right now, giving my opinion. I'm being downvoted, shouted down, dismissed as naive, etc ad nauseum by people (mostly men, some of whom have a known track record of pretending to be pro women's rights while treating me personally like absolute crap) defending the folks who walked out at Google.
Color me unimpressed. Methinks if all these good guys were so interested in women's rights, it would be possible for me to get a smidgen more respect here.
But, no. And pointing that out gets further dismissed as "I don't have any clue what you're going on about."
Par for the course. And it's a big part of why I am highly skeptical that anything will actually be changed by this walk-out. If men at Google really wanted to change the culture, they could start right here, right now, in this very discussion with actually taking my questions seriously and treating me with respect instead of piling on to stomp me into the ground for saying "I don't get it. Seems to me there's maybe a better way to approach this."
Anyway, before the mods* decide that my comments here somehow constitute bad behavior for baldly saying some of the things that people the world over never like having said to them about blatantly obvious hypocrisy, I think I'm done with this utterly pointless discussion.
* Not an attack on the mods here. They've been awesome. Just long experience tells me that pushing it too much is nothing but downside.
edit:
Edit: oh, and if you regularly get kicked off of forums, perhaps it had to do with situations like these? You seem to be overreacting in a very strange and hard to follow way, that comes off kind of aggressively.
Ah, yes, let's blame the woman in the overwhelmingly male forum and say she's just behaving badly by suggesting that the guys could actually be respectful to an actual woman if they actually think women's rights are important. Bonus points for this bit of "la la la not listening at all to a word she's saying."
> What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc?
Part of the reason to go to the walkout was to find out what to do. People didn't just stand there doing nothing. They listened to women speak about their experiences and ask for specific, concrete actions from attendees that would lead to less sexual harassment, bias, and associated garbage.
Okay, cool. Is there some reason this piece couldn't be done after hours? (Or, alternately) Is there some reason this couldn't be framed as "We are taking time off to discuss this amongst ourselves and better understand the problem space" without it being framed as a walk-out with a flyer left on the desk filled with their opinion?
Yes, and the comment you are replying to allows for that as a possibility without it being framed as "a walk-out."
I'm not suggesting they shouldn't take company time. I'm wondering why this can't be done differently. And so far the replies I'm getting don't actually address such inquiries.
> What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc?
By handling interactions I have with women at work cognizant of the many ways in which their experience in the workplace differs from mine.
Also, I think about my daughter, and how I'd want her to be treated if she worked here.
> They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.
I can't personally fix the problem of (IMO wrong) decisions made by management on these issues. But I can help increase the pressure (public and internal) on them to make concrete changes.
It's not a criticism of you personally. The last time we had a conversation was before you created this HN account and I didn't look at you bio before reacting to your comment.
I don't care what your justification or excuse is.
If you* can't figure out that Mz and Her First Name and Middle Name are the same person, you aren't paying attention. And that means your criticism is completely vacuous on the face of it, even before we get into other reasons I have no interest in your opinion that would likely be verboten here as some kind of personal attack.
I was not paying attention, and frankly Michele (the only name of yours I recall) is not exactly uncommon. It has taken me nearly a year to notice you were using a different HN account, since I have no interest in mounting personal attacks against you.
Yes. He can put actions behind his words, or his reply is just hot air.
Plus, by endorsing it as a Google-sanctioned event, he's effectively taking power away from those walking out from disrupting normal business as usual (e.g., allowing managers to reschedule meetings).
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 522 ms ] threadPerhaps Google is overcompensating for allowing sexual harassment.
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.
Why should you?
Given that the individuals protesting are employees about their workplace there is information we may not know, and given the history of mega corps violating rights it would be unreasonable to automatically trust the company over the workers putting themselves out there.
If you have reason or evidence against, then by all means don't support the protest, but you should look at this from their perspective and at workers rights in general.
Thank God that's not the way justice system works.
One could reasonably assume that the protestors are innocent until proven guilty.
This makes rape un-prosecutable.
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.
Particularly when you get many people saying the same thing independently, in a social context rather different to that of Salem in 1693.
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 someone accused each of them of being communists, often with zero evidence.
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...
Also, what's with the rampant brigading here. Every reasonable comment here seems to get immediately and automatically downvoted.
Hacker news voters seem to have got a lot less tolerant of this kind of tired regressive culture war stuff lately. But this article is still on the way to being flagged off the front page. There are certain subjects this site is just not capable of having a mature, informed discussion of.
Edit: As it seems, the rule applies to this comment too. Dear reader, if you feel uncomfortable are offended by this comment, you are the problem.
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 different parts of the political spectrum, and a core part of the culture wars.
In addition, harassment is easily lied about. Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
If I was a Google competitor, and Machiavellian in moral outlook, I'd feed those flames to weaken Google, and hope that nobody did it to my organisation.
Divide et Impera!
Because it quickly becomes a witch-hunt.
It is hard enough to have a fair investigation within a proper court system and legal framework - it’s far more likely any Google process will end up as a kangaroo court than the process leading to any justice.
Why would you think that?
I think the majority of claims need to go into the “not really sure” bucket where they belong.
Acknowledging this basic truth does not mean you have to then do nothing.
There are many well tested solutions but they all carry different trade offs.
E.g.
- Have a zero tolerance policy on relationships between colleagues. This works well in smaller to mid-size companies.
Or,
- When you receive a complaint move the accuser and accused into different teams.
Etc.
That's a very good way to be found liable for both later harassment by the accused and, if you move the accuser, for retaliation; and also a PR nightmare when it is discovered to have been your policy or even a common practice to move accused wrongdoers without follow-up (just ask the Catholic Church.)
If priests had been moved around for simply leering at a woman or making a suggestive sexual comment I don’t think there would have been any outrage.
I hope you don’t think I’m suggesting a company should cover up serious crimes - or any crimes for that matter.
You are suggesting that they should shuffle people around without investigation to quiet complaints of situations against which are obligated by law to protect their employees, including potentially involuntary reassignment of the reporting party (again, without investigation of the facts) despite the legal prohibition on retaliation.
Uh no - to protect their employees from abuse.
> despite the legal prohibition on retaliation.
Why is it retaliation to seperate the accused and accuser?
In fact if you don’t seperate them you are opening yourself up to legal liability and a PR nightmare.
This addresses only the tiniest subset of issues, and mostly the ones toward the consensual end of the spectrum. Groping; quid pro quo suggestions (subtle or explicit); coercive threats (subtle or explicit); lewd remarks; invitations to strip clubs; etc ad nauseum (and yes, they're nauseating) have nothing to do with actual romantic relationships.
> When you receive a complaint move the accuser and accused into different teams.
Due to the nature of company hierarchies, this almost inevitably punishes the person lower on the reporting chain much more than it does the one higher - both in terms of short term impacts and long term career advancement. Which often means punishing the victim, due to how the power dynamics of harassment interactions tend to work out.
It's also a pretty damn weak reaction. If your Director of X insinuates that they'll fire an engineer if the engineer won't sleep with the director, you think the only consequence for the director should be that that engineer no longer reports to them?
Not at all - in practice it removes ambiguity which is where most of the issues stem.
> this almost inevitably punishes the person lower on the reporting chain
At a large company that is not true - it’s actually the opposite.
For those below director level it’s usually a privilege to be able to shift teams.
On the other hand when you are director level and up it’s usually a negative because most of your ability to operate effectively comes from the interpersonal relationships you have built up.
> It's also a pretty damn weak reaction.
It’s a weak reaction based on typically weak evidence. In fact most commonly there is no evidence at all.
What it does is it ensures any abuse is stopped.
In practice it’s one of the most effective techniques I’ve seen because it can be used to nip problems in the bud - nobody feels too bad about using the system early and often.
It doesn’t ensure abuse is stopped. It may just expose a different set of employees to abuse. It doesn’t send a message that abuse is unacceptable or will meet with meaningful consequences. It’s only a solution to anything if the only problematic interactions are between two specific employees. If you have an employee with a boundary problem or who enjoys abusing their position or who “just can’t help themselves”, it does nothing to prevent or deter them from subjecting another report to the same unacceptable behavior. Like the molesting priests mentioned in another thread - moving them to another parish accomplishes nothing except to make it clear that they can get away with misbehavior and to expose a new set of victims to abuse.
Maybe at the very top - not for the majority of cases though.
> It doesn’t send a message that abuse is unacceptable or will meet with meaningful consequences.
Does sending a message that abuse is unacceptable stop abuse?
It seems to me that the only people it scares are the people who aren’t a problem in the first place.
In truth such a message seems to enable abusers although I couldn’t explain to you why.
> moving them to another parish accomplishes nothing
That might be the case when children are involved.
In a workplace context though such an approach empowers potential victims.
It empowers victims in four key ways:
1) It stops women from threatening innocent men - saying “I can make you move teams to an equivalent position” is not particularly threatening - more of a pain in the ass.
2) It limits the ability of a male manager to sexually pressure his female subordinates. Saying “you will never advance in this company unless you ...” carries a lot less weight when you can easily switch managers.
3) It empowers women to be able to voice concerns without having to worry about getting people fired.
You’d be surprised at the number of women who keep quiet about real problems because they don’t want an overzealous HR to come in and ruin people’s livelihoods.
4) It limits abuse without requiring strong evidence of abuse in a way that doesn’t result in strong backlash.
Conjecture: the planet would be depopulated.
There should be an objective, measurable process. Given the cul-de-sac that organisations like Google have been strong-armed into, I think the obvious next step is
(1) to record all work-time interaction of all employees and store them for a long time, e.g. at least 10 years.
(2) Give a absolutely clear-cut criteria as to what counts as acceptable behaviour and what doesn't.
This. I imagine most are absolutely true, but there are some that absolutely are not. I've personally been accused by rape, online, of someone in another state that I've never even been to. Fortunately, no one took the claim serious but I imagine there are many innocent people that have been wrongly accused for whatever reason.
I also had a friend, that was using OkCupid, reject a girl very politely in the first message or two. She then went on 'cheaterville' and posted that he gave her sexual transmitted diseases/infections and made multiple accounts alleging the same, one even as him with his name. He's an actor, he was up for a role and they retracted their offer when googling his name brought the cheaterville page up on the first page. Now if these two instances have happened to 2 guys from the midwest that have no power or money, I can only imagine there are quite a few false accusations regularly. I also imagine there are many many more TRUE accusations.
We need to protect individuals regardless of race, gender and sexual orientation but at the same time we need to avoid workplace harassment turning into McCarthyism.
(1) There is simply no agreement currently on what counts as harassment.
(2) Anecdote: I've been involved in investigating a sexual harassment claim at a previous employer, at it was absolutely and categorically and provably false.
Too late. That ship has sailed a long time ago. The situation has gotten so out of hand, that recording all employee interaction might indeed be the only way forward.This is an absolutely fair observation.
>The situation has gotten so out of hand, that recording all employee interaction might indeed be the only way forward.
Yeah, I think something like bodycams is likely the most effective solution to the issue but then things get tricky for various industries, stuff like patient/client confidentiality laws, trade secrets, etc. Not to mention stuff like using the restroom, where sexual harassment could still take place.
Then audio-only wouldn't cover miming explicit actions.
It's certainly a problem with no easily actionable answer.
Not sufficient. Should store them for at least 36 years.
There are major downsides to making true harassment claims: you get denounced as a liar and a slut. This is the main reason why so many claims went unreported, and the #metoo movement is one of solidarity which makes it possible for people to actually report true claims without ruining their career. Actually deliberately making a false harassment claim is potentially career suicide.
(Jacob Wohl thought it would be easy to bribe people into making false harassment claims, and this blew up in his face: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/robert-mue... )
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Argento#Alleged_sexual_as...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/asia-argento-assault-j...
Does the actions of a leader discredit a movement? Can one even say that #MeToo has a single leader? Do you know anything about the #MeToo movement?
Many people who get harassed opt to change teams, companies, or professions rather than actually pursue a formal complaint against their harasser. Perhaps they are mistaken (I don't think so), but they seem to believe that there are real downsides to filing even true harassment claims, to the extent that the aforementioned career upheavals seem easier.
Why can’t both be true?
For what you are implying to make any sense you have to assume some sort of equivalence:
1) Between the kind of woman who makes a false claim and the kind of woman who makes a true one.
AND
2) Between the kind of man who is guilty and the kind of man who is falsely accused.
I don’t think either of these two claims holds any water.
I don't see why the fact that social mores change invalidates the social standard we have today.
Furthermore, why do you folk always jump straight to the "b..b..but false harassment!" argument? All it does is demonstrate that you actually don't care at all about the original problem.
Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
So why are you willing to throw 90-98% of harassed women to the sharks, in order to protect 2-10% of accused men? Plus there's the whole strawman that allegations are always believed. Of course there should be fact checking. In fact, even in the #metoo era, men almost never face repercussions for false allegations (and often not for real ones.)
Your statement that unfounded harassment claims do not lead to repercussions is flat out false. There is no company that would not discipline someone for bringing a harassment claim that was demonstrated to be false.
In short: this argument demonstrates that what you really want to do is only to preserve the status quo and do in fact not give a shit about a major problem in our culture.
Those numbers are specifically for rape, not sexual misconduct. I would hope that the false accusation rate for violent felonies is pretty low. Assuming this is still the case with lesser charges or non-criminal behavior is disingenuous.
I care about fertility, because reproduction is more-or-less the single most important duty every human has. It is also difficult a space to navigage, therefore all indicators and heuristics that help me appreciate his/her sex efficiently, makes navigating this difficult space much easier, hence is a friendly gesture.
Here is an interesting question for you to ponder: Why do basic facts about human biology upset you so much, so much so in fact, that you use the act of procreation as an expletive?
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.
See eh. Does money fix the issue "biotic 1 told biotic 2 'nice lady bits why don't you sit on my man bits' now they want 2 amounts of monies" how does money fix the issue? How does money repair the damage? Is money a Men in Black neuralizer? Does it selectively delete the negative emotions from the event? Is it fair that shareholders in the case of Google, or the owner in a small business where some rogue employee decided he wanted to play grabass without the owner's consent or even knowledge, to have to shell out large sums of money that won't actually undo the damage?
I don't think suing is a good solution here. If you are denied a job and have EVIDENCE it was based on your gender or sexual orientation, then suing somewhat makes sense however aside from lost wages there isn't much that would be productive here. If you sued for the actual job then everyone knows you as that person that got the job because a court of law said you get it and not necessarily because your skill and history make you the best candidate.
>sexual harassment is a crime,
Somewhat. Quid Pro Quo is a crime, not rectifying a hostile work environment (not reassigning the alleged offender, not investigating and terminating the alleged offender etc) is a crime. But biotic 1 telling biotic 2 that they have nice reproductive bits and bobs, is not an actual crime (perhaps it should be?)
>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.
Money /= justice. If someone demands sexual favors, or regularly says sexually explicit things to you, a check doesn't give you justice, especially if it's from the employer.
Take Google as an example. Google is owned, in part, by likely hundreds of millions of people (index funds, direct stock purchase, etc). Google has a board, it has various rungs of corporate management, then more localized management. Chances are none of those people have said "hey Don Draper, make sure you grab Megan's ass today when she comes in to dictate for you today and tell her what you want to do to her on your desk" and while Google does need to do something to employees that think such behavior is acceptable, and carry it out, why should they have to cut a check for hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars, for something a rogue employee did?
Perhaps there should be some sort of penalty/tax that companies, when sufficient evidence is found to support a claim, they have to pay to an NGO that deals with rights equality and safe workspaces? Money doesn't undo the situation so I don't think the victim should be seeking large sums in damages, companies (unless supporting the behavior) shouldn't be penalized for large sums of money because of an employee that has free agency, however if an incident is reasonably provable perhaps they should have to cut a check, based on some sort of scale, say 100k$ for a company like Google to a regularly audited group that provides resources for victims to reach out to for both any required treatment and for help dealing with any potential workplace discrimination as a result of their claim.
A lot stuff that counts as sexual harassment in the work place is not a crime.
You don't sue people who perpetrate crimes, you prosecute them. You're asking the victims of sexual harassment to persuade police to investigate and prosecutors to prosecute, and we know that they won't because we know they already don't.
You're also saying that no action can be taken without meeting the very high criminal burden of proof - that this thing happened beyond all reasonable doubt. That's going to leave harassers free to continue.
Maybe you just meant that sexual harassment is unlawful and employees have an existing remedy through civil courts, but this would be pisspoor management. If your company employs people who reduce productivity of others in the workforce by sexually harassing them it's in the organisation's best interest to manage those people so they stop the harassment or leave the company.
Yet common bullying and generally abusive workplaces are completely legal in California. You have the right to quit anytime, not much else.
They aren't covered by special, workplace-specific laws; there are, however generally-applicable civil laws that apply to them.
However, obviously if things do escalate, access to the law should be guaranteed and the binding arbitration should clearly be dropped.
What seems to be suggested to fight it are tools that would be extremely effective against other junior employees (even if the allegations are untrue), but only middlingly effective against the real problem of powerful employees.
That will understandably lead to push back from junior employees who fear abuse. Offer solutions which would primarily work against powerful employees and would be ineffective against other junior employees and I think there would be much more support.
Fuck you got mine transposed
Except that, under the law, the company’s response (including the absence or inadequacy of any process) to certain situations is part of what determines if they are sexual harassment.
> sexual harassment is a crime
No, it's not, and if it were the process would not be for employees to sue, because crimes are prosecuted exclusively by the government in the U.S. legal system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_(Amendment)_Act,_...
also: some types of sexual harassment that are not crimes in the US are crimes in India.
I like your argument that it is cheaper to just let people rob me blind and then burn time and energy catching them, prosecuting time, and hoping for a conviction as a deterrent.
With any luck using your system crime will magically disappear on it’s own.
I am going to put my fingers in my ears now and make noises and ignore the worlds problems. It is certainly easier to not take responsibility. Good advice.
I agree that assaulters need to take responsibility for their actions. However, when they don't, the law needs to be there to protect the victims.
What we were talking about is ending forced arbitration (the "process" referred to by the person you responded to) so that the law can be used to protect victims. That doesn't mean protections at work suddenly go away. It also doesn't mean suddenly employers will let sexual harassment run rampant either. It's not a binary either-or choice at all. So why not all protections.
"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,"
Notwithstanding the unbelievable confusion of law in that post is a whole other conversation.
I argued that companies should also have a plan in place to prevent sexual harassment at work by using an analogy to robbery, also a crime, that we use preventative measures to stop despite there being a criminal system punishing robbery.
Your response was claiming I was expressing poor judgment for arguing that companies are responsible for not creating environments rife for sexual harassment.
"Comparing sexual assault to a store robbery in a tone of sarcasm is at best a poor judgement call."
I don't agree. I think it's a reasonable demonstration of the absurdity of the position I'm replying to.
I don't know what else you wrote, but that's what I replied to.
Sorry, but if you're still going to stick on this point then this'll be the last thing I say on the matter.
I don't understand how this is even acceptable.
"Sue it out" is probably the least effective possible conflict resolution mechanism along almost any axis.
The underlying goal of arbitration is to ensure effective resolution of non-complex situations and reserve the courts for actually complex cases, instead of now, where they are used because people hope they can make a bunch of money.
The only thing I'm aware of is people complain of bias of arbitrators using the proxy of how often business wins relative to people in courts (with no evaluation of whether people should be winning as much as they do in court).
Otherwise I have seen nothing that suggests that arbitration is not in fact very effective and efficient at reducing the cost and time involved.
- it prevents class-action lawsuits
- it is funded typically by the company, and is very likely to agree with the company
Maybe suing constantly is an american thing, but if that is to be addressed it should be by congress not by individual companies wanting to circumvent civil law.
Also, there exist the concept of a so-called "unconscionable contract." I'm not saying this proposition is true, but I'm submitting for evaluation: is the act of submitting to private investigation processes that may be used as evidence against you in civil or criminal courts unconscionable?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude_in_the_...
There may be a very small number of cases where an employee successfully negotiated against this clause, but it probably requires the candidate to be a true outlier in terms of talent and skill set for the company to even consider it.
Because, Google is a company that builds products. I am interested in their products and in the fact that their products work, not much in the behaviour of the people building them- given the fact that they are located in a supposedly civilized country anyway, where serious misconducts should be prosecuted by law. The internal squabbles and complaints of the company are of very little relevance for their users, as it should be.
Because I'm a bit annoyed by what seems to me a growing push towards confusing the judgement of someone's work with their moral qualities. I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists, or arians; a literary masterpiece isn't diminished by the fact that its author was an anti-semite, or sadist; a great movie director remains a great director even if she did horrible things in her private life. Very little of our past science and philosophy and arts would still be standing if we were to apply these criteria, and I very strongly doubt we'd gain something better. Every single time "political" criteria have been used to judge the value of intellectual products, it's been the indicator of serious troubles, both for the society doing it and for the overall quality of the disciplines.
- Those who care about influencing their culture and want to do what they can to change it.
- Those who are concerned with where their money goes and whether or not they think that that is the most effective use of their money.
Feel free to ignore the concerns of those groups and do what you want. But I don't think that wading into a conversation you fundamentally don't want to be a part of is effective.
I was replying to a comment that claimed that
"no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office [..] would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable"
This to me is clearly a confusion between two completely different things: what Google produces, and what are Google's internal ethics. iPhones are not worse products because working with Steve Jobs was a nightmare. I value the distinction.
The ethics of science does exactly this. A common question which has been asked for much of the 20th Century is: should we use scientific results that are the product of non-consensual human experimentation. an extreme but often used example experiments that were carried out by the Nazis at concentration camps. Outside of science consider the debate over the works of Wagner [0], Knut Hamson [1], or Heidegger [2]. Ethics matters when judging intellectual output. For
These are fundamental questions of ethics which have a long intellectual history of debate and discussion. You are welcome to hold your own opinions on them, but I don't think the way in which you are framing the debate is helpful, e.g. "a growing push", "confusing the judgement", "fundamentally anti-intellectual", etc... Ethical questions which have received this much thoughtful discussion and examination should be treated with respect.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_controversies
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/books/28hams.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger_and_Nazism#Th...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_VL4gqrCHc&t=392
But if they did that, they be giving up control over their careers and the right to deal with their problems with their supervisors, one on one. /s
There are plenty of other people who are in the line and wont make a drama for the company.
If you cannot solve the issue a bit of harassment without creating a drama, you cannot rise to the top where the world is even more cruel. Emotionally weak people have no place. If you cannot give favors or something when other are, no one will pick you.
If someone is the CEO of a multi billion crop, and have 10 people on who could become the manager or VP, 5 are men 5 are women with everything being equal, who do they give the seat? The one who gives them a favor.
Doesn't the employer have the right to fire them for any reason in any "at will job"?
Striking employees can be replaced in order to get the work done, but that doesn't make sense for a one-day walkout.
I am not sure if that is true or not or if it applies to google employees, but I feel like there is a ring of truth in it.
While it's harder to get fired here, it is by no means impossible. The law just provides what's basically a three strike system (one to two adhortatory letters for the same reason, then the third time the employee can be dismissed) to give the employee a chance to change behaviour.
(Edit into this dying thread: reports of the walkout in Google Dublin: https://twitter.com/evelyn_orourke/status/105795687016449228... )
It would be legal to "replace" them with new employees, but that's not practical (or warranted) for a one-day walkout.
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.
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 compare the same jobs. I want to see some actual numbers so people can figure out where the issue actually lies.
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.
But it's not exactly a "conservative" issue. Plenty of liberals have written about it too:
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/stop-penal...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the...
https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2015/...
This is false.
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-a...
>it's very unpopular to question it.
Also false, it's very popular (and almost cliché) to dismiss it.
>Christina Hoff Summers... has paid a huge price by actually investigating these issues.
And what price would that be? She seems extremely successful.
http://www.aei.org/scholar/christina-hoff-sommers/
"$3.27 less per hour than men. The median hourly wage is $15.67 for women and $18.94 for men.
The gender wage gap is a measure of what women are paid relative to men. It is commonly calculated by dividing women’s wages by men’s wages, and this ratio is often expressed as a percent, or in dollar terms. This tells us how much a woman is paid for each dollar paid to a man. This gender pay ratio is often measured for year-round, full-time workers and compares the annual wages (of hourly wage and salaried workers) of the median (“typical”) man with that of the median (“typical”) woman; measured this way, the current gender pay ratio is 0.796, or, expressed as a percent, it is 79.6 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2016). In other words, for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes about 80 cents."
It's meaningless to compare different positions pay to each other. "Typical" men vs "typical" women doesn't tell us anything about potential discrimination.
There's over 12,800 words in the article and 67 citations. It includes sections such as "How do work experience, schedules, and motherhood affect the gender wage gap?", "How do education and job and occupational characteristics affect the gender wage gap?", "Does a woman’s race, age, or pay level affect the gender gap she experiences?", and "What role do 'unobservables' like discrimination and productivity play in the wage gap?" yet you choose to ignore all of it and argue against something from the introduction that's expanded upon further down.
You're arguing on bad faith here.
> You're arguing on bad faith here.
No, I just disagree with you.
> "Women earn less than men at every wage level"
It's utterly useless to compare wage levels across different roles. I read the article, I strongly disagree with it.
Do you really think comparing the pay of people in different roles is useful? It's apples and oranges. I don't expect a nurse and an engineer to make the same amount of money. This is my argument and it's not in bad faith.
There has not been any counterpoint to original disputing of the citation.
This strikes me as "poisoning the well."
My point was that people should base their opinions on CHS' claims on her evidence and arguments, rather than who she associates with.
Edit: I'm not trying to change your approach, I'm just being blunt about my opinions. I appreciate your open mindedness.
How is there not? Literally every modern school system favors activities that disproportionally disadvantage young boys. Boys and young men are dropping out of school at a far larger rate than women, and literally nobody cares. It's a travesty.
>TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
You cannot label an entire outlet conservative or liberal because they bring in people of opposing views to write editorials unless there is an established bias over time (which you have not shown.)
It took me all of twenty seconds to find a liberal leaning editorial: http://time.com/5431836/dna-transgender-history/
Which part of the wage gap article do you disagree with?
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/time/
Like many people replying to the OP, I'd like to see some data that looks at it from different perspectives, tho, instead of just picking a side and arguing for it - "there's a wage-gap" vs "look, there actually isn't".
What if the pay is equal for like-for-like jobs, but for the higher paying jobs one sex is vastly underrepresented? Not saying it is, just that discrimination and bias often runs deeper than some simple comparison.
If the data found an actual issue like this, the it would need to be addressed, but at the moment simply claiming that women are paid less doesn't offer any solution apart from paying women an extra 20% across every single job.
What if one sex takes more paternal leave than another so the other sex spends more time in the office improving skills?
And if we believed that this was the cause, you'd need to think that Googlers were wildly off the norm in terms of ability. They've got like 90000 employees. They aren't exclusively hiring mega geniuses.
My impression (based on 2016 stats [0]) is that as most C-suiters are men, and they can get 100s or 1000s of times the money that ordinary employees get, that in the UK this likely accounts for most of the effect that's not accounted for by career breaks (childcare, for example). To reiterate, this is my _impression_ when looking at the data.
Men who work part-time get lower wages; no one cares, it seems.
0 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
1 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
Note they don't compare like roles here, just same industry sector IIRC.
The largest gap is 95% in favour of female archivists; that must be anomalous.
Could I please see the variance in the data which is a very simple, important and often missing aspect when presenting data? I would also like to see the average amount of work hours (and overtime) per industry and gender, the average amount of flex time and other non-income benefits, and common known sources for wage differences such as how often a person changes job. All this is missing, but again the lowest hanging fruit is the variance which make any dataset completely useless (and I stand by this statement) for any complex dataset.
At least they'll have plenty of time to post about it on Facebook :)
I've seen this specific meme a few times; dozens of posts about gender pay gap including from under-30 part-timers who have a good chance - according to the available stats - of being paid more than men in an equivalently skilled role.
Might have been true until 2015 but not anymore.
If the boss gets 3x the median, that's a 4% gap.
I'd like to see analysis which looks at same qualified people and charts their progression with attempts to understand why their wage changed and whether those changes have any discernible sex bias.
Men seem to fall across a wider distribution (both higher and lower paid), as appears in other characteristics.
There really aren't any differences. Just do a simple mental exercise.
Imagine if the gender gap is real. Male programmers demand $100K while female programmers demand $77K for the same exact quality of work. What would this mean? It would mean all tech companies would only hire females.
For comparison look at seasonal farm work. Imagine if migrant workers deman $7.70 per hour while citizens demand $10 per hour for the same quality of work. What do you think the composition of the labor foce on farms would be? I'd imagine it would be mostly migrants. Right?
If the wage gap truly existed, clever feminists would start companies exclusively composed of women and would be putting everyone out of business because they have a 23% profit margin built in.
The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value. Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech, where compensation packages are routinely so large and supported by large VC funds that those of us who do hire can see those salary differences as negligible. And, even if I were sensitive to those differences, I would not hesitate to pay 30-50k in order to get the right person for the role.
The question here is: are we doing a good job of finding the right person for the role? That is why the Google women are demanding "opportunity equity." Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
I have interviewed for jobs and have interviewed others for positions on my team. Both startup and traditional 9-5 tech jobs.
> The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value.
It's a bit of both.
> Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Is it society or nature? Also, society socializes males to be less aggressive. So I don't agree with your claim.
> Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech,
Because in the tech world, aggression is what is sought?
> Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
If that is the case, why don't these women create companies and hire only women ( who are supposedly doing the same job for 77% pay of their male counterpart )?
Maybe in construction work or farm work, male traits are highly preferred. But in programming and tech world, it's pretty much what you can do.
You really didn't address my point. If what you are claiming is true, why don't you start a search engine company and hire only women? You would put google out of business in a few short years given your built in 23% profit margin.
Do you realize how significant a naturally embedded profit margin of 23% is?
So I'll ask again. What is preventing you or any other person from starting companies and hiring women if women truly make 77% of a man's wage for the same exact work?
See also Dan Luu's discussion of this argument: https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/
It's not just arguing for higher salaries but being trusted to follow through when "the going gets tough".
Display of confidence is hard to distinguish from actual capability. Confidence is often mistaken for "can-do-spirit" or "positive attitude" and therefore always favored.
Women are more honest than man about their abilities in the workplace. They are more honest about previous experience in a job interview, and more reluctant to "fake it until they make it":
Excessive confidence displayed by men regarding their ability to follow through even their chances of success are equal to women, leads later to the assumption that the man knew what they were doing (and knew in advance that they will succeed) and hence men are seen as having been in full control the whole time. But actually it's hindsihgt-bias.
>I want to see some actual numbers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517651...
We know already that "pay inequality" is fictitious at this point.
So by elimination, that leaves opportunity - however as anyone who has ever worked in a large company knows, it is very difficult, except in a very regimented corporate culture like the military, to have equivalent opportunity spread around evenly. I somehow think Google has a corporate culture that is not very regimented.
If I interpret "pay inequality" as "the average pay for women ages 20-60 is less than it is for men 20-60 in the US in 2018" then I've seen data suggesting it is real.
In some instances, such as Hooters waitresses and associate lawyers, women earn slightly more.
You can search for "pay inequality myth" and figure out which argument makes the most sense. Both sides are presented in the search engine I used.
Myself, I think that the issue that pay varies specifically because of the choices that are made is very valid.
This just isn't true, but I think the problem here is a semantic one. It is true that the more finely tuned your analysis is, the less reasonable it is to conclude that sexism or so called "patriarchy" plays any kind of role.
I used to fully believe what you said, on the grounds that willingness and ability to negotiate have no bearing on how valuable the employee will be (at least for engineering jobs - it could be different for something like sales where dealmaking ability actually matters).
However, one counterpoint I've come to realize is that if an employee doesn't value higher salary that much, it's a waste of money to pay them more. Thus, by only paying higher salaries that put time and effort into arguing for higher salaries, you make sure to only spend that money on the employees that will actually value all the extra money you're throwing at them.
In any case, this does not constitute an excuse for paying women less.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/2018/04/04/by-the-num...
Report referenced: https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report
The more appropriate statistic would be that "on average, women are offered 4% less" which seems to have been produced by integrating an estimation of the probability density, and looking at the non-symmetry of the distribution. It seems most of that difference is concentrated within 10% on the mean.
So (roughly) if you're a man, you had a 50% chance of being offered 4% more than a woman, and maybe a 30% chance of being offered 4% less than a woman.
The TLDR, if I remember correctly, is: Yes, there is a wage gap between genders. It is smaller than most headlines claim, but real. Lots of factors go into this, but it is probably a mix of: companies _can_ pay women less, so they will, and women tend to value some things greater than salary. However, there is no smoking gun we can point to as a definitive root cause.
[0] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
[1] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about...
If it does exist, that's a very serious problem, because if Google can't and/or hasn't attained pay parity that would satisfy the people writing this, then pack it in; there's no way it's ever going to happen. Google is just about the best possible environment for parity to happen in, with an almost uniform culture that would support it from top to bottom and enough money that it can pursue almost any parity policy it wants without a serious problem, and a long time frame in which this all should have been true.
If there is still systematic, unsatisfactory bias at Google, what hope is there for these ideas in the rest of the world?
I suspect that if Google wanted to remove pay differences between men and women, they would need to start making strong offers to all their candidates - not just those who obtain competing offers and try to negotiate.
Src:
https://mobile.twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/105780420389...
Honestly, I can imagine that being less troublesome even outside of attempting to be fair an equitable regardless of race / gender / sexual orientation.
I'm not just interested in pure technical skills from somebody, I want somebody who has the common sense and risk aversion to keep their projects running steadily and effectively without needing to put out fires weekly.
I also appreciate people who have something that I like to call "applied laziness", that being an aversion to repeating the same task over and over or building things that will require constant attention down the line. People with this skill are happy to put as much effort in as necessary in the short term to ensure that they don't have to expend needless effort in the future.
Personally I wouldn't imagine those things are well correlated at all. In my experience the best engineers have stayed around long after it was obvious that they could get considerably more by changing jobs (and sometimes changing back again).
That aside, I think it would be entirely possible to set this up transparently enough that an engineer can see their future compensation and thus see how many years ahead they are jumping and can make their own judgement about whether it's worth moving to a company where their future compensation will likely change in the usual haphazard way.
As evidenced by the lowball they just tossed me.
If you’re going to base pay- something really serious- on such an algorithm, it must be open and reproducible.
Google is really good at this and that it doesn’t exist in a useful way is a signal that there is no algorithm. It would be extremely valuable to companies to know this like a credit score.
I think when there are natural incentives, resources, and open problem it means that we don’t really have resources or doesn’t exist and needs more time and innovation to solve the problem.
Then it would be a simple HR policy to assign that engineer to whichever compensation band covered those levels when they joined a new company.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
My point is - there's zero guarantee that a "logical" algorithm would be "fair". Just like if you trained an ML algorithm on the database of people currently in American prisons it would most likely conclude that black=more likely to be a criminal, which is obviously an unfair assumption to make.
You mean, the kind of thing basically every public sector employer has, where alleged gender pay gap is never an issue?
Yes, of course that’s easy to do.
OTOH, private sector employers like to have personal productivity be a factor, but don't have good objective metrics for that, so they let subjective assessment play a major role, such that the biases of managers become a substantial factor in setting pay.
^ Might be a better source article.
Different genders deserve equal pay, people of different races deserve equal pay, people with various disabilities deserve equal pay.
HOWEVER, you want to walk out of work? You should be terminated. If I walked out of work, I would be fired. If I organized several people to walk out of work with me, we would be fired. This is the case at my current job and at every single job I've ever had.
You don't change things by striking, in my book this is effectively corporate terrorism "hey we have demands, if you don't meet them we aren't working!" If someone strikes, you can never trust that employee again. Ever. You can not count on that employee in any situation because they've demonstrated that they will happily stop working when it serves their desires.
What you do is you make the issue publicly known, you do it in a positive way, you do it in a polite way. You ask for change and if change won't be given, you find an employer that will even if that means moving or starting your own business.
I'm all for equal rights, I'm all for equal pay, I'm not for people holding businesses hostage by refusing to do the job they were paid to do.
Traditionally union action including strikes has been the only way to make changes in big employers.
I'm treated fairly because it's the 21st century not 19th and early 20th century, when unions did most of their beneficial work. We have things like OSHA, fire marshals, etc. We have far more avenues of employment than in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well. And arguably more importantly, we have mobile broadcast platforms called cellphones that with a few taps of a screen can broadcast to a global audience to document conditions and immediately expose them.
Unions are dying, presumably because people don't want to be a part of them (can you blame them, there's countless documented instances of union corruption, in some instances with direct ties to organized crime ahem -> https://lrionline.com/mafiaunion-ties-still-strong/ )
In 2016, there were 14.6 million members in the U.S., down from 17.7 million in 1983. The percentage of workers belonging to a union in the United States was 10.7%, compared to 20.1% in 1983.
Couldn't this also be down to rules against union busting being relaxed and companies like Amazon taking full advantage thus making it difficult for people to join a union even if they wanted to?
As far as the 'evil' Amazon mention, they pay double minimum wage here in Indiana as is, people online like to whine about how unfair Amazon is yet people here fight for jobs at Amazon.
People need to wake up and realize they have better working conditions than nearly every other human being from a past age. It's called work for a reason.
> You don't change things by striking
In the UK, the 1970 Equal Pay Act was triggered by the Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968.
And 1970 might as well have been 1870. The 21st century is an entirely different world.
Most of the jobs that triggered actual labor reform in the 19th and 20th centuries just don't exist any more. The factories of the 1800's wouldn't survive a single day of business today because modern, largely automated, equipment would leave them sitting in the dust when it came to profitability.
In this case you list, same thing. There aren't sewing machinists like that now, that stuff is largely automated. Very few automotive manufacturers use people to do the sewing and when they do it's a highly skilled artisan job that involves hand stitching for luxury vehicles, not machines.
I do not deny unions reformed working conditions, most of it however was many, many, decades ago in a world that doesn't begin to resemble today's world.
Fact is, unions are dying in the western world. Union membership is free-falling. Who needs a union when you have a cell phone and organizations like OSHA here in the US that you can directly file safety violations to for investigation.
Unions made changes with striking. Striking is no longer a useful tool and no longer needed.
If you strike now, especially if you aren't in a union, you should be fired. For each of those people that strikes over this, there's probably 50 people that would ecstatically take their job in the city they are in.
Striking isn't going to do jack for discrimination/harassment. We don't live in the 20th century anymore. Documenting and reporting incidents will bring change, not walking out of work like a child throwing a temper tantrum.
> Fact is, unions are dying in the western world. Union membership is free-falling.
Again, quite US-centric. In the UK it's been slowly increasing over the last few years. Finland, Sweden and Denmark have something like 70% trade union density.
> If you strike now, especially if you aren't in a union, you should be fired. For each of those people that strikes over this, there's probably 50 people that would ecstatically take their job in the city they are in.
The first line doesn't follow from anything you've said. The second line is the most convincing argument for trade unions in this entire thread.
Unless they're bombing buildings the word you're looking for is extortion, not terrorism.
Striking has changed a good amount of business's in the history of the U.S . public outcry and worker cooperation is the halmark of workers rights.
The reason protest is required is because the company will not change without a better force. 'asking nicely' doesn't go anywhere when the bottom line is money and image.
Employee collaboration for workers rights does not automatically mean they're against the company. They're against parts of it's operations, but still have wants to do their work. That's, again, been all apart of the last 100 years of workers rights. You should perhaps look into how companies can possibly stay afloat even when there's unions. Not that I agree with unions typically, but if there can be no trust and workers just dont care about the company then it should all fail.
You don't have to blow up a building to be a terrorist. You don't have to carry out an act of violence, or even suggest one, to be a terrorist. Organizing a walk out is intimidation,
ter·ror·ism /ˈterəˌrizəm/ noun the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
>ter·ror·ism /ˈterəˌrizəm/ noun the unlawful use of violence and intimidation
u srs bruh?
"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 even 1 shift, because they are upset about how something was handled, that that isn't 'the systematic use of terror' to coerce Google to change policy then...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
while i'm sure unions were involved i doubt they were the only reason we started reducing work hours and improving work conditions, here's a good history of the 40 hour work week: (https://www.businessinsider.com.au/history-of-the-40-hour-wo...)
You are absolutely correct, I can give a VERY modern example. Medical residents now have capped hours, in I believe all 50 states, due to New York passing the Libby Zion Law and other states adopting similar laws. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby_Zion_Law
The same goes for pilots - https://work.chron.com/duty-limitations-faa-pilot-17646.html
Truck drivers - https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...
Etc.
I'm confused here. Are they demanding that preferential hiring and advancement practices and programs for women and certain minorities be stopped?
But some of us are discovering that what we thought of as "normal" (and thus forms the basis of many of of our value judgements) is quite narrow, so we have to adjust our expectations and that changes a lot of things... getting perspectives from others is a necessary and tedious process.
Im in my early 40s and despite thinking I was pretty liberal on most social issues I've spent the last 10 years discovering I've been wrong, poorly informed, and/or ignorant on a lot of details. At this rate, I dont expect to be done with these self-updates anytime soon, and reasoned arguments and shared experiences, fears, concerns, and hopes are essential for me to re-determine where I now stand, each and every day.
Just as an example, another comment made an argument about why the market would theoretically prefer underpaid staff. (Which would then not make them underpaid). A good point, but irreconciable with pay gap data...how do I resolve that? Ah, someone replied with a decent response about the issue BEING perceived value. Armed with these positions I can now spend a few minutes of much more effective research, and have better chances of noticing details in my day-to-day life.
For people who are tired of rehashing the same old arguments with data and answers that are out there for anyone serious to find...it's actually quite hard to find if you dont really know the question, and as unfair as it is, there is a limit to how much time and effort will people will spend grasping at straws about how they themselves might be reinforcing terrible systems. Implicit bias is IMPLICIT and thus it is hard to find out what your biased thoughts are. Effective arguments dramatically reduce that time and effort, and even if most wont take them for that final step, some of us are trying, and are grateful to those that are willing to once again rehash the "obvious" with those that are unlikely to change their minds.
> For people who are tired of rehashing the same old arguments with data and answers that are out there for anyone serious to find...
It's funny that you say that since there is no data supporting the pay gap. In fact there are people posting data in this thread contradicting the pay gap.
If you say data is available to support your argument, you should link to it.
I think you misunderstood my point in the "answers that are out there for anyone serious to find" - I'm saying it's worth restating your arguments even if you think people "should" know the "obvious" and "proven". Nothing in that position makes it ironic that I also stated my understanding of things (Be that understanding right or wrong).
> If you say data is available to support your argument, you should link to it.
I've chased this rabbit hole before - assuming you are sincere, I'll point to Wikipedia and let you follow their citations, but there's lots out there:
> In the US the average woman's unadjusted annual salary has been cited as 78% to 82% of that of the average man's. However, after adjusting for choices made by male and female workers in college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave, multiple studies find that pay rates between males and females varied by 5–6.6% or, females earning 94 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts. The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from gender discrimination and a difference in ability and/or willingness to negotiate salaries.
I'll be conservative and take the lowest difference and assume that college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave are 100% by un-pressured choice: 95 cents to the dollar doesn't sound like a lot, until you ask yourself if a 5% raise is significant, particularly since the amount of money in question takes effect every single year. My anecdotal experience suggests the conservative assumptions for that are not reasonable, but YMMV.
> The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from gender discrimination and a difference in ability and/or willingness to negotiate salaries.
So according to wikipedia, men may have higher ability or be better negotiators? I don't see a gender pay gap here.
Here's a good article on the subject:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/04/12/dont-buy...
How so? The article rants about the 78% claim, without addressing that (a) even correcting for the concerns they state a pay gap exists, and (b) those "choices" men and women make aren't always free choices (witness who takes parental leave in the US vs in more egalitarian countries.
> men may have higher ability or be better negotiators? I don't see a gender pay gap here.
I fail to see how not knowing the source of a gap disproves the gap.
And men having more frequent and successful negotiations is a pretty tested topic itself. When perceived aggression garners one gender respect and another disdain, it's an inevitable result.
So how would you do that?
> Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later.
> Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
> H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...
If you read Larry and Sergey’s original paper that they wrote at Stanford, where they talked about creating a search engine, they specifically said that advertising was wrong and bad and it would inherently corrupt the search engine if you sold advertising.
>You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market.
Don't know what the Google management is thinking at this point in time. But I'm damn sure, unless you are making it rain hundreds of millions in dollars, and you are a part of these pre-unionizing exercises- You are very likely getting marked up as a trouble maker, and may be already a part of purge lists.
This is also a small industry. You don't want your name to smeared as a person who comes with a high trouble/contribution ratio. Nobody wants to hire people to do their jobs, and get employees running their part time political projects with their fellow colleagues in paid office time, on office issues.
There are also a huge range legal landmines you are likely to step over even without active knowledge that you are.
This is also extremely illegal in the EU. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36242312
I'll just say you weren't a good fit for the "company culture" and that'll be that.
What you are suggesting is called "blacklisting." You may be interested to learn that in many states it is illegal behavior itself. See https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-....
> Nobody wants to hire people to do their jobs, and get employees running their part time political projects with their fellow colleagues in paid office time, on office issues.
Union organizing is not a "part time political project," it is a legally protected right. See https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i....
What you are saying is true, but its always impossible to establish intentions. And either way you have to sue. All the best ever getting a job if you are known to do legal fights against prospective employers.
>>Union organizing is not a "part time political project," it is a legally protected right.
One believes in these things only until they become managers themselves. And every one aspires to be one in this industry.
The law isn't Tinker Bell, it doesn't require you to believe in it to exist.
> And every one aspires to be one in this industry.
It's difficult to think of anything sadder than a person who assents to his own exploitation in the hopes that maybe, someday, he will get to exploit someone else.
I also wish you the very best with your activism.
Oh god no, not even close to everyone in this industry aspires to be a manager.
Personally, even if I end up becoming a manager I don't think my opinion on unions will change. Ten years ago people told me that my opinion on taxes would change once I made more money too and if anything I support higher taxes even more now.
This is so far from the truth that I don't know how to make sense of your claim. Either you are living in a bubble or in a place which provides no career path to engineers (thus forcing them to want to be managers) or you are interpreting the data you are faced with incorrectly.
There are so many people in this industry who never want to be a manager that this claim of yours is frankly absurd!
Sadly, impossible to prove.
I can choose to not hire for you a plethora of reasons. I can just give you a few bullshit questions that you can't answer correctly and use that as an excuse.
If only the fact that it's illegal actually stopped it from happening.
And even if this were true, some things are worth taking risks over.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/quick-thoughts-googl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
there is an interesting tendency that many psychologists pointed out: in many professions for some reason psychopaths tend to get to the top an stay there. Specifically CEOs tend to be people with most psychopathic traits:
https://www.businessinsider.com/professions-with-the-most-ps...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Saints-Killers-S...
Now consider for a second, if you have psychopaths with money running the companies - why would they be interested in well being of their employees?
I am not saying every CEO is a psycho, but many are (as research shows):
https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis...
That is not established.
> They found the allegation credible.
“Credible” is not “true”; it is quite possible to find both a claim and it's negation to be credible.
I do wonder if any reporting process at a company can ever really be trusted to have the employee's interests in mind. HR, legal, and etc all are there to protect the company. They're not there for your standard employee.
Again, not disagreeing with having a process, I just wonder if a process handled by the typical parties really can be trusted. I've never felt that HR, legal, or any of those departments are there FOR me. Rather they are there to prevent any problems the company may have, and that is not likely to be in my interests if I were to make a complaint about something.
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
I would really like to see people rallying against many more things like this.
Many people aren't even aware of such draconian policies they are signing up for. And companies are probably counting on it too.
It is also possible that even the owners of the company (especially small, family owned companies) aren't aware of these dumb policies. They just trust their lawyers to write up the contracts. There was a comment recently on HN - employee reads up the contract, goes to the owner to ask about some clause, and the owner himself is surprised and calls the lawyer to sort it out.
Big companies that spend shit ton of money on lawyers have no excuse - they're likely doing all this intentionally.
Maybe for a lot of the higher end HN devs out there, they can walk and be reasonably certain they'll pick up work in under a month. Personally, I've known a LOT of people (some in software too) that need 6-9 months to find any work in their field. Yeah, Uber and pizza delivery make some ends meet, but for a 'real' job with a 401k and benefits, it can take a LONG time. And at the end of that timeline, they can offer you really anything and you know you have to take that offer.
Anecdata: I'm in biotech and got offered 55k on the Peninsula at the end of about 2 months of interviewing for that particular company. They were the only people that would interview me over ~9 months of applying (caveat: biotech isn't doing well right now). The minimum wage of my 'stop-gap' auto mechanic job in a particular city is 60k. The biotech company would not budge at all.
in other words, if a private settlement is agreed to, the victim's name may be kept confidential, but not the perpetrator’s.
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"?
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!"
By existing. If you make a 'chief diversity officer' then you make an ideal candidate to compromise access to their accounts. Any policy discussion, any reports, any internal discussion of incidents become excellent ammunition for a campaign.
Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead?
Like, if it's someone who said something slightly inappropriate/gray area to another and just needs a stern talking to, sure. Have a process/HR deal with it. But so many occurrences are so much worse than that...
Not the same situation at all, but similar reasoning: I once had a colleague corner me in the office because of a disagreement in a meeting earlier in the day, where they threatened to "meet me outside to settle things". I mentioned it to my boss/HR/etc, and sure enough, they told me to just talk it out with them and were generally useless. I ended up having to quit. In hindsight, it wasn't my boss I needed to talk to, it was the freagin cops. (Not, of course, cops are frequently useless too, and that's a separate problem...but if we have to change the world somewhere, maybe pushing it all on private entities isn't the best thing to do in this case).
*Thankfully
Even if a harasser was prosecuted or sued successfully, if the company retained them, that would create a hostile work environment for the harassee, and make the employer liable.
There's also the case of quid pro quo harassment, where a superior makes someone's career progression tied to the harassment, in which case it may be harder to distinguish the company's liability from the harasser. But even in such cases, an effective system to report such behaviour can mitigate the company's liability. In such cases, claims often surround retaliation for reporting harassment (e.g. employee transferred, demoted or fired in response to a harassment report.)
This reply gets to the more fundamental point: companies are doing a different thing than police investigations or even civil suits over harassment. They can't undo the harassment, they can't punish the harasser (beyond termination with cause), or force the harasser to compensate their victim.
Rather, the goal is to create a workplace where employees are not harassed. This is good for both legal reasons (hostile work environment suits) and obvious moral (harassment is bad) and practical (people will quit) reasons.
If a coworker mocked or punched me every day at work, it might or might not produce a complaint to the police or a civil suit against the coworker. But it would certainly be something that made my employment untenable and a reasonable employer would react to that. People are in general not demanding that employers act in place of the police, they're demanding that they act to stop sex-related hostility at least as thoroughly as they would act against other hostility. It's the purview of the company because it's a completely different task than what courts or police would do.
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).
This shouldn't be the job of HR either.
What you describe is what civil courts are for. From societal perspective, it is their exact purpose: to dispense justice and prevent revenge. If they don't work, they need to be made to work, instead of relegating this function to random people with random training and random incentives following random policies that are ultimately designed to safeguard companies, not employees.
Focusing specifically on the company's perspective, it's also a terrible option from a risk management perspective. It leaves them exposed to the possibility of a very expensive judgment. (Especially if it's a big well-known company that the courts might want to make an example of.) If they can resolve the dispute internally in a quick and satisfactory manner, then that is very much in the company's interest.
Which is exactly why it typically ends up being HR's job. And why it should officially be someone's job.
Framing it this way, I guess the company's internal culture being less dysfunctional because these sorts of problems are more likely to be addressed instead of being allowed to fester is just a happy side effect, but it bears mentioning, all the same.
Defining what makes a non-hostile workplace is hard, enforcing it on individuals is harder, so instead delegate that responsibility to each individual company and take action on the company if it does not do that.
In no way is it a perfect system (cue tons of excessively formalized training etc), but it is the best system I know of.
Allowing companies to remove the external force of "If you do not do this, you may face civil action" breaks the model though, so I completely understand why Googlers would like to remove forced arbitration. The risk of that is a contributing factor towards compliance.
I wouldn't shed a tear if forced arbitration were banned. I can't really see it as not being at least partially an attempt to wiggle out from under the rule of law.
* the people are HR
* trained in sexual harassment prevention and response
* following a transparent policy approved by the board and a union vote (or something like it, for instance an employee rep on the board like they are asking for)
Maybe this isn't the best alternative. I'm just saying, it's not like the choice is between (a) the government works it out and (b) everything is random.
And employer is absolutely responsible for dispering judgement on inappropriate, but legal things that happen while at work.
If I go to a co-worker and start yelling slurs at them, I should expect the be fired, even if my behavior wasn't illegal. The same is true for inappropriate sexual actions.
> 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 then when someone goes free we want someone else with lower burden of proof to step in and let the hammer fall on the guilty. If we changed the law and gave the police the power to fire someone without having a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt (this which we are asking the HR departments to do), then I would personally trust the police to do a better job with less bias than a HR department of a large company. It would also create a better political environment where the justice system would be discuses without extrajudicial punishment being used openly as an accepted alternative when we find the legal system lacking.
What would the optimal system be when we want punishment for crimes when the police drops it because there isn't enough proof.
But beyond that, I'm curious why you think the police are the gold standard for handling all of society's disputes? Again, let's ignore that the people and groups who constitute the "police" vary significantly depending on jurisdiction; and also, of course, that the police do not make the ultimate decision to press and pursue charges (that would be the prosecutor's office). The police have the power of government authority and protection behind their decisions and actions, but that is orthogonal to whether they are trained and equipped to come to the right and/or optimal decision.
It's no different than a company hiring private guards for security -- guards who are not only willing to do, well, guard duty, but also are familiar with the company's culture and regulations etc, and are (we would hope) specifically and better-trained for the attack vectors that the company faces. It would be absurd to argue, "Well, that company must not have real security threats if they didn't contract with the police to guard their workplaces"
And we don't need to use the police. We could invent a new group called peace keepers with different training, but the key point is that crime is defined in a democratic process that is uniformed applied to every citizen and thus the outcome of crime should be equally uniformed.
Private guards has a very clear line between the domain of the police and what they can do, just like the clear line between the military and the police. Private guards do not investigate crime, do not handle evidence, and is not considered part of the legal system. Similarly it seems natural to me that cases which society defines as crime should not be handled internally by any company. Having overlaps where private guards and the military stepping in as police sounds as a terrible outcome and a sign that something is broken in the legal system. Better to then discuss what is broken and fix it so we can return to equal outcomes for all citizens.
This isn't about legal outcomes or crimes.
There is a very clear line between crime and non-crime.
So when we're talking about a "downright criminal act" -- violent assault, robbery, rape, threats to safety, fraud, etc. -- yes, the police should be brought in, for their powers of investigation and arrest, among other things. But then we're basically arguing a tautology -- "Should the police, whose job is to deal with criminal acts, be called in when a criminal act has occurred?"
What I read in u/shados's question, and subsequent comments, was: if an accusation isn't good enough for police standards, why should a company/HR use it as the basis of firing someone? So my line of argument is mostly irrelevant if you believe that companies have the right to fire people for non-criminal accusations. But I guess the bigger discussion is about the line between what constitutes a criminal act, vs. a civil dispute.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355200
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18353824
I agree with that. Let the legal system deal with criminal acts, the HR department deal with the policy violations by employees, the unions/department for workers deal with regulative violations by employers, and teacher/medical/ectra boards deal with professional violations. It is when one of those start to overrule the factual findings of each other that we need to discuss if something is broken and need to be fixed.
To connect back to the article and Google execs, here in Sweden we have an additional rule for public positions. A person can be fired from such position if they simply loose enough public trust regardless of factual events. In return for such weak employment protection they usually get payouts if they get fired without evidence of fault. This has the benefit that you don't need to debate if the accusation is true, but rather if the public trust (from media and so on) has been lost. In those cases where the legal system do find someone guilty they simply don't get the payout. I wonder if such system would work nicely to deal with execs in large corporations.
Think about it from another perspective. If Google wants to cherry-pick the brightest and best educated people from society, they're going to have to meet a higher standard themselves. Would you want that standard encoded in law for the rest of the state? If so, how would you, in a democracy, impose a standard crafted by a subset of the cultural elite for themselves on the rest of the state or the country? Changing cultural norms drag the law behind them, not the other way around. The legal standard will lag behind for a long time, and Google's employees are part of the force that will be leading it forward.
wow. that sounds like a really bad situation. i mean, did you quit because of an ongoing threat of violence from this individual? the company should have offered other remedies before it came to that.
All other issues aside: the company should want to make an environment where good people want to work and can work without "distractions" (using the word very broadly and generically, not dismissing people's important concerns!!!). So it's in their self interest to deal with them well.
This line of argument isn't that different from the GP's analogy to site uptime.
If during an investigation they find criminal behavior they can (and usually should) turn over their evidence to law enforcement and let them do their job, which is investigating violations of criminal law.
Violations of company policies and violations of criminal law have huge differences in burden of proof.
People sometimes confuse the two and say things like "they should have never been punished at work because they weren't convicted in a court of law." But that's not exactly how it works, the burden of proof for work punishment is simply a large magnitude lower than legal punishment.
Most workplace harassment is not criminal. Most violations of company policy aren't criminal.
Because sexual harassment is a form of illegal sex-based employment discrimination by the company. Individual unwelcome acts that don't rise to that level aren't sexual harassment (legally), but may be warning signs that if not corrected rise to the level of an offense by the company.
> Maybe for light cases where someone just need a stern talking to, but a lot of the cases are downright criminal acts.
And for those, the company’s responsibility as regards harassment does not negate the role of law enforcement as regards the criminal violation. The police are not pushed aside in favor or private action. In addition, harassment events, whether or not a crime is involved, can be directly reported to federal, or usually also state (who will dual-file with the federal EEOC), anti-discrimination authorities; the employer process mostly if a mechanism to catch conduct before it reaches the level of discrimination and to manage the company's exposure when it did reach that level.
> Shouldn't it be better to have law enforcement handle it, and have companies forced to cooperate instead?
That's not an “instead” or “better”, because the options aren't mutually exclusive; where a criminal accusation is involved,law enforcement retains their usual role in investigating and prosecuting crimes, including compulsory process which can be directed at parties with relevant information, including employers.
There would be management meetings about rating the sexiest coworkers and who could lay down the most (obviously not a single woman in whole of management and they had no chance of moving even close to it in their career). All sanctioned from the highest level and not a single person would dare to question it. I was not actively participating but also part of the problem since I didn't say anything.
This was not even done in secret and more or less public knowledge. The communication from management had a lot of sexist jokes and pictures and anyone questioning it "had no humor".
Mind you, this was not a tech company per say and I believe the further you get from tech the worse it gets. I think it's sad that the huge problem affecting 99% of women gets reduced to a single company which probably is one of the few in the world that even has a code of conduct against this stuff.
Perhaps they felt it was worth letting it be a bigger event and taking a PR hit if in return what they get is that the employees feel that the company supports them.
We’re the Organizers of the Google Walkout. Here Are Our Demands
https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-exp...
Also, people claimed that the payment was to keep Rubin from working with competitors... But some others say that it was to buy his silence over what others might have been doing...
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told staff he supports their right to take the action.
"I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel," he said in an all-staff 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."
If someone at the top is sincerely interested in resolving this satisfactorily, why the walk-out? I don't get it.
Are they saying they don't really believe him?
My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you." What are these people personally doing to ensure that they are respecting women, creating the right kind of social climate at work, etc?
Because all the policy in the world can't per se fix a shitty culture. Shitty culture is as shitty culture does and it is perpetuated by every single individual in the organization and their individual choices.
I'm not impressed with people who point fingers. They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.
Although I thought the answer was a bit obvious, I answered... Words are cheap and the employees want to see action.
Your response is to talk about pointing fingers? I don't understand your point.
What do you have against Google employees making demands of their managers?
My mother always told me "When you point a finger at others, you have three fingers pointing back at you."
I'm pretty sure employees know that fingers are being pointed at them. Employees are constantly evaluated, and management places expectations on them (both work related and cultural) that those employees must meet, at penalty of termination.
It seems like you're questioning the idea that the fingers should point both ways... by saying that the fingers point both ways.
So saying that to me really doesn't cast any light whatsoever on this situation for me.
That just sounds so naive. If I knew what your real disconnect with this was, I'd try to help you understand.
Let's walk through the basics:
* Employees have a problem with management.
* Management says "we'll work on it" like they always do.
* Employees may or may not believe, but they want to see action taking place. Employees feel secure enough at their privileged jobs to make a statement by "walking out", with the explicit threat of further action if demands aren't met.
* Management encourages the employees... And will have to decide if they mean business, in part based on the walk-outs.
I appear to be the top ranked woman on HN. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard here (under a different handle). Historical surveys suggest the membership was possibly as much as 98% male at one time.
I get nothing but crapped on when I say that. I get nothing but mocked when I suggest that is indicative of personal competence on my part. People mostly admit to recognizing me at all in order to say something dickish. It's relatively rare that I get genuine support.
I got to the leaderboard by not grandstanding, not pissing on all the guys here, etc.
I'm not naive, though I may well be on my way out the door because I've been thrown off of plenty of other forums for saying "The emperor has no clothes." It's generally a socially unacceptable thing to do.
But it doesn't come out of naiveté by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever.
I don't really care about your prowess at "winning" at HN. I don't have any clue what you're going on about.
Edit: oh, and if you regularly get kicked off of forums, perhaps it had to do with situations like these? You seem to be overreacting in a very strange and hard to follow way, that comes off kind of aggressively.
Color me unimpressed. Methinks if all these good guys were so interested in women's rights, it would be possible for me to get a smidgen more respect here.
But, no. And pointing that out gets further dismissed as "I don't have any clue what you're going on about."
Par for the course. And it's a big part of why I am highly skeptical that anything will actually be changed by this walk-out. If men at Google really wanted to change the culture, they could start right here, right now, in this very discussion with actually taking my questions seriously and treating me with respect instead of piling on to stomp me into the ground for saying "I don't get it. Seems to me there's maybe a better way to approach this."
Anyway, before the mods* decide that my comments here somehow constitute bad behavior for baldly saying some of the things that people the world over never like having said to them about blatantly obvious hypocrisy, I think I'm done with this utterly pointless discussion.
* Not an attack on the mods here. They've been awesome. Just long experience tells me that pushing it too much is nothing but downside.
edit:
Edit: oh, and if you regularly get kicked off of forums, perhaps it had to do with situations like these? You seem to be overreacting in a very strange and hard to follow way, that comes off kind of aggressively.
Ah, yes, let's blame the woman in the overwhelmingly male forum and say she's just behaving badly by suggesting that the guys could actually be respectful to an actual woman if they actually think women's rights are important. Bonus points for this bit of "la la la not listening at all to a word she's saying."
Part of the reason to go to the walkout was to find out what to do. People didn't just stand there doing nothing. They listened to women speak about their experiences and ask for specific, concrete actions from attendees that would lead to less sexual harassment, bias, and associated garbage.
Do these things have to go hand in hand?
I'm not suggesting they shouldn't take company time. I'm wondering why this can't be done differently. And so far the replies I'm getting don't actually address such inquiries.
By handling interactions I have with women at work cognizant of the many ways in which their experience in the workplace differs from mine.
Also, I think about my daughter, and how I'd want her to be treated if she worked here.
> They are usually people wanting someone else to fix a problem so they don't have to actually change.
I can't personally fix the problem of (IMO wrong) decisions made by management on these issues. But I can help increase the pressure (public and internal) on them to make concrete changes.
If you* can't figure out that Mz and Her First Name and Middle Name are the same person, you aren't paying attention. And that means your criticism is completely vacuous on the face of it, even before we get into other reasons I have no interest in your opinion that would likely be verboten here as some kind of personal attack.
* You personally, not the general "you".
disclosure: Google employee
The way it's organized, it's also kind of a social event. Lot of folks didn't just walk out, but went to B40 to specifically walk out there.
They probably saw it as an opportunity to meet others and share thoughts on the topic. Find solidarity and get support
Plus, by endorsing it as a Google-sanctioned event, he's effectively taking power away from those walking out from disrupting normal business as usual (e.g., allowing managers to reschedule meetings).