A subclass of employees of Google today will stop working and “walk out” (to where? a suburban parking lot?).
The management of the company says that they support this walkout.
Can we infer from this that this subclass of employee is not considered productive or important by management?
See “The $90M Women’s Walkout At Google: Is Real Change Coming?” (Forbes) for how it turns out that the subclass is “employees who identify as female.”
(Also interesting from the Forbes piece is this characterization of the Google Heretic’s memo:
One instance that comes to mind is the ten-page memo that fired Google engineer James Damore wrote in 2017 explaining why women make bad engineers and arguing against the advancement of women in STEM
A perfect illustration of “people don’t remember what you say; they remember how you made them feel”!)
A flight school owner would never express happiness that mechanics or instructors were walking out. These employees are critical to generating revenue. What kind of message does the Google management send when it says “Go ahead and don’t bother to work on Thursday; the business will be just fine without female employees”?
Related:
- nytimes story on the walkout: “Last year, one engineer, James Damore, argued in an internal document that women were biologically less adept at engineering and that “personality differences” explained the shortage of female leaders at the company.” (i.e., three New York Times reporters were unable to read or understand Damore’s memo; nor could they be troubled to look at a Ph.D. neuroscientist’s “No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science”)
Unless the BBC is lying to me, in the picture going with the article I see plenty of people I identify as male (and how I identify people is the only thing that matters, period). By the BBC the walkout is portrayed as being ‘general employee walkout’, not ‘female employee walkout’.
Federico: NYT says “On Thursday, more than 1,500 — most of them women — plan to walk out of almost two dozen company offices around the world”.
Maybe some of the formerly male-identifying employees, seeing that a female gender ID would relieve them of the requirement to labor, began identifying as women today?
Phil, I was under the impression your president has convincingly shown that US media cannot be trusted, and you should just get news for the enlightened shores of your former colonial masters in Europe.
Personal observation: once a company gets big enough to have its own HR department (300-1000 people?), the hiring process shifts from sharp productive employees who generate revenue to dull agreeable employees who fit comfortably into the bureaucracy. Few of Google’s first 100 hires would get hired by Google today.
After mentioning “prenatal testosterone”, Damore wrote this:
I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
It looks like the NYT summary of the memo was pretty reasonable.
Also, Wikipedia says that the woman that you call a “Ph.D. neuroscientist” got her Ph.D. in psychology and then became a columnist.
Cute. But what the management approval of the walkout really tells us is that there are no other options open to them.:
(1) Publicly approve the walkout
+good PR
– some additional workers walkout
(2) Remain silent
– probable bad PR because “not responding” on this issue is default bad
(3) Remind workers that the walkout is not paid/approved time off
+ might reduce work lost somewhat
– almost certain very bad PR for “fighting” a virtuous thing
No, it’s walkout for everyone, in our office they are going to the plaza between the buildings. I keep telling them this is great, because there will be less lines for free food in cafeteria while they are protesting and I’m eating.
Phil, what do you think about Facebook not firing their executive who is friends with the new supreme court judge, publicly supported him and hosted a party for him when he won? This is really surprising, and fb employees do not even walkout! As you can see Google is more virtuous company because our employees are still railed about the stuff that happened few years ago! I wonder if they can walkout every Thursday for something.
Looks like my immediate team is not virtuous because no one, including female employers, walked out. On the other hand weather is pretty nasty in Seattle right now.
The men who remain at work should of course be reminded that they have to take up the slack. Though it would be somewhat embarrassing if productivity that day rose.
SK: I wasn’t aware of that horrifying breach of virtue at Facebook! That is upsetting. How can they not fire someone who is publicly friends with someone who was convicted of rape by users of their very own platform?
What’s next, a company cannot layoff a female employee or someone from a less privileged group because that would be discriminating against the sexes or group?!
What happened to the 60’s, 70’s or even 80’s when factory workers would go on strike and management would replace them in a heart beat? Or a company replacing you for taking a short term medical leave?
We have become a nation driven by feelings and emotions, not doers.
Phil, some quotes for you then 🙂
“Facebook vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, sat among federal judge Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters at yesterday’s Supreme Court nomination hearings.”
“FACEBOOK’S JOEL KAPLAN and his wife LAURA COX KAPLAN hosted a Kavanaugh celebration at their house last night for people who had worked on his nomination. Brett and Ashley Kavanaugh stopped by the gathering of about 25 people that was organized by Laura, Ginger Loper and several other Kavanaugh female supporters.”
I bet he will not last even six months and will retire “to persue his hobbies” or something or other, lol.
There are a number of factual errors and misinterpretations that merit correction.
1) The purpose of the walkout is for transparency, fairness and other items that apply to all genders.
2) For this reason, many of those who walked out were not female, at least in NYC. I don’t have precise proportions but clearly neither does the NY Times.
3) Characterizing management as “happy” is wrong. Rather management respects employees right to protest and made clear that there will be no negative consequences for someone who does. This isn’t happy – it is tolerant of employees who see a problem and want to make a change.
Diogenes: If Google is a hotbed of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, thus requiring the management-supported and/or management-tolerated protest, why do Googlers heap scorn on the unenlightened masses of Trump voters?
I wondered about this in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/06/28/pixar-and-being-lectured-by-our-bay-area-superiors/ back in June. The virtuous Trump-hating Pixar employee agreed that Pixar had been a hostile environment for women., but at the same time wanted to continue preaching to the unenlightened in states and companies that he had never visited.
Where’s the evidence that “Googlers heap scorn on the unenlightened masses of Trump voters?”. A rant by a single Pixar employee would not constitute evidence.
Also, there’s no interesting issue regarding people who criticize the management of their employers and also criticize other people who are not their bosses.
Vince: What’s the evidence that Googlers are #Resisting? I did a quick search… with Google!
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/407733-after-trump-travel-ban-google-employees-debated-adjusting-search-results
https://www.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2018/09/13/google-video-trump-election-2016-breitbart-orig-js.cnn
https://www.googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-support-hillary-clinton
But why must we search for “evidence”? I hope that you’re not suggesting that the election of Donald Trump was considered okay by anyone at Google.
Google has somewhere near 100,000 employees. Surely you are not suggesting that every single one of them voted for Clinton and not one of them voted for Trump.
Google’s motto is “don’t be evil,” right? Trump is often compared to Hitler. I hope that we can agree that Hitler is “evil.” Even if Trump is merely a fascist and a proto-dictator I hope that we can agree that would be “evil.” Therefore anyone who votes for Trump is actually “evil” and, at least if systems are working as designed, should not be working at Google.
Who knows how many employees actually walked out & for how long. No-one cares what you do hour to hour here. It mainly reminds us who had access to all the women in 2014.
Why were the women having sex with older married senior managers instead of more attractive unmarried younger guys?
Why are the two groups mutually exclusive?
So some Google employees preferred Hillary to Trump two years ago. You may have read that Hillary received more votes than her opponent. So more voters agreed with those Google employees than disagreed, This is yet another uninteresting statistic.
It fits the preconceived notions that fit the premise postulated. I sincerely doubt everyone at Google voted for Clinton. A majority? Certainly. It’s been shown repeatedly that better informed people prefer Democrats (even many lifetime Republicans refused to vote for Trump, including two former presidents, among others – I could give you a list, but a quick search in the engine of your choice will back that up to and be more comprehensive). But not everyone. It’s just another specious argument to make the real-world data conform to the conclusion that is desired. Actual facts don’t really matter, and anything that contradicts the foregone conclusion will be immediately discounted, and carefully cherry-picked “citations” will be trotted out.
Google doesn’t have to be a “hotbed of sexual harassment and gender discrimination” to see that there are improvements that can be made.
As far “heaping scorn” there are many factions within Google. It is a mistake to consider 95,000 employees all speaking with one collective voice. There is a subset who heap scorn on Trump voters, some who are vocal in complaints to management and some intersection of the two groups.
Apparently some senior Google exec who identifies as a man is accused of sexually harassing a woman at the Burning Man festival. Any thoughts on how imposing the new corporate HR sex codes at Burning Man will affect the party?
Bill: https://burningman.org/event/preparation/first-timers-guide/ says “Burning Man is not a festival. Burning Man is a community.” So please don’t call it a “festival”!
Checking https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/30/18045230/alphabet-google-rich-devaul-resigns-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin-investigation
I guess Burning Man could be considered “a community where married Google managers (try to?) have sex with young women instead of fixing Google Contacts and open-sourcing (or continuing to support) Picasa”.
I think you’re onto something going forward, though. If a woman alleges that a man did something outrageous at Burning Man, who wouldn’t believe her? Maybe #MeToo will finally end the plague of turnkey camps (packed with guys who have a lot to lose from being #MeTooed) that some old-school Burners complain about!