18 ms·
Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo
- squish78 7y agoThe memo, since it's not actually linked in this Vice article, for anyone who would rather read the source material than the editorializing: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6240022-I-m-Not-Returning-to-Google-After-Maternity.html#document/p1 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6240022-I-m-Not-Retu...
- phoe-krk 7y agoIt is linked there: literally the two first words of the article, "A memo", link to this URL.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cronix 7y agoWhat do you mean? Literally, the very first 2 words in the article, "A memo", is a link to an article with all 6 pages of the document in question.
- squish78 7y agoThat hyperlink goes to another Vice article: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbmqxq/heres-the-memo-currently-going-viral-at-google https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbmqxq/heres-the-memo-cur... Edit - Which apparently has the document embedded, but doesn't render in Edge.
- sp332 7y agoPrivacy Badger also blocks documentcloud.com and assets.documentcloud.com, so here's a more direct link: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6240022-I-m-Not-Returning-to-Google-After-Maternity.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6240022-I-m-Not-Retu...
- qntty 7y agoChanging internal Google policies isn't enough. America needs stronger worker protection laws.
- jcomis 7y agoYes, this is not a "Google" problem. It's happening everywhere.
- sanbor 7y agoThe United States, Suriname, Papua New Guinea, and a few island countries in the Pacific Ocean are the only countries in the United Nations that do not require employers to provide paid time off for new parents.[1] Parental leave policies in the United Nations [2] [1] https://www.npr.org/2016/10/06/495839588/countries-around-the-world-beat-the-u-s-on-paid-parental-leave https://www.npr.org/2016/10/06/495839588/countries-around-th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Americas
- aianus 7y ago> require employers to provide paid time off This isn't phrased quite accurately; I know that in Canada maternity leave is guaranteed by law but it is not paid for at all by the employer (it is paid by government insurance schemes instead).
- Osiris 7y agoI've spent most entire career at relatively small companies (25-100 employees). I've never seen these types of issues (I can't say they've never happened, I'm just not aware of any). In fact, reading these stories is probably why I've never had the desire to apply to work at any of the large tech companies. I can't say for certain what the differences are, but I think smaller companies tend of have less office politics, less ambition as there is less opportunity for promotion, more shared goals (everyone works on one product), fewer layers of management, and more personal interaction with management.
- kyrra 7y agoGoogle has ~100,000 employees at this point. This is the story of a single manager within the company. When you have that many people at the company, there are going to be people that make bad choices, and then the story will fall under the umbrella of "Google" and make the news. If this was a single small 25-100 person company, it would (likely) not get any notice.
- hcnews 7y agoHow do you know if there are 1 or 100 or 1000s of such cases without actual data? Companies should be forced to reveal number of cases per year per geography. That'll allow me to make an informed choice when joining a company. Also, its not clear to me why "HR will always help the company" has to be the status quo. This is an area where I would like the laws/judicial system to improve things.
- itchyouch 7y agoNot to argue against regulations that force revealing of data, but in my experience, whenever places are forced to "document" issues, the culture shifts to only document the egregious while anything else that can be swept under does get swept away as to not inflate the statistics. I wonder if there is a strategy that encourages openness, yet doesn't have the immediate impact of moving all the conversations behind closed doors in a buddy-buddy system.
- 7y ago
- balaksakrionon 7y agoIt's always gamble to go to HR
- hundt 7y agoI'm wondering, does anyone have any stories of involving HR in a situation like this (less-than-overt discrimination or harassment from a person more senior/important than you) and getting a positive outcome? At this point whenever I read that someone "reached out to HR to ask for help in navigating the situation" I assume that the main outcome will be to put the company on notice that they need to start working on their paper trail for when you inevitably quit or get fired. But I suppose I wouldn't hear the happy stories as often as the unhappy ones.
- TAForObvReasons 7y agoHR exists to protect the company, full stop. They are only interested in the workers insofar as they reveal potential legal liabilities for the company. It is almost always better to first talk to outside legal representation to understand the landscape. If there are actual law violations, they will help properly document and possibly start preparing a case, and if not then you know you should prepare to leave the company. EDIT: surprised at the downvotes here, this is common knowledge for workers in all industries, not just tech, and this has been discussed at length every time a similar issue arises.
- hundt 7y agoYeah, that appears to be the "Hacker News wisdom" on this topic and it certainly seems plausible to me. I was just wondering if this is a basically universally held opinion, or if some people with relevant experience have a different view.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoWhile that may be "HN Wisdom", when it comes to these sentences, "HR exists to protect the company, full stop. They are only interested in the workers insofar as they reveal potential legal liabilities for the company.", I usually see HN folk only think about the first sentence and forget about the second one. That is, often times an employee and the company share a mutual interest because of the risk of liability, and it's good to understand this, because as an employee this can help you. As jedberg said in a comment above, this is one reason maybe while going to a third party (e.g. complaining to someone else, who then brings that to HR) can help. In that case, it's not so much "you vs. your adversary", but both the person reporting to HR and HR itself share the viewpoint of "If we don't stop this person he could get us sued."
- jrockway 7y agoI feel like "you should take medical leave" is Google HR's answer to everything. Is that normal?
- truthwhisperer 7y agoIf I don't play soccer for 4 months I doubt whether i will be selected for the most competitive team after returning. and 2) you were probably in that position as the 1% of the 1% of the 1% who was willing to sacrifice everything to get that role. If the cards turn they select another 1% of the 1% of the 1%. So, harsh on personal level however, you should have known before signing likewise Messi knows he is not playing in 10 years team for Barca 1th
- ben7799 7y agoI'm always amazed Google management tolerates things like internal message boards aimed at letting employees create Memes on company time. On the "evil point haired boss" level it seems these types of things like their internal message boards cause a lot of trouble for the company. On the less evil side it seems like employees waste a lot of time on these internal sites and all the internal social justice stuff. Maybe Google just seems to get it's dirty laundry aired out. I've been working in this field for 20 years not including my internships in college and I've never worked any company that seemed to have as much of this weirdness as Google seems to. Maybe it's an artifact of them having a money printing machine and then a ton of employees who seem to work on items other than the money printing machine which don't really matter to the company's bottom line. From the outside it just seems like a never ending series of stories about ultra-toxic management.. all of which greatly exceed anything I've seen in my career.
- takeout 7y agoWhat do you mean by "internal social justice" stuff?
- ben7799 7y agoThis current story does not sound like anything weird is going on but some of the stories it sounds like some employees spend a majority of their time setting up protests internally. It is hard to understand how someone can spend significant time in the office fomenting internal protests (even if they are for a good cause) and actually be getting their job done.
- ChamindaV 7y agoLet's not jump on one women's exit review about her relationship with her boss, trust it be unbiased, and give benefit of all doubt to throw the company under the bus.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoSo the author was managing a small team and was hold by her manager to get rid of one of her reports because she was pregnant. Now we know why management consists of psychopaths, those who are not evil quit in disgust.
- bubblewrap 7y agoThat's what the pregnant woman claims. The manager could have disliked her for other reasons or considered her unfit for leading people for other reasons.
- notyourday 7y agoHere's a thing - the current legal framework means that manager's dislike to a pregnant woman is basically irrelevant.
- bubblewrap 7y agoThe legal framework could be wrong, though. I thought this is about emotional upheaval and hating big corporations, not the law. If it is about the law, why even discuss it, instead of waiting for the courts to sort it out?
- HarryHirsch 7y agoAccording to HR, there was a documented history of inappropiate remarks on part of the author's manager. On the basis of available evidence, it's reasonable that those remarks are genuine, too.
- ryanmercer 7y agoIt could have been a logical decision, something along the lines of "you said you're going to use maternity leave in a casual conversation, why don't you pass that report off now to so and so in case they need to ask you questions about it before you are gone for an extended period". At my last job I was a contractor and took over a retired employee's desk/duties. She has apparently quit doing any actual real work months before and was just doing a small percentage of her work and not documenting what random bits she had actually been doing, I spent 2 months just trying to sort it out with the agency complaining to my employer that I wasn't doing anything, despite the fact I had literal boxes full of printouts and every surface in my cubicle covered, including most of the floor, with stacks of spreadsheets and records trying to figure out what she'd move from what account to which accounts going through highlighters like crazy highlighting stuff once i was confident a specific line for a specific office for a specific month for a specific bill had in fact been moved out of the field office account into the main GSA account for that type of entry, all while trying to keep up on the incoming stuff.
- bubblewrap 7y agoMaybe the (female) manager(s) simply didn't like the woman in question. What is a manager to do, in this day and age, if they are not happy about an employee?
- jlawer 7y agoMaybe buck up and do their job? They are paid to manage people and get the best performance out of them even if they aren’t who you would have picked. Unless the staff are incompetent, or otherwise unsuitable, the job is to make it work effectively.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoRealize that the person in question is the company's employee, not the manager's employee. Far too many managers see their position as some kind of feudal lord where those beneath them on the hierarchy owe personal allegiance to them. If the manager doesn't like the person, that's quite possibly the fault of the manager, not the person. The manager shouldn't automatically be the one who stays if no working relationship with the person in question is possible.
- bubblewrap 7y agoMaybe the person in question shouldn't automatically be the one who stays in a working relationship? Just because somebody is pregnant, they are not a saint. It is amazing how many assumptions people seem to make here.
- sylvinus 7y agoMaybe they expect better from a company like Google, but people need to be reminded that HR protects the company, not its employees. While still risky, it's often safer to complain about someone's behaviour to their manager instead of HR.
- squish78 7y agoGoogle's greatest PR move was convincing people that they're not a soulless billion dollar corporation like those other soulless billion dollar corporations
- pjdemers 7y agoYears ago, I worked at a big aerospace company (that no longer exists). I was hiring a small team of software engineers. I was flat out told not to hire anyone who was, or wanted to be, pregnant. Why? Health care cost. We were self-insured, and a baby born with severe health problems could bankrupt our plan.
- cafard 7y agoOdds are you had some male software engineers. Did management forbid you to hire any that were married, cohabiting, or considering the possibility? Or did the big aerospace company not insure families?
- mieseratte 7y agoI've been asked in interviews about my familial status, even had one CTO flat-out tell me he wanted to know because of insurance costs.
- harryh 7y agoFor the record, asking such questions in a job interview is illegal. Though it definitely still happens. Probably a lot.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoIf a bad outcome of a single employee can "bankrupt your plan", I think the company should stop with the euphemism of they are "self-insured" and admit to the reality that they have no insurance. The entire purpose of insurance is to spread risk to a level that it becomes acceptable if there is 1 negative outcome, which obviously wasn't the case here. As an aside, just another example of how our f'd up healthcare system causes all these additional negative follow on effects.
- sjg007 7y agoThe CEO of AOL referred to million dollar babies once as a reason to cut benefits.
- whiddershins 7y agoI dunno, I couldn’t read the entire memo (it just felt too long) and I’m uninterested in Vice’s editorializing. That said, I just don’t love the way the original thing was handled. A manager made some comments, it was totally feasible to just ignore them, or to make a bit of a wisecrack or say directly “hey, that feels a little harsh, no?” Instead you go to HR. I don’t know, people say dumb or insensitive things all the time. I would be loathe to make it a formal issue unless I really thought something harmful was going on. Edit: obviously I wasn’t there, and I possibly don’t understand the nuances. It’s just a gut reaction.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoI can't downvote you enough. This is horrible advice. People tend to view going to HR as "the nuclear option", but this is not the case. Most companies put their managers through training about how they put the company at immediate (potentially large) liability if you are aware of harassment, even a "gray area", and you don't report it.
- ci5er 7y ago> I can't downvote you enough. Why? The point of view seemed to be politely presented. You disagree. I tend to disagree with you (for the limited number (call it ~10) of large company HR departments I have seen). What are the downvotes for? Now - to your second point - companies do train managers to report. Yes. I believe that this is a containment device. I am not marketing this here, so don't call me a shill, but I'm working on a better way for employees to get their individual complaints anonymously surfaced all the way to the board. The upside is: less layers of battle-hardened defence mechanism against employees. The downside is: loss of plausible deniability. We'll see how it works out.
- sandino 7y agoThe only support I received as the victim of my manager’s abuse was encouragement to take advantage of medical leave. This statement is quite telling: first HR goes to lengths to deny that there's any seriously wrong. Then they pretty blatantly acknowledge that yes, things are so fucked up that you'll likely want to take medical leave.
- cdumler 7y agoFrom first-hand experience, I cannot stress this enough: HR's job is to protect management. Period. Full stop. Having going through this type of situation (high-performer until on the wrong side of someone in management), I really didn't understand things until someone pointed something out. I was asked: who hired the manager? The purpose of a manager is to handle the details of the goals of hirer. A musician hires a manager to handle the details book gigs, vet contracts, etc. If the musician doesn't like the work being done, the manager is fired. If the manager thinks he or she can get a better result from someone else, they fire the assistants, caterers, etc. The musician doesn't care, only that results are generated. The senior execs hire managers for the exact same purpose: deal with the details to get projects completed for them. If you play ball, you'll get the rewards. Mess with that agenda, you'll get canned. The biggest disappointment I had was how I was treated. They make you feel like it's you letting them down. They dangle in front of you all the ways out: "we're inclusive, we want to you have a great work environment, we have these resources for you to grow". And, I was there for all of it: the manager who would tell you exactly how to handle things only to lie in a HR meeting the exact opposite. The big hint should be the HR title: Human Resources. A resource is explored, extracted, and exhausted. HR's job is provide for management, not the employees.
- trhway 7y agonoticeably that both managers were women. One would naively think that that would lead to deeper empathizing and more understandable accommodation due to better mutual understanding and shared experience. Well, better mutual understanding and shared experience seems to be a double edged sword. Can you imagine a male manager trying to oppose, or even just question the necessity of, something like that bedrest: "She says that she and her baby had potentially life-threatening complications toward the end of her pregnancy, and that she would need to go on maternity leave earlier than expected. “During one conversation with my new manager in which I reiterated an early leave and upcoming bedrest, she told me that she had just listened to an NPR segment that debunked the benefits of bedrest,” she wrote. “She also shared that her doctor had ordered her to take bedrest, but that she ignored the order and worked up until the day before she delivered her son via cesarean section."
- philwelch 7y agoA lot of modern society is a bit stacked against women actually having children. Women managers have as much a vested interest in the system as anyone but, by virtue of being women, don’t have the same kind of awkwardness and shame that a man would have.
- jayd16 7y agoThis is a pretty tough spot. You don't want to impede someone's career because of there reproductive choices but at the same time were the teams wrong in not wanting to introduce a new manager about to take a months long medical leave? You can look at the suggested early medical leave as being pushed out (and it certainly could have been) but it also strikes me as a good option if you only want to work in a rock star position at a rock star pace.
- sp332 7y agoI think those are different things. To start with, you can "discriminate" about a worker not being available to do their job. You're just not allowed to discriminate against someone for being pregnant specifically. The manager made comments "that the Googler was likely pregnant again and was overly emotional and hard to work with when pregnant." Secondly, there is FMLA leave which is supposed to guarantee that a person has their job when they get back, but I'm not sure if that was even relevant here or how it would affect the role changes that happened in the months prior to taking leave.
- rolltiide 7y agoI am genuinely open to understanding what reforms are possible that are compatible with running a business. I don't like how she was treated, and I don't see how introducing a manager that leaves makes sense either. My understanding is that we have an egalitarian ideal we want to reach - for career driven wage workers - but don't have a successful business structure that remains competitive here as it predates this need completely?
- kaitai 7y agoDowngrading someone's performance review because they're pregnant, though, is just classically illegal.
- tracker1 7y agoWorth mentioning TFA is wrong about the Damore memo... it wasn't suggesting that women are less disposed to be "good engineers" only that they are less disposed to seek out a career in engineering to begin with. Quality isn't a part of it. But that doesn't fit an SJW narrative.
- commandlinefan 7y agoNobody has ever refuted anything that Damore ever actually said - they've just said they didn't like the way it made them feel.
- tracker1 7y agoTFA mentions specifically "good engineers" and the point wasn't about quality, it was about the overall pool. That's all I was saying. It's about the false framing.
- xenadu02 7y agoThat's not even remotely true. I've addressed it many times here in the HN comments. I'm just tired of repeatedly giving the same explanation over and over.
- sfkdjf9j3j 7y agoHere's an extremely detailed refutation that was published about two years ago: https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boots-on-what-the-evidence-says-about-mr-damores-google-memo-bc93c8b2fdb9 https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... It's on the first page of google search results for "refutation of james demore memo", as are several other similar pieces.
- mieseratte 7y agoThat article is just rife with attacks on Damore’s character based on speculation and hearsay, and semantic games.
- fortran77 7y agoIt's interesting the internal memer used the "Unpopular Opinion Puffin". This meme image was banned from Reddit because it was frequently associated with racist ideas. (See https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/26m7uq/why_has_unpopular_opinion_puffin_been_banned_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/26m7uq/why_ha... ) It almost seems like someone is trolling by using it. I wonder whose leg is being pulled here.
- droithomme 7y ago> Exactly two years ago today, another, much different memo, went internally viral at Google. That one was written by the now infamous James Damore, an engineer who wrote a 10,000-word, unscientific memo attempting to argue that women are naturally less disposed to be good engineers compared to men. The purpose of that memo was to get Google to scale back its diversity efforts. That's not what actually happened.
- ab_c 7y ago"unscientific" Technically, yes what he said is unscientific in the sense that he didn't conduct a long-term study. However, the guy has a degree in molecular biology so it's not as if he's pulling shit out of thin air to justify his stance -- that's grossly misleading. While I don't agree with everything he said, there's a lot that I feel is very fair. It's sad the media wrote him off as a misogynist. Misogynist don't write pages of suggestions on ways to encourage women into STEM and into leadership positions.
- notadoc 7y agoNot specifically about Google or this article, but how many people here have seen or experienced some sort of discrimination against parents in general? Like outwardly complaining that a man is asking for paternity leave (or insinuating job consequences if they take more than a few days)? Or more subtle approaches like deliberately scheduling unimportant meetings at obscure times to interfere with parenting and childcare schedules?
- ab_c 7y agoYes, there have been male parents being discriminated against because some companies don't feel that men could ever be considered a "primary" guardian -- that designation is reserved for women, only. Thus, men can't get the full allotted paternity leave time; only women can. Just recently did the courts decide this is unfair; both men and women can carry the title and deserve equal time off. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/business/fathers-parental-leave-jpmorgan-chase.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/business/fathers-parental... That said, I've seen cases where the opposite is true. Parents are treated well but other groups aren't. I know several friends working at a large, well-known, evil gaming studio. They've had controversy in the past surrounding how they pushed employees to work insane crunch. When it became public, they (moderately) changed. Project managers would never ask women to work late, nor ask an employee who is a parent. For parents, this is great... however, they pushed all that work to others. If you're male, single, a PM asks you to work overtime (without pay) and you decline, it will be a detriment to your career. After all, you have no kids therefore no legitimate reasons to say no. Be prepared to receive negative, nebulous feedback on your quarterly reviews. "It doesn't feel like this employee is a team player." "I question their commitment to the project." "This employee seems dispassionate about their job." I've worked with a project manager who carried a similar sentiment. In a candid conversation, he said to my face that he'd never ask women to work overtime. However, if you're male and under the age of 35, you should, "know better." If you're getting into the tech industry, you should expect to work at least 10hrs/day. I'm very happy I don't work with him anymore.
- augustarian 7y agoWonder if people in HR go through the same empathy-draining process doctors go through. Beyond a point, people's troubles/accidents/burns/cuts become objective things to take care v/s pain that people are going through
- bumblebritches5 7y agoINB4 only pregnant white women are discriminated against.
- gojri 7y agoCan someone tell me what 'PA' stands for in the memo? Project Admin?
- gojri 7y agoor perhaps 'Product Area'?