
Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo - jmsflknr
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59nmkx/google-employee-alleges-discrimination-against-pregnant-women-in-viral-memo
======
ben7799
I'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.

~~~
grape_eater
I work for Google, can confirm many of the points you've made. While I haven't
experienced any toxicity at Google, your analysis of the internal
communication culture raises really good points.

On one side, the internal social justice campaigns are incredibly pervasive
due to large usage of internal message boards. On the other side, Google is
one of the few companies that allows this level of internal airing of dirty
laundry. I've heard stories of similar incidences at Microsoft which were
swiftly shut down.

The problem is that when you encourage internal dialogue and communication at
a huge company like this, you'll never have people with different opinions
pitching in. You'll mostly get people with the most 'acceptable' opinions, the
others being silent as they value their jobs. It's a huge risk to be singled
out as someone who thinks Damore was right or that Maven should've been
continued. As a result, you'll get a constant stream of one-sided social
justice campaigns which inevitably leak to the press.

Encouraging internal dialogue and communication but not understanding its
limits at scale is one of the biggest mistakes Google has made. Google was
built on principles of open company-wide communication and sharing of
information, and while it clearly doesn't work as intended anymore, there's
too much inertia to change the course.

~~~
ben7799
Should have added, I worked one place we got acquired by a giant company that
most here would say is really f*cking evil (TM) and even there I never
detected any of the toxic stuff these Google stories talk about.

That place was actually Evil enough I quit within a year to go back to another
small company but it was nothing like what you read about Google. A different
axis of evil.

~~~
grape_eater
I should've been more explicit - I haven't experienced any toxicity at Google.
However, due to its internal communication culture Google is far more prone to
blowups of well-publicized scandals than other companies of similar size. I'll
edit my post to make it clearer.

~~~
aiyodev
I’m curious how you reconcile the admission that you work at a place with
bigoted witch hunts with the claim that you’ve never experienced any toxicity.
What is your position on the war with Eastasia?

~~~
stevenhuang
Google is a huge company, so why's that so hard to believe? In fact I'm
curious how you'd so easily write off the whole company and everyone who works
there from few pieces of bad press.

------
squish78
The 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-
Retu...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6240022-I-m-Not-Returning-to-
Google-After-Maternity.html#document/p1)

~~~
phoe-krk
It is linked there: literally the two first words of the article, "A memo",
link to this URL.

------
Osiris
I'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.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
It happened to me at Tudor Investment in NYC, which only has about 200
employees. I tried to quit when my daughter was born as I had found a better
job anyways.

If I didn't stay an extra 3 months, my manager threatened to fire me 'with
cause' so they could enforce my non-compete without paying me in New York.

So there I was working through some of the most incompetent shit from my
dismal colleagues while my wife was trying to take care of our newborn baby
while she couldn't walk due to delivery complications.

A week before I was supposed to go he mailed me a 25 item list of tasks to do
before he would 'allow' me to quit, so I terminated my employment. _After
which_ , they claimed my non-compete was in force without pay.

Don't ever work for those fucking vultures at Tudor Investment.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
Never tested but I've heard from colleagues that noncompetes without payments
at the base salary level are not considered "reasonable" and would be not be
enforceable in New York state. Of course that's the whole schtick with hedge
funds and the like, keep the base salary lower and pay bonuses.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
If you're terminated 'for cause', they are supposedly enforceable without pay
in New York. Then you have to argue that their 'cause' was invalid, which
takes time and lawyers.

~~~
nitrogen
Can one still be fired after already having quit (I suppose that might vary
from state to state)?

~~~
CoolGuySteve
No but that didn't stop their idiot HR lady from trying.

------
sandino
_The 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
From 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.

~~~
aiyodev
It’s the human resource’s department’s job to protect the company from
liability. If they’re not protecting the company from renegade managers
they’re not doing a very good job.

~~~
cdumler
What makes you think the managers are being renegades? They know the company
details that you don't know: we have too many women claiming maternity
benefits, we have too many people with skill X and not enough Y, etc. Again,
HR's job is to handle the needs of senior management, and only until then will
HR act against a manager.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Your hypothesis is extraordinarily unlikely. Google has continuously expanded
benefits for men and women going on parental leave over these last years. It
would make no sense whatsoever for them to also systematically harass pregnant
women out of the workforce. If they were concerned about the costs of
maternity, they could just have expanded those benefits more slowly. That
would have had dramatically more impact, at less cost, than harassing a woman
here or a woman there out.

~~~
duaoebg
Expanding benefits while simultaneously harassing those who take them gives
the benefit of virtue signalling with less of the cost. Most people who
receive harassment keep it to themselves as to be public about it is generally
a career ender.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
I'm not saying we can't concoct a series of words that makes it seem likely,
if you suppose that all the evidence that you would otherwise expect is absent
because of flimsy reasons. I'm saying that the balance of the evidence
suggests that this is not part of any systematic policy, but rather an
intermittent failure of a kind that one would expect given a sufficiently long
timeline, even in an organization with the best of intentions.

To the extent that there systemic anti-maternity bias within Google, it is
certainly below the background rate of society as a whole. That's not a very
high bar to clear, so I'll go further to say that Google is actively
supportive of parenting and maternity in a way that few other organizations in
the United States are. I can say that as someone whose spouse has had two kids
there, and as someone whose teammates have had dozens of kids between them
during our time working together.

Even with that, failures like these occur, because that's just what people are
like, and we have not designed perfect systems to counter this type of
behavior. That's not to excuse -- if the story is accurate, figurative heads
should roll. And our systems should be improved.

But positing a systematic policy of abuse like this is cynical and doesn't fit
with the evidence. Doing so is less like extrapolating a line from a single
data point and more like drawing an entire picture from that point.

~~~
duaoebg
There is no need for it to be a systematic policy, it can easily be an
emergent behavior. Such behaviors are common when there are conflicting
objectives. It's human nature. Good luck fighting that.

------
qntty
Changing internal Google policies isn't enough. America needs stronger worker
protection laws.

~~~
sanbor
The 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-
th...](https://www.npr.org/2016/10/06/495839588/countries-around-the-world-
beat-the-u-s-on-paid-parental-leave)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Americas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Americas)

~~~
aianus
> 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).

------
trhway
noticeably 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
A 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.

------
hundt
I'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
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.

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.

~~~
MegaButts
> 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.

Assuming you have already agreed to legally binding arbitration as is pretty
much standard in all employee contracts (although thankfully a recent law
banned this practice in California for employees hired in 2019 or later), how
useful is it to go to a lawyer? It just seems like the system is designed to
work against you.

I have never actually gone through the binding arbitration process, so my
knowledge of this is very limited.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
In many states that permit binding arbitration agreements, whistleblower
protections and criminal activity reports pierce the agreement. That's why the
specific nature of the transgression is important, and why actually talking to
a lawyer is better.

~~~
kevin_b_er
It is the reverse. The state must not "permit" so much as aggressively work
around mandatory binding arbitration, as the judiciary viciously denies access
to courts of law to victims of mandatory binding arbitration and invalidates
state laws to protect their citizenry. The American Arbitration Act has been
interpreted with maximal denial of the rule of law towards its victims.

------
jayd16
This 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
I 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.

------
pjdemers
Years 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.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
If 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.

~~~
sokoloff
It also seems unlikely that even a multi-million dollar birth with
complications would bankrupt the plan of a "big aerospace company", except for
fairly small values of big.

------
HarryHirsch
So 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
That'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
Here's a thing - the current legal framework means that manager's dislike to a
pregnant woman is basically irrelevant.

~~~
bubblewrap
The 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?

------
sylvinus
Maybe 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
Google's greatest PR move was convincing people that they're not a soulless
billion dollar corporation like those _other_ soulless billion dollar
corporations

------
jrockway
I feel like "you should take medical leave" is Google HR's answer to
everything. Is that normal?

------
notadoc
Not 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
Yes, 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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/business/fathers-parental-
leave-jpmorgan-chase.html)

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.

------
balaksakrionon
It's always gamble to go to HR

------
augustarian
Wonder 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

------
gojri
Can someone tell me what 'PA' stands for in the memo? Project Admin?

~~~
gojri
or perhaps 'Product Area'?

------
tracker1
Worth 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.

~~~
JSavageReal
Was going to mention this as well. Vice deliberately misrepresenting the point
of his memo and explicitly mentioning that it's "unscientific". Well no sh __,
it 's a memo. I wonder if there's an agenda there?

------
droithomme
_> 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
"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.

------
fortran77
It'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_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/26m7uq/why_has_unpopular_opinion_puffin_been_banned_from/)
)

It almost seems like someone is trolling by using it. I wonder whose leg is
being pulled here.

------
whiddershins
I 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
I 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
> 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.

