

In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women - sciurus
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/technology/in-googles-inner-circle-a-falling-number-of-women.html?hp&pagewanted=all

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marquis
The last few paragraphs are insightful, paraphrased below.

"..women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The
reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers
judged them unaccomplished.

.. women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a
woman interviewing at Google will meet other women.

A result: More women are being hired.

.. employees nominate themselves for promotions, but the data revealed that
women were less likely to do so. So senior women at Google now host workshops
to encourage women to nominate themselves, and they are promoted
proportionally to men

The attrition rate for postpartum women was twice that for other employees. In
response, Google lengthened maternity leave to five months from three and
changed it from partial pay to full pay. Attrition decreased by 50 percent."

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droithomme
The article describes a lot of good practices being rolled out by Google.

Not sure how the leave really works in practice though. 5 months off is a lot
for someone on executive track, a lot can happen in the tech field in five
months for a critical person and if the person is not that critical they
probably shouldn't be executive level.

However, I certainly wouldn't say no to 5 months full paid time off for
paternity leave myself and a guarantee it wouldn't affect my chances of
promotion at all. I'm not sure how that could really be guaranteed though.
Some men and women might have several children during their 20s and 30s, that
could amount to a lot of time off for them. Surely it would affect their jobs
if they, as many do, had one child a year for a streak, and took 5 months per
year off.

This assumes of course that men and women are treated equally and there is 5
months leave for both parents. The article isn't clear about this, but I
assume paternity and maternity leaves are treated equally.

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waqf
The article stated that paternity leave at Google is up to 7 weeks.

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xcode
Gender is a don't care.

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heretohelp
I can't and won't speak to any supposed trends, but Marissa got "side-lined"
because she was despised by nearly everybody.

She mistreated everyone who answered to her or met with her in a meeting for
years on end, the upper-ups' patience for that understandably evaporated. They
gave her the best they could manage at the time, which was to shelve her so
she wouldn't keep pissing people off.

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saraid216
That's completely understandable if true, but it's something we only have your
word on. Makes her Yahoo! role more interesting, if nothing else.

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wololo
fyi [http://www.quora.com/Marissa-Mayer-Named-Yahoo-CEO-
July-2012...](http://www.quora.com/Marissa-Mayer-Named-Yahoo-CEO-
July-2012/How-was-Marissa-Mayer-viewed-within-Google)

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saraid216
Reading through those responses, the answer seems to generally be "HN is
wrong: she was not especially rude."

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heretohelp
The Quora response to the general subject that usually gets quoted is excusing
her egregious inability to play nice with others by leaning on her putative
intellect.

That's not a rejection of the picture painted of what it was like to work with
her by (multiple) others.

I've worked with smart people who were unable to listen or otherwise interact
with others. It was pure hell.

If she was like that, I'm confident most Googlers who had any skin in the game
(meaning, they weren't her peer or superior to whom she was pleasant and
respectful, but someone who answered to her at some level) were happy to see
her go.

