What the Google walkout tells us about sexual harassment in 2018

Google, the search engine with many parts to its operations and services, recently admitted that over a period of two years, they fired 48 employees because of accusations of sexual harassment. This is apparently a much bigger problem as on Thursday 01 November, female and male employees did a coordinated walkout to stage a protest on the streets outside. With posters saying, “Worker’s rights are women’s rights” or the slogan of Google itself, “Don’t be evil”, they stood up in many different countries and also from subsidiary firms like YouTube, against the situation how Google deals with complaints about sexual harassments.

Last week the New York Times revealed this: In 2013, the developer of the Android systems, Andy Rubin was accused of sexual harassment and left the company in 2014 after Google thought the reproaches were credible – but with an unbelievable high amount of money, 90 million US dollars (around £69m) of compensation. Another case was Rich DeVaul, who touched a woman without her permission during her job interview but he did not get any compensation. The third case of a high-level manager showed that he did not even get a penalty but got promoted.

Why do the senior executives get something like a reward instead of just getting fired? Many people are more than dissatisfied with how Google solves the problem concerning the complaints about sexual harassment. The employees want to change these things with their protest yesterday. They want to change the procedure of getting the complaints to Google, to be paid equally, not to be forced to arbitrate, to see a report showing how many cases of sexual harassment really exist, and more.

However, the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said that they will support the walkout of the employees and they will need to change the handling of such situations better. On the point of the forced arbitration, he added that he already had ideas on how to improve this.

This is a topic where it is absolutely not understood why nothing is done about sexual harassment. Nowadays you would think that this should not be a topic any more, and sad that it still is in companies, with employees, more often female, not feeling safe in their working place.