Google Changes Sexual Harassment Policies After Massive Global Protests
After the massive Google Walkout where over 20,000 protestors led an agitation against the sexual harassment cases at Google, the company has now come up with new sexual harassment and sexual assault policies.
Along with publicly posting CEO Sundar Pichai’s e-mail to the employees, the company has released a long PDF file named ” Our commitments and actions.” The three-page file talks about the new steps taken by Google to add “more transparency on how we (Google) handle concerns.”
“We recognize that we have not always gotten everything right in the past and we are sincerely sorry for that. It’s clear we need to make some changes” said Sunder Pichai in the blog post.
Among the new policies, one makes arbitration optional for individual sexual harassment and sexual assault claims. Sundar Pichai assured to bring “more granularity around sexual harassment investigations.”
Also, Google is updating the rules for its mandatory sexual harassment training. For those who do not participate in the training, the company will start docking their performance review scores.
Most of the changes made by the Google are in fact the demands of the Google Walkout protestors who reportedly had a meeting with Sundar Pichai. Meredith Whittaker, one organizer of the protest and co-director of the AI Now Institute, congratulated everyone with a tweet.
Collective action works. It will continue working. https://t.co/FGDItqWemA
— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) November 8, 2018
Since the breakout of the #MeToo campaign that spread across the whole world, people have become more vocal about sexual harassment and assaults in different workplaces.
The Walkout of Google Employees was the direct result of a report from NY Times where Google paid off massive $90 million exit package to Android creator Andy Rubin, despite being accused of sexual harassment by a fellow Google employee.
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