The Times investigation also noted Google's overall “permissive culture,” in which top executives—including Brin, Schmidt, and chief legal officer David Drummond—had relationships with female employees. Some of the women claimed they were later pushed out of the company.
Google employees lit up the company's internal social networks, once again contemplating galling facts about the status of women in Silicon Valley. But this time the discussion was less easily derailed, perhaps because some of the most important exchanges took place on an anonymous mailing list called Expectant New Moms. The group's 4,000 members knew the stories about Rubin and Singhal—thanks in part to email threads on the list after each executive departed. But Rubin's $90 million payout felt like a sucker punch. The fact that leaders' misconduct had been an open secret made it worse. Why had they given so many years of their lives to make these men insanely rich?
At 2:05 pm, Claire Stapleton, then a product marketing manager at YouTube, fired off a message to the group: “absolutely disgusting—all of it, all of them. topple the patriarchy.”
That day Alphabet was already poised to share some mixed financial news. The company was set to report $9.19 billion in profits for the third quarter, thanks in part to Trump's tax cuts to benefit big business, but missed revenue targets. Now executives scrambled to do damage control with employees before the earnings call. A couple of hours after the Times story was published, Pichai sent a memo assuring employees that Google had reformed its ways. In the past two years, he wrote, 48 people had been terminated for sexual harassment, including 13 at the senior manager level or higher, none of whom received an exit package. Employees were skeptical. If Google was so committed to a safe environment, why was DeVaul still there? (A Google spokesperson said HR investigated the allegation “thoroughly and took appropriate corrective action.”)
That same evening, Page—who was CEO when the claims about Rubin, Singhal, and DeVaul came to light—apologized to employees at a TGIF. “I've had to make a lot of decisions that affect people every day, some of them not easy. And, you know, I think certainly there's ones with the benefit of hindsight I would have made differently,” he said in a prepared statement. Page's explanation was evasive, but his tone was serious. Brin, on the other hand, made an awkward joke about confidentiality, which sounded to some as if he were blaming the leakers, and seemed irked by the fact that the same question came up over and over again when the executives had nothing new to say. The meeting soon returned to business as usual with a product demo for new Google Photo features.
For Stapleton, the meeting was a huge letdown. Her first job at Google, in 2007, had been to help lead TGIF, including writing talking points for Page and Brin. Now they couldn't even answer the main question. At 7:58 pm, Stapleton fired off another message to the list suggesting the moms channel their anger into collective action, like maybe a walkout, a strike, or an open letter. “Googler women (and allies) are REALLY ragefueled right now, and I wonder how we can harness that to force some, like, real change.”
As the women dissected the TGIF performance, they also swapped stories about reporting harassment to Google HR, only to watch their abusers receive promotions. The messages were still rolling in at 1 am.
The next morning, Stapleton started a Google Group. “Welcome to ground zero of the google women's walkout / a day without women (naming/branding tbd).” Just as with the travel ban walkout 21 months earlier, word spread quickly. A group of eight organizers emerged, including Meredith Whittaker, and they got to work planning logistics, hammering out demands, and fine-tuning their message. Stapleton set up a Google form to ask employees why they were walking out. The 350 responses that promptly poured in included personal stories about harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and pay inequity.
From those responses and other internal posts, the organizers smelted together five core demands. They wanted an end to forced arbitration, a process that compelled employees to bring their claims to a private arbiter, paid for by Google, rather than before a judge. They also demanded pay equity and policies that would guarantee more transparency around harassment claims. They scrubbed personal details from the 350 stories and divided them into buckets that mapped to each demand, so the rally organizers would have something to read.
As the plans came together, Google invited Stapleton to join a meeting with three top female executives: Ruth Porat, the company's chief financial officer; Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube; and Eileen Naughton, the head of people operations. The invitation was brokered by the head of Women at Google, an employee resource group, who told Stapleton it was an amazing opportunity. Other walkout organizers disagreed. Google was just trying to co-opt their momentum, the organizers felt. Stapleton pushed off the request. “It feels weird to say no to these women who are, like, Illuminati,” she said.
On Tuesday evening, two days before the walkout, Pichai sent another memo: “One thing that's become clear to me is that our apology at TGIF didn't come through, and it wasn't enough.” He acknowledged the protest and told employees they would have the support they needed.
The plan was for each office to walk out at 11:10 am on November 1, 2018. By the time the first images came in from Asia, it was clear that the call hadn't merely mobilized the lefties in Mountain View. In Singapore, where labor law prohibits workers from marching, employees stood in a cavernous office lobby, somber and listening intently to the speakers. In New York City, employees streamed out from Google's Eighth Avenue office into a nearby park. Whittaker and Stapleton stood on chairs as they rallied the crowd. Their megaphone was no match for the noise from the West Side Highway, but chants of “Time's up!” rose above the din.
When it came time for Mountain View to rally, 4,000 Google employees filled the courtyard outside the main café, once again chanting and holding signs, including ones designed by volunteers from Google Creative Lab that said “HAPPY TO QUIT FOR $90M—NO SEXUAL HARASSMENT REQUIRED” in a fresh, sans-serif font. Standing a few yards from where Pichai and Brin had stood during the travel ban walkout in 2017, employees once again shared their stories. A female YouTube employee described being drugged by a coworker at a company event, then being told by HR that she had to stay on the same team. This time, no executive stepped up to the mic. No one chanted their names.
