After Paying Off Men Accused of Sexual Harassment, Google Says It Will Meet Many of the Protesters’ Demands

But also consider kudos to Salesforce.com for solving many of these issues before they became problems. You need only look to them to see a model of the future.

If companies can't be motivated to do the right thing because it's the right thing, then make it hurt its bottom line. Make it weigh paying off perpetrators vs. the bad press for doing so; the savings of underpaying women vs. the cost of lawsuits, wasted talent, profit loss from boycotts. Put an actual price tag on bad behavior. As long as companies that enable it continue to prosper, nothing will change. If this is the cynical world we live in, then this is what it will take -- until we've earned the luxury of living in a better one.

They are a corporation. So, they will do what is minimally necessary considering only what is needed to assure the bottom line. They have a court that will decide that whatever they do is sufficient and appropriate and more than what any reasonable person, because corporations are people, would do.

There's always hope, but be prepared to be disappointed. Google's CEO obviously means well, but it's up to the individual to change. And that's where the problem lies.

People need to be taught how to interact socially and responsibly. The google world in terms of its personnel; is an introverted one. Yet Google is one of the most famous brand names in the technological world. Nobody has all the answers; but everybody needs to do better.

How about clawing back the massive payoffs that sparked the protests? that would be a sign of real commitment to change.

The biggest problem with tech industry is that men coders think they are God! Most superficial in their attitude, they think its just easy to hide behind computer screens. So many coders harass women over chat windows and find invisible ways to derail women in tech. Harassment to women in tech has been going on for too long, it just doesn't get seen.

The truth is if you really wanted to change G’s attitude you would boycott it. Instead people with be satisfied with G platitudes.

I believe not all men are rapists. I believe that women sometimes lie, not always of course. I believe that the accused is entitled to a presumption of innocence, in cases of sexual harassment, just as in cases of murder. The NY Times presents article after article of this or that claim of sexual harassment. There were over 17,000 murders in the US. Most did not warrant mention in the NY Times. The NY Times has an editorial policy. It seems to be oriented towards changing the roles of the sexes. Not everyone agrees. I think other things are more important. It is outrageous that unlike Canada and Great Britain and several countries in Northern Europe, the US still not offer its citizens universal health care. It is outrageous that a month's supply of Humira can cost one person $5 and another $6000 depending upon which crack he or she falls into in America's broken health care system. Why should I care when a fabulously wealthy movie star who has butlers and maids is hit upon by a director? Her sisters are dying because of lack of medical care! The NY Times and liberals in general have lost their way. They hold up ordinary Americans to ridicule because they cling to family values, and all they offer is declining living standards for the poor and hatred of the so-called white patriarchs. Those white patriarchs include Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Beethoven and Albert Einstein. I've had enough of the NY Times' campaign of hate speech against men.

I am just glad that we are talking about this. No more back room deals and arbitration. It is time to allow all individuals to work in a safe environment without harassment. This goes for both sexes, keep you libido in check. Try not to mix work and "play".

Google's "Don't be evil" tagline or clause or even better, aspiration, should make a comeback. It has lost its way for reasons that have to do with the bottom line. For a company worth almost $8 trillion, the management's tolerance for despicable and criminal conduct by men against women, was certainly evil. These guys don't learn unless they feel their wallets may shrink. Shame they are brilliant at 010101010 and stupid at just being decent people.

The central problem is Google’s Class B shares. These allow a very few insiders to control this huge company almost absolutely. The result is a company whose internal operations resemble the last few years of the Emperor Caligula’s reign. Horrifying to read that (if I understand this correctly) an executive slipped a female Google employee a Roofie and was not fired.

I was a Ggle, it's a very weird place to work if your expectation is that work is about work. It's not a game, a playground, or your mother. A lot of Ggle is set up to obscure those facts. Tech companies need to understand - when they encourage employees to eat, sleep, and date within the confines of the organization - boundaries get confused and people act like idiots.

Thanks for covering this important topic. I believe the cure for this is more formal policies, processes and independent, board-level oversight to hold management accountable for properly addressing complaints. If backroom dealing by the boys club is allowed by BODs, it will surely continue.

I left banking and moved into tech as means of escaping constant sexism and a culture that built men up to be kings who could get away with anything, as long as they brought enough dollars through the door. Sadly, I walked into my new career and that culture I thought I'd escaped was now just hidden a bit better because the "geeks" are a bit smarter and do things like feign social awkwardness as an excuse for certain comments. One of the biggest problems is that men don't call other men out publicly when they see them misbehave. Instead, the burden is placed on the female victims to speak out and suffer as a result. It doesn't help that HR departments are spineless because they have no power and are treated as a worthless cost center by the male executive team. Things can change but only if men really want them to.

Working at Google? I can't imagine working in any office environment today. We live in an overpopulated, bureaucratically intrusive world, a world of resentments of all political leanings meeting in the workplace and creating just a bad feeling, mutual and self loathing, a bickering atmosphere. Overpopulation, urbanization, increased technological control has resulted in increasingly angry music to point that people are so sickened we don't even have great music anymore, and instead we are expected to be all equal and petty, constantly observing each other, and not only can we not make war we are watched carefully lest we overstep the line in overtures of love. We might as well become monks, nuns, live in cells, produce products and entertainment for celled people who constantly busy body each other's minds from a distance. I really cannot imagine any human being worth anything raised and educated in such an environment. To have great human beings will probably be increasingly dependent on giving them some form of home schooling, removing them somehow from the increasingly celled and petty politics life of today. How exactly, I want to know, are we supposed to produce human beings who have first a good mood, and second profound intellectual individuality in such an atmosphere? How can we speak of true intellectual ability being accomplished when we have so much evidence of everybody actually being in a bad mood all day? Equally feeling lousy but with medical insurance.

In the "day late and dollar short" category, we have....

Thank you NYT for bringing Kara Swisher aboard. Her reporting and commentary indeed shine a bright and critical light where needed. Silicon Valley has always seemed somewhat of a mystery to me--small groups of people getting very rich while having increasing control over daily life. We need more of this kind of coverage but Ms. Swisher has admirably been leading the charge.

If a powerful man in a corporation and a less powerful woman have an affair which leads to an accusation of bad behavior, who makes the decisions about what should be done? Presumably the first steps would be taken by the administration which might have the resources to look at relevant information and make a judgment. The word judgment is key here, because accusations can be wrong, misinterpretations are not only possible but common. But then a decision is made. Several years later the decision is called into question. And the people doing the protesting are often large in numbers but short on actual knowledge. A group of a thousand employees or a million NY Times readers can second guess the actions of a small committee. It is conceivable that such protests are justified in some cases. But large groups of people are subject to social pressure and may react to their views on social issues that may have limited relevance to a specific case. Moreover, newspapers can provide essays which whip up sentiment in a given direction. The NY Times has many such essays suggesting that men in general are more violent than women. A particular editorial position is pushed. But a slogan on a placard may not reflect the depth of reasoning needed to achieve the right decision in a given case. The crowd may have an illusion that it understands more than it does. That is why groups sometimes lynch the innocent. And sometimes, we later realize that social movements overreacted.

Someone slipped someone a drug, tried to leave with her? How on earth wasn't he thrown in jail??

The problem with sexual harassment is that unless there's a drugging event, or a sexual assault, it doesn't rise to a level of crime. So we have all these extralegal methods to deal with it, arbitration, EEOC, etc. Unlike TV fiction, it's not common for people to decide 'not to press charges' in disagreements that end in assault. It's the police's prerogative to bring charges or not. At least in cases that rise to assault. The one time a coworker clearly harassed me and progressed to blatantly touching me in full view of others, he was summarily fired and the managers had a field day questioning me for details they could use in case he sued. It was over in a couple of days. The aggressive response really threw me for a loop because I was prepared to talk to him myself in private and tell him he was risking his career over something that doesn't really matter and will never work, and he should be smart and stop it before the management notice. Except they noticed first. I guess it doesn't matter that I wanted to be a "nice person" about it. He was acting out and if it wasn't me, it would be transferred o someone else, probably. It bothers me that people aren't taught and expected to act better, I feel like we need a rehab for harassers, not so much of a trash can. But that may be naive of me. The harm he did was that I was considerably distracted during the training class and several people felt uncomfortable with it too. Loss of work focus is the harm.

Gaining employee representation on the company board as demanded by the Google protesters could have a major impact on important issues of the day including economic inequality and civic engagement. Google should take the lead on this issue and provide 40% employee representation on the board as suggested in the Accountable Capitalism Act proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

As the overseer of the entire Google empire, Mr. Pichai who knew and abetted these despicable decisions, needs to go.

I've shared this before, but it's still apt: Vanity Fair recently had an expose about Silicon Valley parties high in the Santa Cruz mountains. Young female employes were expected to attend, dressed like cocktail waitresses, where they faced groping and worse. Like Hollywood starlets in the 1920s.

"These were the inane reasons put forward over the years by top Google executives for a series of hush-hush agreements and payoffs to far too many high-ranking men who had been accused of sexual harassment, according to numerous sources who were in the private meetings where the decisions were debated." Genuine question: What on earth does this mean? Don't you pay the victims of assault to keep their mouths shut, not the assailants?

What is "humanity"? A definition I will give you is shared knowledge. That is what Google (and MS search) does billions of times every day. Man-made Climate Change (CC) affects all humans, and along with a loss of biodiversity is the number one pressing issue worldwide affecting humanity on Earth. Google search is an advertising vehicle that through the invasion of your privacy helps the worst fossil fuel polluters on Earth. Think car companies, airlines, and a range of products that are made using the energy from fossil fuel technology (such as heating a building by burning coal) that are totally unnecessary. No mention of this in the election coverage today. The sexual harasser-in-chief, polluter-in-chief, is still in the WH along with his oil cronies in the Senate and Russia. Short term profit people, including Google executives who supported Ted Cruz, a CC denier (One of the problems is that election cycles are in 2-4-6 yrs, whereas CC is a decades long problem requiring long term focus.) This doesn't have to be. The shared knowledge, shared humanity, through Search can highlight the continued and ongoing dangers of CC every day, informing everyone with just the information that is already there--journal articles explaining the science and photos from satellites. A daily link to this is all that is needed. The only statistic that counts is that CO2 ppm need to come down. Talk or maintaining the current level are half way measures that won't work. Humanity.

Truth and Reconciliation. Truth and Reconciliation. Truth and Reconciliation. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Remarkable disconnect between the responsiveness of Google's management here and that of, say, the Senate during the Kavanaugh hearings. Evidently one of these groups cares about governing while the other merely wants to maintain power.

This revolution demanding change, has certainly generated a great deal of commentary on the need for fairness, not rushing to judgement, reviewing the behaviors in a fair and legal manner. Well the Stanford sexual assault case conviction, for his crime he ended up to be just 3 months in the county jail and a release for good behavior. I challenge you read the Emily Doe victim impact statement. If you are not affected, you need to read it again, and think if this was your sister, your best friend, your cousin or even your mother. This is the impact of these crimes and this is what the justice system hands down, basically a slap on the hand. We have seen often opinion that these crimes should not ruin the lives of these men. But for decades, it has been fine if these crimes ruin the lives of the victims, but it is a crime that we have let this happen. Great to see so many standing up for justice and demanding change.

If any employee -- male or female -- has been sexually harassed, the individual has recourse by initiating a complaint against the company with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC will investigate the allegations and will bring an action on the employee's behalf if the person's claims are found to be credible. Perhaps Google requires that employees waive their statutory rights and submit any employment claims to arbitration. Changing that would be the right thing to do. Let employees use the EEOC and the courts as laid out in the statutory scheme. But reporting every allegation to the workforce is not the way to go. As we all know, sometimes the truth gets distorted and claims of sexual harassment are exaggerated and weaponized. Google must protect the privacy interests of all employees, including those who are accused.

Google did not "pay off" men accused of sexual harrassment: they simply paid them what they had otherwise earned - or at least been guaranteed in exchange for their employment, whether it was indeed earned or not. Would you have Google attempt to deny them compensation upon departure that they would otherwise have been legally entitled? That would be illegal. Further, as you yourself seem to acknowledge by your careful phasing, these were men ACCUSED of sexual bullying, not CONVICTED of the same. Would you have them declared guilty until proven innocent and then have Google execute a sentence by illegally denying them severance compensation? I am in favor of holding people accountable for inhumane or antisocial actions, but not doing so preemptively and not doing so illegally. What you propose is effectively vigilantism.

A lot of concern these days principally about sexual harassment. Just hope racial harassment in the workplace doesn't get sidelined while we're in this moment. Google recently issued a report showing black employee retention is horrible. I'm sure working at Google is a worthy goal for many black employees. If they're leaving in droves that means something's very wrong there too.

I feel like "slipping a mickey" should be changed to "drugged." "Slipping a mickey" sounds like a 1950s-era sugar coating for, well, drugging someone.

How does asking someone to lick their lips equate to destroying a career? Shouldn't the punishment fit the non-crime?

What to say. "Asking a barista to lick her lips" is a noteworthy, much less actionable, instance of sexual harassment? If the "stories that go on and on" feature similar dragons and demons, even children will find them tepidly boring. "Unfortunate that it took a public protest"? Given that these proles work ghastly hours on a diet of new age nutrishakes, a little feeling of agency and potency probably goes a long way to buttress morale. And better morale is better productivity, doncha know. "Technology doesn't solve humanity's problems"? Of course it does. Fighting disease, crime, disorder, ignorance; raising the standard of living, workplace productivity, information, knowledge, wealth? Since the 18th century, it's been all technology. You mean the social problems of love and hate? There's plenty of room to express those in the fantasy realm of digital media. And once we have a truly prole system of robotic manufacture and transportation, and home delivery of all essentials and lifestyle adornments, people can live in their private bubbles in total self satisfaction and autonomous harmony. If they are wealthy, or work in technology and media — of course.

Google has always been a cult of personality, with the leaders setting their own standards, and people throughout the company modeling their behavior on the founders and L-team. Unless these new rules apply to everyone, and the "too valuable to discipline or fire" standard is completely erased, nothing will change.

No company pays out millions of dollars unless they feel they have to, whether due to contract issues, legal issues, or fear of losses revenue. Google and all other companies have to act within the laws established in the jurisdiction that they do business in. That could be why they are less than completely transparent about these issues.

Inasmuch as human behavior must be controlled by humans, and let technology do it's thing, we are ultimately responsible for what we allow technology to do, a wonderful tool to enhance our knowledge, even understanding, or an accelerator of falsehoods and conspiratory theories meant to confuse and divide us. What is it going to be?

Thanks to all the courageous women - and men - who stood up to Google and forced change. It is NOT acceptable to reward men - or women - for bad behavior and corporate America seems to be finally getting it. OUR story of Socially Conscious Women standing up for their inalienable rights starts now. It starts with women demanding a level playing field in every walk of life and taking one-half the power to bring balance to OUR world. Great news when there seems to be little of it right now.