https://www.cbsnews.com/news/andy-rubin-google-settlement-se...
Google has enough money to hire the best law firms too. Why would any law firm engage in frivolous litigation against a potential future client?
The linked settlement is 10X that of this one, which if paid, would be divided among 6,600 people. Not exactly a huge payday.
So, yes, it appears Google is in the habit of paying out contradictory settlements rather than litigating them.
The state of US case law -- IANAL, this is a layman's understanding -- is that plaintiffs only have to show that there exists "disparate impact," which is to say that outcomes were not exactly the same for Asians/whites and blacks.
Two things can be true: 1) Google did not intend to discriminate, did not institute any policy designed to discriminate, did not in actual fact discriminate against non-Asian/white employees; and 2) they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.
So, yes, I think there are indeed situations in which they'd pay out settlements knowing full well they've done nothing morally or ethically dubious.
Because the chances is getting a payout is greater than the chances of ever working for Google.
Some dumb stuff that happened while I was at Google:
* There was a ERG for literally every single race except White people. "Just join one of the others" was what they told me.
* During an onboarding learning exercise because I was merely showing initiative before the rest of the group. "Ok everyone here's my idea". I was tapped on the shoulder by the contractor-teacher-person and asked to move aside and let the group do the very same thing without me.
* Nonwhite employees in my org also got a special mentor who helped them get a leg-up in the company. Some employees were whisked-away from their work responsibilities to go on little field trips with other teams. A few of these people were totally inept technically at their job and I saw them convert into better jobs. It must have been nice.
I'm pretty liberal, but this corpo-liberalism that somehow thinks an eye-for-an-eye to people living in 2025 is insane to me. It might even burn someone so much it changes their politics if they're whimsical.
1. There were ERGs for old people, young people, people who brought dogs to work, Irish people, Jewish people, etc. I can't imagine why they would say you couldn't create one for the group you wanted.
2. One thing hot-shot programmers fresh out of college need to learn is that while their opinion is valued, they need to listen to other people on the team as they may have important points as well. While it's nice to show initiative, that's L3-L4 thinking. To get to L5 or higher, you need to be able to listen, strategize, and drive consensus. All of those fuzzy things that you became a software engineer to avoid. Because at the end of the day, no one is particularly interested in how clever you are, they're interested in what you can get done. And you can get a heck of a lot more done through working with other people, even if they aren't quite as clever as you. After all, quantity has a quality all its own.
3. Every new employee gets assigned a mentor (at least at the office I was at). I'm not sure how this would differ from the "special" mentor you're talking about, but maybe you can inform me. Though with the level of ego reflected in your post, I'm not sure you would have benefited from a mentor, special or otherwise.
4. Some people that are hired are not as good, technically, as others. I'm aware of confirmation bias, so seeing a few less technically capable employees that happen not to be white doesn't surprise me. And when I do the math, assigning scores to previous co-workers and talking it up, I don't actually see a statistically significant difference in the capabilities based on race (though it does lean a bit towards white males being less capable).
But maybe my Google office wasn't representative, as we weren't one of the main ones.
I don't know if it's a common thing at companies or not, but it's a new initialism to me.
Imagine moving to say, Switzerland, to work for a massive corporation. 90% of the employees are Swiss. The other 10% come from a smattering of other countries from around the world. To help those employees acclimate to a new culture and find support, the company sponsors country-based ERGs.
Of course, there is no Swiss ERG, as it's the "default", because the entire company is essentially a Swiss ERG. But, the company encourages its Swiss employees to join the others as a show of support and cultural exchange.
If you had attended one of those groups, you might have found yourself feeling extraordinarily welcome, and even learned a few things about your fellow employees.
>A few of these people were totally inept technically at their job and I saw them convert into better jobs. It must have been nice.
If "totally inept" people are being promoted with any frequency, then that's a problem for any company. I think we have all seen this occasionally but, in my experience, it has very little to do with race (or other identity) and more to do with the Peter Principle and the fact that hiring and HR management is notoriously hard to get right.
I'm not suggesting anything about the earnestness of your observations, but you should be aware that assuming every non-white person you see at a company is the beneficiary of preferential treatment is a bit of a canard. And the idea that a disproportionate number of those are inept is yet another.
As such, whimsical people might draw rather nasty conclusions from your statements, that are other than what you intended.
> There was a ERG for literally every single race except White people. "Just join one of the others" was what they told me.
What would an ERG for white people even do? What would you want from it?
> Nonwhite employees in my org also got a special mentor who helped them get a leg-up in the company.
There are general mentorship programs, too. Usually focused on career development. I was a part of the main one.
Why should a rational person support people who act against him. This will horribly backfire...
I wouldn't interpret this as a top-level policy, just some individuals in some hiring and pay/leveling decisions with little accountability. This does mean they represent Google though, and one remedy for that is a settlement by the corporate entity.
Ideally shareholders would become interested in rooting this out and creating better, less expensive, accountability.
It creates an environment where everyone (or some additional subset of everyone) feels they need to elevate their own in-group.
Thinking back to a unicorn I worked for we were unofficially told to favour women in hiring. We all thought it was a great idea at that time, but also I do remember a coworker saying how her group has been doing heavy favouring of women in hiring for years already before being told to do so.
Does anyone familiar with the case know the context behind this?
This got down to a pretty low level of details, not only specifically cutting the class down to "Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Native American, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and/or Alaska Native" employees but also explicitly excluding anyone in any of those groups who identified as Black.
The bigger issue really is that Google should start reviews of a lot of managerial decisions in this regard. If you've got courts agreeing with plaintiffs, then these people you've been hiring are pursuing their, um, "preferences", a little bit too openly. You have to take things back in hand.
lol
shows 5 percent black people. not a huge amount
So this is an "I feel wronged so I'm going to call you names" trial, because the only person in question is Cantu.
Google can and absolutely should be paying these people more in compensation.
If group X on average performs better than group Y, then objective hiring will lead to more group X bring hired. Then group Y takes you to court for discrimination.
I've been on the employer side of this... you fire someone who's performing badly, and then they come back 4 months later and sue the company for [insert made up thing here].
In our case, an ex-employee is suing us for not accommodating an anxiety and migraine disability, which they never disclosed and never requested accommodations for. So now we face a discrimination lawsuit (from a non-minority) based completely on falsehoods and things that never happened.
The reason people do this is because it works! Employers will almost always settle before it goes in front of a judge in order to avoid the hassle and cost of defending the claim.
The article doesn't go into details, so it's probably a safe bet not to make these sorts of assumptions at all.
Google, Apple and others have colluded to not poach employees from each other, distorting a free labor market, and settled that for $400m.[0]
[0]https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
It's not exactly beyond the realm of possibility that individual managers at Google had discriminatory promotion practices. Google picks up the legal tab for their alleged malfeasance, because they empower managers to make those decisions.
If it is so easy to squeeze some cash out of a major company, I'd imagine Google, Apple and many others in California would be cutting checks left and right to dodge lawsuits alleging violations of the state's Equal Pay Act, which saw its last major update in 2018, enacted into law in Jan 2019.[1]
If anything shows that our liability laws and adjudication process is written by lawyers for lawyers it's rules like this.
First: the standard isn't relevant to a nuisance suit, since by definition you don't expect to win a nuisance suit anyway.
But setting that aside, disparate impact requires a significant difference in outcome and can be defended against by showing that the standards are relevant to job performance ("business necessity"). That's true for both the federal Civil Rights Act and the California Equal Pay Act (which is what this suit was brought under). So a "single variable analysis" isn't the end of the story, and employers can (and often do) provide statistical arguments that their policies satisfy business necessity.
I'd suggest looking up the case (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) that established the disparate impact standard in the first place. TLDR, a company that had explicitly discriminatory Jim Crow-era policies banning black employees from certain departments adopted new requirements on the day the Civil Rights Act went into effect. Those requirements hadn't been in place before, Duke Power could not show any actual connection with job performance, and white employees were two to ten times more likely to satisfy them. A unanimous court (which, as a fun trivia fact, included an open former member of the Klan!) said nope, can't do that.
If people want to change anything about it, they need to know the structure of it
Does X perform better than Y in general or within the community. Does hiring match national population, the applicant pool, or the top 1% of the applicant pool? How do you measure performance?
These topics are rarely fleshed out in any public corporate policy. All I know is my bonus depends on increasing the % of minority employees.
This isn’t something you can just assume when you see someone quoting statistics. It could be a garbage study.
From anecdotal experience with voice recognition software: early versions struggled with accents and also required training on your voice specifically, which limited their utility. Making models more flexible didn’t just help minority users with accents—I think it improved accuracy for everyone. Similarly, curb cuts on sidewalks, originally designed for accessibility users, now benefit parents with strollers and even those food delivery robots running around some cities.
Maybe one frame is to avoid unintentional exclusion? The pizza shop isn't obligated to, but could at least consider the fact that some people don't eat meat (or pork or whatever), and therefore keep the margherita on the menu to the benefit of everyone.
In my brief experience with litigation the only role the court has in helping both sides achieve a settlement is forcing the litigants to go through endless and expensive procedure until they both realize it's not worth it. Before trial, the court does little to indicate to you that it even knows you exist.
With how close the numbers actually are I wonder if the different biases of different HR people and hiring managers actually cancelled out pretty well.
Put another way: The NAACP didn't change their name, but if you called most black folk I know "colored" they'd punch you in the throat. Language is fluid and all that.
So again I ask: Why the generalization on how a whole mish mosh of people feel.
As we're not actually using real Spanish, such criticisms feel to me like objecting to the way Star Trek dares to boldly split infinitives that have never been split before on the basis that Latin (the language) didn't split them — Latin couldn't split infinitives because infinitives in Latin are single words, just as the -x suffix to denote -[o/a in this case but way more complex when you get to all the other gendered suffixes] doesn't make sense in Spanish.
(And now I'm wondering if anyone says "una hombra" and "un mujero" for trans people…)
This is mainly a comment about English speakers borrowing the word as an exonym, my grasp of the Spanish language itself is "tourist" at best.
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/la...
Less than half of Hispanics have even heard the term "Latinx", and of those that have, an overwhelming majority (75%) say they'd rather you don't use it. This is true regardless of age, gender, race, education level, party affiliation, orientation/gender identity, and immigration status - you don't get a much clearer picture than that in a poll. The plurality, and usually majority, preferred term across all demographic slices was "Hispanic", which is also not gendered.
If we choose particular terminology, and ask others to do so as well, shouldn't it be with the clearly-expressed preferences of the people we're talking about in mind? To me, that seems like the most obviously-respectful path.
It doesn't help that it's unnatural to even pronounce.
> there are so many bigger problems right now
Indeed, I'm more worried about the loss of true freedom of speech and the impending sense of WW3 coming. Having HR mix up race and sexual identity in some select countries is a minor complaint.
Yes, and look at the stats that the sibling post shared. I'm talking from experience and obviously some generalisation from what I saw among a few separate groups of Latinos. I'm not making stuff up just to be offended on the internet.
> I have latino friends who insist on that language, some who don't give a fuck, and latinx friends who own that jab at the patriarchal idea of forcing gender on genderless objects or groups.
Yes, but the ratios I saw had a clear trend and everyone agreed that the X at the end was clearly made up and force-fed instead of borrowed from Spanish/Portuguese/Italian/French.
Why do you?
I don’t use LatinX, but I don’t think it changes anything and it doesn’t bother me that other people do.
Surely it doesn't change anything for you, but I'm not complaining because absolutely no one got mad, people were furious, but unsure how to get angry at the Diversity stuff without getting cancelled.
What do other groups get? Support, networking, mentorship probably. A lot of white people could use that help too.
I get plenty of that elsewhere. Do you have issues finding support, networking events, and mentorship programs?
ERGs specifically tend to group those generic, open-to-all programs together and add another layer of `navigating the workplace as [insert ERG demographic]` that doesn't really make sense if you insert "white man".
The exact same thing as anyone of any other group of course.
To be clear, Whites are a minority at Google. They are also not even the largest group. (Not that this should matter - all groups have the right to exist).
and I’m scratching my head about why these same questions arent asked for “employee resource groups” of other minority “themes”
as well as why the ability to empathise is so apparent for those other themes but not so easily imagined for this person who is white
forgot the EEOC, I’m about to go to the SEC Whistleblower bounty program since shareholders might want to know how misguided the population there is
We considered many black folks property until 1865, and we had segregation of some schools in the 1960s. We didn't let women vote until 1920. We put Japanese people in internment camps until 1946. Gay folks couldn't marry in all states until 2015. Do I have to list more?
If you don't think this kind of stuff leaks into the workplace, then I don't think you're paying attention.
And now they are economically ahead of the average American. Universities actually discriminate against them by their malevolent definition of "fairness" where success is a punishable offense. People are where they are because of what they do today, not what happened to their ancestors in the past.
Why are you invalidating their experience, its look like you have let something else leak into the workplace under an amusingly ironic interpretation of empathy
Let's write it again in a different way: Nothing about the name "Employee Resource Group" suggests that "state-sanctioned disenfranchisement at some point in the country's history" is the only reason or prerequisite for an employee seeking resources
Looks like an another race and ethnicity settlement is brewing
Focusing on "White Allies" is a bit strange, though. Anyone not directly in a given group can be allies.
If you don't know about mentorship programs that already exist and fills at least most of the gap you're talking about, how would you find the ERG?
OTOH, for the same reason, skin-color-based groups don't really make sense to begin with.
We all have multiple identities. We relate to those identities and others relate to us by those identities—at times, unfortunately. So, you can substitute any identity here, and it still makes sense.
>it might feel extra-alienating if the company suggests you could join the Asian or Indian employee support groups
Not necessarily. There's certainly some overlap in experience, as they are all working to integrate into the same culture.
What you may be missing here is that it's not strictly about which specific group, but also about the fact that the group is not the majority / "culture-defining group".
>OTOH, for the same reason, skin-color-based groups don't really make sense to begin with.
Oh, if only they didn't, my friend. What a world this would be. It's worth noting that it's generally not those "skin-colors" who made these groups necessary. Part of it is just the complicated tribalism of humans. And, yes, another part of it is that some people have taken advantage of that tribalism.
Yes, and Google offers a wide range of mentorship/support programs, from those for community college students to upskilling to new hires to tailored programs and more.
>The assumption that all white people, males or in this case Swiss don’t need support
I don't think anyone assumes that. I certainly don't. I'm sure Google provides other means of support to its employees, and ERGs represent just one approach, which address specific needs for specific employees.
What you have to understand is that people are tribal and that can have effects on "outgroups" in any given context. If we're out at lunch and all but one of us is in the same frat, we may unintentionally exclude that person. It's not necessarily intentional or malicious. That's obviously a simplification, but you can extrapolate.
So, ERGs aren't meant to be punitive or exclusionary. In fact, according to OP, Google encouraged all employees to join whichever groups interested them.
It's not supposed to map statistically on to Google. It's an analogy, intended to remove the problematic political context.
That said, Asian+White does make up 90%+ of Google's workforce, split roughly in half. Interestingly, there's an Asian ERG.
Switzerland is a country of three dominant languages. When I worked for a Swiss bank, they had internal groups for, essentially, domestic expats.
That said, feel free to substitute a more homogenous country if that helps to clarify my point.
Asians have an ERG.
If Whites want to make an ERG, why can't they? What is special about Whites that they must be prevented from doing the thing that literally all others have done?
Google doesn't exist in a vacuum, but in a broader culture (e.g. America). If you're coming from an Asian country, you might still feel alienated or simply want to connect with people who intrinsically understand your culture.
That said, the Asian makeup of Google has increased significantly over the years. I wonder how that has impacted the participation rate in its ERG versus when it was originally established.
>* What is special about Whites that they must be prevented from doing the thing that literally all others have done?*
The dominant culture is essentially the "default" and is somewhat "self-reinforcing", so generally has no need of an identity-based support group. Thus, when the dominant culture does establish an identity-based group, it tends to take on a different meaning.
You're being so indirect we're forced to guess at what you mean. Can you please say clearly why you think White must be actually prevented from doing this, when all other groups have already done so?
Not why you think they don't need one - why do you think they must be prevented, even if some of them want to start one?
I don't see many English words ending in X, so I doubt it's linguistically correct in English either. Normally you just borrow the word as closely as possible, maybe trying to make it easier to pronounce (see any word the Japanese borrow from English), but here people that didn't speak Spanish, but apparently knew a little bit took over.
English corrupts a lot of stuff it borrows, the examples which come to mind are when people try to be fancy. See also "chai tea", the difference between beef and cow. Also corrupts itself spontaneously, what with all the "u"s in British English or how many "i"s there are in aluminium.
Slient letters. Queue. Ptarmigan.
Ok, but this isn't a Portuguese/Spanish/French word that was borrowed into English that naturally got a final X because it suited English better.
I didn't say there are no words ending in X, but it isn't common and it's not a way to help borrow words from other languages, nor is the X also borrowed.
That the linguistically correct in both English and Spanish (and other Latin-derivative languages) term “Latin” got passed over in favour of Latinx sort of speaks to the motivations of those who pushed it.
Huh. Well, I repeat the point about my Spanish language (lack of) skill.
(At time of writing Spanish is not listed on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/latin or https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Latin, but I don't know how complete that dictionary is).
It’s not--it's still a neologism. But it’s grammatically conventional to both languages in a way LatinX is not. (The idea of neutering languages without a neuter tense is its own can if worms.)
I don't even believe that white men aren't the largest demographic at google.
But even if they aren't, do they face systemic oppression because of this?
Why is it relevant that they aren't a majority?
Yes, Whites face systemic oppression by any definition of the word. For example, hiring systems set up that systemically prefer others over them.
I'm not sure what OP actually proposed, but I'm reasonably sure he's not telling the whole story.
What experience are you talking about? What resources are lacking that don't address those experiences?
History. There is an undeniable legacy of gender and race-based discrimination. This discrimination was absolutely laser-focused on gender and race, so is it fairer to simply ignore this and call it a wash?
For instance, some estimates of the value of free labor provided by slaves in the U.S. are upwards of $100 trillion, with an amplification effect (including an inverse one), compounding over generations.
>Do people really think that a white guy from some poor area has more privilege...
No. There are programs for people in rural areas, poorer areas, etc. To the extent that these are inadequate, they should also be addressed.
But, it's not just about economics. It's also about culture, socialization, etc.
I understand, but I'm trying to provide a point of view that might make it less unsettling. Otherwise, we're just kind of saying that people find it unsettling, so it must be wrong (BTW, we also can't overlook that there are people who want to make it more unsettling, for reasons).
Anyway, it really comes down to backing up a little to consider why race became a factor. Else, if we simply start the clock at the inception of these groups, then I suppose it should be unsettling.
Interestingly, there are other immutable characteristics that do not trigger that unsettledness. If nothing else, this gives us reason to question why this particular characteristic became so charged.
Like what?
> this gives us reason to question why this particular characteristic became so charged
Because it's been a tool of social division. As a result, we've been attuned to it culturally from both sides (separation and integration).
The Disability Alliance Network (DA)?
I'm assuming that's a good example, because I've yet to see an outcry around disabled people getting unfair advantages.
But, it's really down to any group that has not been socially or politically charged. So, I'd also say things like women's groups, given their historic underrepresentation in tech. However, that's also become charged recently.
So, what we have is this thing of defining what's OK by how people react to it or, maybe more accurately, how people are encouraged to react. That seems potentially unhealthy and infinitely abusable.
>Because it's been a tool of social division.
Exactly. But, it's not just division in the sense of splitting people in half. There's also a historic inequity that corresponds with one side.
Some make the argument that you can't heal division by "dividing further". But, I think it's a little unfair to simply not acknowledge those who have been negatively impacted. The other part is that the existence of a group doesn't have to be divisive in itself. In fact, seeking to understand and support them can be quite the opposite.