people operations. The invitation was brokered by the head of Women at Google,
an employee resource group, who told Stapleton it was an amazing opportu-
nity. 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 employ-
ees 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.
Local TV crews had to report from the edges of campus, but the news choppers
overhead had a clear view of “Not OK, Google” and “Time’s Up” written in chalk
on the pavement. By then, Stapleton, Whittaker, and the other organizers back
in New York had commandeered a booth at a Mexican place in the Meatpacking
District. They ordered margaritas and chips and guacamole, updating social media
accounts and ducking outside for press interviews. The women were triumphant;
they were half asleep. A few days earlier, they’d thought a turnout in the hundreds
would be a big deal. When they tallied the total, 20,000 employees had walked out.
In a way, though, Google’s attempts to neutralize the walkout had worked. A
sense of catharsis and camaraderie seemed to overshadow any hostility toward
management. Even some supporters felt that the walkout was more about the act
than the asks. On November 8, 2018, a week after the protest, Pichai sent a memo
to his employees—simultaneously published on Google’s blog—announcing that
Google would no longer require arbitration on sexual harassment claims. But it
would still prohibit class actions. The change brought Google in line with policy
tweaks that Microsoft, and even Uber, had made within the past year.
IX.
GOOGLE’S RESPONSE FOLLOWED A FAMILIAR CYCLE: INTERNAL OPPOSITION
and bad press, followed by incremental change. But the Women’s Walkout appears
to have perturbed executives in a way that the protests against Dragonfly and Maven
had not. In the months that followed, pushback seemed to spill over into the organiz-
ers’ day jobs. In December, Whittaker was told she would have to leave the Google
Cloud organization, where she had worked for three years. A few weeks after that,
Stapleton claims she was told that her role at YouTube would be “restructured” and
she would lose half her reports and responsibilities. (A Google spokesperson says
no changes were made to Stapleton’s role.)
Fong-Jones, for her part, was burning out. It had been a long year and a half
since Damore’s memo leaked. In early January 2019, she submitted her res-
ignation, but she turned even that into a
last-ditch effort to reform Google; she told
executives she would reconsider if the
company put an employee on its corporate
board. Instead, Google HR tried to get her to
leave before her notice period was up, and
she filed a retaliation claim. Google inves-
tigated and determined it was unfounded.
That month, Google also tightened
the reins on TGIF. Brin and Page stopped
showing up. Employees could access video
recordings for only a week after the meet-
ing, rather than for years. The company
nixed live questions, which Google claimed
was more fair to employees in different
time zones. (“We’re a global company and
want to make sure we’re answering ques-
tions from employees around the world,” a
spokesperson says.) TGIF’s transformation
from candid conversation to press confer-
ence was pretty much complete.
The company’s internal social networks
were quieter too. Cernekee had been fired
in June 2018 for violating multiple company
policies, including using a personal device
to download company information. As part
of his ongoing legal case, according to peo-
ple familiar with the matter, he had to give
back 20,000 pages of internal documents,
some of them confidential. (Cernekee dis-
putes this.) Damore’s class-action law-
suit was also proceeding, albeit without
Damore. In October 2018 his claims were
moved to arbitration, while claims from two
conservatives who allege they were denied
positions for political reasons are proceed-
ing in court.
A couple of months later, Pichai was called
up to answer questions about Dragonfly at a
House Judiciary Committee hearing. “Right
now,” he said, “there are no plans for us
to launch a search product in China.” That
wouldn’t be his last trip to Washington. After
two years of employee revolts, culture-
warring, and accusations, the furor that had
surrounded Facebook for the previous three
years now finally seemed to be aimed at
Google with full force. Within a three-week
span in March, Senator Hawley banged the
drum on amending laws that granted plat-
forms immunity from liability for moder-
ating their platforms; Democratic senator
and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren
published a plan to break up Big Tech; and
the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified
that Google’s effort to court China “indirectly