In any case https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/574268362051584001 makes it clear that there was more to it:
> "You look amazing in that bathing suit, like a rock star." -Vic Gundotra, to me, when I was a junior engineer at Google. In Maui.
> Vic G to Matt S within earshot of me, on a boat in Maui: "doesn't Kelly look amazing heh heh"
… and it's looking like this wasn't just an isolated misunderstanding:
> anyone who has worked with Vic knows he constantly makes comments about women's appearances.
In or out of the office doesn't matter if it's a work event – and off-site retreats, conferences, etc. certainly qualify. Even if it's not, a manager still has to be responsible for what they say to a subordinate and make it clear that this is unofficial and not connected to their job.
> By vilifying innocent remarks, you're only further making men not want to work with women, while promoting a culture of oversensitivity and political correctness. Who wants to work in an environment where they can't make a simple compliment without being publicly ousted as a mysogynist offender? I sure as hell don't.
I'm a man and I don't have a problem working with women. The difference is that I know my job isn't a singles bar and in no case would I want someone to think that there would be professional consequences for not reacting favorably to something they didn't like. That doesn't mean that you can't be friendly with people you work with, only that you have to pay more attention to what you say than you might with a group of close friends, because your friends have already given you more of an idea for what's okay or not and, critically, if it ceases to be fun they can leave with no professional or financial consequences.
Finally, you're very quick to use loaded language which implies knowledge that Vic's actual intention was completely innocent. Using terms like “simple compliment”, “innocent remarks” says that you know more about what he meant than someone who was actually there or the coworkers who've voiced support for her interpretation. Given that the most common reaction seems to be “That sounds bad – Google better do something” and not “Off with his head”, I'm not sure you should be criticizing anyone for oversensitivity.
Don't read that as saying harassment is okay. Harassment is not okay. However, talking about sexual topics bringing them up, etc., is not sexual harassment, prima facie. But this is where we are, unlike Europe. I dare say in Europe there is less sexual harassment in the workplace, but simultaneously there is more open talk about sex at the workplace; people don't have a puritanical knee-jerk reaction to sex. Talking about sex and complimenting people in the workplace is not some weird taboo. They understand people are sexual creatures and don't try to pretend they are not.
Again, it's reprehensible and bad to sexually harass people. I think any normal person would agree --but I would have to disagree with saying that to combat sexual harassment it's necessary to extirpate sex from people's conversations at work. It's unnatural. What's next, sing a contract explicitly allowing consensual sexual talk at work to ensure correctness?
To put this another way, women also like to talk about sex in the workplace. What they don't like is talking about sex turning into an invitation to sex. It's not. Sometimes people just want to talk. And it's not as if women are sexless beings without impulse. As men, women too have sexual thoughts about people at work but they don't typically act on them in a repulsive way, where as men don't control their impulses as well (plus tend to have the power imbalance in their favor).
Just don't sexually harass people who work under you as subordinates; that's abusing your position.
People aren't sure any more if a compliment is going to be interpreted as harassment. Harassment meanwhile goes unabated, and as you conclude, may be getting worse.
If someone hurts you, whether or not you will experience the offense as a dangerous threat depends very much on whether the offender makes the offense knowing they enjoy the protection of power, which allows them to harm people who don't.
The proximity to the office is irrelevant according to NY and CA law.
> you're only further making men not want to work with women
I hadn't realized this sentiment existed.
> while promoting a culture of oversensitivity and political correctness
There is a big difference between oversensitivity and a reasonable response to being treated differently because of one's looks/gender. Imagine if you walked into work every day and an executive said "Nice legs" or "nice blouse" to you. By your definition that is harmless.
1. "Outside the office," is irrelevant (it's ALWAYS wrong to make inappropriate remarks about a colleague or—worse—subordinate), and since the remarks were made at a company offsite they can be considered in a "work environment."
2. You're way off base. Commenting on a colleague's personal appearance to other colleagues is totally inappropriate. Commenting on a colleague's appearance in a bathing suit is totally inappropriate.
> By vilifying innocent remarks, you're only further making men not want to work with women
I hope men like you feel uncomfortable enough to get the fuck out of this industry. I don't want to work with you, and I'm male! Get lost!
> while promoting a culture of oversensitivity and political correctness
The problem is that the offenders in these situations aren't AT ALL sensitive to the feelings of others. There are a plethora of examples of men alienating women with their shitty and insensitive comment and attitudes. Reactions to this are not about "oversensitivity" but rather a plea for ANY KIND OF SENSITIVITY AT ALL PLEASE.
> Who wants to work in an environment where they can't make a simple compliment without being publicly ousted as a mysogynist offender?
If you think these remarks are appropriate and non-sexual then you should probably just keep your mouth shut.
I think it is quite likely that Gundotra is a sleazy slimeball and Google has covered its ass by trying its best to ignore the complaint. He should probably be fired and Google should never be allowed to pretend it doesn't have a sexist culture.
However: I do not think that things are as simple as declaring the rules of a "work environment" and enforcing them.
After-hours events or company vacations can be considered work environments, but they're also deliberate attempts to escape the work environment. If you extend the logic of standardizing all work environments, what you might find is that it's simply inappropriate to be around coworkers in sexualized situations. (And if you don't think bathing suits are designed to sexualize bodies, I'm not sure where you're drawing the line.)
Edit: Perhaps I should make it clear that I find nothing inconsistent in demanding that work events be completely professional, that all corporate interaction be sterile, and that's basically what I expect from my employer. No booze cruises. No getaways to beach locations. No employee dating whatsoever, not even a hint of acceptability for that kind of relationship.
I just don't know that this is a realistic expectation, and I don't trust anyone that is certain of a solution. Sometimes problems cannot be solved and we can only punish who we can punish and move on.
Gundotra left Google many months ago.
Being a creepy greaseball is not illegal, we have social ways of dealing with that. But this wasn't that situation, it was a more serious one, because these were subordinates he had control over; in that position it's just not ethical to push people to talk about porn and to accept your announcement that you want to grope them. And it's bad business when we are talking about people who were not hired as prostitutes but as long-term assets for the company.
The thing here is understanding context and the way other people's feelings need to be respected.
EDIT: then again circle jerks are more common in some places than others.
Do you mean ever, or do you just mean to you (or in a group conversation in which you are taking part)? Because the latter would be absolutely fine. You don't want to talk about that, no worries. I won't bring it up. What's the problem with that?
Rap music is a genre. If you said "rap music that talks about running around murdering police officers", despite the fact that no police officers were murdered in the making of that song, it would probably also be offensive.
My point is that at some point the crusaders on both sides of this should step back and realize that most of us actually have dealt discrimination and harassment to some degree, and I think the best solutions actually don't involve putting women up on pedestals or men in gags and blindfolds.
I think your belief that women are judged more superficially than men is driven more from mass media than scientific fact.
Uh-huh. If you want to start talking about scientific evidence, where's yours?
A excerpt from a meta-analysis of the topic by Eagly, Ashore, Marhijani, Longo from 1991;
Whether physical attractiveness is more important to per-
ceivers of one sex than the other is not entirely clear. In view of
Feingold's (1990a) meta-analysis showing that men place greater
value on physical attractiveness than women do, especially
when romantic attraction is considered, it is possible to argue
that physical attractiveness could be a more powerful dimen-
sion in men's than women's implicit theories of personality.
However, the research we review on the physical attractiveness
stereotype was not carried out in the context of romantic rela-
tionships. Moreover, the question addressed in research on the
physical attractiveness stereotype pertains to the meaning in-
ferred from attractiveness cues, not the importance of attractive-
ness. Men and women may differ in the importance they ac-
cord to attractiveness even though they infer similar meaning
(e.g., social competence) from attractiveness cues. Particularly
in view of evidence that the content of gender stereotypes
differs little for male and female subjects (e.g., Deaux & Lewis,
1983,1984; Eagly & Steffen, 1984), we suspect that the physical
attractiveness stereotype is widely shared in American culture
and is therefore little affected by variation in subject character-
istics, including subject sex.
Yes, men are judged on their appearance. Yes, 10% of anorexics are men (disproportionately gay men) and all of those people feel real pain. Nobody should dismiss that.
Nor should anyone dismiss the fact that the remaining 90% of anorexics are women. Is that because women are somehow weaker than men? No, it isn't.
The extensive back-and-forth downthread between me and @camgunz I think illustrates the difficulty in having these conversations. Till this very story I've always avoided these discussions for fear of being unfairly characterized, or cast as somehow supporting harassment (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171403)
My whole point is I don't want to dismiss anyone, least of all 50% of the population! I am curious about better ways to recruit a much larger percentage of the population in actively working against harassment. Part of recruitment is making everyone think there's something they personally could gain from participating. E.g. this isn't about making the world a better place for women, this is about making the world a better place, period.
Part of it is also dampening some of the overreach (like the idea you can't pay an honest complement to a female coworker). Everyone should strongly condemn harassment, but I think many people also have a vehement reaction to anything that smells like prior restraint of personal freedoms, and unfortunately sometimes zealous attempts to "protect" women can feel, indeed are, too much of the later.
I think it's really important to mediate against this, and some strategies I've adopted; make sure we're not casting this as men vs women, to cut out the man bashing (because most men are awesome husbands, fathers, and coworkers), and perhaps the hardest, trust men enough to not feel like we have to restrain them, but rather recruit them to help battle harassment.
Such a complex and delicate topic, so rife for misunderstanding and personal attacks.... I'm probably going to check out of this particular story now. Maybe one day I will work up the courage to blog on it.
And if people's belief was based on that study then you might not be wasting your time trying to cast doubt on it. As things stand, it isn't, so you are.
Without actual evidence you can't hope to sway opinion because there's SO much evidence that indicates to the contrary. How do you explain that anorexia and bulimia are massively swung towards people who target male sexual partners? How do you explain the massive difference in the amount of time and money spent on clothes and grooming? How do you explain the fact that ugly/pretty couples are massively swung towards m/f rather than f/m. It's data. The hypothesis needs to fit the data. Yours doesn't.
> Rather I'm trying to nudge the discussion a bit toward a path which I personally think will be more successful overall.
Hang on... so you're trying to divert people away from, y'know, an idea that fits the evidence, so you can change the narrative to what you personally think would be "more successful"? And we should let you do that based on, what, blind faith that you know best? Have I got that right? If so, dude, you're way off the reservation on this.
> My whole point is I don't want to dismiss anyone, least of all 50% of the population!
Assume you don't see the irony there. By trying to protect men you're denying women, because the evidence overwhelmingly points to this being a problem that affects women. How you can you deal with a problem when you deny the evidence for it? It's like #NotAllMen all over again.
Dude, I'm sure your pain is real. I sympathise, I really do. Everyone has shit to deal with. Doesn't make you right.
Denying the facts makes it harder to solve the underlying problem, not easier.
> I'm probably going to check out of this particular story now
Uh-huh.
--------------------------------------------
Your parent comment doesn't make any sense regarding the Sasha Grey remark. I assume you're talking about
>"You look amazing in that bathing suit, like a rock star." -Vic Gundotra, to me, when I was a junior engineer at Google. In Maui.
I agree that may be an inappropriate remark depending on the context, but "yep I/Google evaluate women on the basis of their looks" is complete hyperbole.
How will that make you feel if you don't have muscular shoulders. You might feel pressure to go to the gym more, or that your prospects at the company are limited in a way compared to if you did have them. You might even feel a bit insulted if your shoulders were clearly far from muscular, and this is a characteristic that you could actually change by working out. Looks in general are much more a lottery/luck kind of thing.
So while looks are definitely part of life and most people are average looking, the expectations that women face regarding looks are different than those faced by men. This just means that they have more pressure to look a certain way and to be judged positively or harshly on the basis of their looks.
I would not feel insulted (I'm not attractive at all, but someone talking about an actor's physical traits would not bother me), but I suppose someone else might. If this is an "after work drinking" occasion, things like that are par for the course. If the comments aren't directed towards you in any way I think it's kind of ridiculous to feel offended or harassed. The bathing suit comment is different because it was directed only at her, though I think that's just more an inappropriate remark that would make one feel uncomfortable, not evidence that "I represent Google and I judge women based on their looks."
It's only relevant because women are typically judged on the basis of their looks. I'm not saying that comment is alone indicting, but in the context of the other comments it appears that Vic is more of a man's man who has fairly traditional ideas of men, women, beauty, and workplace conduct.
> After hours, having drinks with Vic and the gang. Vic talking about how G+ was promoting Sasha Grey. Starts talking about how hot she is.
I may be entirely clueless, but is this not considered an acceptable topic for after hours drinks?
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Edit: I found another Vic tweet that you were more likely referring to:
> "You look amazing in that bathing suit, like a rock star." -Vic Gundotra, to me, when I was a junior engineer at Google. In Maui.