Google CFO Ruth Porat walked out with employees over sexual harassment

Google CFO Ruth Porat.
Google

• Google’s Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat is one of
  the most senior women at the company.
• She told a conference hosted by The Wall Street Journal
  that she joined employees walking out two weeks ago in protest
  at how the firm deals with sexual harassment.
• The protest ended in Google ditching its requirement
  for forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment.
• Porat claimed Google had created a culture that lets
  employees voice issues and effect change. 

One of Google’s most senior female executives has revealed that
she joined a mass protest at the firm’s handling of sexual
harassment.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech D.Live
conference on Monday, chief financial officer Ruth Porat said
she walked out with her finance team from Google’s Mountain View
headquarters in California. 

Porat said: “Many of us were out with Googlers and speaking with
Googlers… I was out with my finance team.”

Reflecting on management’s response, she added: “What we did was
[take] in a lot of information, step back, and think about the
breadth of policies we could put in place that would up our game
on something we feel is really important, which is ensuring
diversity and equity in the workplace.”

Read more: 

Facebook
won’t force employees to settle sexual harassment claims
privately thanks to the Google walkout protests

The global Google walkout protest involved
employees around the world leaving their desks at 11.10 a.m. on 1
November in response to
an explosive New York Times article revealing that senior
male Google executives had been paid off after accusations of
sexual misconduct.

The demo
involved around 20,000 employees, with protesters listing
five demands. These included ending forced arbitration, where
victims can’t take their cases to court but must resolve them
privately, and commitments to pay equality.

A Google walkout sign
referencing the $990 million reportedly paid to former Google
executive Andy Rubin, who was accused of sexual misconduct. He
has denied the claims.
Matt
Weinberger/Business Insider

Porat sought to portray a company that gave its employees “voice”
and listened to their demands. Googlers, like most white-collar
workers in Silicon Valley, do not have union representation
thanks to their decent pay and conditions.

“You know the company from inception was built with the concept
that we should give employees voice, and if you give employees
voice and there’s transparency, things will percolate up and will
make you stronger,” she said.

She suggested that the 2008 financial crash might have been
prevented if Wall Street employees were empowered in a similar
way. Porat has a Wall Street pedigree and was chief financial
officer at Morgan Stanley before joining Google in 2015.

“[I] firmly believe that if employees in Wall Street back in
2006 felt they had voice and could percolate up issues they saw,
it may have helped prevent some of the things that unfolded,” she
said.

The employee walkout triggered not only changes at Google, which
dropped its forced arbitration requirement, but
also resulted in Facebook and Airbnb taking similar
action. 

Porat acknowledged that treating victims of sexual harassment
better and tackling wider diversity problems should be simple for
a company that has the collective brainpower of Google. 

“One part of it is, if you can get cars to self-drive… why
can’t we solve this? We should do better,” she said.