Google employees plan walkout to protest sexual misconduct allegations

Google
CEO Sundar Pichai
Greg
Sandoval/Business Insider

• Google
  employees are planning a walkout Thursday to protest the
  company’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations,
  Buzzfeed News reported.
• The “women’s walk” protest, which more than 200 Google
  employees are reportedly planning to participate in, originated
  from an internal forum where workers shared their frustration
  with the tech giant.
• The New York Times reported last week that former employee
  Andy Rubin, the creator of Android,
  was paid a $90 million exit package when he left the
  company following a sexual misconduct investigation.
• According to Buzzfeed, Google executives held a company-wide
  meeting last week after the news broke to try to explain their
  behavior.

More than 200 employees at Google are
planning a walkout later this week following a report that
described a culture of sexual misconduct by senior executives at
the company, according to
Buzzfeed News.

The protest, scheduled for Thursday, is in response to a
New York Times report that detailed how Google handled
allegations of sexual misconduct against its employees. The
report described incidents involving several current and former
executives, most notably Android creator Andy Rubin, who left
Google with a $90 million exit package even after an
investigation found that allegations against him were “credible.”

Google responded to the Times’ story by
publicizing a company-wide email, where CEO Sundar Pichai
wrote that 48 people had been fired for sexual harassment over
the past two years. But internally, according to Buzzfeed, Google
executives held an all-hands meeting where they apologized to
employees and tried to explain how they dealt with Rubin.

Over the weekend, Google employees took to an internal forum
afterwards to voice their frustration, Buzzfeed reports, where
the idea to organize a walkout gained traction. Google employees
on the forum criticized what they called a pattern of
“powerful men getting away with awful behavior towards
women” at the company. 

Rubin
disputed the Times’ report last week, and accused the
publication of a “smear campaign” that contained “numerous
inaccuracies.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.