How a company deals with a bad manager is very important. Assuming you believe the accusations (1), the fact that Google wasn't immediately firing people and settling with the plaintiff is worse than the original complaint.
(1) A big if. I haven't seen any hard evidence yet.
I imagine that not believing the accusations (or believing other accusations - true or not - made by the manager against the plaintiff) play a large role in Google not rushing to settle. They'd be mad not to regardless of their politics if the course of events happened exactly as described.
It's not hard - if in this escalation the company would have facepalmed and fired the manager, than that would be the case of one weird manager; but if the company fires the recruiter and keeps the manager, then obviously that's the company culture they intentionally want to have.
This isn't too big to fail, it's "a bad egg doesn't ruin the bunch." Whether that's the case here is arguable, but no one is saying they aren't responsible for their actions.
Is 'allowing for variance' up to and including racism and sexisism in hiring? Because it seems like you are giving them a pass, because there are many hiring managers.
If someone who worked for Walmart became a murderer, would you condemn all of Walmart as murderers? Promoting a culture of murder?
If that's too far removed from the actual job for you, how about if someone at Walmart acted in a sexist way in an interview. Would you condemn all of Walmart? Would you automatically assume there is a culture of sexism? Or would you at least entertain the possibility that Walmart employs thousands of managers, so it's not crazy to imagine that some of them might sometimes act in sexist ways, even without such a corporate culture?
You need more than a few instances to prove a claim of "this must be a cultural thing", IMO.
I'm not saying that bad behavior should be dismissed. But I am saying that the larger the organization, the more potential there is for there to be a bad actor that doesn't match the overall organization's culture.
If the recruiter's accusation is indeed true, then we should ask questions about whether it is endemic to the entire organization. Though given the company's size—especially its growth through acquisitions (such as YouTube)—it's likely that the behavior is constrained to a single manager or department.
I doubt this single incident alone is the reason, but maybe the catalyst. Google and its unhealthy lust for diversity has been an increasingly frequent topic. Hell, someone got fired for posting an anti diversity rant last year. While his arguments were weak or flat out wrong, it's clear that Google is making a point to single out underrepresented minorities to the detriment of others who may actually be better candidates.
I mean, if it's the same memo in thinking of, it wasn't a "diversity memo" he was fired over, it was a manifesto that has been reviewed and agreed on as sufficient cause for his dismissal several times now.
In it, he argued that women were essentially worse at logical tasks than men, and further that this made them poor engineers.
That's not a diversity memo, that's a sexist screed.
> In it, he argued that women were essentially worse at logical tasks than men, and further that this made them poor engineers.
No he didn't. He said they were inherently less interested in STEM, and speculated about a few personality characteristics from psych research that might explain why, but all of that is irrelevant. Damore explicitly said that you can't judge individual competence from a probability distribution, even if the distribution of competence of each gender were different (which they largely are not).
Turns out, he was right that women seem to have different interests. I suggest reading about the things vs. people hypothesis. You can get more women into STEM subfields that deal with people if you highlight those aspects. Hiring quotas and some of the other measures Damore was arguing against would indeed have no effect on gender diversity given these facts.
That is not what the memo said. did you not read it or is this what you think the writer meant even if he did not actually write that but you have some kind of mind reading abilities?
Are we counting reviews by pushing the same narrative that was being pushed by the people he originally offended? What I've seen is a number of scientists (in the specific fields that are related to it) backing his work, others attacking it, and all agreeing it doesn't rise to the muster of a peer reviewed paper/meta-analysis (though that seems a pretty insane bar to begin with).
Where there is smoke, there might be fire. Its not unlikeley related to KPIs set by high managment (given the news around Google in the past). And further down the food chain managers want to look good and do these things.
This is a good point. There's a lot of negative press and truly appalling allegations swirling about Google, but it's near impossible to get an accurate idea of extent or even the truth of the situation from the outside.
Based on Reddit stories for a while, it seemed that even settin foot in the US was a near guarantee one would then be tasered, have their money taken by police officers, and then detained by agents from an unknown 3-letter agency and shipped to Guantanamo.
It's possible, though we have no way of knowing, that what's in this story is a case of a lone manager with an axe to grind. It's also possible that the attitude is pervasive.
It's likely best to withhold judgement and keep asking questions.
(1) A big if. I haven't seen any hard evidence yet.