Eh, yes. PowerPoint was about how to do interviewing in ways that eliminated bias. A week later I'm having a conversation with my boss, who's telling me that I was reported to HR for misogyny and sexism because the presentation was about how to ensure that people don't hand out jobs based on sex or race. The logic seemed to be that if people are trained to eliminate bias in hiring, the the results will be sexist because not enough token women would be hired.
I told said boss exactly how many times the complainant should be fired but needless to say, their identity was protected and nothing happened. If you believe that can't happen you're not really aware of how these people think. The next step is an admin/site-level setting that allows "uninclusive" language to force-disable sharing. You wait and see.
"The logic seemed to be that if people are trained to eliminate bias in hiring, the the results will be sexist because not enough token women would be hired."
If this was implicit in your presentation, then I think I can see why you were reported to HR.
But, look, maybe you didn't deserve to be reported. Anyone can report anything to HR.
Did you mean to write explicit? The presentation wasn't actually about gender representation or affirmative action and didn't mention those things, it just had a slide or two where it pointed out that working out a fixed interview plan before doing an interview was a good way to avoid bias of various kinds, and mentioned age/gender bias as examples.
Obviously, if you're teaching people how to eliminate bias in an interview process then people who believe that absence of pro-female bias is "sexism" will consider it implicitly sexist, regardless of intent. But that's a nonsensical inversion of basic English and morality. People who report others to HR for that would be fired in any competent company (this one wasn't).
How is that relevant? People are concerned about bad things that might happen to them but haven't happened to them yet. Just because it hasn't happened to them specifically doesn't mean their concerns are invalid.
Because the frequency of an occurrence is valuable data relating to its likelihood, just like knowing whether your house is in a floodplain is valuable data in making a decision as to whether you should worry about your house flooding.
I mean, how many times has this happened to anyone, let alone the individual in question?
If they are using those terms in a way that is trying to stir up trouble, it makes sense to report them. If they did it without any intent to cause trouble, there wouldn't be an issue.
I don't call Japanese customers Japs even though that used to be a valid English term because it is now widely considered offensive. These are terms that some groups find offensive and more may find offensive in the future. It makes sense to stay ahead of the game and not cause offense if it costs me nothing to do it, and it makes sense for Google to help people who are trying not to offend people do so easily.
I told said boss exactly how many times the complainant should be fired but needless to say, their identity was protected and nothing happened. If you believe that can't happen you're not really aware of how these people think. The next step is an admin/site-level setting that allows "uninclusive" language to force-disable sharing. You wait and see.