With Google Accused Of Protecting Men In Power, Company’s Policies In The Spotlight

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Publish Date:
October 25, 2018
Source:
Yahoo! Finance (law.com)
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Summary

Google’s chief executive officer Sundar Pichai sent an email to employees Thursday addressing the Mountain View, California-based company’s handling of sexual misconduct and inappropriate relationships.

Pichai’s email followed a report from The New York Times that alleged high-ranking men, including parent company Alphabet’s CLO David Drummond, at the company faced little or no consequences for inappropriate sexual relationships with women in their departments, some of which were consensual.

Deborah Rhode, the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law, the director of the Center on the Legal Profession, and the director of the Program in Law and Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University, said that companies should avoid hard laws against workplace dating.

“If organizations take a really draconian position on this, they force the relationship under ground, and that isn’t necessarily better,” Rhode said.

Rhode said that companies should be informed of a relationship between manager and subordinates as soon as possible.

“I think you want full disclosure at the earliest possible moment and a transfer of the individual to a situation in which she is not in a reporting relationship,” Rhode said.

But Rhode said that someone signing a form isn’t a sure indicator that a departure was voluntary.

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