Empathy Games
Let’s do a little thought exercise in empathy.
Think about your first “dream” job. We’ve all had these. This is the first job that you really wanted, that you worked really hard to get, and were a little surprised when you actually got the position. You came from a hardscrabble background, you may have even been homeless at one point. But you learned programming and software engineering as a way out of your hardship. And this job was your big chance to prove yourself and pay back the company that had given you this opportunity.
But once at your job, the person in charge of your day-to-day operations, and would soon become your manager, wants to call you “beautiful” and “gorgeous.” And after much haggling, because you have to sit next to this person every day, you get this person to settle on calling you “my queen.” For this exercise let’s disregard for a minute what this manager’s gender is, and forget your gender, and just concentrate on how this person is abusing their positional power, however slight, to hit on you, pretending your career didn’t now depend on how you responded.
Pretty f’king creepy huh? Feels like you’re not there to bring value with your hard-won skills, that the company you so esteemed has just hired you as eye-candy for mid-level management. You tell HR, but in an effort to minimize collateral damage, they downplay the situation, even gaslight you into believing all your feels are insignificant. Soon you find yourself passed over for promotions, and disregarded as “difficult.” Honestly, you’re pretty much washed up there, through no fault of your own. The easy thing to do, at least in sense of day-to-day survival, is to mentally check out, while seeking other opportunities. Screw this company.
Now, imagine you’re the CEO of this company. You actually have not only one problem but two. For one, you have an immensely valuable employee who, after the great expense of being recruited and onboarded, has checked out and will soon leave the company, probably during a critical moment for the business. The second problem is this other bozo who is using the company’s time as a personal dating service. It’s just the sort of disrespect — for the coworker, the company and your leadership really — that can rapidly fester through the ranks, corrupting the esprit de corps needed to get your service out the door.
And, if you happen to be the CEO of Google (Alphabet), then you have a third problem on your hand: embarrassing publicity. For this is the exact position that Pichai Sundararajan faces this week, as people around the world dig into a The New York Times Op-Ed by ex-Google engineer Emi Nietfeld, who describes the above scenario happening to her at Google.
We (meaning, in this case, the rabble on the internet) love to read about a company that has shown itself, once again, failing to live up to the standards it has publicly vowed to keep. What Sundararajan faces is no longer a personnel issue, but a financial one, an indicator to investors that the company may not be in tune with reality as it portrays.
In short, sexism and racism in the workplace is not only an issue for women and minorities, it is an issue for entire companies, who ignore it at their own peril.
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