Chapter 6: Walkaway
This is a revised excerpt from the book Black Box: A Pregnancy Discrimination Memoir. Copyright © 2024 by Chelsey Glasson. All rights reserved.
In the fall of 2018, when I was offered a position on the Cloud UX team, led by Russ Wilson, I was verbally told by my new management chain that I would be placed in a managerial role. I would initially be in charge of a team of two or three researchers, which was less responsibility than my role on the Comms team. By this point, I was into my second trimester, my daughter Lena was due in the spring, and the move away from Comms and Dawn was a relief.
One day, as I was preparing to transfer teams, I received an unexpected email from my new boss on Cloud, Arunima Kashyap. Attached to the email was an offer letter stating there were two options: The first was to delay assuming my managerial duties until after my maternity leave. The letter stated, “We prefer this option. This will be low stress for the team.” The second option was for me to be made a manager effective immediately, but the letter warned, “we should be sensitive with [Individual Contributor] sentiment here — the team is very new and still forming, and this plan might rock the boat.” I was a little less than five months away from starting leave at the time.
The letter confused me, but I quickly let it go. I was eager for a fresh start and didn’t want to appear ungrateful or too aggressive to a team that had offered me this role after I turned down their initial offer.
With everything I’d been through with Dawn Shaikh, I also couldn’t fathom that I was yet again a target of misconduct, so I assumed good intent, as I had been repeatedly coached to do by People Ops. I had a follow-up meeting with my design lead, Scott Hines, who verbally reassured me everything would be fine. “I’ve dealt with pregnant employees in the past, don’t worry,” he said. I desperately wanted to trust that we would work it out, so I walked away from this meeting feeling hopeful.
It would soon become clear that the only reason the Cloud team did not wish to make me a manager effective immediately was because of my pregnancy. Stating that they wanted to delay my managerial role until I returned from maternity leave was blatant pregnancy discrimination; fortunately for me, they had put it in writing. At the time, though, my plate was distractingly full, and I really didn’t have the energy to question things. I was struggling with increasingly intense morning sickness, and with the team switch inherited a massive new commute.
We lived in Seattle but had Soren enrolled in a daycare in Bellevue, a city close to my former office in Kirkland. Now that I was working out of Google’s Fremont office in Seattle, Max and I would take turns driving the 520 floating bridge from Seattle to Bellevue and back twice per day. This was a commute that would take two to three hours in total on most days since we were driving during peak rush hour. Daycares are quite competitive to get into in the Seattle area, so a quick switch wasn’t possible. Besides, Soren loved his school, and we didn’t want my work situation impacting him.
ON OCTOBER 25th, 2018, The New York Times published an article detailing Google’s ninety million dollar severance payout to Andy Rubin, who had been accused of coercing a subordinate Google employee into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013. The Times had conducted an intensive investigation into Google’s severance payments following misconduct allegations and discovered that in addition to Rubin’s payout, two other senior executives accused of sexual misconduct were also given millions of dollars to leave the company quietly. Yet a third had remained in his high-level position with no consequences.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai soon thereafter sent an email to the entire company:
So first, let me say that I am deeply sorry for the past actions and the pain they have caused employees. Larry mentioned this on stage last week, but it bears repeating: if even one person experiences Google the way The New York Times article described, we are not the company we aspire to be.
This email gave me hope that Google would eventually do the right thing in my situation. It seemed even more possible when, a day after the email was sent and a week after the article was published, thousands of Googlers worldwide staged a walkout to protest how the company was poorly handling reports of misconduct.
Four months pregnant with Lena, I walked out of the Google Fremont office at the designated time with a colleague who had recently joined the company from Amazon. As we stood between office buildings not far from the Burke Gilman Trail, my Noogler coworker boasted, “Isn’t this amazing? A protest like this would never be allowed at Amazon.” Her comment, as well as the anonymous stories of sexual harassment and discrimination a Googler shared via megaphone as we all stood listening in solidarity, reassured me. I’m not alone, what’s happening is real, and it’s very wrong. The peace this moment gave me lasted until I returned to the office.
Once I reached my desk, I took a brief scan through all of the emails and internal chatter in support of the walkout and noticed some of the people chiming in were those aware of my situation. They had been complacent, and yet here they were, saying all the right things, except not to an actual coworker on their radar who would have greatly benefited from their solidarity. The allyship messages that were being projected by the same people who refused to acknowledge what was happening to me presented a glaring contradiction.
It occurred to me that events like this, while important and impactful, allow us all to feel better about ourselves. If we are marching for justice, we must be good people — this seemed to be the subtext anyway. But some of these thousands of Googlers would return to the office, put their blindfolds back on, and continue to tolerate or unconsciously ignore workplace misconduct out of indifference, ignorance, or fear of compromising their careers. I knew this to be true because I had once been one of them.
SHORTLY AFTER THE WALKOUT and less than a month after I started on the Cloud PA, Max and I visited the doctor’s office for my twenty-week ultrasound. By the slightly pinched expression on the technician’s face, I sensed bad news.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
She responded with an apologetic smile and said, “The doctor will review the results with you,” as black-and-white images of my uterus flickered on the screen. I immediately burst into tears. Having been through miscarriages in the past, I feared the worst.
We walked out of the ultrasound room to the exam room and waited for the doctor to review the results with us. Those minutes were long. When the doctor finally came in, he soberly explained that I had complete placenta previa, a life-threatening pregnancy complication that can cause significant maternal hemorrhaging and premature birth. While there was some hope the situation could resolve, it was important to start taking precautions, including stopping all travel. He also warned that it was quite likely I would be placed on bed rest at some point.
Max and I were in shock. We canceled our Thanksgiving travel plans per the doctor’s orders so we could stay close to Seattle’s Swedish Hospital, with its ample donor blood supply and Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) that had the capacity to treat babies born severely premature. I knew the placenta previa wasn’t my fault, but still, I wondered if I had somehow caused this to happen by exposing my fetus to so much stress. Thoughts like these only exacerbated my steadily increasing anxiety.
I was scheduled to travel to Google’s offices in Tel Aviv in the next couple of weeks and was also planning to attend a team offsite in Poland, where a number of engineers from the Cloud PA were based. Arunima had also just asked me to attend an upcoming brainstorming session in Mountain View.
In our next 1:1 meeting, I shared the news with Arunima.
I couldn’t stop bouncing my foot while talking, nervous to even say the words out loud for fear they could come true. I told Arunima I wouldn’t be able to travel for the remainder of my pregnancy, and I also mentioned there was a chance at some point I would have to take an early maternity leave.
I remember Arunima rolling her eyes and following up with something along the lines of, “Chelsey, I bled in my pregnancy, too! It was fine!” she said. Perhaps, in her own way, she was trying to be reassuring, but her words had the opposite effect. My distress grew as she kept talking.
She shared she had recently heard an NPR segment that debunked the benefits of bed rest during pregnancy. “Doctors always make such a big deal of things,” she said. “My doctor recommended bed rest, but I ignored him and went on to give the biggest presentation of my career the day before my C-section!” she boasted.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was momentarily paralyzed until I eventually reminded myself to blink and take a breath. Did she really think she was being helpful? I had hoped we could discuss accommodations and find ways I could work and attend upcoming events remotely, but instead she was dismissing my life-threatening condition completely. Before I left the meeting room that day, Arunima wound down our conversation by sharing that due to some reorganization, there might not be a management role for me when I returned from maternity leave after all.
Other discriminatory acts, less blatant but no less upsetting, were occurring during this timeframe as well. For instance, my design lead Scott Hines held an offsite for all of the user research managers on his team, and I wasn’t invited to attend. It was a small group of people, and even though by this time it was decided to delay my managerial responsibilities until after my maternity leave, I should have been included given I was hired onto the team as a manager. Several out-of-state Googlers attended the offsite remotely, and it would have been no problem for me to do so as well. Later, Google would claim my exclusion was simply an administrative error.
Another frustrating ordeal unfolded over parking. In the main garage of the Fremont office, there were three designated parking spots for pregnant women, which were almost always occupied by non-pregnant Googlers. I knew this to be true by the lack of the required special parking permit for expecting moms displayed on the dashboards of these cars. Following my diagnosis, I brought this to the attention of People Ops, explaining that my condition required me to limit my activity. In response, they gave me a spot in an alternative parking garage that wasn’t broadly accessible to Googlers. This garage was closer to my desk but entailed more walking overall since it was not as conveniently located near the other buildings I frequently walked to for lunch breaks and meetings. I definitely had to do more walking as a result.
The absolute low point occurred when I was excluded from the annual UX Managers Summit, a highly consequential, week-long conference jam-packed with classes, dinners, and many other networking opportunities. The conference was a well-known way to create a presence for yourself among the Google UX leadership community. I applied, given it was being hosted locally in Kirkland that year, but was told I didn’t qualify because I wasn’t managing anyone.
I explained to conference leadership, which included Dawn as the program chair, that the only reason I wasn’t managing anyone at the time was because I was about to take maternity leave, stating via email, “I wouldn’t push back otherwise, but with my not having any reports because of my upcoming maternity leave, my interpretation is that I’m being excluded from an awesome opportunity on account of my pregnancy.” The response to my request for my application to be reconsidered was a curt update informing me that People Ops had been consulted, and my request couldn’t be accommodated.
“Sorry, you can apply again next year,” I was told.
THAT FALL, A NEW CALIBRATION cycle kicked off. Concerned Dawn’s retaliation might continue through this fresh cycle, I approached People Ops asking whether there was going to be an investigation into what had happened to me on the Comms team. I hoped that if I could hold Dawn accountable for her prior actions, it might prevent her from doing anything more to damage my career.
People Ops’ response was that what happened to me when I stood up for Lauren was inappropriate but didn’t meet the qualifications for an investigation:
As we discussed, we took all the concerns you raised in July very seriously and took appropriate action to address them. This is not the type of behavior that we encourage in managers, and I want you to know that. I completely understand that you feel this was retaliatory behavior. But I do want to confirm, per our conversation, that this is not considered retaliatory behavior.
There was so much gaslighting in this one email; it was shocking. How can you acknowledge the behavior was inappropriate and that you took action while at the same time say there wasn’t enough evidence for a proper investigation? I responded to the email asking how they decided my experiences didn’t meet the qualifications for an investigation. It didn’t make any sense, which is likely why I never received a response.
Around this time, Arunima and I discussed again that due to my placenta previa, it was likely that I would need to take an early leave. This led to a conversation about a potential reorganization of our team, and yet again, she mentioned the likelihood that I wouldn’t have a managerial role when I returned from leave. I remember reflecting upon how eerily similar this felt to Dawn telling me my team was at risk of being depreciated after I reported her discriminatory remarks about Lauren.
Not what I was wanting to hear, I tried to pivot smoothly and shared that if that were true, then I would look into switching teams to remain in a managerial position. Arunima was supportive and enthusiastically encouraged me to explore that option, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. While she seemed outwardly supportive, I sensed I was being pushed off her team. Arunima was hoping to go up for promotion within the next year or so, and in hindsight, I suspect she was starting to view me as a roadblock.
The thought of interviewing for another role this far along in my pregnancy was overwhelming, and I knew it would be challenging with my maternity leave fast approaching. I could feel the downward spiral of unchecked papercuts once again, and I decided I needed some outside help. It was time to hire an attorney and I asked for a referral from Max’s law firm. That’s how I ended up working with Josh.
DURING OUR INITIAL CONSULTATION, Josh assured me that Dawn Shaikh’s behavior was indeed retaliation, which he defined as harassment that occurs subsequent to an employee initiating a legally protected activity, such as reporting workplace discrimination. He also said that the Cloud UX team’s handling of my hiring, placement, and request for pregnancy accommodations was classic pregnancy discrimination.
Josh relayed that his hourly fees were $350 an hour and that the cost of helping me navigate this could quickly add up. He said he felt more ethical charging me a flat fee of $10,000 and a contingency fee in the amount of fifteen percent of any gross proceeds he recovered on my behalf. I know now that he was asking too much, probably because of my Googler status, and that I should have consulted with other attorneys. But I was low on energy at this point and highly motivated to take action to get back on the trajectory toward an L6, staff-level research role, where I belonged. I was more than willing to pay the flat fee and wrote him a check for $10,000.
At our next meeting, Josh and I talked through the case on a deeper level. There were laws protecting workers from workplace discrimination, Josh shared, but they could be challenging to enforce, particularly against an enormous corporation like Google. He told me my best option would likely be to accept a severance and move on. Outrage coursed through my veins — this couldn’t be how things ended. I told Josh I was not ready to give up, emphasizing that surely Google would be motivated to do the right thing. The company’s historical lack of appropriate response to reported misconduct and their promises to do things differently in the future were clearly a sign of this, I explained.
“What are my other options?” I asked.
Josh responded by sharing that the first step would be to serve Google with a demand letter. This would be a document that would summarize what had occurred with Dawn and Lauren, as well as with Arunima. It would recount every act of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation I had endured at the company and point out that Google was in violation of specific state laws.
I agreed to move forward with the demand letter; at the time, I would have done anything to stay at Google. Despite everything that had happened in the past year, I loved my job and the community I had built at the company, and I still held hope that Google would do the right thing if I just got the right person’s attention. A load of other motivations drove me: Max and I were dependent on my income, my whole identity was wrapped up in being a Googler, and I had worked hard and invested a lot into the company.
For all of these reasons, accepting a severance wasn’t appealing. I just wanted to get someone’s attention and get back to work. Josh gently clarified that would likely not happen and warned that if we served the demand letter, Google would almost definitely come back with a walkaway agreement. I would be offered a sum of money to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, pack up, and leave.
“Companies like Google have standard processes to deal with complaints like these,” he told me, elaborating that “This is how Amazon and Microsoft almost always approach these situations.”
I still wanted to give serving a demand letter a try, however, and I continued to tell myself although with eroding confidence, that Google is different. Google is better. If nothing else, perhaps the demand letter would prevent any future retaliation. All I was aiming for was to regain my status and return to the management track at Google. We made it known in the demand letter that I believed in Google’s values and was motivated to stay:
To be clear, Ms. Glasson believes in the ethos of Google. She wants to remain a committed member of Google’s workforce and hopes to continue contributing to its success. It is Ms. Glasson’s sincere belief that Google is a progressive and inclusive culture that does not tolerate the marginalization of employees based on their familial status, medical conditions, or opposition to discrimination in the workplace. She does not want to see [anyone] unnecessarily punished. Instead, Ms. Glasson views this situation as an opportunity for Google to further establish itself as a leader in fostering workplace equality and transparency.
Following the above excerpt was language indicating the company needed to take appropriate action. At the top of my list of demands was a request for an independent investigation into Dawn’s discriminatory and retaliatory actions “to be conducted by an experienced external vendor qualified to conduct workplace investigations.”
We also requested a nominal amount of back pay to account for my income being jeopardized due to my lost advancement opportunities. As a result of my reporting what had happened to Lauren (you can read her declaration here), those who reported to me on the Comms PA — all women — had seen lowered scores in the prior calibration. I felt they unfairly paid the price for what happened, so I also asked that their calibration scores be reevaluated. Finally, I asked to be moved into an appropriate role of similar responsibility that included managing a mid-sized User Research team, putting me back on the path toward L6.
After we served my demand letter on December 5th, 2018, People Ops reached out to me again, refusing to investigate what had happened with Dawn on Comms; they did, however, promise to launch an investigation into my complaints about the events that were unfolding on the Cloud UX team.
Google’s legal team came back with Google’s response to my demand letter in late December. They would be pursuing a walkaway agreement.
“IT’S TIME,” MY DOCTOR told us grimly during a prenatal appointment that happened the first week of the new year. At twenty-eight weeks pregnant, my complete placenta previa wasn’t resolving. My doctor was concerned that the acute stress surrounding my work could trigger early contractions, which would be especially dangerous because of my condition. I was directed to stop working and go on medical leave in order to give myself and the baby the best chance of survival.
I cried as my husband drove us home. Still, I managed to compose myself just enough to email Arunima on January 3rd and let her know I was starting maternity leave early. Within a few hours, she emailed me back, stating my performance was not meeting expectations for my level at the company. There was zero concern stated for me or my baby.
Feeling utterly defeated, I gave Josh the go-ahead to continue talks with Google about a walkaway agreement. We added up my lost pay, a year and a half of my earnings, and general damages. The goal was to give me a safety net given my high-risk pregnancy, upcoming maternity leave, and uncertain future employment status.
The next two and a half months were a whirlwind of hospitalizations and legal negotiations. I wondered almost constantly how things had gone so wrong at work, and what might happen next. How had my career taken such a disastrous turn? At the same time, I knew that this fear and worry were not at all good for the baby I was carrying.
One night in early February, Max and I went out to dinner to celebrate my 36th birthday. I went to use the restroom upon our return home, and I started gushing blood. Max called 911, as we had been instructed to do, and the ambulance came. We attempted to shield two-year-old Soren from the scene as he screamed, “Mommy, Mommy!”.
The EMTs administered an IV once I was inside the ambulance. I was shaking uncontrollably, and I remember that the ambulance ride was loud and full of sharp, bumpy turns. I tried to keep my body as still as possible for fear of making the bleeding worse. Max was with Soren and would get to the hospital as soon as he could, but for the moment, I was alone.
The bleeding had slowed by the time I got to the hospital, where I was told I was having early contractions and hemorrhaging. There was also concern that Lena’s lungs wouldn’t be mature enough if she were born early, so on top of the magnesium they gave me to stop the contractions, I was given steroid shots to speed up the development of Lena’s lungs.
In total for that first visit, I stayed in the hospital for a week and a half, returning home for less than a week before bleeding again and being readmitted to the hospital. This time passing golf ball-sized clots my nurses helped me fish out of the toilet for measuring, our doctors began preparing us for Lena to be born prematurely.
This is when the hospital staff gave me a tour of the NICU to preview what was likely to come. I’ll never forget seeing those tiny babies and their parents who looked so broken. Max wanted to join the tour, but his boss had been complaining about how much time he was spending away from the office while attending to me, so he stayed at work instead.
From then on, I was in and out of the hospital. Because we lived so close, my doctors would let me go home once I had a week of no bleeding. But after a day or so of feeling hopeful at home, the cycle of hemorrhaging and being rushed to the hospital would start again.
In these scary moments, I often reflected on being in the hospital during my first year at Google for a follow-up surgery on my arm. My coworkers had showered me with flowers, cards, and phone calls. During this entire period of multiple hospitalizations, not a single person from the Cloud UX team–nor anyone from Google — reached out with any of those things. My baby could have died. I could have died.
This double standard is an example of how pregnancy is handled and conceptualized differently than other medical conditions. Since it is so often considered a choice, a condition a woman has opted into, there can be little empathy when things go wrong.
For all of the time I was in and out of the hospital, I felt guilty leaving Max alone with Soren. It was the middle of winter, and Max had to navigate his work duties and caring for Soren with snow days prompting sporadic daycare closures. I knew Max’s boss had spoken to him about trying to do a better job at compartmentalizing his work and personal life, which added to the guilt. Max never complained, but I could sense that he was under tremendous pressure.
I remember thinking to myself how impossible it would have been to endure what we were experiencing without a partner. A single parent in my situation would have had a tough — more likely impossible — time surviving it all.
During all these hospital visits, Max and I encountered conflicting doctors’ opinions. Every time a shift ended and a new doctor rotated in, we would be told something different. Since each doctor gave slightly varied guidance, we were often confused about our choices, which added to the emotional rollercoaster we were riding. One doctor once told us that if I had one more episode of hemorrhaging, he would take me in for an emergency C-Section since he didn’t think we should risk any more bleeding. When it inevitably happened again, nurses rushed to get me ready for surgery. But then suddenly everything stopped. The doctor had gone off shift.
A new doctor came into my hospital room and proceeded to ask us, “Do you want to wait? Or do you want to do this now?” We hadn’t even realized we had a choice, and we opted to wait.
In early March, three weeks before Lena’s due date, I started bleeding again, so we drove to the hospital. We knew exactly where to go at this point because we had been in and out of there so many times. We passed through the triage room and met the OB-GYN on rotation.
She said, “Okay, this is it. We’re calling it.”
The doctors and nurses next started prepping me for surgery. I remember having to get up out of the wheelchair they had put me in to get myself onto the operating table and seeing blood on the hospital floor below me, a sight that was sadly familiar at that point. I was then pushed into the surgery room; it was cold, and the bright lights made me squint my eyes. They numbed my abdomen, but otherwise, I remained completely awake.
Almost immediately, I began to bleed excessively. I couldn’t see it, but Max could. The medical team started soaking up the blood with white gauze and then weighing the drenched gauze to track how much I was losing. Max sat there watching as they weighed more and more blood until, finally, my doctor decided they needed to stop the bleeding. I was given an injection of a drug that helped my uterus clamp down, and this lessened the bleeding. The medicine made me violently ill, however, so I began throwing up, and then, at some point during all of this, I lost consciousness.
As Lena was being pulled out of my uterus I regained consciousness. My medical team quickly sewed me up and placed Lena’s little, newborn body on my chest. She was born completely healthy. I was severely anemic from all the blood loss, but would be fine. I remember the doctor pointing to my placenta, which sat in a metal dish beside me, and mentioning how deformed it was.
Had Lena been born just one day earlier, she would have been classified as premature and would have had to spend a week in the NICU under observation. In my mind, the most beautiful coincidence of all was that she was born on March 8th, which happens to be International Women’s Day.
Less than a week following Lena’s birth and a few days after we transitioned home, I checked my personal email to discover the following two things: On March 14th, 2019, Google’s legal team had approached my attorney with their walkaway offer which consisted of paying me three months of my base salary to leave the company.
The most senior researcher on the Cloud PA, Javier Bargas-Avila, who managed the distribution list for Cloud PA research managers, had also emailed me on March 13th, “This is a quick note that I temporarily removed you from the Cloud UXR mgrs list. As soon as you start managing, I will add you back in.”
A few weeks later, I received news from People Ops that they were chalking up all of the pregnancy discrimination I had experienced on the Cloud UX team to miscommunication.
THE FIRST WEEK OF MAY 2019, a few days before my daughter turned two months old and four months into my maternity leave, I received my first-ever negative calibration score from the Google Cloud UX team: Needs Improvement. My entire Cloud UX management chain, including the then Head of Cloud UX, Russ Wilson, was aware of and involved in happenings to-date. The same day the score was released, I emailed Russ and Javier yet again, as I had done before, to express my dissent. Javier responded on May 2, “I was in that calibration session and can confirm we spent a long time discussing a fair rating.”
I was still on maternity leave and had rejected Google’s walkaway offer. As I’d learned on Dawn’s team, calibration committees have the option of giving someone an NA when on maternity or medical leave. Giving me a Needs Improvement for a cycle in which I was on maternity leave was explicit retaliation. This was a final warning sign that Google wanted me out.
With the Needs Improvement on my record and Google’s continued refusal to acknowledge the misconduct I was experiencing, I knew if I returned to the company coming out of maternity leave, I would be placed on a PIP and likely soon thereafter terminated. Not wanting to subject myself or my family to additional hardship and needing to preserve my income and career trajectory, my only option was to start interviewing for jobs outside of Google. That June, I landed an offer at Facebook for an L6, staff-level research role and was told I could start as soon as my maternity leave ended.
Google presented a slightly better walkaway offer after giving me the Needs Improvement calibration score, which they firmly stated was their best and final offer. I had just survived a grueling year due to Google’s negligence and knew that accepting the offer would leave a chronic wound. When I told Josh I would be refusing the offer, he agreed to file a lawsuit on my behalf.
ONE WEEK BEFORE my last day at Google, which would coincide with the end of my maternity leave, I woke up in the middle of the night on August 2nd, 2019, to a strong impulse to write it all down. While my husband and children slept, I sat down on the couch, opened my laptop, and started writing; all of the awfulness, all the moments where things could have gone another way — everything poured out of me.
Encouraged by other women like Ellen Pao, Kelly Ellis, and Susan Fowler, who had spoken out about widespread harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, I wrote all night long in the hopes that other Googlers experiencing workplace misconduct would know they weren’t alone.
As the morning light began to creep in, I logged into my corporate email account and started drafting an email. In the subject line, I wrote, “I’m Not Returning to Google After Maternity Leave and Here is Why.” I chose the largest distribution list I could find, which was the distribution list for the Google Walkout, and hit ‘Send.’
The aftermath was much more impactful than I had expected, and I remember being glued to my laptop, watching everyone view the Google Doc, desperate for someone to finally say that what had happened to me was wrong.
People began reaching out almost immediately; some I knew, most I didn’t. “I’m so sorry,” they said. Or “I’m so upset this happened.” The empathetic messages were comforting, but for each person who contacted me, I couldn’t help but notice the ones who didn’t. The silence from certain longtime colleagues was significantly wounding.
By Monday morning, 12,000 people had read my memo and I became the focal point of top-rated memes on Google’s internal meme generator site; one referenced Googlers having more trust in gas station sushi than Google HR. My memo had also been leaked to the press, and so I woke up to find myself in the international news cycle that morning, although my identity remained private. Reading how others were describing and analyzing my situation was eye-opening. It all felt validating, yet at the same time triggering.
Losing Google was like losing a part of myself. For five and a half years, the company had been my identity, my social life, and my sense of home. In part because of my upbringing and struggles with fitting in, Google had represented so much more than a job: it was a feeling of safety and security I had worked hard to build for myself.
I had idolized other Googlers, and some of them had become close friends. Separating myself from that community filled me with deep grief during a time in my life in which I was deeply vulnerable. I no longer had any idea where I belonged.
A few days into working at Facebook, a Googler shared with me that People Ops had been sponsoring roundtable discussions for Cloud and Communications PA UX staff, offering an opportunity to process and grieve what had happened to me. I wondered to myself, What exactly were they grieving? I was the one who had been put on the chopping block for standing up for the legal rights of a fellow employee and myself. I was the one who had lost my job and so much more.
It occurred to me that these roundtables served Google and my former coworkers well. Similar to the Walkout, these discussions allowed everyone to feel that their hands had been washed clean of any complicity, and they were good people as evidenced by their public demonstration of grief. The company could also use these discussions to spread the message that it wasn’t all true and that if any of it was true, they were making changes to ensure it never happened again.
Russ Wilson’s last day at Google occurred in August of 2019, the same month my Google memo went viral. Ulku Rowe (who also worked on the Cloud PA) and I would become the first two women to file discrimination and harassment lawsuits against Google following the Google Walkout, with Russ and Javier eventually becoming embroiled in my suit.
It’s significant that Javier Bargas-Avila and Russ Wilson would make an additional appearance in my life in 2024, in association with my criticisms of UXPA International and World Usability Conference. #uxfriends
