Julie Bort

There's been another round of employee drama at Google these past few weeks. <a id="339d9ef8-a464-337e-a737-ca8de135fb6e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html"> After The New York times </a> published an explosive story on how the company previously protected one of its star engineers, Andy Rubin, amid a sexual-misconduct investigation,Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the company has fired 48 employees for sexual harassment in the last two years.

On Thursday, Google published new policies for how the company will handle sexual harassment after employees staged a walkout <a id="196445ee-3e8e-3817-abd8-4f5766bb3342" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-walkout-staff-protest-at-sexual-misconduct-2018-11?r=UK&amp;IR=T?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest"> and sent the company a list of five demands. </a>

Employees didn't get everything they wanted, but they did get their top demand: an end to forced arbitration for sexual-harassment cases.

In <a id="6412e577-369c-3a32-a7a2-7dbab854f09a" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-memo-changes-sexual-harassment-policy-2018-11?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest"> a memo </a> , Pichai announced the new policy while also defending Google's general policy of forced arbitration by claiming it never required confidentiality.

Read more: <a id="7eee7ead-8c59-36c0-a1c7-9b5ea00e864c" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-memo-changes-sexual-harassment-policy-2018-11?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest"> Here's the memo Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent to employees on the changes to its sexual harassment policy after the walkout </a>

"We will make arbitration optional for individual sexual harassment and sexual assault claims. Google has never required confidentiality in the arbitration process and arbitration still may be the best path for a number of reasons (e.g. personal privacy) but, we recognize that choice should be up to you," he wrote.

Forcing employees to sign agreements forbidding them to sue the company, and to instead go to arbitration, is one of the key ways a company can keep its dirty laundry secret.

Arbitration is a private process that doesn't produce public court documents or public court decisions. It can also make it more difficult for employees to band together to file class-action lawsuits.

And settlement agreements may also include a gag order, forbidding the employee to talk about their experience, even if they won the case.

Mix it all together, and you get a perfect combo where a company's incentives to cover things up can seem more alluring than banishing illegal behavior or misconduct and seeing that it doesn't happen again.

With private arbitration, even if the company fires the employee (and that doesn't always happen), a new employer has no easy way to know about the underlying incident, freeing the employee to continue engaging in the same behavior at the new company.

Forcing employees to agree to arbitration as a condition of employment has become common practice in corporate America today. And it is standard practice in Silicon Valley. It is so common that Susan Fowler, the famed engineer who wrote about her experience with sexual harassment at Uber, argued the practice should be banned in a <a id="a84d5b30-a5f0-338c-ab0b-7c83ff2566c2" href="https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/supreme_court_preview/briefs-2017-2018/16-285-16-300-16-307-amicus-pet-resp-susan-fowler.authcheckdam.pdf"> petition to the Supreme Court about a year ago </a> .

While Google clearly hasn't given up forced arbitration in general, making it optional for sexual-harassment cases is a huge step for Silicon Valley.

Alone, this one company's choice won't end Silicon Valley's well-documented bro-culture problems.

But the thing is, Google isn't alone. About a year ago, Microsoft also removed its <a id="d915db61-b381-31fe-a8df-7cbcc4798165" href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/12/19/microsoft-endorses-senate-bill-address-sexual-harassment/"> forced-arbitration clause for sexual-harassment claims </a> and endorsed a Senate bill attempting to make such a change the law of the land.

Uber <a id="de5f05cd-bbe3-352b-a680-18aaee0b5b0c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/technology/uber-sex-misconduct.html"> followed suit in May </a> .

Ideally, companies would simply stop making their employees waive their rights to sue in regular courts for every issue, not just sexual-harassment claims.

But for now, a slow-and-steadywave of change is happening on this front. Perhaps Silicon Valley can even become a beacon for other industries with well-publicized sexual-harassment issues, like media and finance, to do the same.

Ultimately, the freedom of employees to go public with sexual-harassment claims will shed some much-needed light on a situation that has been allowed to fester in the dark far too long.

NOW WATCH: <a id="57ad28ad-c90c-3585-a010-e89862c03169" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-breaking-up-regulating-amazon-2018-4?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest"> Jeff Bezos on regulating giant tech companies: 'I expect us to be scrutinized' </a>

<ul><li> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/waymo-one-driverless-car-service-launches-in-phoenix-arizona-2018-12?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest">Waymo has launched its commercial self-driving service in Phoenix — and it's called 'Waymo One'</a> </li><li> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-faang-stocks-lost-45-of-their-value-2018-12?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest">The big tech stocks just lost $141 billion in market value. That's enough to buy McDonald's.</a> </li><li> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-blind-test-apple-iphone-google-pixel-2018-12?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest">A top YouTuber did a ‘blind’ test to find the very best smartphone camera, and the iPhone lost in the first round</a> </li></ul>

One of Google's new sexual-harassment policies could be the key to changing all of Silicon Valley's bro culture

When Mandy Ginsberg took over as CEO of <a id="0b2fd78a-5479-367a-a0e8-a3ea200db4f3" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/match-group?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest"> online dating juggernaut Match Group </a> in mid-2017, she was determined to alter the perception of the industry as a "bro culture" world.

And one step she made was to audit the salaries of her own workforce, which is now 1,500 people, to see if she was paying women and men equally for equal work.

She was shocked to discover that at her company —the largest operator of dating apps with brands like Tinder, Match, Plenty of Fish and dozens of others — her female employees were 100% equally paid, according to the findings by a third-party auditor.

Paying people equally for the work that they do, regardless of their gender, has been required by law since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. And yet women still earn 80 cents for every $1 that men earn, and are often underpaid even for equal work.

See Mandy Ginsberg speak at Business Insider's Ignition conference, December 3 &amp; 4 in New York and streaming online.

Ginsberg didn't just want to give lip service to her internal audit. She hired outside auditor, Syndio, to examine the pay rates of her workforce which is 36% female. The firm didn't just look at job title but grouped employees by what their jobs entailed. If it found a difference in pay between genders, it looked at other non-gender factors such as tenure, education, years of experience to determine if that explained the gap.

And often, it doesn't. <a id="ca81d276-f521-30d4-a28c-58014eea7e37" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/crm-stock?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest"> Salesforce </a> famously audited its workforce, not just once but twice over the past couple of years and issued $6 million in raises to women and agreed to publicly discuss its process, becoming the poster child for equal pay. The second audit and adjustment was done after Salesforce grew its employee base substantially through acquisitions, CEO Marc Benioff <a id="225ba66a-2763-3c8c-a3d7-79384d98d042" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-6-million-dollars-women-pay-raises-fired-executive-me-too-2018-4?utm_source=intl&amp;utm_medium=ingest"> previously told Business Insider. </a>

See Salesforce HR chief Cindy Robbins speak about the impacts of paying equally at Business Insider's Ignition conference, December 3 &amp; 4 in New York.

Match has also grown dramatically through acquisitions. So, when the consultants told Ginsberg that their analysis had found no discrepancy, Ginsberg was so surprised she demanded the third-party auditor go back and check the data again. They did and the results stood.

It was a light-bulb moment for Ginsberg. Although she's only been in the top CEO role for a year and a half, she spent the last half dozen years as the executive in charge of a number of Match's biggest businesses, including Match.com, Match Affinity, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid.

And one of her "guiding principals" has been to offer pay and raises based on people's value to their company "whether they ask for it or not," she said <a id="b771c70b-99af-37fe-a6b3-42d26c34f5d3" href="http://match.mediaroom.com/news-releases"> in the press release. </a>

In other words, she hasn't turned compensation into a negotiating game, granting raises only when someone asks. She has simply paid people what the company was willing to pay them and rewarded them without asking for a job well done. And now, she's not only published the results but is speaking out and advocating for this method.

"So often and in so many businesses, women don’t make compensation demands. And until we raise our daughters to make those demands, we, as leaders, need to be proactive and methodical about how we think about compensation," she said.

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SEE ALSO: A former top GitHub lawyer claims she was fired for asking for equal pay, lawsuit says

Match Group's CEO audited the company's payroll to make sure she was paying women equally and was surprised at the results (MTCH)

Every year since 2009, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has challenged himself to broaden his perspective "and learn something about the world beyond my work at Facebook," <a href="/mark-zuckerbergs-new-years-resolutions-2015-1?utm_source=intl&amp;amp;utm_medium=ingest">he once explained</a>.

His tool of choice? A New Year's resolution.

Zuckerberg on Thursday <a href="/mark-zuckerberg-reveals-2018-personal-challenge-is-to-fix-facebook-2018-1?utm_source=intl&amp;amp;utm_medium=ingest">announced his 2018 resolution</a> — and this time, it's focused on his job.

This year, he wants to fix Facebook's hardest problem: He wants to end the abuse of the platform, whether through election-interference efforts, fake news, or other nefarious practices.

His <a href="/mark-zuckerberg-personal-goal-for-2017-meet-people-in-every-us-state-2017-1?utm_source=intl&amp;amp;utm_medium=ingest">resolution last year</a>, to meet someone from every US state, was made after the 2016 presidential campaign, during which <a href="/some-blame-facebook-for-trumps-victory-2016-11?utm_source=intl&amp;amp;utm_medium=ingest">many people accused Facebook</a> of having a role in the nation's divided political discourse.

That resolution took Zuckerberg on a tour of the country that included visiting the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist killed nine black worshippers in 2015. He met people recovering from opioid addiction in Dayton, Ohio, and hung out with a dairy farmer in Blanchardville, Wisconsin.

His first resolution, in 2009, was also focused on his job: wear a tie every day.

"That first year the economy was in a deep recession and Facebook was not yet profitable," <a href="https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104380170714571?pnref=story">Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday</a>. "We needed to get serious about making sure Facebook had a sustainable business model. It was a serious year, and I wore a tie every day as a reminder."

But many of his resolutions focused more on personal growth - the kind of resolutions that any of us might make. Here's the full list, in case you need inspiration to take on a New Year's resolution of your own:

<ul><li>2009: Wear tie daily</li><li>2010: Learn Mandarin</li><li>2011: Be a vegetarian or only eat meat if he killed the animal himself.</li><li>2012: Code daily</li><li>2013: Meet a non-Facebook person every day</li><li>2014: Write a thank-you note daily</li><li>2015: Read a book every two weeks</li><li>2016: Build an artificial intelligent app for his home and run 365 miles</li><li>2017: Meet someone from every state</li><li>2018: Focus on fixing Facebook's abuse problems.</li><li>2019: Hold public debates on the effects of technology on society. etc.</li><li>2020: No more public disclosures of annual goals but more focus on long-term projects.</li></ul>

Tech How Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg uses New Year's resolutions to improve himself

How Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg uses New Year's resolutions to improve himself

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Julie Bort

Articles written by the author

One of Google's new sexual-harassment policies could be the key to changing all of Silicon Valley's bro culture

Match Group's CEO audited the company's payroll to make sure she was paying women equally and was surprised at the results (MTCH)

How Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg uses New Year's resolutions to improve himself