> The legal definitions of a hostile work environment is not simply based on how something makes you feel.
No, but the the entire point of that essay was to advance the idea that women are less successful because of their biology. [1]
> It is very unlikely a hostile work environment for not firing him based on this memo would win, though of course Google might choose to settle.
Any employment lawyers want to chime in on this?
[1] "For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."
I am not a lawyer. I'm just a guy who takes my employment rights seriously and has always tried to be up-to-date and understand them.
From my understanding, a hostile work environment is created when a reasonable person would interpret actions or speech as hostile, offensive, or intimidating, and such actions are not a one-time event, but frequent, severe, and pervasive, and they must be so serious as to change the conditions of your employment. Keeping in mind that terms like "reasonable person" are legal terms and we're not dealing in colloquialisms, it's hard to see how this memo could be interpreted by a judge as creating a hostile work environment.
Again, that's not to say people can't try to sue anyway, but in that case, there are plenty of people on the other side of the story Google should be worried about suing as well, since there appears to be some minority of (white, male) Google employees who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are persecuted due to their gender and race, and they also claim there are written communications at Google they interpret as denigrating them. I don't think they have much of a chance either.
No, but the the entire point of that essay was to advance the idea that women are less successful because of their biology. [1]
> It is very unlikely a hostile work environment for not firing him based on this memo would win, though of course Google might choose to settle.
Any employment lawyers want to chime in on this?
[1] "For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."