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April 22, 2005
Anne Galloway on Google Girls
Anne has some fun with Google's well-intentioned but slightly off-key effort to recruit more women:
...Watch out for that non-intellectual appetite: when you're not attending tech-talks with the boys, you're likely to be eating the amazing food and putting on the dreaded Google 15 (pounds). Thank goodness Google also has a gym so you can work that ass off!
If you're just coming out of school, we'll make sure you have an easy transition! You can work flexible hours, find a female mentor and Google's belief in the importance of work/life balance means you get laundromats - but guys, Don't steal the Undies!! - and excellent child care so the whole family can actually live at Google while you work...
So adventurous-women-geeks, if you're looking for a place that embodies the culture, philosophy and personality of the company's founders - and really, who can resist a man that understands high heels?! - then Go Google!
Posted by Foe at 06:27 AM in Organizations | Permalink
Comments
This makes it look as though the text is taken from Google's recruitment site, but in fact it's a rather tendentious paraphrasing of a recruitment video that isn't billed as specifically for women, but that does show almost nothing but women.
I think Anne's being rather harsh on them - I thought the video was pretty good. Anne emphasises and ridicules things that were either not really in the video or they were small - the undies joke is stupid, for instance, but it's a shot of a note on the whiteboard "Don't pinch undies!", not a voiceover making a stupid joke. Sure they could have and probably should have left it out. It's a male joke - most women probably don't enjoy the thought of their undies being stolen by workmates.
Nobody talked about living at Google - they talked about providing childcare at work and being able to work flexible hours, doing some of the work after kids are asleep at home. And the multicultural thing was never said, they simply interviewed a female Latin American (I guess) engineer.
Isn't that exactly what we WANT? How could they have done this better?
Posted by: Jill at Apr 23, 2005 5:04:20 AM
Oh, and I should have read the trackback before posting!
Yes, like Ana, I was appalled at the section on maternity leave. As Ana writes:
>
I often find myself dreaming of working at Google - until I read about the parental leave. I mean, I realise that's way better than most other companies in the US, but jesus, that's not saying much.
Posted by: Jill at Apr 23, 2005 5:07:33 AM
