Meredith Whittaker, founding father of Google’s Open Research Group and one of many leaders of final 12 months’s worker walkouts, is leaving the corporate. Google confirmed her departure, which was first disclosed on Twitter by a Google engineer and reported by Bloomberg, however had no extra remark. TechCrunch has additionally contacted Whittaker for remark.
Whittaker and one other one of many walkout’s organizers, Claire Stapleton, mentioned they’d confronted retaliation from Google after the protest. Other workers additionally claimed that they’d skilled fallout on account of their participation, which Google denied.
Thousands of workers world wide took half within the large walkout final November to protest how Google handles sexual harassment and misconduct allegations. They requested the corporate to implement a number of measures towards harassment and discrimination, together with an finish to pressured arbitration, a publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report and a secure and nameless course of to report sexual misconduct.
The walkout got here after a New York Times report that regardless of credible allegations of sexual misconduct towards Android co-creator Andy Rubin, he had left Google with a $90 million payout bundle.
Over the previous 12 months, Google workers have additionally protested Project Dragonfly, the corporate’s censored search engine for China, and its contract with the Pentagon for using its AI tech to investigate drone movies. Google introduced in June it could not renew the contract.
Whittaker, who’s co-director of AI Now, an ethics committee affiliated with New York University, tweeted on the time that she was “incredibly happy about this decision, and have a deep respect for the many people who worked and risked to make it happen. Google should not be in the business of war.”
