FUTURE BAZAR ONLINE .com: women

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Saturday, October 13, 2007

Does Google’s Equality Drive Extend To Old People?

Google posted earlier today on its efforts towards building a workplace that provides equal treatment to all staff. Google noted that it has ranked highly on the U.S. Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index during a “time of rapid growth for our population of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees (whose group name is, naturally, Gayglers) around the world.”

Google’s inclusive work environment for GLBT employees should be commended, but does equality in Google extend to old people? Brian Reid doesn’t think so.

Reid is a former Google Director of Operations and Engineering and in now entering his third year of battling Google for unfair dismissal. Reid claims that despite receiving positive work reviews he was dismissed by Google after being told he was “slow”, “fuzzy”, “lethargic”, and did not “display a sense of urgency” and was told by a manager that his ideas were “obsolete” and “too old to matter”. Reid also noted in evidence that some of his colleagues referred to him as an “old man”, an “old guy” and an “old fuddy-duddy”.

It would appear that Reid did act in a fashion that was different to the general working ethos of Googlers. By his own admission Reid would leave work at 7pm and noted that he was regularly asked why he wasn’t remaining at work when Google provided dinner for its employees. An issue with diabetes also meant that Reid was required to eat at regular intervals, even when this meant interrupting meetings.

Google has denied the allegations, saying that Reid was let go after the project he was working on finished. An Appeals court has allowed the case to proceed with a trial date to be advised.

Monday, August 27, 2007

Damsels In Success: Networking For Professional Women

Damsels In Success has officially launched with a networking platform that is targeted strictly at professional women.

The service positions itself away from the usual range of social networking style clone sites by being more LinkedIn than MySpace and Facebook, with a dose of content chucked in for good measure.

Members are able to connect and discuss topics including job opportunities, entrepreneurship, mentoring, returning to work after parenting, gender issues in the workplace and more. The discussion forum is supplemented by a blog network of around 50 professional women who blog about issues related to…well, professional women. A job board also connects professional women with potential employers.

Suffice to say, being male I am totally unqualified to pass judgment on Damsels In Success. It’s certainly a well designed site with a clever name. Function wise it seemingly offers a variety of content that could make it a compelling site for professional women. I’ll let TechCrunch’s female readers be the ultimate judges in the comments.

Damsels in Success was founded by Harleen Kahlon, a former lawyer and executive recruiter, and is based in New York.

Monday, March 5, 2007