The Real Story Behind the 2018 Google Walkout

In 2018, Claire Stapleton was living in New York, raising a young child, and working at Google as a marketing manager. In October of that year, upset with how the company had handled sexual harassment claims, she helped organize what became known as the Women's Walkout. In this new excerpt from her book Don’t Be Evil, she explains how one Google Group helped start it all. On the Saturday after I started the womens-walk Google Group, I sprang awake at 6 and opened my laptop, stealing time before my son Malcolm stirred. My inbox was dotted with the usual weekend emails from my manager, Marion. We were in the middle of a big push involving Article 13, a piece of EU legislation that would hold platforms liable for user-generated content. I’d strenuously avoided learning the ins and outs of this particular bit of lobbyist infighting. But the drumbeat went on. “#SaveYourInternet!” we screeched from our Twitter and Instagram accounts, multiple times a day, with slick branded graphics. It was supposedly “top urgency,” despite being both inside baseball and counter to every brand goal we’d set for the year. I’d been at YouTube long enough to know the truth: If Google wanted this law overturned so badly, Article 13 was probably good for the world. The company didn’t want limits on growth, accountability, or liability; it wanted a frictionless, consequence-free internet and the endless consolidation of power that came with it. I couldn’t absorb Marion’s Saturday to-do list. My mind was consumed by the Women’s Walk. I refreshed the tab where I’d set up the new Google Group. An avalanche of names had joined— only a handful I knew. Most were strangers, and yet their presence felt like a new kind of belonging. I wasn’t overthinking anything; I was just writing, sending, doing. The energy was right there, primed. I typed an email—from my own account, my name fully attached, come what may. From: Claire Stapleton Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 6:46 am To: womens-walk *rolls up sleeves* welcome to ground zero of the google women’s walkout / a day without women (naming/branding tbd). couple of open Q’s for the group (200 of us and counting!) as we start to formulate the statement of purpose and next steps: what do you hope this collective action accomplishes (could be what we express/communicate to leadership, could be an action leadership agrees to take, could be a more existential cultural change we set into motion)? put another way: why are you here? thoughts on when we should do it? mindful of giving us enough time to make this as global, inclusive, and big as we can while also capitalizing on the rage-buzz-momentum we have flowing right now. there’s also the US midterms (a week from Tuesday) to consider. please forward to friends who’d be interested in getting involved. –claire Replies shuffled in all weekend. People wrote under their real names; the anonymity cloak was gone. The I’m so fucking mad emails gave way to discussions of culture, then strategy. We made our first decision almost immediately: The walkout would be Thursday, November 1—just five days away. The US midterms were November 6; waiting would dilute everything, especially our greatest asset: rage. What followed was a week at Google unlike any other. Here’s how it unfolded. The Walkout was all I wanted to work on, but there was the usual rigmarole first. Article 13 had momentarily faded, so we pivoted to a slate of uninspired Halloween tweets—special-effects makeup tutorials, a stop-motion pumpkin. The contrast between that bullshit and the walkout planning—with its electricity and urgency as women across Google convened—was almost psychedelic. A project manager named Tanuja reached out and offered to help. We met in a conference room in my building; she was hyper-organized, fired up, ready to project-manage the hell out of this. In 45 minutes, we outlined a rough plan and built an internal site: a “hub and spoke” model with local leads in every office, each customizing the day with their own stories and flair. Tanuja was another good girl pushed to the brink. Rule follower. Devoted worker. And now: ready to step out of line and not care who saw. I left the meeting fortified. This was what solidarity felt like—so different from the solitary, self-erasing “teamwork” I’d practiced for years. That night, as I cooked dinner for Malcolm and my husband, Shane, I took a call from a guy named Amr. He’d chimed in to the womens-walk group with a warning: Yes, we had a legally protected right to organize, but Google would likely push back hard. It was bracing to hear aloud: The company was almost certainly monitoring us, taking note. Amr described himself as an “entry-level engineer,” which was a bit of shtick but also refreshing—the rare person at Google who didn’t care about posturing their seniority, calling themselves a “global head” of whatever microscopic-in-the-grand-scheme project they’d been assigned to. He was incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about organizing—he had organized restaurant workers in the South after college with the Fight for $15 movement and had been involved in various activist causes at Google since the day he joined. He referred to management as “the bosses,” a phrase I’d never heard in the company’s Disneyland of techno-optimism. He told me we had an obligation to use our privilege to check Google’s power. The directness of that sentence alone was disorienting. Amr, along with a woman named Meredith Whittaker, had been organizing opposition to Maven, the Department of Defense project that used Google’s AI for drone surveillance and targeting. I’d heard her name for years—she was known as a rare example of actual moral clarity inside Google. We had mutual friends, and she was a fellow Californian who’d joined Google at roughly the same golden-era moment I had. Meredith had a mane of wild brown curls and dressed in head-to-toe black, a cross between a philosopher and a downtown artist. She carried a grounded, almost zen steadiness—but sharpened at the edges. She was a serious yoga practitioner, and that same flexibility showed in her mind. Google had even flown her to Mountain View to debate Vint Cerf, the so-called father of the internet, about Maven in front of a live audience of Googlers. She’d built an airtight case for why Google had no business building the machinery of war—why a company supposedly founded on “Don’t be evil” could not, in good conscience, lend its algorithms to lethal systems. Vint, for his part, gave the classic techno-utopian line about technology being a neutral tool like a hammer. It landed like a damp paper towel. She wiped the floor with him. People were still talking about it. Meeting Meredith and Amr felt like discovering a subterranean conscience under the Google I’d known—a network of people who had been resisting and organizing. And I couldn’t help thinking: Where was all this while I was quietly drowning, trying to grapple with the moral dissonance of my work alone? Amr was openly skeptical of us doing a walkout—it was too big, too fast, even if he had to concede the train had already left the station. One of his organizing maxims was that you have to know where people are: politically, emotionally, and—most crucially—what they’re willing to risk. Traditional organizing, he said, starts at one lunch table and spreads sideways from there. You build tight bonds, real solidarity, because when things get hard—and they will—you need people who will stand with you. There were no shortcuts. And yet, we had momentum. People were G-chatting me constantly, offering support, asking how they could get involved. But Amr’s questions stuck with me. Why was everyone so fired up now? What exactly were they reacting to? I wanted to understand the contours of that rage. So on Monday night, I emailed the listserve with a simple prompt and a Google Form: “Why are you walking out?” We got 350 responses. Here are a few: My director pressured women into wearing high heels regularly and openly, pressured overweight women on the team to “hit the gym, be athletic,” and referred to our clients as “battered women” because they “keep coming back” regardless of how we treat them. He required that we walk a certain speed around the office. He told a joke one morning to the managers only that my manager repeated to me: his son had asked him what being gay meant. He told him, “it’s when a boy wants to be a girl.” At team outings, he’d routinely refer to anyone not drinking as “pussies.” He referred to the only African American person on the team as “dark horse.” He said in a 1:1 that he believed many men on the team “had small dicks.” There was an off-site at a resort. During the off-site, the director and the team, including his ABP [associate business partner a.k.a. assistant], were having drinks. There were a few male non-Googlers at the resort as well that they hung out with. The ABP retired for the night. The director facilitated, somehow, getting the ABP’s room key into the hands of the non-Googlers, who were all very inebriated. The non-Googlers entered her room while she was sleeping and attempted to climb into bed with her. She successfully kicked them out of the room without being attacked. What followed was an official HR investigation across the org. Two men on the team lied to HR to try and cover up any wrongdoing from the director. It’s unclear whether they did this on their own or were pressured from the director to lie. Shortly after the investigation, the ABP left the company. I was instructed by my former manager to never report anything to HR in order to protect myself and my career, and I believed her and continue to believe her. The director has since been promoted 3 times. I was working on a Google UK team with a terrible “boys club” culture. One day the women came in and the boys had left to go do a stereotypical “male” sports activity. We were horrified that we hadn’t been included or informed. Due to my persuasion, we wrote a letter to HR. Nothing happened. The next day, the manager called the women into his office 1 by 1, all younger women than me, and he was furious. Every one of them came out crying, regretted writing the letter, and said they would never interact with HR again, and that we should never have said anything. I felt so ashamed I had brought this on them. When I took a sick leave and came back, my manager did not want to work with me and asked me to leave his team. He said if I stayed longer my performance ratings were going to drop. I went to the VP, several senior folks in the team and did not get support. HR investigated the case and talked to 2 folks who were not even connected with the case and closed it. As part of the investigation they told me that the manager acted in bad taste but due to Business needs his decision was right. During this process I found another role. Since I found a job, they said they were not taking action. Also as part of closing the investigation they threatened that if I talk to anyone about this I will be terminated. The Manager is still at Google, has harassed or treated several more women on his team badly. He’s been promoted multiple times. I’m a woman of color. I was underleveled and took a 20% pay cut when I joined Google. After 3 years, and 2 successful promotions, I’m finally going to be making the same base salary as I did prior to working at Google (but inflation and cost of living changes will still render me worse off). I am in HR. I come to work and fight for fairness and improvement for Googlers every day. Who is fighting for me? It was a stunning, sobering monument of disillusionment, capturing all sorts of anecdotes and reflections on a culture of discrimination, gaslighting, retaliation, ethical breaches, punitive managers, bad HR. If I could boil all these responses down to a single question, it might be: When did you first notice the gap between what you believed Google to be—progressive, equitable, fair, good—and what you actually see and experience every day? I kept the tab open and read them as they came in, one by one, clicking back to the tab all day as I did other stuff. As I look back now, it’s so clear to me this was the turning point. I came up the ranks as a corporate storyteller, a buoy of the company narrative. The foundation of that work, the frame of it, is the belief that telling Google’s story would help usher in a better world. Some people have always understood that was bullshit, or propaganda. But you can’t really do the work if you think that way. You have to believe, as I did, that Google (and all technology companies) is essential to progress, is making the world a better place. But now it was undeniable: Those stories, those narratives, those “values” were doing the opposite. They were a veil, cover, PR glossing over the rot. And what was Google’s business really adding to the world, at the end of the day? Ads. A surveillance empire. The scaffolding of attention capture and influence. We would make people’s stories—the real ones, not the sanitized internal versions—the centerpiece of the walkout. Maybe, like Christine Blasey Ford’s story, they wouldn’t topple anything. But they could puncture the myth. And, I realized, sometimes that’s where real change starts. Excerpted from the book Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape From Big Tech by Claire Stapleton. Copyright © 2026 by Claire Stapleton. To be published on August 4, 2026, by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission. [Image text:] WORKER DON'T HI TECH NOT OK GOOGLE RIGHTS out Walkout ALCHANGE RREAL CHANGE ARE WOMEN'S MYOUTRAGE CANTET DON TECH NOT OK RIGHTS OU Walkout RREALCHANGE