Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years

So, I have to wonder how the world would frame it had they fired him. Would the scandalous headline be, instead, "Google screws Android creator out of millions on flimsy excuse of unprovable sexual harassment claims"?

In settling on terms favorable to two of the men, Google protected its own interests. The company avoided messy and costly legal fights, and kept them from working for rivals as part of the separation agreements.

So, this is "good business" for reasons beyond my point above.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a woman and I spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to get taken seriously, make business connections, yadda. My experience/opinion/hypothesis is that, never mind that I'm a toothless gray-haired old hag, most men don't really want to engage me in meaty, meaningful discussion unless they are looking to sleep with me. And, in fact, engaging me in meaty, meaningful discussion seems to fairly frequently lead to men having the sudden realization that "I'd totally hit that. I'd hit that so very hard, good god."

I used to think I was all special. I'm not so sure these days. Maybe that's just how men react to a "deep" conversation with a woman. Because if it isn't pointless small talk and goes on for more than a minute (so to speak), that seems to be the routine outcome.

Later quote in the article about a different person at Google:

During the job interview, she said he told her that he and his wife were “polyamorous,” a word often used to describe an open marriage. She said he invited her to Burning Man, an annual festival in the Nevada desert, the following week.

To me, this should be straight up a firing offense. There is absolutely no (legitimate) reason whatsoever for telling someone in a job interview that the interviewer is "polyamorous."

I don't know what policy is these days, but, back in the day, an Army officer who had an affair with the wife of a lower ranking soldier in his unit would be busted down to E-1 and thrown in jail. It didn't matter if she swore up and down that it was consensual.

It is basically treated like statutory rape. Because of the nature of military work, he can have literal power of life and death over her husband, plus power over his career. The implication 'You will sleep with me or I will see to it that your husband winds up in a combat zone/ is ordered to his death/etc" does not need to be stated for the wife to know that turning down someone with that kind of power over her husband's very life could go very bad places for the man she swore to love for life.

So, it's illegal in a "We throw people in jail for that" kind of way in part for reasons of morale. An army can't function if the soldiers are worried they might be ordered to their death so some guy can get his damn freak on with their wife. That just absolutely doesn't work. Being an officer is a position of trust.

The stakes are not usually literally life and death at most jobs, but close enough. Being barred or blacklisted from being able to have a good job at all means you wind up homeless and starving, basically. In order to have the good life we expect in a developed country, you have to be able to get a good paying job (for most people -- I realize there are exceptions as some people inherit vast wealth).

I don't know the full answer for how to resolve this complicated problem. But I think it is clear that we need to get a whole lot clearer about the fact that powerful men on the job need to be explicitly educated about the fact that hitting on women at work is inherently problematic, and not just for the woman being asked.

I'm 53. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this problem space. I sometimes blog about it, largely for my own edification.

We are in a transition where the old rules really don't work and we haven't yet sorted out what does work. Historically, powerful men could have multiple lovers. If he could support them all, a mistress on the side tended to be culturally tolerated.

I think there are some valid reasons why, so I'm not saying "Those heathens!" I'm just saying we have this history and powerful men often have this expectation because it wasn't an unreasonable expectation at one time. But now it is turning into scandal for powerful men to behave that way. It's no longer being treated as their "just deserts."

And I think that is part of why it keeps getting swept under the rug. On some level, most folks know that a lot of these men grew up with this idea that if they made enough money, they could have multiple women and society would kind of wink and nod and look the other way, even if it wasn't officially approved. So it is a kind of unstated expectation of a longstanding social contract. There is lots of precedent for it.

When push comes to shove, I think a lot of folks are hesitant to burn men too badly for that for various reasons.