Inside the 2018 Google Women's Walkout: How a Single Group Sparked Global Protest

Claire Stapleton recounts how a modest Google Group she launched in October 2018 grew into the catalyst for the company-wide women’s walkout.

In October 2018, Claire Stapleton, a marketing manager at Google living in New York, woke early to find a newly created Google Group for women swelling to about 200 members, all dissatisfied with the company’s response to sexual-harassment complaints. She sent an email the same morning calling for a collective action, proposing November 1 as the walkout date to capture momentum before the November 6 U.S. midterms. Collaborating with project manager Tanuja, they built an internal coordination hub, while activist engineer Amr and AI researcher Meredith Whittaker offered strategic guidance and highlighted broader ethical concerns such as Google’s Maven defense-AI project.

The narrative also references the internal push to support EU Article 13 and the clash between Google’s public “don’t be evil” mantra and its internal culture of sexism and retaliation. Stapleton reflects on how the walkout exposed systemic issues and aimed to puncture the myth of Google’s progressive image. The passage is excerpted from her forthcoming book “Don’t Be Evil.”