I can't read the whole article, but does it (or DOL documents) include details like amount of experience and job function?
I've heard that much (not all) of the aggregate gap (i.e., on the national level) goes away after controlling for those variables.
Curious if that applies here, and if so, to what degree.
Edit: consider recent headlines promoting outrage at Marissa Mayer's successor earning double her salary because he's a man. Turns out he's a veteran executive with 20 years of C-level experience. Mayer didn't have that. It may be an extreme example, but it's a good reminder to be cautious about pay gap assertions.
DoL has NOT reached any conclusion. DoL has a suspicion based on 2015 snapshot of salaries. They want to understand why there's a disparity. It may or may not be due to a gender wage gap but for that conclusion to be reached you need to have access to data they have requested from Google.
No, they DoL is not stating anything like conclusions. Read through the court documents again.
> Wipper said the department found pay disparities in a 2015 snapshot of salaries and said officials needed earlier compensation data to evaluate the root of the problem and needed to be able to confidentially interview employees.
They found pay disparities in a 2015 snapshot and now want to investigate further.
> Does it include details like amount of experience and job function
The DoL hasn't released any data to back up their claim. Up to what is published for the moment, it's a blanket, overly broad, unsustained accusation by the DoL which makes the IT market look bad.
I'm appalled that no journalist (whether the WSJ or the others who relayed the info) do their work of putting the claims in perspective, and instead, just quote the nationwide non-normalized averages.
What you heard is an apology for sexism. Almost all structural/systematic discrimination can be controlled out of your comparison if you normalize it for the factors of the, er, structural/systematic discrimination.
Nope. The pay differences are often themselves used as a reinforcement of sexism, rather than as a recognition of net contribution. It's one of the mechanisms of systematic discrimination.
NB: not commenting on whether this an issue at Google specifically.
Leaving the workforce is generally believed to negatively impact people of every gender's ability to contribute productively. If you want to claim that women or types of absences specific to women are special, the burden of proof is on you.
EDIT: I see you've removed the claim I was addressing in an edit. Wish I'd quoted it.
Yeah, because it masked my main point. I'm happy to answer for it though. That "general belief" is simply another systematic problem. I've left the workforce numerous times to go do something interesting (defining the initial parameters of a new human life definitely fall into this category, but that's not the only social construction that can pull women out of the workforce), and it's increased my skill-set every time. As a result the idea that a gap on someone's CV is a negative is grossly antithetical to me when hiring, but I've heard it far too often from other managers who expect their teams to be, essentially, slaves to a corporate machine.
My point of view on gender role & pay disparity reinforcement mechanisms in institutional structures is often dramatically unpopular with traditional managers, but since my teams get results I don't care.
>I've left the workforce numerous times to go do something interesting (defining the initial parameters of a new human life definitely fall into this category, but that's not the only social construction that can pull women out of the workforce), and it's increased my skill-set every time.
Well, these are not the types of leaves we're discussing.
Besides this is anecdotal at best. It's not like most "gaps on a CV" lead to "increased skill-sets".
Most gaps on a CV are due to someone going off to do something else interesting, like study, or see the world and meet new types of people, or to deal with some major life challenge or event, all of which I correlate to increased professional utility. If someone can't see or use that, they're a poor manager.
Studying? Major life challenges? Those are not the kinds of gaps that are applicable to this discussion. The gaps the parents alludes to are taking time off working to be with the kids and such. And those are not especially correlated to any "increased professional utility".
And even the ones you mention, with the exception of studing, most of what you described would still be either irrelevant or detrimental to "professional utility". The typical white-upper-middle-class "trip to see the world" is more of a Gen-X/millenial cliche than some eye-opening cultural experience.
You clearly have some entrenched (and false) opinions about how talent and capability develops, some huge blind spots about the reasons for women's moves in and out of the workforce, and deep preconceptions about what people should and shouldn't be doing.
Since that reveals a rigid thinker, I will not bother to debate.
>Part of this is due to the fact that gender roles are lagging behind labor force trends.
The study you linked looked specifically at the USA, which is very much behind the rest of the civilized world when it comes to gender equality. Other countries have solved this problem of gender discrimination by mandating paternity leave as well as maternity leave.
I can't find the source but I read something recently that said that after controlling for position and experience the pay gap is around 7%. Off the cuff, I find that to match my intuition. If you could hire women engineers for 80% of the equivalent man, then all companies would wan't to hire every other companies women at 90% of equivalent because they would still be getting a deal and the women would get a big pay bump. This is not happening.
There is a pay gap and we should fix that. It is also very likely to vary widely in different industries. I also wonder if it all really caused by closed minded hirers who pay women less because they are going to be "too emotional" or other such nonsense.
Of course that is the reason. People aren't underpaying women because they think they can get away with it to save money, they under pay because they think the women is worth less than an equivalent male.
> If you could hire women engineers for 80% of the equivalent man, then all companies would wan't to hire every other companies women at 90% of equivalent because they would still be getting a deal and the women would get a big pay bump. This is not happening.
Of course it's not happening, because according to your own response, people of both genders who have less experience get paid less.
People get paid in accordance with their experience. There is no arbitrage opportunity.
People get paid in accordance with their cultural presentation, their self-confidence, their political skills, and their ability to display tempered aggression when valuing themselves and seeking pay rises.
There's some correlation with experience, but experience is often not the primary determinant of pay.
I make about 10% less than my co-worker. We were hired for the exact same position with the same amount of experience (hired out of school). I just did not negotiate as well as he did.
I think trying to fully equalize pay (outside any obvious pay gap like women making 80% compared to men) across the board will remove the ability to negotiate.
Yup. I suspect if we remove the ability to negotiate such that everyone with the same title or at the same level gets paid equally that there will be an increase in the number of titles and levels to compensate. If that doesn't happen at the very least those candidates who believe they are worth more will not negotiate the salary but negotiate the title instead.
Exactly. I think this would end up like the restaurants that tried out a no-tipping policy. All of their best servers left and turnover went from low to incredibly high. The best engineers would negotiate on title, or ask for creation of a new title, or just go somewhere that would allow that.
That 7% isn't uniform through all age groups. At below age 25 women at the some education and position earn more than men. from age 25-35 the wage gap reverts, and from age 35 and up men earn more than women. With a work force that generally starts at age 20 and stop work at around age 60 the total result gives you that 7%.
I'm not sure how to fix it because it is such a human thing. Women might need to learn to be more aggressive in negotiation or come with more detail salary numbers to demand higher wages. In some industries though, there is an excess of workers and that will always make the gap worse as people will take what they can get. I think the best step forward is that in as many companies as possible, women who are in a position of management to fight to make sure that all the women in their groups are being treated as fairly as the men.
What's your source on a gap with higher earning women below age 25? All I can find is http://www.aauw.org/files/2017/01/spring2017-the-simple-trut... which doesn't control for education or position, but with women going to college in higher numbers than men...
I can't find any statistics that show women out-earning men, at any age or education level, in the US.
I'm a woman and fairly aggressive and experienced negotiator. When I negotiate for myself, I find the gap is about 10%. When I used to work as an agent and I was negotiating on the behalf of others, it was the exact opposite. I was able to get my clients about 10% more with less work even though I was less skilled at negotiation than other agents. If I was better, I'm curious if I could've gotten 15% or 20%.
In tech though, I end up making more money than my male co-workers because engineers in general are such terrible negotiators.
It's very hard to find female engineers at all, but many years ago (before Glassdoor) I did manage to interview at one company (~200 employees) with 25% female engineers. Their offer was 40-60% of market value and their benefits were awful. My guess is that the men at that company were making 60%, and women 50%.
I interviewed at another company where there were 100 women employees. The only men were the 3 founders, all 10 warehouse workers, and all 4 on the tech team. Interviewed with the founder and I got an offer. It was low but I could not get him to budge a dime so I turned him down. He called over 6 times after that trying to get me to take the job. He seemed genuinely confused about why I wouldn't take it. I'm pretty sure he was a very nice and reasonable boss with the one exception of pay. He was just delusional in that department.
I interviewed at a ton of these companies almost none of them are thinking "Haha! We can get away with paying our workers 70% of market value," instead they are truly deluded. I think women are more likely to just accept the low pay and not negotiate at all.
When interviewing, I used to just get this intuitive feeling like "I don't think this place pays well," and it took me many years to realize what I was just seeing was too many female employees.
Most people are unaware of their own implicit bias. Others who share the same implicit bias will also see no problem whatsoever. It is the people who get stepped on by it that notice it.
I think this is a big part of why discussions about things like sexism typically are shit shows. The people doing stupid stuff honestly do not see it and feel wrongfully accused. The people getting crapped on by it tend to feel "Are you fucking kidding me???!!!! This is painfully obvious!!!!"
> I've heard that much (not all) of the aggregate gap (i.e., on the national level) goes away after controlling for those variables.
The question you may ask here however is: Does it matter? I mean I agree that it matters from "getting the facts straight", but maybe not necessarily from the conclusions.
If the pay gap is due to less experience, less education etc., then you're seeing effects of earlier discrimination in society. Shouldn't it be the responsibility of the society to compensate for that?
That's blasphemy. You are only allowed to think that physiology and millions of years of different evolutionary developments are totally irrelevant, and that this is the year zero: all divergent cultural and historical choices between the sexes were only and solely the result of oppression and discrimination, and sexes only differ in having different reproductive organs.
What if that same excuse has been used as far back as you choose to look for all sorts of discrimination? It's not that it can't possibly be right, but it's a hypothesis to be forced to, not to grab and promote above all others. And we just haven't been forced to it yet.
> If the pay gap is due to less experience, less education etc., then you're seeing effects of earlier discrimination in society.
No, it can also be due to interests/innate biological differences. Women firefighters/professional athletes would be paid less than males, all other things considered, because women generally have less strength and athletic ability than men do.
If there is a group of people who perform jobs better than another group, yes, they should be paid more.
Last I checked, there's no peer reviewed studies about effectiveness/ability in nebulous characteristics such as "better with kids" and "caring". However, there are tests that measure your physical aptitude/upper body strength.
Considering that physical standards are different between genders[0] why would they expect the same pay?
I can't wait to see Googles response. I have no idea why they would even open themselves up to this criticism when they could easily align the salaries.
Google basically claims they have internal programs and have reached pay parity globally. The DoL says that's not true based on the data they've viewed. There seems to be a lot of lawyer scaremongering on both sides, I'd wait for this case to progress more before choosing a side.
They responded and denied it; frankly it's plausible that they're correct (but also that they're not). It's not yet fair to assume one party is correct over the other while both try to drive the media presentation. Let it play out.
I would lean towards both being correct depending on how they looked at the data. If you did purely education level, degree field and years of experience related to position then I would expect minimal deviation. However, you can go further tweaking how you look at each of those variables.
Google already responded, they essentially claim there is no gap, that there was one in the past but that they worked very hard to close that gap. They also question the governments methods to arrive at their conclusions.
Without data to back up either position debate is pretty much meaningless.
DoL is suing Google to access for data in order to complete their evaluation of a pay gap. DoL suspects a pay disparity. It needs more data to come to a definition conclusion for which it asked Google and was denied access.
Can someone who actually has access to the story answer the following questions for me. Is this before or after controlling for:
- field of work. Is this the whole company or just devs?
- years at the company.
- age, as a crude proxy for total experience at all companies.
Also does it say the magnitude of the gap?
There's a number of ways this headline could be true, all may be unfortunate from a societal perspective, but it only shows bias on Google's part if this is after controlling for the things companies say they base their pay on.
Seems like it is early days on this lawsuit. The DoL are asking for more documentation about employee's pay and Google is calling it a "fishing expedition." This is definitely one to watch, but I won't be drawing any conclusions this early in this lawsuit (since even the DoL say they need more documentation to prove their case).
Note that this is not originally a WSJ story; for those without a subscription, you'll learn just as much by reading from the same news source that WSJ is commenting on (and which they link to in this article):
Of course, when I say "just as much" I mean "not much", because neither party has released anything substantive to rebut the other's claims. Until then, the court of public opinion is going to be both passionate and completely uninformed. But if I'm being cynical, that's probably the point of reporting on it at this stage.
What is that Google would gain from this? Not that they are strapped for money. It could only lead to such bad publicity. And if the women engineers were hired by Google, they obviously are good at it. Can't understand the rationale behind it, if true.
Companies like google are obsessed with diversity. The idea that they'd systematically pay women less is laughable - you will not find more liberal environments outside of academia.
I can't help but wonder if this is politically motivated.
It is hard to discern what is going on, and it feels strange to say I trust Google ahead of the government.
Google is full of engineers who prize logic and fairness above most else, and culturally most the engineers I meet in most places espouse gender parity and equality. In light of this, it is hard to believe Google would not find a way to even up payscales. That said, while non-management says one thing it is often the case that management find a way to enact the opposite.
Something in me feels like this has the air of a dirty underhanded PR-war to it, and the government is trying to pressure Google into something we don't know about...
While I generally agree with your main point, I have witnessed engineers who espouse equality publicly until their own remuneration is the topic of discussion, at which point self-interest kicks in and "of course I should earn more than A, because x, y, z ..." becomes the private narrative.
While a lot of progress has been made in reducing the gender wage gap in tech, we still have a long way to go.
Of course everyone tries to have the best salary possible, the same is expected for both men and women and that's a good thing.
I mean, even if I'm willing to get a hit on my salary in the name of gender equality, I'm pretty sure the money will go in upper management's pocket and not my female counterparts.
> "of course I should earn more than A, because x, y, z ..."
Unless "x, y, and z" include "because I'm a man and she's a woman" then I don't really understand your point. Of course most employees think they're underpaid, and they can all come up with reasons, due to performance on the job, specific incidents, experience, and level of education why they should be paid more.
How is that related at all to gender wage gap in any industry, let alone tech specifically?
I agree. Google is one of the companies with the other big cos that take diversity and pay gaps very seriously. This is a very bold claim by DOL and Wsj publishing it just for eye balls says a lot about our government and journalists nowadays.
"Make outrageous stories for readers so they click ads"
Google is in the core of Silicon Valley, extremely liberal, socially conscious, etc. etc., pretty much from top to bottom. To be honest, if the government were correct here my reaction to this news isn't a renewed belief in the need to do better... my reaction is that if even Google, hypothetically (since I'm not assuming that Google is necessarily wrong), couldn't manage to have equal pay, with all of its immense resources, its obvious desire to handle this correctly for all kinds of reasons, and with all of the money that is metaphorically sloshing down every hallway for them, it's time to just pack it in and give up on the idea of doing any better than Google. (Note that doesn't mean everybody else is "done", but that they shouldn't be expected to do any better than Google.) That would imply to me and probably most people that apparently this problem is just unsolvable past this point; what is anyone else who isn't as abundantly resourced as Google supposed to do that Google isn't already doing?
I'm actually inclined to believe Google on this one moreso than a government, because as much as for any other company in the world they have the resources to create a reasonable definition of parity and then not particularly blink to achieve that parity by simply paying certain people more, with no other compromises needed. (Most companies would need some sort of compromise to use that plan, because one way or another the books need to balance.)
(And please do me the favor of reading this message carefully again if you're really enraged by it and want to just smash the downvote button... if that's your reaction you may need to double-check your reading.)
This isn't just the WSJ, also the LA times and Guardian have similar stories, all based on the recent court appearance (just search using that headline).
It's a reasonable topic to report on, the government is accusing of Google of "extreme" (in their words) discrimination.
DoL suspects pay disparities and asks for more data from Google to see if their suspicion is true or false. Google refuses access to the data. DoL takes Google to court for access to data.
It sounds like they have more than just a suspicion,
> “We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” Janette Wipper, a DoL regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa... (no pay wall)
Methodology is important here. A lot of the logic behind pay gap talk assumes that the jobs men and women do in the same company are exactly the same, as if these are assembly line jobs and worker output can be compared in a direct and straightforward manner. Anyone who works in tech knows that what each person contributes varies greatly and there's no way to directly compare what two people do or even the amount of experience they bring to the table when they're hired.
Assuming labor markets are liquid, if the pay gap is true it means either:
1. Women really want to work for Google and take less pay than working at other employers or
2. Women at almost all employers are receiving less money.
There were times not too long ago when there were Jewish quotas. Nobelist Physicist Richard Feynman was denied entry into Columbia and he went to MIT instead.
Nobelist Medicine & Physiology Author Kornberg was one of 3 of 200 Jewish applicants to get into medical school from his university.
Those universities/firms that didn't have Jewish quotas and discrimination got a good boost in performance over those who had quotas and discrimination.
If they women are only getting paid less at Google and not other firms then they should change firms. If other firms are paying less, then Feds should go after them as well and not single out Google. Any firm that pays women as much as men should be able to hire the competent women from Google.
In another part of the WSJ article, there is a complaint that most of the employees are male and asian or white. They should examine the portion of people attending top engineering schools: male and asian or white.
In an era of slavery, many would not. In an era of Jim Crow and segregation, many would not. In the era of the 60s civil rights movement, many would not. In fact during those times a minority would hire for competence regardless of race.
Simply telling the discriminated to "go work somewhere else" is just encouraging those who discriminate, and is a lazy solution to a complex problem.
> '"go work somewhere else" is just encouraging those who discriminate, ...'
I once heard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who at age 28 was the youngest full professor in Harvard law history, say that he didn't get one job offer from 40 different white shoe law firms. His lawyer son when interviewing did far better.
Today's marketplace is way too competitive to discriminate. Those who discriminate simply allow the competition to get better talent. Nobody should work in a workplace where they are not wanted when there are workplaces that would want them.
> Those universities/firms that didn't have Jewish quotas and discrimination got a good boost in performance over those who had quotas and discrimination.
Counterpoint: a recent study suggested that corporate boards with gender quotas worked better, because it meant they didn't overlook competent female executives in favour of mediocre male ones.
Doesn't that counterpoint still fall prey to the same problem of isolating only a correlated variable? I.e., having qualified female board members could confer a competitive gender advantage, but putting women on the board regardless of their hiring prowess doesn't guarantee similar results.
The thing with quotas like this is that they're not being put on the board “regardless of their hiring prowess”. You hire the best people you can find of both genders.
Sometimes that will mean a less qualified person will be put there who otherwise wouldn't, but that's by no means a guarantee. And it cuts both ways: if sexism meant that previously, better candidates who happened to be women were not getting hired, now they will be; on the other hand, the quota may mean that better candidates who happen to be men won't be hired.
>Those universities/firms that didn't have Jewish quotas and discrimination got a good boost in performance over those who had quotas and discrimination.
I'm sympathetic to this point, but this particular example assumes that the discriminating entity is focusing solely on performance. Harvard and Yale maintained and increased their social cachet over non-discriminating entities like MIT and Cornell by instituting Jewish quotas. Future donors from the majority demographic were willing to pay for "culture fit". This supposedly irrational strategy worked so well that it has been reprised and copied by other institutions against other demos. Inefficiency can be remarkably persistent if it enjoys the status of a social norm and satisfies other values.
It would be surprising and novel if the DoL statisticians had produced an unambiguous correct analysis. They're working in a complex field, and under pressure and regulated to use the wrong tools in many cases---so I'm sure plenty of the people there are excellent and could do great work---DoL statistics in general are not a good basis for action.
Example: DoL is required by law to track non-white applicants and hiring to jobs. Alice is not white, and applies to ten open jobs at Example.com, a hot new startup. She's hired for one. DoL reports this as 90% of non-white applicants being rejected. If 10 non-white applicants each apply for all those ten jobs and are all hired, one job each, that's 90% rejection.
A mix of law and regulation requires counting this way. Near one edge case (plausibly including SV today!) the error doesn't matter much. But as you get anywhere near justice, this isn't helpful.
So without seeing the details of this analysis, I'm skeptical that DoL's way of counting is helpful here.
I think you are constructing a strawman. If rejection statistics were indeed calculated as you describe, it would scale with the number of job seekers crossed with the demographic. I am going to go with DoL statisticians not being idiots.
Strawman or not, the public has a right to the methodology and criteria behind the DoL's claim, without which we are free to disbelieve their allegations without justifying ourselves.
What they're counting matters. It seems if Google has the goal of hiring more females than industry average, then the stats are stacked against them when you look at their worker pay distribution, even if Google isn't doing anything wrong.
Suppose the population is distributed in their experience and productivity, and that you can measure these to some extent.
Suppose your field has way more males than females. This is not your fault, more of a pipeline thing, but you want to be more equal internally than the outside world is. Most people commend this kind of thing.
If you are fairly paying both genders, wouldn't you necessarily have to take more unproductive and inexperienced female engineers to reach your goal? And if you're fairly paying based on those criteria, won't the female population be paid less as you try to take on a more-than-average number of them?
I'm not saying any of this is how it ought to be, just that it seems like a typical conclusion with napkin math, and would result in these allegations while Google is actually trying to do good.
Interestingly if equal pay were not a thing, I would expect the opposite headline: That Google would pay women much more than men to work so that they could attempt to correct a gender imbalance internally that exists in the external population (software workers).
> If you are fairly paying both genders, wouldn't you necessarily have to take more unproductive and inexperienced female engineers to reach your goal? And if you're fairly paying based on those criteria, won't the female population be paid less as you try to take on a more-than-average number of them?
If you are fairly paying both genders, it's fair to assume that women would be paid less statistically.
They usually retire from work mid-career for pregnancy and possibly for a much longer time to raise the child (when it's not the man doing it, and when the couple don't have a nursery/grandparent, etc...).
Retiring from work at the peak time for career growth is a disastrous move on one's income. (Be it a man or a woman).
> They usually retire from work mid-career for pregnancy and possibly for a much longer time to raise the child…
No. Here's how it actually works in a modern family unit in a high-earning, dual-income Silicon Valley household:
Mommy takes time off when babby is born, as does daddy because it's not 1960. At some point during this sabbatical help is hired, and then mommy and daddy go back to work and establish their new work/home balance. The end.
It's not conceptually that different than sabbaticals not involving babies. It certainly doesn't explain systemic pay discrimination.
I'm sure sabbaticals (and even vacations) hurt careers in some scenarios, at some companies. I was responding to the notion that this was "retirement", and unique to the woman.
> You don't get a raise and a bonus for being away 1 year when you are 25-30.
People take parental leave for weeks (6-8 is typical), not a year.
This is a strange position. On average every person should raise a family for the continuation of the humankind. Therefore this should affect everyone equally.
On average it affects all women equally because women are physically affected by the specifics of having babies. However, some men just choose to sacrifice their family life instead of lowering their pay rate one iota.
So you should see an effect on family income but divergences in gendered income.
Considering that there are probably hundreds of companies listed as Federal Contractors, and among them, the major Defense Contractors with thousands of employees. I would find it difficult to believe that Google has any grounds that would make them an exception to complying with the Federal requirement of submitting Compensation Data. From experience I can assure that Defense Contractors would have exploited any loophole or angle to relieve them of fulfilling this Federal requirement. Of note here is that Google was asked to submit this data back in September of 2015 and have been given numerous opportunities to meet their obligation. “Diversity and equal pay” of the workforce has been a very visible topic as of late, so you would think that Google would take a position of being in the forefront, and setting an example especially in the tech industry. It hasn’t been too long ago, Microsoft was being chastised for its apparent lack of diversity and equal pay. Google was not forced to be a Federal Contractor; they accepted that position and therefore accepted the responsibility of meeting the Federal requirement from the beginning. If Google had a problem then, they should have not accepted the responsibility of being a Federal Contractor. Maybe Google has taken the position that they are “Too Big to Comply” or they do have something to hide. But the old adage applies, “They knew what they were getting into in the first place”, and they undoubtedly accepted compensation.
I recommend reading some of the news that started this 3 months ago[0]. Quote from Google's response:
"However, the handful of OFCCP requests that are the subject of the complaint are overbroad in scope, or reveal confidential data, and we’ve made this clear to the OFCCP, to no avail. These requests include thousands of employees’ private contact information which we safeguard rigorously."
Again, Google entered into a contractual agreement to be compensated as a Federal Contractor. DoL's request is part of that contract. Google's stand for protecting private contact information is basically mute. The IRS also contains much of that information. I recommend reading the official complaint. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20170104
Yes me too ;-) But especially with women. Since reading "Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute" a long time ago I've applied this to myself.
The people who talk about the president on the tv and radio said this isn't a real thing. I'd check your fact sheet on this is could be one of those liberal based poll things with a slanted view!
The US Dept. of Labor is suing Google for not revealing compensation data [0].
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has suspicion on pay disparities and in order to investigate further sent a request to Google to access some records (Point 9) [1]. Google denied OFCCP access to these records. Now, DoL has taken Google to court to get access to the records they need to investigate further and complete their evaluation. I wonder why Google is being so evasive about it.
> I wonder why Google is being so evasive about it.
The article says that Google thinks the DOL is going on a fishing expedition. They turned over records, but like most private companies, don't like turning over records for no reason, especially about highly confidential information such as compensation packages.
> The article says that Google thinks the DOL is going on a fishing expedition.
That's because the system is designed in such a way. The DoL can't make a case without access to meaningful data. So, if the system is designed to make access difficult this is what we end up with.
> They turned over records
They did not turn over records - that's what the entire lawsuit is about as mentioned in the court documents.
I don't think so. The lawsuit clearly mentions that Google denied access to data. In fact, Google attorney is on record saying that we denied access too.
This is just stupid. Men make more 1) they can usually do the job better, and or are more driven b/c testosterone. 2) they are more likely to negotiate for a better salary.
Women have been complaining about being women for a hundred years now. It's been a disaster for the country.
This isn't popular, but women ought to spend more time acting like women and less trying to act like men. This is actually better for the economy. If a woman has twice as many kids instead of a career, in just one generation she will have made up for not being a full time employee. People underestimate how awesome and unique women are. Making kids is amazing and people act like there is something wrong with a woman for focusing on motherhood. It's good for the country, but ladies going on birth control is bad for the country. If you don't believe me, look at Japan. Their GDP is constantly shrinking because they have such a low birth rate. So why is the government complaining?
135 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI've heard that much (not all) of the aggregate gap (i.e., on the national level) goes away after controlling for those variables.
Curious if that applies here, and if so, to what degree.
Edit: consider recent headlines promoting outrage at Marissa Mayer's successor earning double her salary because he's a man. Turns out he's a veteran executive with 20 years of C-level experience. Mayer didn't have that. It may be an extreme example, but it's a good reminder to be cautious about pay gap assertions.
"The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry."
Pretty strong language when you aren't yet willing to back it up. Google's replies are equally strong in the other direction:
"Every year, we do a comprehensive and robust analysis of pay across genders and we have found no gender pay gap."
Saying there's no gender pay gap at all is pretty bold as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067113
"We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce"
That statement obviously depends on numbers they already have, and are not sharing.
> Wipper said the department found pay disparities in a 2015 snapshot of salaries and said officials needed earlier compensation data to evaluate the root of the problem and needed to be able to confidentially interview employees.
They found pay disparities in a 2015 snapshot and now want to investigate further.
I included the direct quote from the DoL that I was referring to when I said it sounded like a conclusion.
The DoL hasn't released any data to back up their claim. Up to what is published for the moment, it's a blanket, overly broad, unsustained accusation by the DoL which makes the IT market look bad.
I'm appalled that no journalist (whether the WSJ or the others who relayed the info) do their work of putting the claims in perspective, and instead, just quote the nationwide non-normalized averages.
NB: not commenting on whether this an issue at Google specifically.
EDIT: I see you've removed the claim I was addressing in an edit. Wish I'd quoted it.
My point of view on gender role & pay disparity reinforcement mechanisms in institutional structures is often dramatically unpopular with traditional managers, but since my teams get results I don't care.
Well, these are not the types of leaves we're discussing.
Besides this is anecdotal at best. It's not like most "gaps on a CV" lead to "increased skill-sets".
Most gaps on a CV are due to someone going off to do something else interesting, like study, or see the world and meet new types of people, or to deal with some major life challenge or event, all of which I correlate to increased professional utility. If someone can't see or use that, they're a poor manager.
And even the ones you mention, with the exception of studing, most of what you described would still be either irrelevant or detrimental to "professional utility". The typical white-upper-middle-class "trip to see the world" is more of a Gen-X/millenial cliche than some eye-opening cultural experience.
Since that reveals a rigid thinker, I will not bother to debate.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/01/women-more-t...
>Part of this is due to the fact that gender roles are lagging behind labor force trends.
The study you linked looked specifically at the USA, which is very much behind the rest of the civilized world when it comes to gender equality. Other countries have solved this problem of gender discrimination by mandating paternity leave as well as maternity leave.
There is a pay gap and we should fix that. It is also very likely to vary widely in different industries. I also wonder if it all really caused by closed minded hirers who pay women less because they are going to be "too emotional" or other such nonsense.
Of course it's not happening, because according to your own response, people of both genders who have less experience get paid less.
People get paid in accordance with their experience. There is no arbitrage opportunity.
There's some correlation with experience, but experience is often not the primary determinant of pay.
I think trying to fully equalize pay (outside any obvious pay gap like women making 80% compared to men) across the board will remove the ability to negotiate.
So what would a rational fix be to that?
I can't find any statistics that show women out-earning men, at any age or education level, in the US.
In tech though, I end up making more money than my male co-workers because engineers in general are such terrible negotiators.
It's very hard to find female engineers at all, but many years ago (before Glassdoor) I did manage to interview at one company (~200 employees) with 25% female engineers. Their offer was 40-60% of market value and their benefits were awful. My guess is that the men at that company were making 60%, and women 50%.
I interviewed at another company where there were 100 women employees. The only men were the 3 founders, all 10 warehouse workers, and all 4 on the tech team. Interviewed with the founder and I got an offer. It was low but I could not get him to budge a dime so I turned him down. He called over 6 times after that trying to get me to take the job. He seemed genuinely confused about why I wouldn't take it. I'm pretty sure he was a very nice and reasonable boss with the one exception of pay. He was just delusional in that department.
I interviewed at a ton of these companies almost none of them are thinking "Haha! We can get away with paying our workers 70% of market value," instead they are truly deluded. I think women are more likely to just accept the low pay and not negotiate at all.
When interviewing, I used to just get this intuitive feeling like "I don't think this place pays well," and it took me many years to realize what I was just seeing was too many female employees.
I think this is a big part of why discussions about things like sexism typically are shit shows. The people doing stupid stuff honestly do not see it and feel wrongfully accused. The people getting crapped on by it tend to feel "Are you fucking kidding me???!!!! This is painfully obvious!!!!"
And discussions get stuck right there.
The question you may ask here however is: Does it matter? I mean I agree that it matters from "getting the facts straight", but maybe not necessarily from the conclusions.
If the pay gap is due to less experience, less education etc., then you're seeing effects of earlier discrimination in society. Shouldn't it be the responsibility of the society to compensate for that?
No, it can also be due to interests/innate biological differences. Women firefighters/professional athletes would be paid less than males, all other things considered, because women generally have less strength and athletic ability than men do.
Perhaps there's a problem with this kind of generalisation. Can you see what it is?
Last I checked, there's no peer reviewed studies about effectiveness/ability in nebulous characteristics such as "better with kids" and "caring". However, there are tests that measure your physical aptitude/upper body strength.
Considering that physical standards are different between genders[0] why would they expect the same pay?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Physical_Fi...
Just a grammar note: the appropriate adjective in that clause is 'female', not 'women'.
Invert the genders: 'men firefighters'. Most readers would raise an eyebrow at that phrasing.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
Without data to back up either position debate is pretty much meaningless.
Google has done a lot of work internally to even up the gap and claims that they have achieved parity.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
Either party could squelch the un-informed debate by releasing the data and the methods used to arrive at their conclusions.
Just like the overall gender pay gap in the US, right?
Here a company is singled out with a very specific and easy to prove or falsify claim given the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067113
- field of work. Is this the whole company or just devs?
- years at the company.
- age, as a crude proxy for total experience at all companies.
Also does it say the magnitude of the gap?
There's a number of ways this headline could be true, all may be unfortunate from a societal perspective, but it only shows bias on Google's part if this is after controlling for the things companies say they base their pay on.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
Seems like it is early days on this lawsuit. The DoL are asking for more documentation about employee's pay and Google is calling it a "fishing expedition." This is definitely one to watch, but I won't be drawing any conclusions this early in this lawsuit (since even the DoL say they need more documentation to prove their case).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
Of course, when I say "just as much" I mean "not much", because neither party has released anything substantive to rebut the other's claims. Until then, the court of public opinion is going to be both passionate and completely uninformed. But if I'm being cynical, that's probably the point of reporting on it at this stage.
I can't help but wonder if this is politically motivated.
Google is full of engineers who prize logic and fairness above most else, and culturally most the engineers I meet in most places espouse gender parity and equality. In light of this, it is hard to believe Google would not find a way to even up payscales. That said, while non-management says one thing it is often the case that management find a way to enact the opposite.
Something in me feels like this has the air of a dirty underhanded PR-war to it, and the government is trying to pressure Google into something we don't know about...
While a lot of progress has been made in reducing the gender wage gap in tech, we still have a long way to go.
I mean, even if I'm willing to get a hit on my salary in the name of gender equality, I'm pretty sure the money will go in upper management's pocket and not my female counterparts.
Unless "x, y, and z" include "because I'm a man and she's a woman" then I don't really understand your point. Of course most employees think they're underpaid, and they can all come up with reasons, due to performance on the job, specific incidents, experience, and level of education why they should be paid more.
How is that related at all to gender wage gap in any industry, let alone tech specifically?
"Make outrageous stories for readers so they click ads"
I'm actually inclined to believe Google on this one moreso than a government, because as much as for any other company in the world they have the resources to create a reasonable definition of parity and then not particularly blink to achieve that parity by simply paying certain people more, with no other compromises needed. (Most companies would need some sort of compromise to use that plan, because one way or another the books need to balance.)
(And please do me the favor of reading this message carefully again if you're really enraged by it and want to just smash the downvote button... if that's your reaction you may need to double-check your reading.)
It's a reasonable topic to report on, the government is accusing of Google of "extreme" (in their words) discrimination.
DoL suspects pay disparities and asks for more data from Google to see if their suspicion is true or false. Google refuses access to the data. DoL takes Google to court for access to data.
> “We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” Janette Wipper, a DoL regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa... (no pay wall)
There were times not too long ago when there were Jewish quotas. Nobelist Physicist Richard Feynman was denied entry into Columbia and he went to MIT instead.
Nobelist Medicine & Physiology Author Kornberg was one of 3 of 200 Jewish applicants to get into medical school from his university.
Those universities/firms that didn't have Jewish quotas and discrimination got a good boost in performance over those who had quotas and discrimination.
If they women are only getting paid less at Google and not other firms then they should change firms. If other firms are paying less, then Feds should go after them as well and not single out Google. Any firm that pays women as much as men should be able to hire the competent women from Google.
In another part of the WSJ article, there is a complaint that most of the employees are male and asian or white. They should examine the portion of people attending top engineering schools: male and asian or white.
Only if that firm pays men and women more than Google pays (competent) women.
Simply telling the discriminated to "go work somewhere else" is just encouraging those who discriminate, and is a lazy solution to a complex problem.
I once heard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who at age 28 was the youngest full professor in Harvard law history, say that he didn't get one job offer from 40 different white shoe law firms. His lawyer son when interviewing did far better.
Today's marketplace is way too competitive to discriminate. Those who discriminate simply allow the competition to get better talent. Nobody should work in a workplace where they are not wanted when there are workplaces that would want them.
They shouldn't get away with illegally discriminating just because they are also making themselves less competitive.
Is like assuming a spherical cow.
Counterpoint: a recent study suggested that corporate boards with gender quotas worked better, because it meant they didn't overlook competent female executives in favour of mediocre male ones.
Sometimes that will mean a less qualified person will be put there who otherwise wouldn't, but that's by no means a guarantee. And it cuts both ways: if sexism meant that previously, better candidates who happened to be women were not getting hired, now they will be; on the other hand, the quota may mean that better candidates who happen to be men won't be hired.
I'm sympathetic to this point, but this particular example assumes that the discriminating entity is focusing solely on performance. Harvard and Yale maintained and increased their social cachet over non-discriminating entities like MIT and Cornell by instituting Jewish quotas. Future donors from the majority demographic were willing to pay for "culture fit". This supposedly irrational strategy worked so well that it has been reprised and copied by other institutions against other demos. Inefficiency can be remarkably persistent if it enjoys the status of a social norm and satisfies other values.
Example: DoL is required by law to track non-white applicants and hiring to jobs. Alice is not white, and applies to ten open jobs at Example.com, a hot new startup. She's hired for one. DoL reports this as 90% of non-white applicants being rejected. If 10 non-white applicants each apply for all those ten jobs and are all hired, one job each, that's 90% rejection.
A mix of law and regulation requires counting this way. Near one edge case (plausibly including SV today!) the error doesn't matter much. But as you get anywhere near justice, this isn't helpful.
So without seeing the details of this analysis, I'm skeptical that DoL's way of counting is helpful here.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+spreadsheet+compensation+le...
Suppose the population is distributed in their experience and productivity, and that you can measure these to some extent.
Suppose your field has way more males than females. This is not your fault, more of a pipeline thing, but you want to be more equal internally than the outside world is. Most people commend this kind of thing.
If you are fairly paying both genders, wouldn't you necessarily have to take more unproductive and inexperienced female engineers to reach your goal? And if you're fairly paying based on those criteria, won't the female population be paid less as you try to take on a more-than-average number of them?
I'm not saying any of this is how it ought to be, just that it seems like a typical conclusion with napkin math, and would result in these allegations while Google is actually trying to do good.
Interestingly if equal pay were not a thing, I would expect the opposite headline: That Google would pay women much more than men to work so that they could attempt to correct a gender imbalance internally that exists in the external population (software workers).
If you are fairly paying both genders, it's fair to assume that women would be paid less statistically.
They usually retire from work mid-career for pregnancy and possibly for a much longer time to raise the child (when it's not the man doing it, and when the couple don't have a nursery/grandparent, etc...).
Retiring from work at the peak time for career growth is a disastrous move on one's income. (Be it a man or a woman).
No. Here's how it actually works in a modern family unit in a high-earning, dual-income Silicon Valley household:
Mommy takes time off when babby is born, as does daddy because it's not 1960. At some point during this sabbatical help is hired, and then mommy and daddy go back to work and establish their new work/home balance. The end.
It's not conceptually that different than sabbaticals not involving babies. It certainly doesn't explain systemic pay discrimination.
This affects negatively many future years of income, because your future prospects are affected by your current job.
I'm sure sabbaticals (and even vacations) hurt careers in some scenarios, at some companies. I was responding to the notion that this was "retirement", and unique to the woman.
> You don't get a raise and a bonus for being away 1 year when you are 25-30.
People take parental leave for weeks (6-8 is typical), not a year.
So you should see an effect on family income but divergences in gendered income.
"However, the handful of OFCCP requests that are the subject of the complaint are overbroad in scope, or reveal confidential data, and we’ve made this clear to the OFCCP, to no avail. These requests include thousands of employees’ private contact information which we safeguard rigorously."
[0] https://www.law360.com/articles/877558/dol-sues-google-over-...
When advising women on interviewing I always suggest they ask for more money than they are comfortable with.
I do the same for men.
Saw a few guys jump ship recently for significant raises. Turns out they were badly underpaid :D
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has suspicion on pay disparities and in order to investigate further sent a request to Google to access some records (Point 9) [1]. Google denied OFCCP access to these records. Now, DoL has taken Google to court to get access to the records they need to investigate further and complete their evaluation. I wonder why Google is being so evasive about it.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20170104
[1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...
The article says that Google thinks the DOL is going on a fishing expedition. They turned over records, but like most private companies, don't like turning over records for no reason, especially about highly confidential information such as compensation packages.
That's because the system is designed in such a way. The DoL can't make a case without access to meaningful data. So, if the system is designed to make access difficult this is what we end up with.
> They turned over records
They did not turn over records - that's what the entire lawsuit is about as mentioned in the court documents.
Women have been complaining about being women for a hundred years now. It's been a disaster for the country.
This isn't popular, but women ought to spend more time acting like women and less trying to act like men. This is actually better for the economy. If a woman has twice as many kids instead of a career, in just one generation she will have made up for not being a full time employee. People underestimate how awesome and unique women are. Making kids is amazing and people act like there is something wrong with a woman for focusing on motherhood. It's good for the country, but ladies going on birth control is bad for the country. If you don't believe me, look at Japan. Their GDP is constantly shrinking because they have such a low birth rate. So why is the government complaining?
People are too easily deceived by love of money.