Not intending to detract from this article or the merits here. Congratulations to her for pushing forward.
Can a man sue on similar grounds? I have a friend who’s been passed up for promotion several times while women were given greater titles. The company actually gave him an equivalent raise to assuage him, but he still doesn’t have a fancy title despite doing equivalent work. It’s basically an open secret they’re doing this for gender parity. This is at a Fortune 500.
Maybe but I imagine his future at the company will be strained after this. Is he willing to do this on exit? Since there is no financial issue I’m not sure what he would win.
Suing while continuing to work is an absolute baller move, but it has to be carefully coordinated. When done well, it puts the company in a terrible predicament, and they will be eager to settle in most cases.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Actually your account has been doing so much of this that it's well over the line where we'd ban it, but want to at least give you a heads-up first.
You just have to convince a jury, which I would not consider gender impartial. Interestingly, she brought this case under a New York law.
It didn’t use a state labor commission or the federal EOCC
so the answer is probably, but its a much greater gamble, as the commissions use public funding to strong arm companies to settle, while providing a path for representation in the courts alongside your own counsel
It takes a big place of privilege to circumvent that and use a different state law and go straight to court
Whereas the labor commissions would absolutely take your case and try to get you compensated
The interesting part is when a woman does the exact same thing, she will be considered strong, brave and independent.
Actually, it's right! Speaking up against inequality is strong and brave. We really need to see men who do that the same way, instead of "what a crybaby".
What you're describing doesn't sound like a "pay equity" issue since he's getting equal pay and he's doing equivalent work. If he was paid less for equivalent work then he'd have a stronger case. He'd have to claim the lesser title is damaging to his career prospects.
If they're doing equivalent work for equivalent pay I don't think anyone involved has much of a chance for any legal claims, regardless of titles. The value of a title is far too subjective.
It does seem to create a pay inequity for the job at the lower level whereby the man in this story is being paid more than the typical woman who is at that same job level as him.
I would suggest looking first at the legal definition of "protected group" as well as "historically underrepresented/marginalized groups". If your friend still believes he has a case, then consult a lawyer. Good luck going up against a Fortune 500 if he does move forward.
In the United States, the law says that employers can't discriminate against any individual on the basis of sex. It doesn't matter what the sex of the person is.
Isn’t your situation literally evidence of the woman being discriminated against here?
The woman in your situation with the greater title is being paid no more than your friend with a lower one, or women with the same title are being underpaid. If and when the man is promoted to the same title as the woman with the greater one they will be paid more than the woman despite doing “equivalent work”.
Unless your friend is required to do the work above their title it seems like a non issue and literally your friend is the one with the advantage…
> Unless your friend is required to do the work above their title
This is what the OP is implying is happening (I'm not going to rule on fact). Or at the very least, the person is voluntarily doing work above their title.
In either case the friend, the man, still is in the superior position.
In the first case they are paid the same as someone with a higher title, and when promoted inevitably they will be paid more than someone with the same title.
In the second case they are paid more than people with their same title who may be performing all of the duties required, and this is not to say that there are not others also performing equivalently who did not received this equivalent wage.
This sort of situation is exactly why people need to talk to their manager, to avoid over performing and being resentful about it. The fact the person was able to get a raise without a promotion is literally the best case scenario. If their work is actually the same they’ll be promoted and get another raise, resulting in higher pay than those with the same title…
> In the first case they are paid the same as someone with a higher title, and when promoted inevitably they will be paid more than someone with the same title.
You act like promotions are automatic, but you're ignoring case where they never get promoted, and can't leverage their resume nearly as effectively because of the lower title.
In which case, all they got was a temporary pay bump in exchange for doing extra work, but didn't get any credit for that work.
this is false, at least as a matter of what the law actually says. discrimination against men is definitely not legal. with most protected characteristics, discrimination is banned even against the dominant or historically favored group (e.g. it is also illegal to discriminate against white people, against Christians, etc.)
exceptions are age (it is legal to discriminate against younger people) and disability (it is legal to discriminate against people who don't have disabilities).
In a general sense yes. For example, if a man was unjustly denied a promotion and some random unqualified woman got the job instead (gender swapped version of the article) they might have a case. In your friends case...I dunno. Seems like if they're being paid the same it's hard to argue discrimination.
I imagine the women who were promoted above him, but are nevertheless earning the same amount of money as someone below them on the org chart (and presumably, less than some of their peers) might have a more compelling case in court.
An "I'm being overpaid for my job title" situation is going to require a pretty nuanced approach when it comes to showing damages, compared to a lot of other job discrimination lawsuits, I would think.
(this seems like something where a lawyer would say "you want to do what?")
Titles have value. Two people with same pay, their rank in the company and relative progression in their career is determined by title. Arguably titles can even trump pay. Would you take the title of CxO even if we leave your total comp the same? Many people would say yes, if only to get it on the resume, spend a couple years with it, and jump laterally to shore up the comp aspect. I use title CxO as extreme example but same behavior applies to any senior leadership position at least.
There could be a discrimination claim, because being denied a promotion is an adverse employment action irrespective of pay. Damages can be shown from the loss of career opportunities that a fancier title would carry. That can be established with different types of evidence, one being expert testimony.
The difficulty with this sort of case is showing causation, because the company will always produce some alternate reasons other than gender to justify its decision. It’s a surmountable hurdle, but not every case is strong enough to even make it to a jury.
Of course, on a practical level, you have all of the politics surrounding this. Depending on your judge and jury pool, you may or may not have a fighting chance.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm aware that the law might be infinitely more ridiculous than what I've seen as a mere observer working in business, but:
> Damages can be shown from the loss of career opportunities that a fancier title would carry.
The guy is going to sue his employer because, while he's arguably overpaid in the way that's easy to measure (pay for a given job title) he's arguably underpaid in the way that's difficult to quantify (was he provably more worthy of a promotion than the person who got it?).
And not even he claims that he is not receiving equal pay for equal work?
Honest question - has anyone (a person that can be named, not a message board hypothetical) ever won a lawsuit like that? Did the victory involve anything more than a court ordering that they be awarded a "fancier title?"
Don’t put words in my mouth. I made absolutely no such assertion. At no point in my comment did I mention gender at all, or proportion at all. I literally can’t understand how you can take that from what I wrote.
You're responding in a (transitive) sub-thread describing gender discrimination applied to men and asked why you can't have 2 "Senior/Executive" Whatevers. I answered that the titles being zero-sum is often precisely the point; if you hand out more titles you throw off the gender ratio you're looking for. At no point did I put any words in your mouth, and I literally can't understand how you can take that from what I wrote.
> And not even he claims that he is not receiving equal pay for equal work?
You’re confusing two different things: equal pay and discrimination. These are separate issues with (in California) separate code sections governing them. So, this hypothetical person would bring a discrimination claim, not a pay claim. The relevant elements he has to prove are that he experienced an “adverse employment action” (denial of a promotion is textbook for this), that his gender was a “substantial motivating reason” for the adverse action, and that he was harmed in some way by the loss of the promotion.
The fact that his pay was advanced might be evidence to undercut the causal element (“why no, we would never discriminate against a man - look at his paycheck”). But it’s not conclusive. Suppose there was a documented policy that men cannot qualify for VP roles. Then, pay becomes almost irrelevant - we have discriminatory animus on paper.
Anyway, yes, this is purely hypothetical. You need real facts to breathe life into a case and know if it has legs. Especially when it presents an uncommon application of the law. You need 3 things: facts that tick the right legal boxes; evidence that establishes those facts; and a compelling narrative that presents a real injustice that someone experienced.
> Honest question - has anyone (a person that can be named, not a message board hypothetical) ever won a lawsuit like that?
I can’t think of an example for this specific pattern, but employees do win (or settle favorably) in cases you might not expect. Many companies have implemented diversity policies in ways that actually do break the law, and I expect to see an uptick in claims challenging this.
It's okay to be racist and sexist as long as it's in the "right" direction. This is standard-issue morality in California and it applies to absolutely everything including hiring and the courts.
That's funny I always thought that prejudice and discrimination was something someone could be regardless of who you are. That is interesting to learn that as long as you are part of certain groups it is impossible for one to be racist, sexist, or homophobic.
I love this morality, next thing you'll tell me it is not wrong for one group of people to attempt to perform ethnic cleansing because they were "disadvantaged" so it's okay.
I mean if that is the price we have to pay to keep Nazis out of society though clearly it is worth it. I mean how horrible would it be if we had students at prominent ivy League universities chanting things like. "There is only one solution infantada revolution."
But I am sure this relative standards of ethic and morality will lead us to a new golden age and not just engender resentment and divide.
I'm not going to try to wade into this discussion and argue one way or another (mostly because I'm too tired to put that kind of effort in), but I do want to point out a case of varying word usage that I think often muddies the waters in these kinds of situations.
It's a misclassification of things. Prejudice is a feeling against a group. Racism/Sexism/etc., is an action against individuals based on prejudice. There is an old saying, "racism = prejudice + power". Basically, people can be prejudiced all day long, but if they lack the power structure to be able to do anything about it, then they can't be whatever-ist.
It's also where the notion of "systemic racism" comes from. If a law or policy disproportionately impacts a certain group of people, that is prima facia a power structure that enforces a prejudice.
In a way, it's almost like a kind of mathematics. There are operands and operators. Depending on the operands, the operations are one-way. Like the issues of zero getting anywhere near division. In the pursuit of a mathematics that is consistent, we discard a mathematics that is complete.
This distinction is important because people educated in traditionally liberal institutions have this taught to them, as well as what "counts" as power structures capable of weaponizing prejudice to become an -ism. Just as we accept in STEM fields that "division by 0 is an undefined operation", people in social justice fields accept "traditionally underrepresented groups can't be -ist". Kind of like how lawyers have their own language for things like "reasonable" and all kinds of Latin phrases that don't follow or completely befuddle the intuitive understanding that lay-people have.
For example, you'll see people talk about how certain standup comics appear to "get away" with saying things that would cause screaming fits if a person of a different background said similar things. E.g., an African American comic making comments about white people vs. a white comic making comments about African Americans. You're likely to hear apologia like, "it's impossible for a black person to be racist". What they mean is that black people historically lack the power structure to be able to activate prejudice against white people. In other words, Kevin Hart's prejudicial comments about white people aren't "racist comments" because it's unlikely to have any major impact on how white people are perceived or treated. Whereas Michael Richards using the N-word reinforces and normalizes existing systemic problems in American culture.
Again, I'm not here to argue that prejudice from one group is OK as long as that group has been historically (and let's be honest, contemporaneously) mistreated. But if you want to understand how people can make such confusing statements as "black people can't be racist" or "women can't be sexist", this is the worldview under which they are operating.
NB: I'm a big believer in Sun Tzu's exhortation to "know your enemy and know yourself". To be clear, the enemy here is "people who overly-parse words to post hoc rationalize saying mean things about other people."
That's because in sports physical attributes are a bona fide occupational qualification. In the same vein actors can be hired based on their appearance.
> discrimination on immutable characteristics is bad no matter what.
Why?
I feel like "immutable characteristics" is a thing people reach for as an attempt to generalize/rationalize things like "suspect classification" and other groupings of protected characteristics into a simple rule without understanding the rationale that goes into the thing they are generalizing, without a really good reason (and even though it doesn't fit the established categories; e.g., two of the four standard things that qualify as a "suspect classification" for government discrimination are mutable associations -- religion and alienage -- while the other two are, at least normally conceived as, immutable -- race and national origin.)
> Sexism and racism refer to institutional bigotry and discrimination, not just discrimination in general.
This is a definition that a small, zealous, subset of people try to push. It is not a definition that the vast majority of people believe in or intend to use.
This is a good question because “sue” and “convince a jury” are used interchangeably. It is a good thought experiment because if we treat the act of filing a lawsuit and the act of winning one as the same thing, this does make the outcome of this trial proof positive of reverse sexism.
Some kooks might say “in America you can sue anyone for anything and your chance of winning depends on myriad factors” but that is just a distraction. One woman won one case, so it stands to reason that we must ask if the system is set up so no man can win any case.
I’m pretty sure a guy has won a case based on gender discrimination before, but it doesn’t happen as often as the other way around. It would be a really awkward case to push in any case, which is probably why it doesn’t happen often?
Grounds to sue mean at least wanting to sue, feeling that an injustice was made, having a legal avenue of suing, and predicting good probability of a favorable outcome.
Whether it’s likely he would get a favorable outcome depends on the legal system as well as its components. In case law countries, this might be a strong precedent-setting lawsuit, where the defendant will have an advantage due to the very lack of precedent. In civil law countries, it might be easier as no precedent is needed and discrimination would almost definitely not involve a jury. So if the laws are unbiased, a man and a woman would be treated exactly the same in that case.
I'm stunned and pleased - bloomberglaw.com includes the raw case files/useful links to the primary sources! Might be the first time I've seen that in a news article. The complaint doesn't look that explosive.
The amount of politics in these sort of situations is intense. I don't think it is reasonable for executives - male or female - to sue their employers over promotion decisions. I'm going to point at "Another male colleague’s background was in physics, not engineering, and he did not satisfy the requirement that candidates have an MS in Computer Engineering" - in and of itself that suggests the male was better at the job than she was. We know from Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing. Amongst people actively working in a field, qualifications are a negative signal of quality.
Female executives using an Equal Pay Act to fight executive skirmishes undermines the look of this sort of legislation. Maybe some people want to pretend that Google executives are delicate daisies that need special legal protections but it just isn't true. This executive shouldn't be getting special treatment because of her gender.
So you want to detract from a case about bias (that was won), because you have another bias about this male having been better because of their lack of correct qualifications?
> This executive shouldn't be getting special treatment because of her gender.
But you're perfectly fine with her getting worse treatment because of her gender? Since you don't believe in her right to sue to remedy this.. I'm sorry, but your post reeks of "these thing's don't affect me and therefore don't need fixing".
I literally haven't talked to anyone this month who has as materially successful a life as her. Probably this year. Maybe longer. Yeah I'm OK if she feels hard done by, although I'm also OK with her feeling good.
I've not read the specifics of the case, but based on her complaint? I'm completely OK with her losing a HR struggle for stupid reasons [0]. Judges don't need to be involved. I just wish we could all be mistreated with that sort of compensation and power.
> So you want to detract from a case about bias (that was won), because you have another bias about this male having been better because of their lack of correct qualifications?
I'm happy to admit to being biased in favour of basic statistics. Berkson's paradox isn't some weird edge case, it turns up all the time. If you don't like it there isn't much you can do, even moving to a different universe isn't enough to escape math.
Based purely on her complaint, Google could quite reasonably have been chosing someone with a signal of higher quality. In the same paragraph she complains about 19 vs 22 years of experience as though that matters too, which keeps undermining my outrage.
[0] I'm not even taking a position on whether the reasons are gender related. I've seen this sort of thing play out among male executives based on height, tone of voice, random luck, coincidence, nepotism and all sorts of silly factors. It could even be legitimately good reasons. I don't see why, especially legally speaking, anyone needs to care. Nobody has a solid metric to measure executive quality, or we'd just use that.
So principles doesn't matter when you feel jealousy? That's a weird stance to have. It reads as since you don't want this specific woman to sue or win (without even having read the documents), no woman should ever be able to, even in other positions.
Why not view it as good that an executive risks much to remove the glass ceiling, and perhaps prove biases in the processes affecting the whole chain? It reads as since you don't want this specific woman to sue or win (without even having read the documents), no woman should ever be able to, even in other positions.
I think OP is trying to convey that he's unconvinced that gender bias is at play here, and taking into account the fact that she's incredibly privileged, the thought of a powerful person making a tenuous claim to victimhood is not something that elicit much sympathy.
In the end, I think it's almost impossible to say anything meaningful about individual cases. Fact is that in a lot of companies salary varies, sometimes quite wildly, based on all sorts of factors: how well you negotiated, how badly the position was needed at the time of hiring, the mood of the hiring manager that day, how much of the budget was used that year, how well the company is doing at the time of hiring, stellar alignment, etc. It's very hard to say which factor played a part. This is true for most roles and not limited to the executive level.
The law states that (from the judge's opinion): "Rowe must demonstrate that Google failed to pay her equally to a man in the same geographic area for (a) equal work on a job the performance of which requires equal skill, effort and responsibility, and which is performed under similar working conditions, or (b) substantially similar work, when viewed as a composite of skill, effort, and responsibility, and performed under similar working conditions.", but this is kind of an unreasonable standard to really prove gender discrimination IMHO.
So any male getting paid more than any female can only be explained by discrimination? In some cases it's probably a factor. In others: probably not? Hard to distinguish the two however.
All we can really do is statistics over a large group, and then say something about that group. But that says nothing about individuals. There are short Dutch people, tall Indonesians, and Germans with a sense of humour.
Yeah I think this is going to be really hard to prove on an individual level. Not impossible though. It depends on the job. For instance in programming the work and skill levels vary so wildly it would be very hard. But think about something like sales.
If a woman/man was bringing in more sales than men/women that were promoted over her?
Or in rare cases you might get written/recorded damning evidence.
> If a woman/man was bringing in more sales than men/women that were promoted over her?
It depends; being better in sales does not automatically make a person a good team lead, or whatever else they're being promoted to.
And even "bring in more sales" is not that simple because if you're a curmudgeon that makes everyone around you miserable then that's probably going to be factor. Stuff like that.
I think you are mistakenly conflating gender bias with qualification bias. The OP's invocation of Berkson's Paradox here does not say anything about sex. You could change the sex of this female executive and OP's argument would still stand.
> Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing. Amongst people actively working in a field, qualifications are a negative signal of quality.
Source. Because on the surface this looks like a pretty ridiculous take.
And you seem to have missed the whole point of the lawsuit which is that she wanted the company to simply follow their normal processes.
> ...on the surface this looks like a pretty ridiculous take.
Is it really? If you put up a significant barrier to a group of people, and only the exceptional can cross those barriers, it's shouldn't be that surprising when the pool that make it past those barriers is filled with a higher percentage of exceptional people.
Sort of like how a surprising percentage of women in the sciences before 1960 were of Ada Lovelace quality. The women who were merely competent weren't allowed to work in the sciences.
& that isn't the point of the lawsuit, I think the point was more that Google misrepresented to her that she'd get paid more than she did after some period of employment and she also believes that there is a gender aspect to that. It isn't reasonable to tell a company that your interpretation of their policies is more correct than theirs.
IMO someone is born yesterday if they buy the "we're not going to agree to that wage now but we will in a while" line from a corporation, but whatever.
I think you're right that the world of executives is less like "employment" and it's kind of insulting to pretend it is.
But I also think it's fine for executives to sue the companies they represent. I think the government should have a role in corporate governance. I would even support having a government appointed representative like the Federal Reserve has.
The replies are missing the point, I agree. “Executives” are part of the bourgeoisie, employment laws bitterly won by the organised proletariat aren’t really relevant.
At the same time, people can sue each other based on laws, why not? If you don’t like that, you should join those working to overthrow the current system.
I think it’s also potentially useful, at least rhetorically, for gender discrimination to be an issue even among the ruling class.
>I don't think it is reasonable for executives - male or female - to sue their employers over promotion decisions
Why? We have all kinds of rules about discrimination, they can and do include promotion decisions.
>We know from Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing.
This would only be true if you assume that interviews are consistently perfect judges of job performance, which is well-known to not be the case.
>Maybe some people want to pretend that Google executives are delicate daisies that need special legal protections but it just isn't true.
It isn't special legal protection. It's very regular legal protection. It's the kind of legal protection which should be provided to everybody (and in practice is provided to everybody who can afford a lawyer).
It's tough to see the arguments, I can't sympathize with her because doesn't seem to be offering arguments in good faith.
To her credit, gender discrimination is hard to prove and perhaps she felt she really had a strong case (based on the risk she took - this action may close some doors for her), but allowing these arguments to go through really erodes what facade of meritocracy we have left in the industry.
The claims seem to be have gone as far as saying she should have been hired as VP. Her background was senior tech management at a bank, which no doubt is a significant appointment, but I don't think it's easy for anyone to argue that bank tech management easily transfers to big tech.
Giving L8 and presumably a sizeable raise from her bank role means Google already valued her experience very highly. Much more highly than I would have tbh; if someone was top level management in an bank, effectively at least partially responsible for the poor culture of bank tech, and then hired as senior tech management at my company, us grunts would be running for our lives. As she didn't get consistently stellar performance reviews as L8 (which Google uses as argument), the only thing one can argue for is that the performance reviews were biased - which again to her credit tends to be hard to prove - but there's no reason to believe that say a third party looking at those reviews would have given her a promotion.
I also can't fathom someone is arguing in good faith that at this level MS in CS should be a barrier. It should be clear to any Google L8 that MS in CS means absolute jack shit for anyone who manages to get to L6, if not L5. It should only be a factor in junior-ish hiring. For one, Google's technical work even at L6 level can literally shape curriculums at universities. It may just be a legal tactic but I don't want US courts to lend any credibility to this argument, and anyone who wants the court to sanctify this point is basically someone that damages my profession and I don't want near my jurisdiction.
> I'm going to point at "Another male colleague’s background was in physics, not engineering, and he did not satisfy the requirement that candidates have an MS in Computer Engineering" - in and of itself that suggests the male was better at the job than she was.
A true milestone in YC’s and HN mods transition to the alt right that the top comment currently on this article is so brazenly sexist. There is nothing curious about unzipping a thesis like this and airing it out. Battle of the Sexes gets won by hard work, team work, and leaving behind the game (“battle”) which was pointless anyways.
In a field of professional endeavour (due to Berkson's paradox) the default position should be that qualifications are a negative signal of quality. That has nothing to do with sexism, it is just a statistical observation. By the magic of it being basic math, it applies to men too!
And women are underpaid relative to men because for the past 4,000 years they have statistically been diverted away from the workforce and into child-raising. By the magic of basic math, that means men are overpaid!
Eugenics is also rooted in basic math and statistical observations. Now that HN has become totally disinterested with social equality, maybe eugenics will fall under ‘curious conversation’ and fill the forums here.
Does anyone at Google want to chime in how easy it is to get from L8 to L10 in two years? And is it reasonable to file a lawsuit over not having been promoted from L8 to L10 in two years and claiming gender based discrimination because you didn't get those promotions?
I have no idea how things work at executive levels. At lower levels, being promoted from L(n) to L(n+1) in two years is an unusual and difficult achievement, typically it takes longer; and going from L(n) to L(n+2) in two years is something out of fantasy.
Googler here, I agree. L(n) to L(n+2) in two years is pure astronomical outlier. L(n) to L(n+1) is very difficult and can take many years. I've been stuck as a L5 workerbee for five years with no navigable path to L6. It's extremely tough and gets tougher the higher you get.
Not to dox the Google exec here (you can search her LinkedIn): But, to be fair, she seems to have an extraordinary career history. Went from presumably an entry level position at UBS to the executive class in just 12 years. Does that kind of disposition allow someone to bypass the "level gatekeeping" at Google? Maybe, maybe not. I wish I had whatever wizardry she's using.
Her argument wasn't that you should be able to go from level 8 to 10 in two years.
Her argument was that she should have come in at level 9.
The Bloomberg article clarified it like this:
"She came into the job with 23 years of experience in the financial services and technology field but was hired as a level eight employee while other men who were hired at the same time as her, and allegedly had less experience, were hired at level nine. As a level eight employee, Rowe made about $750,000 a year while some of the level nine employees made over $1 million a year."
No, she complained that she didn't get the VP job. That's L10. That she was passed up for promotion and that someone else didn't deserve it as much as she did.
The actual level can be irrelevant if the perf multiplier gets really high. For example the early Google X / Waymo engineers got tens of millions for driving a prius around freeways with zero end-user impact. Before that, Google Plus engineers got big payouts and a team offsite to Maui for shipping G+ (and then tearing it down).
The root of the issue is that Google’s comp is highly subjective, just as it is anywhere else.
The problem with these lawsuits is that they require a company to prove that their promotion decision is based on competence, which is the exact opposite way that it actually works: to minimize risk to their boss’s job.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadCan a man sue on similar grounds? I have a friend who’s been passed up for promotion several times while women were given greater titles. The company actually gave him an equivalent raise to assuage him, but he still doesn’t have a fancy title despite doing equivalent work. It’s basically an open secret they’re doing this for gender parity. This is at a Fortune 500.
Does he have grounds to sue?
Not a lawyer… etc…
If they do “strain his future”, wouldn’t that be retaliation for a complaint, and wouldn’t that then be illegal? Again, not a lawyer.
And no, you definitely won’t have a future there.
Actually your account has been doing so much of this that it's well over the line where we'd ban it, but want to at least give you a heads-up first.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Nope, still very visible to the world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It didn’t use a state labor commission or the federal EOCC
so the answer is probably, but its a much greater gamble, as the commissions use public funding to strong arm companies to settle, while providing a path for representation in the courts alongside your own counsel
It takes a big place of privilege to circumvent that and use a different state law and go straight to court
Whereas the labor commissions would absolutely take your case and try to get you compensated
Actually, it's right! Speaking up against inequality is strong and brave. We really need to see men who do that the same way, instead of "what a crybaby".
We don't have any objective evidence e.g. when they say "equivalent work" on what basis is that being determined.
1. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...
The woman in your situation with the greater title is being paid no more than your friend with a lower one, or women with the same title are being underpaid. If and when the man is promoted to the same title as the woman with the greater one they will be paid more than the woman despite doing “equivalent work”.
Unless your friend is required to do the work above their title it seems like a non issue and literally your friend is the one with the advantage…
This is what the OP is implying is happening (I'm not going to rule on fact). Or at the very least, the person is voluntarily doing work above their title.
In the first case they are paid the same as someone with a higher title, and when promoted inevitably they will be paid more than someone with the same title.
In the second case they are paid more than people with their same title who may be performing all of the duties required, and this is not to say that there are not others also performing equivalently who did not received this equivalent wage.
This sort of situation is exactly why people need to talk to their manager, to avoid over performing and being resentful about it. The fact the person was able to get a raise without a promotion is literally the best case scenario. If their work is actually the same they’ll be promoted and get another raise, resulting in higher pay than those with the same title…
You act like promotions are automatic, but you're ignoring case where they never get promoted, and can't leverage their resume nearly as effectively because of the lower title.
In which case, all they got was a temporary pay bump in exchange for doing extra work, but didn't get any credit for that work.
The hypothesis is that they are not being promoted because of the demographic they belong to, so that is not a given.
exceptions are age (it is legal to discriminate against younger people) and disability (it is legal to discriminate against people who don't have disabilities).
I imagine the women who were promoted above him, but are nevertheless earning the same amount of money as someone below them on the org chart (and presumably, less than some of their peers) might have a more compelling case in court.
An "I'm being overpaid for my job title" situation is going to require a pretty nuanced approach when it comes to showing damages, compared to a lot of other job discrimination lawsuits, I would think.
(this seems like something where a lawyer would say "you want to do what?")
The difficulty with this sort of case is showing causation, because the company will always produce some alternate reasons other than gender to justify its decision. It’s a surmountable hurdle, but not every case is strong enough to even make it to a jury.
Of course, on a practical level, you have all of the politics surrounding this. Depending on your judge and jury pool, you may or may not have a fighting chance.
> Damages can be shown from the loss of career opportunities that a fancier title would carry.
The guy is going to sue his employer because, while he's arguably overpaid in the way that's easy to measure (pay for a given job title) he's arguably underpaid in the way that's difficult to quantify (was he provably more worthy of a promotion than the person who got it?).
And not even he claims that he is not receiving equal pay for equal work?
Honest question - has anyone (a person that can be named, not a message board hypothetical) ever won a lawsuit like that? Did the victory involve anything more than a court ordering that they be awarded a "fancier title?"
You’re confusing two different things: equal pay and discrimination. These are separate issues with (in California) separate code sections governing them. So, this hypothetical person would bring a discrimination claim, not a pay claim. The relevant elements he has to prove are that he experienced an “adverse employment action” (denial of a promotion is textbook for this), that his gender was a “substantial motivating reason” for the adverse action, and that he was harmed in some way by the loss of the promotion.
The fact that his pay was advanced might be evidence to undercut the causal element (“why no, we would never discriminate against a man - look at his paycheck”). But it’s not conclusive. Suppose there was a documented policy that men cannot qualify for VP roles. Then, pay becomes almost irrelevant - we have discriminatory animus on paper.
Anyway, yes, this is purely hypothetical. You need real facts to breathe life into a case and know if it has legs. Especially when it presents an uncommon application of the law. You need 3 things: facts that tick the right legal boxes; evidence that establishes those facts; and a compelling narrative that presents a real injustice that someone experienced.
> Honest question - has anyone (a person that can be named, not a message board hypothetical) ever won a lawsuit like that?
I can’t think of an example for this specific pattern, but employees do win (or settle favorably) in cases you might not expect. Many companies have implemented diversity policies in ways that actually do break the law, and I expect to see an uptick in claims challenging this.
I love this morality, next thing you'll tell me it is not wrong for one group of people to attempt to perform ethnic cleansing because they were "disadvantaged" so it's okay.
I mean if that is the price we have to pay to keep Nazis out of society though clearly it is worth it. I mean how horrible would it be if we had students at prominent ivy League universities chanting things like. "There is only one solution infantada revolution."
But I am sure this relative standards of ethic and morality will lead us to a new golden age and not just engender resentment and divide.
It's a misclassification of things. Prejudice is a feeling against a group. Racism/Sexism/etc., is an action against individuals based on prejudice. There is an old saying, "racism = prejudice + power". Basically, people can be prejudiced all day long, but if they lack the power structure to be able to do anything about it, then they can't be whatever-ist.
It's also where the notion of "systemic racism" comes from. If a law or policy disproportionately impacts a certain group of people, that is prima facia a power structure that enforces a prejudice.
In a way, it's almost like a kind of mathematics. There are operands and operators. Depending on the operands, the operations are one-way. Like the issues of zero getting anywhere near division. In the pursuit of a mathematics that is consistent, we discard a mathematics that is complete.
This distinction is important because people educated in traditionally liberal institutions have this taught to them, as well as what "counts" as power structures capable of weaponizing prejudice to become an -ism. Just as we accept in STEM fields that "division by 0 is an undefined operation", people in social justice fields accept "traditionally underrepresented groups can't be -ist". Kind of like how lawyers have their own language for things like "reasonable" and all kinds of Latin phrases that don't follow or completely befuddle the intuitive understanding that lay-people have.
For example, you'll see people talk about how certain standup comics appear to "get away" with saying things that would cause screaming fits if a person of a different background said similar things. E.g., an African American comic making comments about white people vs. a white comic making comments about African Americans. You're likely to hear apologia like, "it's impossible for a black person to be racist". What they mean is that black people historically lack the power structure to be able to activate prejudice against white people. In other words, Kevin Hart's prejudicial comments about white people aren't "racist comments" because it's unlikely to have any major impact on how white people are perceived or treated. Whereas Michael Richards using the N-word reinforces and normalizes existing systemic problems in American culture.
Again, I'm not here to argue that prejudice from one group is OK as long as that group has been historically (and let's be honest, contemporaneously) mistreated. But if you want to understand how people can make such confusing statements as "black people can't be racist" or "women can't be sexist", this is the worldview under which they are operating.
NB: I'm a big believer in Sun Tzu's exhortation to "know your enemy and know yourself". To be clear, the enemy here is "people who overly-parse words to post hoc rationalize saying mean things about other people."
If we want equality we need to aim for equality, not just turning the wheel so the next group of people get to be king shit of oppression mountain
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_quali...
It's a relatively mild communication, pretty quickly cleared up, but pushing responsibility for it onto your readers seems poor form.
Why?
I feel like "immutable characteristics" is a thing people reach for as an attempt to generalize/rationalize things like "suspect classification" and other groupings of protected characteristics into a simple rule without understanding the rationale that goes into the thing they are generalizing, without a really good reason (and even though it doesn't fit the established categories; e.g., two of the four standard things that qualify as a "suspect classification" for government discrimination are mutable associations -- religion and alienage -- while the other two are, at least normally conceived as, immutable -- race and national origin.)
This is a definition that a small, zealous, subset of people try to push. It is not a definition that the vast majority of people believe in or intend to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nbnGUUdQTU
This is a good question because “sue” and “convince a jury” are used interchangeably. It is a good thought experiment because if we treat the act of filing a lawsuit and the act of winning one as the same thing, this does make the outcome of this trial proof positive of reverse sexism.
Some kooks might say “in America you can sue anyone for anything and your chance of winning depends on myriad factors” but that is just a distraction. One woman won one case, so it stands to reason that we must ask if the system is set up so no man can win any case.
Grounds to sue mean at least wanting to sue, feeling that an injustice was made, having a legal avenue of suing, and predicting good probability of a favorable outcome.
Whether it’s likely he would get a favorable outcome depends on the legal system as well as its components. In case law countries, this might be a strong precedent-setting lawsuit, where the defendant will have an advantage due to the very lack of precedent. In civil law countries, it might be easier as no precedent is needed and discrimination would almost definitely not involve a jury. So if the laws are unbiased, a man and a woman would be treated exactly the same in that case.
In 2019 Google found that some male SWEs were being underpaid and issued extra raises that IIRC came out to around $10m/year
The amount of politics in these sort of situations is intense. I don't think it is reasonable for executives - male or female - to sue their employers over promotion decisions. I'm going to point at "Another male colleague’s background was in physics, not engineering, and he did not satisfy the requirement that candidates have an MS in Computer Engineering" - in and of itself that suggests the male was better at the job than she was. We know from Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing. Amongst people actively working in a field, qualifications are a negative signal of quality.
Female executives using an Equal Pay Act to fight executive skirmishes undermines the look of this sort of legislation. Maybe some people want to pretend that Google executives are delicate daisies that need special legal protections but it just isn't true. This executive shouldn't be getting special treatment because of her gender.
> This executive shouldn't be getting special treatment because of her gender.
But you're perfectly fine with her getting worse treatment because of her gender? Since you don't believe in her right to sue to remedy this.. I'm sorry, but your post reeks of "these thing's don't affect me and therefore don't need fixing".
I've not read the specifics of the case, but based on her complaint? I'm completely OK with her losing a HR struggle for stupid reasons [0]. Judges don't need to be involved. I just wish we could all be mistreated with that sort of compensation and power.
> So you want to detract from a case about bias (that was won), because you have another bias about this male having been better because of their lack of correct qualifications?
I'm happy to admit to being biased in favour of basic statistics. Berkson's paradox isn't some weird edge case, it turns up all the time. If you don't like it there isn't much you can do, even moving to a different universe isn't enough to escape math.
Based purely on her complaint, Google could quite reasonably have been chosing someone with a signal of higher quality. In the same paragraph she complains about 19 vs 22 years of experience as though that matters too, which keeps undermining my outrage.
[0] I'm not even taking a position on whether the reasons are gender related. I've seen this sort of thing play out among male executives based on height, tone of voice, random luck, coincidence, nepotism and all sorts of silly factors. It could even be legitimately good reasons. I don't see why, especially legally speaking, anyone needs to care. Nobody has a solid metric to measure executive quality, or we'd just use that.
Why not view it as good that an executive risks much to remove the glass ceiling, and perhaps prove biases in the processes affecting the whole chain? It reads as since you don't want this specific woman to sue or win (without even having read the documents), no woman should ever be able to, even in other positions.
The law states that (from the judge's opinion): "Rowe must demonstrate that Google failed to pay her equally to a man in the same geographic area for (a) equal work on a job the performance of which requires equal skill, effort and responsibility, and which is performed under similar working conditions, or (b) substantially similar work, when viewed as a composite of skill, effort, and responsibility, and performed under similar working conditions.", but this is kind of an unreasonable standard to really prove gender discrimination IMHO.
So any male getting paid more than any female can only be explained by discrimination? In some cases it's probably a factor. In others: probably not? Hard to distinguish the two however.
All we can really do is statistics over a large group, and then say something about that group. But that says nothing about individuals. There are short Dutch people, tall Indonesians, and Germans with a sense of humour.
If a woman/man was bringing in more sales than men/women that were promoted over her?
Or in rare cases you might get written/recorded damning evidence.
It depends; being better in sales does not automatically make a person a good team lead, or whatever else they're being promoted to.
And even "bring in more sales" is not that simple because if you're a curmudgeon that makes everyone around you miserable then that's probably going to be factor. Stuff like that.
Source. Because on the surface this looks like a pretty ridiculous take.
And you seem to have missed the whole point of the lawsuit which is that she wanted the company to simply follow their normal processes.
Is it really? If you put up a significant barrier to a group of people, and only the exceptional can cross those barriers, it's shouldn't be that surprising when the pool that make it past those barriers is filled with a higher percentage of exceptional people.
Sort of like how a surprising percentage of women in the sciences before 1960 were of Ada Lovelace quality. The women who were merely competent weren't allowed to work in the sciences.
Which the lawsuit we are talking about explicitly alleges is not the case.
No, my example very much does not. It's about the exact the opposite, where extra barriers are put in front of one group, but not the other.
& that isn't the point of the lawsuit, I think the point was more that Google misrepresented to her that she'd get paid more than she did after some period of employment and she also believes that there is a gender aspect to that. It isn't reasonable to tell a company that your interpretation of their policies is more correct than theirs.
IMO someone is born yesterday if they buy the "we're not going to agree to that wage now but we will in a while" line from a corporation, but whatever.
I do believe that rich parties should pay for their use of precious court time,
I think you're right that the world of executives is less like "employment" and it's kind of insulting to pretend it is.
But I also think it's fine for executives to sue the companies they represent. I think the government should have a role in corporate governance. I would even support having a government appointed representative like the Federal Reserve has.
But I'm just a communist :p
At the same time, people can sue each other based on laws, why not? If you don’t like that, you should join those working to overthrow the current system.
I think it’s also potentially useful, at least rhetorically, for gender discrimination to be an issue even among the ruling class.
Why? We have all kinds of rules about discrimination, they can and do include promotion decisions.
>We know from Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing.
This would only be true if you assume that interviews are consistently perfect judges of job performance, which is well-known to not be the case.
>Maybe some people want to pretend that Google executives are delicate daisies that need special legal protections but it just isn't true.
It isn't special legal protection. It's very regular legal protection. It's the kind of legal protection which should be provided to everybody (and in practice is provided to everybody who can afford a lawyer).
To her credit, gender discrimination is hard to prove and perhaps she felt she really had a strong case (based on the risk she took - this action may close some doors for her), but allowing these arguments to go through really erodes what facade of meritocracy we have left in the industry.
The claims seem to be have gone as far as saying she should have been hired as VP. Her background was senior tech management at a bank, which no doubt is a significant appointment, but I don't think it's easy for anyone to argue that bank tech management easily transfers to big tech.
Giving L8 and presumably a sizeable raise from her bank role means Google already valued her experience very highly. Much more highly than I would have tbh; if someone was top level management in an bank, effectively at least partially responsible for the poor culture of bank tech, and then hired as senior tech management at my company, us grunts would be running for our lives. As she didn't get consistently stellar performance reviews as L8 (which Google uses as argument), the only thing one can argue for is that the performance reviews were biased - which again to her credit tends to be hard to prove - but there's no reason to believe that say a third party looking at those reviews would have given her a promotion.
I also can't fathom someone is arguing in good faith that at this level MS in CS should be a barrier. It should be clear to any Google L8 that MS in CS means absolute jack shit for anyone who manages to get to L6, if not L5. It should only be a factor in junior-ish hiring. For one, Google's technical work even at L6 level can literally shape curriculums at universities. It may just be a legal tactic but I don't want US courts to lend any credibility to this argument, and anyone who wants the court to sanctify this point is basically someone that damages my profession and I don't want near my jurisdiction.
A true milestone in YC’s and HN mods transition to the alt right that the top comment currently on this article is so brazenly sexist. There is nothing curious about unzipping a thesis like this and airing it out. Battle of the Sexes gets won by hard work, team work, and leaving behind the game (“battle”) which was pointless anyways.
Eugenics is also rooted in basic math and statistical observations. Now that HN has become totally disinterested with social equality, maybe eugenics will fall under ‘curious conversation’ and fill the forums here.
Mods please fix link.
Not to dox the Google exec here (you can search her LinkedIn): But, to be fair, she seems to have an extraordinary career history. Went from presumably an entry level position at UBS to the executive class in just 12 years. Does that kind of disposition allow someone to bypass the "level gatekeeping" at Google? Maybe, maybe not. I wish I had whatever wizardry she's using.
Her argument was that she should have come in at level 9.
The Bloomberg article clarified it like this:
"She came into the job with 23 years of experience in the financial services and technology field but was hired as a level eight employee while other men who were hired at the same time as her, and allegedly had less experience, were hired at level nine. As a level eight employee, Rowe made about $750,000 a year while some of the level nine employees made over $1 million a year."
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/google-must-pay-fe...
The root of the issue is that Google’s comp is highly subjective, just as it is anywhere else.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/13/14599186/google-waymo-sel...