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Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#11

Post by chillacy »

xienze wrote: post #9
maxxxxx wrote: post #4

That's why we need salary transparency to really address this. There are a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women. Making this into a male vs. female issue does nothing to address the fact that people are underpaid.

I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference…

Performance is one explanation between differences between two people but will it explain differences between one sample of thousands and another sample of thousands? Are men really less performant than women on aggregate?

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#12

Post by danaliv »

Do read the fine article for the details:

But the study did not tell the whole story of women at Google or in the technology industry more broadly, something that company officials acknowledged.

Most significantly, it did not address ingrained issues that, according to workplace experts, cannot be overcome simply by considering how much different people are paid for doing the same job: Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.

Etc.

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#14

Post by xienze »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #6

I love the irony of this. Accused of underpaying women - their reaction is "let us get some data". Nope. underpaying men. This is the way you do things. You collect the data, analyze and react. Wash rinse repeat.

A similar thing has happened with companies that go to great lengths to make sure they don't have any gender bias in their hiring process (no face-to-face during interviews, voice altering during phone interviews, etc.) only to find that they still selected more men than women. The conclusion, of course, is that they must be doing something wrong because it's simply impossible that they wouldn't be selecting a perfect 50/50 mix of men and women.

Similarly, I think imagine Google will find similar flaws with how these numbers were generated.

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#15

Post by sokoloff »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #6

I love the irony of this. Accused of underpaying women - their reaction is "let us get some data". Nope. underpaying men. This is the way you do things. You collect the data, analyze and react. Wash rinse repeat.

Given that Google's workforce is 69% men, it's quite possible that they found 3 men underpaid for every 2 women who were underpaid (60%/40%), which would mean they gave more men than women salary equity adjustments while still having a bias in the direction of the original complaint.

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#16

Post by munk-a »

xienze wrote: post #9
maxxxxx wrote: post #4

That's why we need salary transparency to really address this. There are a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women. Making this into a male vs. female issue does nothing to address the fact that people are underpaid.

I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference…

I think this only really comes up when pay disparity is as extreme as it is now, when some people at a company (outside of C-level) are making 300k and others are making 32k there is a good reason to be aggressive about fixing pay disparity.

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#17

Post by blattimwind »

jandrese wrote: post #10
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect they'll be fine giving raises to anyone specifically being underpaid while under such investigation.

I've seen a couple of studies that suggest that the pay gap isn't so much sexism as it is men just being better at negotiating in general. But with all generalizations it's not true for the entire group, so there will be some women who are better at negotiating and some men that are worse and have salaries that reflect that. Basically the real world is a lot more complicated than people think and there are many facto…

The by far largest part of the pay gap is purporting it is upwards of 20 % in the first place.

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#18

Post by notadoc »

Many companies avoid these kind of issues by having a strict experience-based salary scale for all positions.

Gender or any other identity factor is then irrelevant if pay is based entirely upon candidate experience, right?

Edit: I have no knowledge of how Google handles salary. If anyone knows, feel free to share.

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