Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 297 posts

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#111

Post by broodbucket »

tptacek wrote: post #102
lumberingjack wrote: post #100

I still wonder why the gender equality issue in nursing has not been addressed we need more men as nurses! What is it like 12 women to 1 men nurse we have to fix this its is out of hand. /s

Hahahaha it's funny because "nursing" is a gendered term for a class of front-line medical occupation that is almost certain to be vital to the provisioning of cost-effective health care in the 21st century where it is vitally important that we both raise the status of the profession to get more people into the labor force to do it and also to raise its status among consumers so less people have to wait for ludicrous…

Because one of the several definitions of "nursing" is gendered does not mean it is a "gendered term", especially when used in a non-gendered context.

Unless I'm immune to the irony, this looks like a ridiculous out of place outburst.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#113

Post by strken »

rhizome wrote: post #53
Gustomaximus wrote: post #15

> (women) hold only 20 percent of the company’s higher-paying engineering jobs. I believe women make up less than 20% of comsci graduates? So wouldn't this be about right then. Also I'm assuming women in comsci have lower workforce participation than men do (as in broader economy) so Google must be hiring women at a higher ratio than men from the available pool. I'm 100% in support of open workplaces for gender/race/…

Sure, lack of advancement indicates a lack of ability. It's an old rationalization, but it's a post hoc fallacy. That is: lack of ability to do what ? Can you clarify?

It seems more like a faulty null hypothesis. Instead of assuming zero correlation between ability and pay, some people start from the assumption of perfect correlation.

With regards to ability, we seem to intuit the existence of an unmeasurable "ability factor" that underlies real, measurable metrics of performance. I have no idea how Google measure this kind of thing or any statistics qualifications, but a very dumb first attempt might be to get all the engineers to recommend five top co-workers, break the recommendations up into male/female groups and discard cross-group recommendations, then look at the attributes of the most recommended co-workers in each group.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#114

Post by bandrami »

The fun part of these articles is reading all the comments that literally post proximate causes for the gender wage gap and somehow conclude from that that the gap (which they just validated) does not exist.

This whole process infuriates me. The gender wage gap is an empirical question. It exists. If we believe it's a problem (I do; you may not), it has the easiest solution in the world: give women more money. Seriously, I just solved the gender pay gap, right there: give women more money.

There's all kind of ways you could do that (wage mandates, tax credits, etc.) and they all have pros and cons, but searching for proximate and ultimate causes here is kind of stupid. It exists; if you think it's a problem, the solution is breathtakingly obvious.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#115

Post by zaptheimpaler »

kamaal wrote: post #92
osmala wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of HIGH PAY ENGINEERING jobs in google have comp sci degrees, that's the true comparison. And then there is bigger issue here. It's really the obsession about percentages of women in X position. Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked? I believe it is both very sma…

>>Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked? Most people are not in the job because they like create things or build things. They are there because they want a job and nothing more. And they want a job where (unit of money)/(unit of work) has a higher value. That means they have to…

So true.

People didn't give two shits about the nerds and the tiny useless portion of the world known as computing they occupied 20 years ago - back then it was less glamorous and less money involved. They scoffed at the morons who not only did computers at work but continued to think, write and do "work" after work!

Now theres money involved everyone wants in! Now those same leeches demand to be given the same roles/money as those who worked much harder for it , because its so unfair that people who put have more experience and passion are rewarded while they are not!

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#116

Post by geofft »

isoskeles wrote: post #91
brad0 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to achieve with this comment. In saying that I am curious as to why the GP is looking for females specifically in the team.

The person I replied to was implying that the team he was interviewing for was sexist, to an extent where they simply would not hire women. I don't think this is an okay implication to make based on such little information (we're supposed to trust that the people he spoke to were "wishy-washy" about "diversity"), and I'm asking if it's just as okay to question his own intentions.

> The person I replied to was implying that the team he was interviewing for was sexist, to an extent where they simply would not hire women.

I am making no such implication. I am simply saying that I don't find it "highly dubious" that Google has extreme levels of gender bias in teams correlated with area, based on some amount of data (looking at basically all the open reqs in backend in Google NYC over a couple months).

I do find it worrisome to see "sexist" thrown around so quickly: this is a question of objective fact, and we either need to be comfortable with applying the label "sexist" to lots of scenarios and not interpreting it as equivalent to "morally inferior and execrable", or we need to avoid the label, because otherwise there are chilling effects towards discussions of objective fact. The assertion was made, in the lawsuit, that backend teams at Google do in fact fail to hire women. In order to discuss that, we have to be willing to talk about teams that fail to hire women.

That said, if I'm going to support free speech, I should be consistent, and I welcome your attempts to question my own intentions. But to that I would reply that if I was looking for someone to marry, I'd specifically want to avoid them being on my team (even if I'm okay with the ethical breach, conflict-of-interest rules would prevent us from marrying), so joining a company that hires women but not for my field would actually be just what I'd be looking for in this case. Perhaps more factually-tenable aspersions to cast would be that I'm gay and get hopelessly distracted if I'm working with men? That's not true either, but it'd make more sense.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#117

Post by mpweiher »

geofft wrote: post #2

Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I heard, the specific organization that was pursuing the case was being defunded / split up by the current administration. It sounded like they had some interesting analysis of the data, and I don't think that's ever made it to a courtroom. I'm pretty unsurprised that leveling is a good way for bias to sneak in. My experience as a man applying for…

> Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently?

Last I heard was the judge denying a request for more information, saying DoL was on a "fishing expedition" and didn't have anything to back their case and justify said fishing expedition.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#118

Post by linkregister »

stretchwithme wrote: post #25

Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I don't think they're thinking "Jim's a dude so we should pay him $50K more than Sally." No, they're paying somebody more because they don't want them to leave. And if they are paying you less than somebody else, it's probably partially because they don't think you are as much of a flight risk. And if Google is wrong about these decisions, I'd guess we'd see…

I feel you missed something important in the article. The plaintiffs are asserting that there is a pervasive irrational cultural bias by managers that assumes people like them are superior engineers.

The entire premise of the lawsuit is that the managers are working contrary to the best interest of Google. Companies are made of people, and no matter how much CEOs might want employees to behave a certain way, employees are still beholden to their cognitive biases.

The optimum situation for Google would be to pay all employees the market rate for the level of quality they desire. This would basically yield a meritocratic pay structure. But this is not what happened. The plaintiffs were awarded different pay grades for measurably comparable ability. This is suboptimal for Google and for society; that is why Google is being sued.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#119

Post by kamaal »

linkregister wrote: post #109
kamaal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked? Most people are not in the job because they like create things or build things. They are there because they want a job and nothing more. And they want a job where (unit of money)/(unit of work) has a higher value. That means they have to…

I find it interesting that HN commenters frequently take it for granted that someone who tinkered with programming at an early age and do side projects is a better performer at work. I have never seen any multiple-data-point evidence presented to support it. Sure, various prominent entrepreneurs used computers as hobbyists (Gates, Zuckerberg), but does that apply to the typical programmer? We all encountered students…

Its not necessarily starting early in programming. Its being in general being good at 'scoring marks' vs 'doing projects'. The former and latter take very different skill sets, and their returns too are often very different.

If you are good at doing projects. Along the way you learn a lot of other very important life skills. Things like resourcefulness, persisting at things, immunity to failure, trying many times etc. And these come handy and are usable to to many things that actually matter in the real world. That is building things.

These things are harder to gain at a later stage in life because expectations from one's life at that time are different and you have to worry more about monthly payments and putting food on the table. You don't have 10 - 15 years lying around to do what other programmers have done in their early years where it was cheap to that in terms of time.

You are also discounting the accumulative effects of these things. After a while due to years of practice, early starters are likely to get very good at things in a far more disproportionate way than those who come later.

Re: Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

#120

Post by tosser350 »

lumberingjack wrote: post #100

I still wonder why the gender equality issue in nursing has not been addressed we need more men as nurses! What is it like 12 women to 1 men nurse we have to fix this its is out of hand. /s

98% of plumbers are men, for some reason feminists aren't outraged about men getting to make sure shit flows.

The reality is that programmers are an easy target and easy to push around and tech is a high paying and now somewhat sexy industry.

Post reply on HN