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

nytimes.com

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

#131

Post by Consultant32452 »

thekashifmalik wrote: post #51
ransom1538 wrote: post #34

Flat salaries may fix this? You basically join at the same bracket publicly. No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. For each male hired there must be a female hired. No roles. Everyone has the same title: "Engineer". Off sites are strictly prohibited. Is this what the lawyers want?

Haha that'd be ridiculous! Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much. That being said, salaries are not determined by how hard you work but rather how much the company needs you to stay.

> Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much.

It's the socialist dream!

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

#132

Post by dogruck »

geofft wrote: post #96
dogruck wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said, and your experiences match my own. I still say that situation leads to formulaic, systematic management. Let's say that GOOG developed a sophisticated machine learning algorithm that made all hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation decisions. The code is open source, and everyone can see that it doesn't contain explicit logic for bias. Now, a short, 44 year old, male engineer sue…

This seems essentially like Searle's Chinese room. The program is not biased, in the sense that there is no line of code that adds bias, but the application of the program to the available data clearly produces a biased process. We've seen this exact thing with other machine learning algorithms - there was the one in the news recently that insisted on classifying a photo of a man in the kitchen as a woman, because al…

What if we observe differences in said algo(s), when applied to small companies and the Googles?

Said another way, if Google's employee stats are biased, is there any feasible defense?

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

#133

Post by linkregister »

Spivak wrote: post #88
rhizome wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Or just a lack of drive/desire. In my office almost all of the management positions are filed by women while almost all the technical people are men. I asked about it when I was first hired and most of the people in the office had been offered management positions at some point during their career and they tuned them down because they'd rather do engineering work than human work. Looking at the demographics you might…

It sounds like your workplace doesn't suffer from the same issues addressed in the article. The women managers at Google were not being offered the same compensation increases, despite performing at or above the level of their male counterparts (all allegedly).

You shouldn't take it on faith that the women were being underpaid. The case will reveal what happened.

You also shouldn't derive from your experiences that just because you have only seen good outcomes, another workplace or team is similarly good. You only know what you actually know.

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

#134

Post by bandrami »

great_psy wrote: post #122
bandrami wrote: post #114

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. Seriou…

I don't understand how just giving a group of people more money will solve the problem. That's is an artificial way of addressing it, it's just a band aid. Let's look at the causes , and address those. I think that's how you solve it. It is pretty sexist to say , "give someone more money because they are a women"

Ummm... you realize band-aids solve the problem of bleeding, right?

Similarly, giving women more money solves the problem of women getting paid less money.

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

#135

Post by unescape »

danschumann wrote: post #35

Disagreeable personalities tend to get paid more. When a man is disagreeable, people usually get wide eyed, but then accept him as kind of abrasive, but lovable. Women are either less likely to be disagreeable personalities, or less liked when doing so. If women get paid less, why doesn't google hire only women to save money?

Disagreeable people also tend to get fired more, in my experience. Perhaps it balances out, which would explain why there are still disagreeable people.

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

#136

Post by broodbucket »

ihm wrote: post #123
broodbucket wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't think that people are accustomed to thinking of "nurse" as a female role?

Sure but I don't think a mother breastfeeding their child being called "nursing" is the reason

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

#137

Post by govg »

ransom1538 wrote: post #34

Flat salaries may fix this? You basically join at the same bracket publicly. No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. For each male hired there must be a female hired. No roles. Everyone has the same title: "Engineer". Off sites are strictly prohibited. Is this what the lawyers want?

> For each male hired there must be a female hired.

General grad CS populations are split 4:1 in favor of males. It won't end well when you cut out a significant amount of your candidate pool because you want to promote "diversity". Why 50:50? Why not majority women? Any cutoff would be arbitrary.

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

#138

Post by kamaal »

sidlls wrote: post #128
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know what's more funny (or sad): that you think engineers are no longer as looked down on or compensated at a lower rate than their "work" should otherwise merit or that you seem to have completely missed the part about "equal experience" in your haste to poohpooh them that desire equal treatment for it as inferior.

>>that desire equal treatment for it as inferior.

The kind of equality that you are aiming for is meaningless, it doesn't exist and attempts to create this have lead to far bigger problems than they have tried to solve.

This is the equivalent of asking why we don't handover gold, silver and bronze medals to the people who came last in the race instead of the top 3. This isn't discrimination. The sheer concept of effort vs reward in human psychology is designed such that "Humans are unequal by merit of our actions"

Also the fact that some people are better than others is here to stay and not just restricted to software. Most of us are not going to be Neil Armstrong or Richard Feynman. That's not discrimination.

There is only equality of access and opportunity. Outcomes are not going to be equal.

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

#139

Post by kamaal »

flukus wrote: post #129
linkregister wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It would be a hard study to do, many of the non-tinkerers will never enter the industry in the first place. For a fair evaluation I think you'd have to look at first year comp-sci students and then see where they are in 10 years. Personally I think the correlation I've seen personally is strong enough that I'd be shocked if a study proved it otherwise.

>>It would be a hard study to do, many of the non-tinkerers will never enter the industry in the first place.

They will if there is enough incentive. They won't other wise. For example: CS definitely sees more diversity than mechanical engineering, simply because its easier to get paid and higher in CS.

Even in CS a lot of people eventually hop to MBA as that is even more better in terms of making low-effort big-money.

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

#140

Post by jieiieifnfj88 »

broodbucket wrote: post #136
ihm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think that people are accustomed to thinking of "nurse" as a female role?

Sure but I don't think a mother breastfeeding their child being called "nursing" is the reason

Look at this tree! It's lovely and the only one in the forest.
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