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

nytimes.com

161–170 of 297 posts

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

#161
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

I looked up the etymology of the word and this is in fact where it came from: https://nursemanifest.com/2012/04/24/some-history-on-the-ori...

> The first instance in English of nurse occurred in the early thirteenth century as the Anglo-Norman nurice, derived from the fifth-century post-Classical Latin nutrice, a wet-nurse (hired to provide an infant with breast milk when the infant’s mother would not or could not do so), although by the time it entered the Middle English lexicon, it had already absorbed the figurative sense of any female caretaker of children (Oxford English Dictionary 2010). Etymologically it is related to our modern word nourish, to feed.

Unlike other professions like stewardess, nursing has never broken away from the gendered roots of the term.

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

#162
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I looked up the etymology of the word and this is in fact where it came from: https://nursemanifest.com/2012/04/24/some-history-on-the-ori... > The first instance in English of nurse occurred in the early thirteenth century as the Anglo-Norman nurice, derived from the fifth-century post-Classical Latin nutrice, a wet-nurse (hired to provide an infant with breast milk when the infant’s mother would not or could not do…

Language does evolve, though, for better or for worse. I'm sure the term has contributed to the "nurses must be female" perception, but I doubt renaming the profession is going to do anything

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

#163
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the condescension sensei. I think your position is equal work experience should merit equal pay. You seem to have missed my point also - experience outside work also counts as experience. And millions of things besides experience determine your salary. So we should not be so quick to assume that 2 people with the same years of experience "should" merit equal pay - its obviously false. If all people with eq…

Are you saying that the plaintiffs in this case didn't do side projects?

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

#164

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

I don't know if you are trying to be sarcastic, but this is a very hot topic in the nursing field. https://www.nurse.com/blog/2017/03/17/making-the-case-for-mo...

From the article,

"a University of San Francisco study of data from 1988 to 2008, extended to 2013, demonstrated male nurses made an adjusted $5,148 per year more than female nurses. This inequality has persisted over 20 years with no discernible trend toward resolution in the future."

"The percentage of men in nursing has slowly risen from about 2% in 1975 when I entered nursing to almost 12% (or 330,300 nurses) now."

And I'm not trying to imply anything. I just thought it was noteworthy.

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

#165
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would participation in athletics or math competitions fulfill your requirements for early hard work and adversity? I do agree with your premise. I just don't see where you actually disagree with mine. I'm not discounting anything. I'm just saying that it shouldn't be a given that engineers who got into the field late are automatically less able. > early starters are likely to get very good at things in a far more dis…

>>Would participation in athletics or math competitions fulfill your requirements for early hard work and adversity?

Yes, but in School and a little higher- math is about learning heuristics and ready made procedures to solve problems in algebra and plugging numbers in formulas to get answers. And that is one of the biggest reasons why Nerds go onto to do things like projects to bail from the what is largely a useless academic exercise that gives you nothing real at the end.

Sports has a binary distribution, you either make the big league money or you don't.

>>I'm just saying that it shouldn't be a given that engineers who got into the field late are automatically less able.

They won't be treated as such. They will be evaluated on the same grounds as the long slog people. And that is precisely the problem. Somethings come only with time.

>>Entering a field at the age of 18 or 20 isn't actually late.

Its isn't late in absolute terms. But everything in the world is comparative.

The world is essentially a stack ranking system. You can do anything at any age you want. But there are costs associated with starting late, and they are in comparison with people who are long there.

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

#166
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.

Got a link?

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Giving preferential treatment to anyone based on their skin color, gender or sexual orientation instead of the value they provide or the skills they posses is exactly how not to address diversity issues. This line of thinking only fuels more outrage from other minority groups.

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

#169
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?

This is a broad and complex question with many variables, especially the human element and needs deep context to answer. From this I am going to avoid the question as as I get the feeling this becomes 'internet nitpicking' at specifics on a broad issue. But if you'd be more specific in the question I'd be happy to discuss. Apologies if I have misunderstood.

The Fundamental Attribution Error comes to mind, but the last time I mentioned it someone jumped on me a little about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

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

#170

> (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/…

It seem there are two issues at hand:

1) Women who are in tech get paid less then men.

2) There are less women in tech to begin with.

They are related, in multiple ways perhaps and it's possible tease some links and accompanying explanations:

a) Maybe women know they'll be paid less so they don't go into tech to start with. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem.

b) As you've identified, because of so few women in tech, individuals who end up in well paid positions by chance are less likely to be women as well. So it's a statistical explanation in way.

c) There is sexism. I've seen it, together with xenophobia and other prejudices. And because of that women are rejected, as in not getting offers to start with, or even if hired not taken seriously.

d) In order to fix 2) women were hired but they didn't have an equivalent skill set or experience as men, so they got the job, perhaps to fill some diversity metric, but they did worse in performance reviews later on so they get a smaller salary, less bonuses etc.

Regarding d), I remember going out of the way to bring more women for onsite interviews trying to "fix" 2), that is I wanted to provide more opportunities for success and wanted to increase the diversity in the office. Most of the women failed the interview. I am sure c) was a contributing factor in some cases why the higher ups rejected them. But many simply didn't have their skill set at the level we were looking for. Had they've been offered and taken the job, they might found themselves in the position of getting a smaller salary and poor performance reviews down the road.

Now this doesn't present any good solutions, and doesn't address the lawsuit at hand because I don't know enough details about it. So it is mostly a breakdown of the issue as I see and from personal experience, as I was in charge of recruiting and interviewing for a good number of years.

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