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

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

#171

Post by kamaal »

linkregister wrote: post #157
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…

So true. People didn't give two shits about the ladies and doing the tiny useless portion of the world known as software they occupied 50 years ago - back then it was less glamorous and less money involved. Yes, women used to dominate software development. Until the money and prestige started coming in, then men started dominating the profession. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmin...

Not justifying anything. But wasn't early programming two distinct tasks?

1. Writing the Program(On Paper).

2. Feeding the program to the computer.

People in 2. were called 'Programmers' because that is what they did literally- 'Program the machine'. Also early programming had all sorts strange situations where a large part of programming was actually getting results by plugging values in largish math formulas. So there were a range of people who did just that. Generating graphs, being the human equivalent of source control etc.

The 2. part wasn't exactly a very glorifying role and was more like borderline stenographer.

By some definition that is still true. Notice how many programmers there are who probably write MVP web apps for a living copying code from stackoverflow/internet, but there are also people doing all the real work thinking about stock markets, security, medical devices, writing compiler patches, building tools.

I've always thought as coding as a mere ritual the real work always happens on the paper.

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

#172

Post by dang »

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

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15254245 and marked it off-topic.

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

#173

Post by TeMPOraL »

tbrownaw wrote: post #145
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every single industry and craft, those with more work experience are typically paid more than whose with less. There is little difference between "experience programming during a job" and "experience programming for fun". It is the same activity. So of course those with more experience should be expected (on average) to better than those with less. Of course those who seek out more experience due to passion will (…

There is little difference between "experience programming during a job" and "experience programming for fun". It is the same activity. Over of my more recent hobby projects was writing an RSS->IMAP bridge in maybe a couple hundred lines of Python. It has one user (me). This is fairly typical. Until this year, my primary work project was a toolset for streamlining one-off ETL projects. It has parts written in I think…

Yeah, exactly. With the work frequently being the dollhouse.

At my various $dayjobs, I spent most of the time building various flavours of the same CRUD (web CRUD, desktop CRUD) in dumb mainstream languages. At home, I do everything from video games to data processing to AI, in actually productive languages.

The difference I see is that with hobby projects, you're at least free to make something that's actually useful. At work, you might get that if you're lucky. If you're not, you'll be implementing in code some dumb inter-management politicking.

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

#174

Post by in3d »

linkregister wrote: post #157
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…

So true. People didn't give two shits about the ladies and doing the tiny useless portion of the world known as software they occupied 50 years ago - back then it was less glamorous and less money involved. Yes, women used to dominate software development. Until the money and prestige started coming in, then men started dominating the profession. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmin...

The article you cite is fluff and doesn't support the statement that "women used to dominate software development." It mentions the "Computer Girls" article from the 1967 Cosmopolitan, but here is what's in it: "At one point the author speculates, seemingly without irony, about the “ the chances of meeting men in computer work. ”(The conclusion she comes to is that these are “ very good, ” as the field was currently “overrun” with men.)"

http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/files/Ensmenger2010-M...

Apparently, the best guess is that between 11% to 50% of programmers were women back then.

"Mandel suggests that one out of every nine working programmers was female. This is probably overly conservative. The exact percentage of female programmers is difficult to pin down with any accuracy—even figuring out the total number of programmers in this period is difficult—but other reliable contemporary observers suggest that it was closer to 30, or even 50, percent.3 The first government statistics on the programming profession do not appear until 1970, when it was calculated that 22.5 percent of all programmers were women—an estimate more than twice Mandel’s.4"

"Of course, computing itself is a very broad term covering a multitude of occupational categories, including high - status jobs like computer programming and systems analysis as well as low - status jobs such as keypunch operator. Women tended to congregate in the lower end of the occupational pool in computing"

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

#175

Post by TeMPOraL »

ajross wrote: post #125
stretchwithme wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to think that successful companies tend to know what they are doing better than observers.

But the problem is "know what they are doing" can still be unfair. Consider: you're staffing up a company and need folks now. You've found two candidates who seem equally qualified and want to hire them. Both are asking for only a modest raise over their current salaries, but one happens to make 50% more than the other due to arbitrary reasons[1] having nothing to do with qualifications. What do you do? Realistically…

And if we change [1] to "Yeah, one is a gal", then I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem.

Ultimately, the only alternative is to pay people equally. Which won't fly generally, as companies always want to pay the minimum amount that can keep the employee from leaving.

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

#176

Post by kamaal »

linkregister wrote: post #141
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every single industry and craft, those with more work experience are typically paid more than whose with less. There is little difference between "experience programming during a job" and "experience programming for fun". It is the same activity. So of course those with more experience should be expected (on average) to better than those with less. Of course those who seek out more experience due to passion will (…

> In every single industry and craft, those with more work experience are typically paid more than whose with less. This isn't true. Those who do more with their work experience are paid more. We all know engineers who have been at the same company for over a decade, but have practically nothing to show for it. There is an enormous disparity between engineers. There's a reason why Google and Facebook allow engineers…

>>We all know engineers who have been at the same company for over a decade, but have practically nothing to show for it. There is an enormous disparity between engineers.

Please note that this has nothing to do with gender.

>>There's a reason why Google and Facebook allow engineers to stay Senior Engineers for an entire career: most don't actually progress beyond a certain point.

Or they have golden handcuffs, and its very hard to get paid that much else where. And throwing away money for some measurement of ethics which no one cares about is foolish.

>>There's a reason why Google and Facebook allow engineers to stay Senior Engineers for an entire career: most don't actually progress beyond a certain point.

Oh they have been. They don't build furniture, they build the machine that makes furniture. So they are valued more.

>>'m just trying to communicate to you that extra hours programming at home might not be as intrinsically valuable as you might think.

Ever heard of the proverb: "Opportunities multiply as they are seized".

To go some where, you might have to travel a lot of distance going nowhere. The destination isn't always visible from where you stand.

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

#177

Post by TeMPOraL »

dasil003 wrote: post #121
aceon48 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is irrational. If a company could get away with paying someone 70%, they would only hire the 70 percenters, or at least disproportionality. Google has roughly 20% female engineers, in line with the 20% female CS grad population. Seriously... if there's some nefarious bias, it would mean a company hiring more women than expected, bc they can "under" pay them. Silly irrational people.

Well no, Google wants to hire all the best engineers they can find, even if they have to pay more. Obviously they don't want to pay more than they have to, but their primary concern is capturing as much of the top talent as they can.

Which is how you end up with worker demographics reflecting the grad demographics, as it is expected when there's no bias involved...

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

#178

Post by brad0 »

cakedoggie wrote: post #38
brad0 wrote: post #8

One of the women suing complained that a man was hired a level above her with the same years of experience. They both had four years experience. I joined one of the big 4 eight years into my career. Similar to her I was placed at an entry level position. When I started I saw that I had the same ability as people higher than me. I made sure that I displayed that ability to my peers and manager. And what do you know, I…

> And what do you know, I got promoted into a more suitable position. This is a bit of a ridiculous statement. You seem to be claiming that everybody who shows off their skills rises to their correct level. I don't see it that way. I see that there are way more people capable of doing a senior position, but only a few positions are available.

As far as I understand the larger companies have a clear trajectory for promotion in software engineering. There's no limited places. Prove you have skills a, b and c and you get promoted.

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

#179

Post by snovv_crash »

geofft wrote: post #116
isoskeles wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mon…

I'm currently trying to hire multiple C++ engineers. We have a quick, simple automated test that we use as a pre-screen, and so far no women have managed to pass this test. Not that I'm actually surprised; the ratio of applicants is also biased about 50:1, and we haven't had 50 people pass the automated test yet.

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

#180

Post by drather19 »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #166
mpweiher wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

WaPo article (with provisional ruling linked as well):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/07/16...

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