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

nytimes.com

171–180 of 626 posts

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

#171
post #45

Reminiscent of Simpson's Paradox, the most famous example being a gender discrimination lawsuit alleging UC Berkeley discriminated against women in admissions (57% men vs. 43% women). It turned out there WAS bias - in favor of the women! "The lawsuit triggered a study. The study results showed that not only were women not discriminated against, but that women had a statistically significant advantage! Here’s what hap…

Exactly what I thought. How this is even considered a paradox is a paradox to me. Human beings just have very strange presuppositions regarding probability and statistics that are almost always wrong.

Simpson's paradox is a statistical phenomenon where you can measure one outcome in aggregate (e.g. total average pay by gender) and the opposite outcome when you segment (e.g average pay by gender AND job).

Univariate analyses can hide lots of interesting things!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

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

#173

> Kelly Ellis, a former Google engineer and one of the plaintiffs in the gender-pay suit against the company, said in a legal filing that Google hired her as a Level 3 employee — the category for new software engineers who are recent college graduates — in 2010 despite her having four years of experience. > Within a few weeks of Ms. Ellis being hiring, Google hired a male engineer for her team who had also graduated…

Not all college graduates are created equal. There are many people with four year degrees that do not get hired by Google at all. You'd have to look at a case by case basis.

Also, a L3 at Google makes ~$200k a year. Someone getting paid that 4 years out of college is not being discriminated against.

Source: https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft

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

#174

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level…

> No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?

I’d wager it’s the same as the composition of females in any Engineering program. If there were 25 women in your CS program out of a 100 (being generous), they can’t magically multiply and somehow end up 50 in the workforce.

No one is forcing them to NOT join a STEM field. Everyone is telling them to specifically join STEM and giving likely billions of dollars in support aiding the increase.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?

Amount of training required. I'd be fine with a random anesthesiologist teaching my grade schooler, but I'd hesitate to have a random elementary school teacher giving him anesthesia. Elementary school teaching: a teaching certificate. University professor: PhD, pre-tenure work & published research (Note that there are less-qualified people teaching in universities that are compensated much less.) Nurse practitioner:…

How do software developers fare under that regime? I make 3x more as a software developer than my teacher friends that have had far more schooling (masters degrees in many cases, plus continuing education requirements). I don't know where you live, but in my state (Michigan) teachers have rigorous certification requirements.

And I definitely would NOT expect someone without training to be an effective teacher. I'm in awe of what my kids' teachers are able to do. Classroom management is a skill that is incredibly difficult to master.

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

#176

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level…

> No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?

In my company in the IT department (over 1000 people) more than 50% are women, reaching around 60%. In the past 5-6 years the promotions were 4 to 1 in favor of women and when hiring, female candidates come first if the skills are comparable or not much lower than male candidates.

This is because we used to have a female CIO that set diversity targets that were mandatory for all levels, so in less than 10 years we went from 15-20% females to 55-60% females by rejecting male new hires and promoting females by the dozen.

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

#177

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level…

> No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?

> .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?

So you're saying, to achieve parity, we need 80-90% of STEM grads to be female and only 10% men?

Or do you think we should bypass the job interview process for women entirely, until we get a 50-50 ratio in software engineering teams?

Shouldn't we apply this to nurses and teachers (for male equality) as well? That is, have more accelerated job and education programs for men?

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

#178
Talking about the additional compensation - "Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money."

Doesn't this imply that men, per capita, were being underpaid more than women?

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

#179

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level…

> No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?

What do you think the breakdown of applicants by gender is for these roles? Are you suggesting that females should be forced into occupations they don't voluntarily choose? The countries that have the most egalitarian societies show difference in gender preference maximizing, not minimizing.

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

#180

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level…

> No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?

It's possible to both discriminate against men, yet have more men in the workforce, if women voluntarily are choosing not to enter a profession.

In fact, that seems to be the problem: no amount of discrimination against men resolves that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do, but the only policy lever that can really be utilized is discrimination at various stages of education or employment.

This has left people aiming for a fantasy, and using increasingly aggressive discrimination to try and carry it out, biology be damned.

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