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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

#181

Post by kamaal »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #173
tbrownaw wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usefu…

This reminds of a situation I faced early in my career. We worked on a network alarm management tool, and some of us used to rewrite the tool or bulk of its features. To a point we finally arrived to invent our own tools to fill up the gaps in the feature set offered by the current tool.

It used to be one of the biggest reasons why we learned so many thing in comparison to the rest of the team(which was fairly big), to a point we could make a lot of very critical design decisions or write an application that could save hours of time for our users.

Its one of those axioms of software development I've learned, in order to do good work you have to do mountains worth of waste work.

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

#182

Post by nikcub »

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…

> it has the easiest solution in the world: give women more money

I don't understand why this is so difficult to understand or controversial - especially in an industry with such a skills shortage.

If you want more and better employees start hiring more women and paying them.

That is a market solution - consider it an investment. Pay them now, pay them more, have a larger hiring pool later.

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

#183

Post by kamaal »

sumedh wrote: post #103
vcool07 wrote: post #13

I'll be shocked if its true. I'm working in the tech industry for like 13 years now, I've never heard of anyone getting a lesser pay on account of gender (at-least here in India). What has gender got to do with knowledge is beyond me !

> I've never heard of anyone getting a lesser pay on account of gender (at-least here in India) and so you can speak for all Indians? I have heard one of my Indian manager saying they dont prefer hiring single females who are not native to the city where they are hiring because once they get married the females would leave the city and so the company loses all that training/skills etc.

The attrition in most IT firms in India has been around 13% on an average. It means they have to hire endlessly to merely survive, let alone grow.

That argument you made I've heard many managers say in many situations. You can't blame them because they have a situation in their teams where if the team size is say 20. There are on average 5 people who are expected to slog till death, while the remaining chill. You also run into situations where the most laziest ask for never ending accommodations. Leaving office early, WFH, never showing up on a friday, onsite, unjustfiable hikes etc. There is an upper limit how much a few people can work to make up for others.

Regarding that training part. The problem is in a country like ours(India) where merely getting a job can be a ticket out of poverty. Expecting companies to pour in several hundreds of crores to train people, all because they were bored at home so wanted some place to sit and while away time till marriage, and move on later is a national waste. Especially if you are taking resources for people who are more committed to using that training to do something for themselves and the company.

Don't expect others to take your career and life seriously, if you yourself don't.

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

#185

Post by watwut »

osmala wrote: post #50
kevmo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of programmers at Google have compsci degrees? What's the split like within that subset?

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…

The teenage years are completely utterly irrelevant to this. They are super irrelevant to high tech positions and definitely anything related big data software. Video games are irrelevant too.

Who play with dolls and who plays with action figures or cars is even moremember irrelevant.

High paying computer jobs are not filled with nerds nor high funstional autistic while we ate at it too.

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

#186

Post by rootlocus »

Clubber wrote: post #68

Ladies, please, never take the first offer. My wife did that (she's also a programmer) and she's getting paid shit salary by a shit company to get shit on all day. From Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In "But what's interesting," she says, "was that when my brother-in-law and my husband were saying 'negotiate, negotiate, negotiate' – when I finally said OK I'll do it, because no man would take the first offer, I then thought…

On a related note, my company raises salaries yearly as a percentage of the current salary. Even though those with lower salaries get a slightly larger percentage, everyone gets somewhere between 8% to 15%. Having a higher initial offer and asking for a higher raise (and arguing that you earned it) results in better raises. Nobody expects everyone to get the same salary.

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

#187

Post by willchen »

kamaal wrote: post #139
flukus wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-mone…

Citation?

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

#188

Post by uiri »

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/…

In software engineering, the figure is much lower than 20%. It is at most 15%. The 20% figure includes anyone within a Tech department in the org chart. This means PMs, UX/UI designers, etc.

I don't mean to minimize the level of technical competence in these roles. It is great that there are SWE-adjacent roles with 30%+ women. It irks me deeply that Google puts out these misleading statistics which then get parroted by the media and then everyone else.

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

#189

Post by eksemplar »

There is an empirically proven wage gap, yet almost every comment to this article is people conjuring up social constructs to explain how that is perfectly fair.

It's not fair though, that's the entire point of the inequality in the wage gap.

What I do t understand is why people so fiercely defend this wage gap. If women were paid equal to men, we would have lost nothing.

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

#190

Post by watwut »

linkregister wrote: post #163
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, majority of software developers don't do side projects, especially not those in high paid difficult positions. Those people put all strength they have into work itself. Employers don't even care all that much about side projects. So, it is safe bet.

This whole thread is stupid red herring. It has nothing to do with reality of working in corporation. It has zero to do with skills required in those high positions - just about only reusable from teenage years is linux internals.

It is basically assumption that a.) women are surely lazier b.) since they are girls they did not played with boy toys c.) if you discovered tech as part education instead of in playroom you can't be good.

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