Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 626 posts

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

#181

Post by screye »

bandrami wrote: post #131
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #94

The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap i…

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?

Let's not act as though those are in any ways similar. Elementary school teaching does require less academic rigor than a university professor. Same applies to RNs vs an anesthesiologist.

I do not mean to belittle those career choices (if anything, I myself want to become a k12 school teacher at some point in life). But, there are a certain set of traits that are needed to excel at the 'prestigious' careers. Disposition towards hard work beyond the standard 9-5, an acumen for logical reasoning, ability to retain large quantities of information are all more rare than social skills and empathy, which take precedence in elementary teaching or nursing.

Our culture idolizes the hard working, career oriented person, that sacrifice other things in life to singularly chase this money and fame driven idea of success. This is irrespective of how physically/mentally healthy it is, or if it positively correlates to long term happiness.

IMO, it leads to an obsession to prove that men and women being equal, would have equal outcomes on this narrow benchmark for success. It both neglects the fact that that social norms haven't changed as much and that equal outcome is meaningless without context.

p.s: nice to see someone use 'beg the question' in the correct context.

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

#182

Post by dlivingston »

noelsusman wrote: post #153
johnny313 wrote: post #36

> 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…

I've seen this first hand. I was hired into my position straight out of grad school. I noticed one of my colleagues (a black woman) was in a position below mine that paid about $20k less even though she had all the same knowledge and skills that I had. She had a PhD and had done a post-doc while I never even finished my PhD. She's older, more experienced, and better educated, yet somehow not qualified for my position…

Seems to me that if there is truly nothing more to this story, your colleague has a very clear lawsuit.

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

#183

Post by munchbunny »

rafiki6 wrote: post #96
colonelxc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing is that Google prefers to downlevel people who have external experience. I (male) had 5 years of experience, still was hired at L3. I know many others who have the same story. So the L4 person probably had some better story/negotiation which allowed them to start at L4. It of course could be bias. It was really frustrating for me to be at the same level as new grads, though on reflection, I was not at…

Can I ask why you might think that you were not at the same level? Why is Google a special software snowflake and none of your external experience is transferable?

The major tech companies in general down-level you on the way in. It's because the skills that lead to success within Google and success elsewhere are different skillsets that intersect on common engineering skillsets.

I tend to think of it this way: Google has tens of thousands of engineers. That's an ecosystem the size of a few thousand startups, except stuffed into one company. It has its way of doing things, and to move up in this ecosystem you don't just master your own startup, you master the ecosystem around you.

That and a noticeable amount of elitism.

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

#184

Post by macinjosh »

maxxxxx wrote: post #165
dgudkov wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary transparency is not possible and would be highly misleading because jobs are not standardized. A "senior Java developer" can be anything. Then you would have to provide a job description in a comparable format for every salary which is not trivial, if feasible at all. Salary transparency without job descriptions would be akin to showing house prices without describing house details - location, square footage,…

Why not? Just publish who makes how much money. That’s it.

IMO, companies should not be allowed to keep salaries private but I do think employees should be able to keep their own salaries private. I don't want coworkers or the public to know my income for all sorts of reasons. It's just not anyone else's business.

This whole notion that the only way for someone who thinks they aren't paid enough to get a raise is to know everyone else's salary and then use that as leverage is absurd. If you feel like you aren't paid enough ask for a raise and explain why you feel that way. If you're turned down look for a different job that values you at a level you're comfortable with. If you still can't make the amount you desire maybe then it is time to check your own assumptions and see what you can do to provide more value so that you can get it in return.

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

#185

Post by crooked-v »

sokoloff wrote: post #170
crooked-v wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of video game companies, it's the comparison to other software companies and positions requiring about the same level of experience and prestige. Game producers are well-known at this point for recruiting naive grads and paying them peanuts compared to what they could get even just making CRUD web apps.

It's likely that many charities underpay software developers, because the developers are working there voluntarily in part for the mission. Political campaigns have the same property in a lot of cases. So long as people want to express their preferences in where they work based on the content of the work, the mission of the organization, the laptops they issue, or any other set of criteria, I think it's fair game tha…

I think a key difference here is that a greater awareness of market-rate salaries preemptively affect those "want to work on video games" decisions much more than working for a volunteer organization. Corporate organizations in general put a lot of effort and culture into suppressing open knowledge and comparisons of pay rates.

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

#186

Post by organsnyder »

tziki wrote: post #83
esturk wrote: post #51

I read the article first and then came in to read the comments. I feel that most people commenting did not actually read the whole article. To put it simply: It is not just about pay equity in a particular level. It is also about the ingress and egress rate of a level. As the article mentions, some woman was hired as L3 while all of her co-workers were hired as L4. Was she overpaid as a L3? Maybe. But she was underpa…

Sure, but there's zero data to suggest either of those are a factor at Google. That's just moving the goal post.

How is that moving the goal post? The question at hand is whether individuals are fairly compensated based on their amount of experience and ability to contribute. Compensation is affected by job title, therefore job title is absolutely relevant.

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

#187

Post by markdown »

adamsea wrote: post #169
rhegart wrote: post #154

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?

Your argument doesn't counter his/hers.

It could be that fewer women are entering engineering fields at the top of the funnel (after high school). So every woman who applies for a job in the field could be getting one while on the whole, women still making up a tiny proportion of the workforce in that field.

In any case even if every engineering class in college has women in the majority, and every one of them is getting a job that a man previously held, it will still take a generation for parity to become visible in the workplace.

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

#188

Post by crooked-v »

smokeyj wrote: post #130
crooked-v wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.

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

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/teacher-shortage-us...

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

#189

Post by NotAnEconomist »

krn wrote: post #121

As a side note: I have recently come over a university which promised a gender equality in "all our science degrees", which it explained as an "admission of 50% males, 50% females". But how can it be a "gender equality", if 80% of the applicants are males?

They don't mean "equality" as in "treating people the same regardless of their gender, sex, race, etc" -- they mean "equality" as in "we're going to use increasing levels of force to coerce society to ignore any variation between people, and make every facet of society a paint-by-numbers picture regardless of individual preferences".

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

#190

Post by klodolph »

kingo55 wrote: post #171
77pt77 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Simpson's paradox is easily my favorite paradox. Anyone interested in interpreting stats, even from a lay perspective, should familiarize themselves with it.
Post reply on HN