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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

#21

Post by nomel »

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…

> Sometimes we might not get what we deserve.

Sometimes we deserve less than others. Gender/etc aside, some people are less talented/effective. Society seems to be afraid to say this, but not everyone is created equal upstairs.

> They both had four years experience.

Obviously, on the job years is almost entirely unrelated to pre-work experience, so this is just silly. I hope there's more to it.

I'm curious how their resumes/accomplishments compare for those four years.

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

#22

Post by kamaal »

This might be true and I hope they win.

But unfortunately everything that they say applies to men too. I wonder if this due to lack of negotiation skills. I have seen this problem being under compensation for the same skill and peer levels for men too.

At work, In one case I discovered a colleague being paid almost 50% times higher than I was. In another case in only a casual lunch conversation I discovered a colleague at the same level having RSU's almost triple my entire compensation. I also discovered while I moved to US from India(I moved back for Visa expiry reasons) that some colleagues had even negotiated green cards through really acrobatic legal work. Promotions, foreign travel, bonuses etc.

Over 10 years in this industry I have seen ability to program well, or even do bigger software work like build scalable and stable systems isn't worth two shoes in this industry.

One must have the ability to be politically skillful, negotiate well, know how to be well connected up management and use that leverage to further your career in both money and positions. I've tried to learn this, and failed. Unfortunately this turns out to be not something you can RTFM and learn.

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

#23

Post by waqf »

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/…

> dont have the talent/drive etc

Don't have the talent/drive/connections/hustle/luck …. There are more possibilities than just sexism vs. meritocracy.

Edit: hey downvoters, I'm talking about why a random given person of any gender may not be progressing in their career. Read the context.

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

#24

Post by econner »

notgood wrote: post #16

Poor 3 things were paid 80K instead of 100K; what and important and news-worthy tragedy; not like the millions of Americans that haven't get an important increase in their [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/wage-chart-2014-6

How does this point invalidate their issue? All you've done is brought up another problem. Now there are 2 problems.

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

#25

Post by stretchwithme »

Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I don't think they're thinking "Jim's a dude so we should pay him $50K more than Sally."

No, they're paying somebody more because they don't want them to leave.

And if they are paying you less than somebody else, it's probably partially because they don't think you are as much of a flight risk.

And if Google is wrong about these decisions, I'd guess we'd see a lot more female engineers leaving Google to start their own companies. But is that what we see?

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

#26

Post by kevmo »

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/…

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

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

#27

Post by WalterBright »

kamaal wrote: post #22

This might be true and I hope they win. But unfortunately everything that they say applies to men too. I wonder if this due to lack of negotiation skills. I have seen this problem being under compensation for the same skill and peer levels for men too. At work, In one case I discovered a colleague being paid almost 50% times higher than I was. In another case in only a casual lunch conversation I discovered a colleag…

We are all salesman - and a better salesman gets better results. As nerds we tend to discount, dismiss, overlook, whatever, salesmanship skills. But they still count big time.

We sell ourselves all the time, like it or not. Might as well try to learn how to get better at it.

All aspects of ourselves can be tweaked to better our salesmanship - grooming, dress, posture, getting our teeth fixed, tone of voice, words used, email protocol, etc., the list is endless.

This all started with the book "Dress For Success" by Molloy who noted that businessmen wearing tan overcoats did better than those wearing black overcoats.

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

#28

Post by disordinary »

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 !

As in lots of western countries we have a large amount of people form India in the Aotearoa (New Zealand) tech industry and quite a few in my workplace.

We're in the middle of an election right now with one of the political parties campaigning on forcing companies to make what they pay public so that we can ensure that minorities are being paid the same as others.

So, naturally the discussion turned to equal pay at work and one of the new Indian hires said that in India his boss told him that he didn't like hiring females and when he did he always paid them less as they were stupid and lazy!

That is obviously horrendous.

This isn't an attack on India, I've never worked in a workplace with gender bias as far as I've seen, but just because my experience is positive it doesn't mean that it's positive everywhere. There are good and bad workplaces in every country unfortunately and statistics back that assertion up.

Because I've never experienced anything bad it doesn't mean that bad things don't happen.

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

#29

Post by waqf »

kamaal wrote: post #22

This might be true and I hope they win. But unfortunately everything that they say applies to men too. I wonder if this due to lack of negotiation skills. I have seen this problem being under compensation for the same skill and peer levels for men too. At work, In one case I discovered a colleague being paid almost 50% times higher than I was. In another case in only a casual lunch conversation I discovered a colleag…

You say everything that they say applies to men too — but that seems like a reason that they will lose.

To win, they have to prove that they could reasonably have been paid more but weren't because they were female. If they show that they could reasonably have been paid more but weren't because they are bad at negotiating, they get nothing.

So, yeah, don't mistake discrimination law for something which would make sure people are paid what they are worth.

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

#30

Post by srtjstjsj »

geofft wrote: post #18
dontnotice wrote: post #7

The media should practice more circumspection when reporting about lawyers seeking plaintiffs or suing for class action status or at least mention how it’s a money making endeavour for that lawyer/law firm. Many of these lawyers are vultures trying to capitalize on topical matters and they rely on this sort of coverage for free marketing, it’s as likely for this to be thrown out as it is for any other outcome, and th…

Of course class-action lawsuits are a money-making endeavor for law firms. We live in a capitalist society, where the way we make things happen is that we make them profitable. In particular, class-action lawsuits exist so that law firms can find it profitable to take on cases where there is a wrong to be righted, but any single individual isn't going to find the cost of going to court and paying a lawyer to be worth…

Posner's an interesting case. He claims that he is sick of how the under-lawyered get mistreated in the courts, but he's been a consistent advocate of many legal theories to harm marginalized people and animals: he's anti-privacy for citizens, but pro-privacy for police, anti-souveillance but pro-surveillence-by-State, anti-animal-rights, anti-antitrust, in favor of a free market for selling children, opposed to equality of educational opportunity even though he doesn't believe in genetic racial intelligence and does believe that Black children are systematically oppressed, and even though he thinks copyright/patents go to far he believes hyperlinking and paraphrasing news should be illegal!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career

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