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

nytimes.com

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

#21

Post by maxxxxx »

xienze wrote: post #9
maxxxxx wrote: post #4

That's why we need salary transparency to really address this. There are a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women. Making this into a male vs. female issue does nothing to address the fact that people are underpaid.

I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference…

"I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. "

there are plenty of environments where salaries are known and there is not more conflict than anywhere else. For example Congress staffers' salaries are public, there are huge pay differences for the same position but it sill works.

I think most arguments against transparency are spread by employers to keep the information asymmmwetry.In most markets the party that has more information will have the advantage.

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

#22

Post by munk-a »

treis wrote: post #7

Should we read "Many Men" as "Those on H1B visas"?

I would actually be surprised if big corps didn't try to pull in more diversity from H1Bs, American universities are particularly bad at producing gender balanced graduating classes.

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

#24

Post by leesec »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #13
treis wrote: post #7

Should we read "Many Men" as "Those on H1B visas"?

$60K and the privilege of working for a FANG should be good enough for everyone.

Pretty sure this is a troll but if it's not then I Disagree.

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

#25

Post by duxup »

maxxxxx wrote: post #4

That's why we need salary transparency to really address this. There are a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women. Making this into a male vs. female issue does nothing to address the fact that people are underpaid.

I like to imagine (although it probabbly isn't true) that then I'd get less recruiter spam for jobs where they want to pay squat.... like "Did you check my salary and think you have something to offer? If so, let's talk."

Granted, that probabbly wouldn't stop recruiter spam and of course there is MUCH MORE to a good job than pay.

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

#26

Post by oarabbus_ »

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 happened. Some departments had high acceptance rates and some had low acceptance rates. Women applied to more competitive departments. Men applied to more accessible departments. Taken on the whole men had an advantage. When broken down per department it was women who were more favored."

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/my_favorite_paradox/

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

#27

Post by Impossible »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

I am sure the Labor Department will absolutely love Google giving raises specifically to men whilst under investigation for "systematically" underpaying women.

A lot of people's pay at big tech companies is based on ability to negotiate at time of offer, not on job performance at the company. I know some women in the same role as me that got better initial offers because they were in a better position to negotiate. My assumption is that women that are underpaid because they didn't negotiate, or due to some other bias, or just due to random factors, would also want men in similar situations to be compensated equally.

Ideally two individuals in the same or similar roles, with similar performance over time in that role, should have the same salary regardless of background or negotiation ability. The major issue with this is that you can't reduce pay of rockstar negotiators (who may or may not be rockstar performers), and a correction that pays everyone as much as the highest earning equivalent employee might be hard for even Google to swallow.

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

#28

Post by munk-a »

leesec wrote: post #24
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60K and the privilege of working for a FANG should be good enough for everyone.

Pretty sure this is a troll but if it's not then I Disagree.

I'm almost certain that's a troll or else someone that forgot a "/s"

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

#29

Post by xienze »

chillacy wrote: post #11
xienze wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference…

Performance is one explanation between differences between two people but will it explain differences between one sample of thousands and another sample of thousands? Are men really less performant than women on aggregate?

> Are men really less performant than women on aggregate?

I don't think that's the conclusion being reached here. What I'm getting at is performance is a VERY hard thing to quantify to everyone's satisfaction (after all, I doubt anyone thinks that they aren't a valuable employee, and everyone has numerous examples of "well this other guy sucks, I'm much better than him"), but it has a major impact on pay.

But for this specific case, there's one of two things happening:

1. As another poster said, "men" is code for "men working under H1-B visas." 2. In an effort to not look sexist, Google let the pendulum swing the other way and pay women more out of general principle.

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

#30

Post by myrandomcomment »

xienze wrote: post #14
myrandomcomment wrote: post #6

I love the irony of this. Accused of underpaying women - their reaction is "let us get some data". Nope. underpaying men. This is the way you do things. You collect the data, analyze and react. Wash rinse repeat.

A similar thing has happened with companies that go to great lengths to make sure they don't have any gender bias in their hiring process (no face-to-face during interviews, voice altering during phone interviews, etc.) only to find that they still selected more men than women. The conclusion, of course, is that they must be doing something wrong because it's simply impossible that they wouldn't be selecting a perfec…

Well it depends on the field. What is the ratio of male to female CS graduates? A quick check seems to say that in 2015 is was only 15% female.
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