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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

#221

Post by Chris2048 »

spaceseaman wrote: post #194
TeMPOraL wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if we change [1] to "Yeah, one is a gal", then I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem. Ultimately, the only alternative is to pay people equally. Which won't fly generally, as companies always want to pay the minimum amount that can keep the employee from leaving.

> I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem. The fun thing about making a straw-man is you make yourself immune from criticism. I can't attack this point without having to completely define someone who is "pro-diversity" (what's that even mean?), and give evidence that no one in that group has the traits you claim of ("look at this feminist, see I was right!"). More imp…

> What irks me is you dismissing the argument with your little straw-man and moving on to "the only alternative". You completely disregarded the points of everyone opposite the aisle of you in the most condescending way.

"little" straw man is also condescending.

Plus, a straw man is "an intentionally misrepresented proposition" - not only can we not conclude what OPs intention was, but also it's not clear to me that it is a misrepresentation of the original comment.

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

#222

Post by mutatedspleen »

I guarantee they will write a book after all of this.

Their story, their raw emotion, the disparity, diversity and oh my the adversity; all beautifully painted on a backdrop of capitalization and autism.

Wake me up when it's time. I'll be here, crying.

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

#223

Post by mutatedspleen »

nikcub wrote: post #182
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.

Jesus christ, no. Scroll up.

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

#224

Post by AjithAntony »

kamaal wrote: post #171
linkregister wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true. People didn't give two shits about the ladies and doing the tiny useless portion of the world known as software they occupied 50 years ago - back then it was less glamorous and less money involved. Yes, women used to dominate software development. Until the money and prestige started coming in, then men started dominating the profession. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmin...

Not justifying anything. But wasn't early programming two distinct tasks? 1. Writing the Program(On Paper). 2. Feeding the program to the computer. People in 2. were called 'Programmers' because that is what they did literally- 'Program the machine'. Also early programming had all sorts strange situations where a large part of programming was actually getting results by plugging values in largish math formulas. So th…

This was my understanding too. Women were given the the enormous and tedious task of transcribing programs onto punch cards and such. It required a large "typing pool", much like secretarial pools preparing letters dictated by others.

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

#225

Post by Chris2048 »

bandrami wrote: post #134
great_psy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how just giving a group of people more money will solve the problem. That's is an artificial way of addressing it, it's just a band aid. Let's look at the causes , and address those. I think that's how you solve it. It is pretty sexist to say , "give someone more money because they are a women"

Ummm... you realize band-aids solve the problem of bleeding, right? Similarly, giving women more money solves the problem of women getting paid less money.

A band aid is a temporary solution to a problem that fixes itself. Do you expect this problem to fix itself?

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

#226

Post by mutatedspleen »

stale2002 wrote: post #150
Spivak wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit in the same breath if you can get away with getting an equally talented employee for 70¢ on the dollar then why would you ever hire a man?

The way that it works is that you hire anyone at all who can pass the hiring bar, and then negotiate salary afterwords. The problem is quantity. At the end of the day, if only X people that you interview pass your hiring bar, it is impossible to hire more than X. You can't just say "Lets double X!". Now, would companies do things like try to reach out to women groups, so as to increase the amount that interview with…

Wait, what? How in the world does anything you mentioned relate to that ending protestation written in capital letters?

All diversity efforts that I've ever seen are the exactly opposite of profitable and result in sexist/racist/otherist selection of candidates. The unfortunate end result of worse selection is that worse candidates were hired.. every. time.

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

#227

Post by Eridrus »

kevmo wrote: post #26
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?

I'm just going to go out on a limb here based on personal experience and say like 95%+ have a bachelor's degree or higher.

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

#228

Post by dontnotice »

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…

My more pressing (no pun intended) concern is with the press' coverage of these suits, when they don't lay bare the underlying machinations they are basically choosing sides.

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

#229

Post by bb611 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #58
jpatokal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Nvm. Alex3917 defines it better than I did.

At a two-person startup, the front end developer is the one doing Angular or React, and the back end developer is the one doing Django or Rails. At a mid-sized startup, the front end developers are probably also responsible for Django / Rails, and the back end developers are responsible for things like managing the Hadoop cluster and the machine learning components. And at a large company, anything built with existin…

I haven't worked at Google, but I have worked at a very large tech company, and this isn't accurate.

They still hire frontend devs. Those frontend devs still do front-end JS with libraries. Some of them work on in-house libraries, but their focus is still narrow. Same for backend - they use the industry standard term to mean the industry standard.

However, the differentiation of teams/departments is much higher. To take on your argument directly, a project to create a new database would have software engineers but be on an infrastructure team. They don't call themselves backend engineers or recruit backend engineers, they call themselves software engineers and recruit people with skills writing system software.

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

#230

Post by bb611 »

to_bpr wrote: post #43

What is the end goal here? Companies being forced to publish and formalize pay tiers? Can Google publish a report on non-pay differences by sex at Google? Sick (or personal) leave taken, overtime worked, vacation time availed of, etc. by sex? Obviously with everyone being equal and doing equal jobs, the above shouldn't really be an issue?

> What is the end goal here?

Presumably these women would like more money.

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