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

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

#251

Post by ajross »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #175
ajross wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem is "know what they are doing" can still be unfair. Consider: you're staffing up a company and need folks now. You've found two candidates who seem equally qualified and want to hire them. Both are asking for only a modest raise over their current salaries, but one happens to make 50% more than the other due to arbitrary reasons[1] having nothing to do with qualifications. What do you do? Realistically…

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.

> 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.

Find me someone (anyone, anywhere) who defends (even in the abstract!) a situation where women are paid more than men for the same work. That's a horrific strawman, and it tells me that you're looking at this as a war (with feminists as your "enemies" I guess) instead of a problem.

And no, you don't have to pay people equally. You have to pay them fairly. If there differences between individuals, that's fine. If there are systemic differences between easily classified groups of individuals, that's discrimination.

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

#252

Post by Chris2048 »

spaceseaman wrote: post #196
Consultant32452 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to believe that you have to believe that literally 100% of tech hiring companies/managers are sexist. If even ONE was not, they'd wind up with all the women because they'd be willing to pay those women more money than every other company. I'm very open to the idea that there's sexism in tech, but the idea that literally 100% of everyone is sexist doesn't seem plausible.

Huh? It's not that the companies are sexist Or the managers are sexist Or the engineers are exist Or you're sexist. That's not what anyone has been saying this whole time - ever. You have completely misunderstood the point. The system is sexist. Not the people in the system, but the system itself (similar arguments exist for police departments being racist - it's not the cops that are, but the system). In this case,…

> and I have noticed it on HackerNews, Reddit, and pretty much every video game I've ever played

what do you mean?

> My coworker had this anime poster

And that's "culture"?

> because they can never truly "fit in" with the guys.

Your examples don't really back up this point.

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

#253

Post by Chris2048 »

bandrami wrote: post #248
Chris2048 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually I do imagine that more gender parity in management and boardrooms would probably organically fix the problem, eventually. This is, ultimately, an outcome of culture(s), and cultural problems are situations where you can fake it until you make it (though it can take a generation).

But isn't the context here "women in tech"? As in, SWE/STEM positions, as opposed to upper management?

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

#254

Post by stale2002 »

romanovcode wrote: post #212
stale2002 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end goal is a meritocracy where women arent discriminated against, and are paid what they are worth. The current situation is not a meritocracy and it needs to be fixed.

In capitalism you are already payed what you are worth. If you agree for a shit salary that is your problem.

Actually, if a company is illegally discriminating against people based on gender, then it is THEIR problem.

If they do that then they can enjoy their millions of dollars in fines for doing something clearly illegal.

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

#255

Post by stale2002 »

mutatedspleen wrote: post #226
stale2002 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it is not worse candidate selection. It is better candidate selection.

Why wouldn't a company want to target groups that other people are missing? It means that you can get good candidates for cheap.

Obviously you don't lower the bar. You kept the hiring bar exactly the same, but get more people from certain groups to apply.

IE, if you can find someone who passes your hiring bar, but no other company has noticed, that means a cheap candidate.

If you target the group that everyone else is going after, they are going to be much more expensive for a given quality level.

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

#256

Post by dasil003 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #177
dasil003 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no, Google wants to hire all the best engineers they can find, even if they have to pay more. Obviously they don't want to pay more than they have to, but their primary concern is capturing as much of the top talent as they can.

Which is how you end up with worker demographics reflecting the grad demographics, as it is expected when there's no bias involved...

Agreed, I don't think there is overt bias, however it doesn't rule out industry-wide systemic bias which I think is real.

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

#257

Post by apk-d »

bandrami wrote: post #216
apk-d wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusion here is between "women get paid less on average" and "women get paid less on average because of sexist treatment/assumptions". If the latter, more specific statement is true, then we have a problem. However, if women are paid less because of less career-oriented personal life choices, maybe making an issue out of it is an overreaction. Left-handed people earn less on average than righties. Tall people e…

Why are the motivations of the people paying women important to you? The gap is an outcome of a complex system, and the outcome is what is problematic.

Not to discriminate isn't to treat everyone equally, but based on merit. If I hire/fire an employee because they're black/male/straight/christian, I'm discriminating. If I hire/fire a person because of their work performance, I'm being fair.

I don't care about the motivations of the people paying women. I care about their employee utility function, in which gender shouldn't be a factor.

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

#258

Post by brad0 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #201
kamaal wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

> 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. It suggests an obvious question though: can we do better? Can we avoid having to do "mountains worth of waste work" before getting to do the "good work", or is the former a necessary prerequisite for the latter?

I believe we can reduce the amount of waste work by doing deliberate practice.

This means really analysing what you did and how it could be better.

Also doing a small amount of work each day is much better than a large amount once a week.

Take a large task and break it down into tiny manageable chunks that you can analyse.

There's tons of material out there that has best practices for mastering anything.

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

#259

Post by geebee »

neerkumar wrote: post #82
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…

Everyone who worked at Google or a company like Google knows that 90% of people do a job well below their skills. That's how it is in those places. To sue them because you have back-end skills, but you were doing front end is laughable. There are so many PhDs in ML there writing SQL queries, or PhDs in CS changing the color of some text for an A/B test. That's how it works in the best companies in the world. You get…

My guess is that this is true of a lot of finance and law jobs as well. Actually, I once talked to a dermatologist who said he wished he got to use his mind more often (he said this on hearing that I was a programmer! I guess he thought it was a lot of deep thinking and logic or something? Seriously made me realize that my impressions of other fields is probably just as flawed).

Of course, there are jobs in all these fields that are fascinating, and people with boring jobs often have had a project here and there that was interesting, so that's what you hear about and how your impressions are formed when you aren't part of another field. After all, people at parties don't like to talk about how boring they are.

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

#260

Post by bitlax »

bandrami wrote: post #247
slavak wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp, that's the whole field of statistics down the drain! Who needs complex analysis and accounting for confounding variables when the answer is simply "Big number good, small number not good!"

What does a confounding variable have to do with anything here? The question is "do women make lower wages than men"? You are adding confounding variables I assume because you are uncomfortable with the fact that the answer is "yes", but are less uncomfortable if there's some reason that it's yes other than "people deliberately pay women less". Of course there are reasons women make lower wages than men. That doesn't…

Why do you think the gap itself is a problem as an outcome?
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