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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

#31

Post by nostromo »

danaliv wrote: post #12

Do read the fine article for the details: But the study did not tell the whole story of women at Google or in the technology industry more broadly, something that company officials acknowledged. Most significantly, it did not address ingrained issues that, according to workplace experts, cannot be overcome simply by considering how much different people are paid for doing the same job: Women and racial minorities oft…

> according to workplace experts

The media really needs to stop this practice of just saying "experts say" without any attribution.

I suggest when reading any article, when you read, "experts agree" or "sources say" or "critics have said" or "others are saying" -- just replace it with, "I, the author of this article, think ..."

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

#34

Post by derefr »

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…

> direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work

Counter-example: pay on commission. Salespeople are "directly compared", but are not doing exactly the same work. Still, the work they are doing is fungible—you can compute the value in dollars both of closing one big account, or ten small accounts, and compare those.

This is essentially how a very small subset of IT people get paid, as well: vulnerability researchers, who make a living off of bug bounty programs.

Attempts have been made to expand this approach. Some FOSS projects have bounties on each issue, where whoever submits a PR for that issue (that gets merged) gets paid the bounty.

The question is how to scale this approach to work that requires more than a single person to complete. (I.e. how to distribute the "spoils" of a bounty among a team.) There are historical examples one could look at of bounty programs where the entrants were teams (e.g. the Netflix Prize), but IIRC in none of them were any of the teams really motivated by the bounty above all; rather, they were just in competition with the other teams to be the first ones to solve an eminently-achievable-but-challenging problem, and it was competition for competition's sake—essentially, a sport.

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

#35

Post by oarabbus_ »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
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.

Given that Google's workforce is 69% men, it's quite possible that they found 3 men underpaid for every 2 women who were underpaid (60%/40%), which would mean they gave more men than women salary equity adjustments while still having a bias in the direction of the original complaint.

It's not a contest of who is more underpaid. This would indicate that Google systematically underpays, regardless of gender. THAT is the real issue here.

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

#36

Post by johnny313 »

> 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 from college four years earlier. But he was hired as a Level 4 employee, meaning he received a higher salary and had more opportunities for bonuses, raises and stock compensation, according to the suit. Other men on Ms. Ellis’s team whose qualifications were equal to or less than hers were also brought in at Level 4, the suit says.

This feels like a part of the issue, but could be really hard to analyze easily.

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

#37

Post by dv_dt »

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.

It's really not difficult to understand that women are systematically paid less than men, and also that minorities (men and women) are systematically paid less than non-minorities. And that beyond pay disparity at a given job title, there is also an issue with higher titles underrepresenting women in general, as well as minorities.

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

#39

Post by ordinaryradical »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
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.

Given that Google's workforce is 69% men, it's quite possible that they found 3 men underpaid for every 2 women who were underpaid (60%/40%), which would mean they gave more men than women salary equity adjustments while still having a bias in the direction of the original complaint.

I think this is countered specifically here:

> Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.

So they were compensated out of proportion with their demographic makeup of the company--they made up a larger share but needed more money to "catch up."

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

#40

Post by benatkin »

> Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.

If women were underpaid, things are less equal on average. If men were underpaid, as the study suggests, things are more equal on average. That said, would it be fair to keep underpaying some people in order to keep it more equal on average? I think not.

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