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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

#411

Post by Dylan16807 »

screye wrote: post #386
Dylan16807 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elementary school teaching does require less academic rigor than a university professor. But you replace that with a need for a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology, so I'd say doing a good job is significantly harder even in the sense of requiring a lot of education.

> a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology Do they really though? In my experience, school teachers don't really have either and both are either learned on the job or academically taught when pursuing the major. Being a great teacher is tough, but very few teachers are actually great. Being a university professor is IMO, among the hardest positions to get. In my experience, the smartest people I know are…

Well there's a reason I said 'need' not 'reliably get'.

Also the original quote was university teaching. The whole professorship and tenure thing is a separate giant ball of complication, and you're right that all that non-teaching stuff is extremely difficult.

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

#412

Post by everdrive »

Will_Parker wrote: post #307
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. My daughter who is finishing the primary school has recently asked me if it's okay if she doesn't like math, but likes animals and babies. Sounds like some pressure is being applied...

> Sounds like some pressure is being applied... Maybe, rightly so? It doesn't matter if you like reading, you need to learn it. For a toddler in 2019, I think coding and some math is getting close to this level of importance.

I think this is a valid point, but a kid would have to be pretty aloof these days to not recognize the expectations being placed on them. I have memories as early as Kindergarten and Pre-K, where it was really clear that adults wanted us to know that boys weren't better than girls.

(as a bit of an aside, I always wished at that time that people wouldn't push the issue. Bringing it to the forefront forced the topic, and one group of kids would "win" the argument at the expense of the other kids.)

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

#413

Post by chc »

stcredzero wrote: post #407
chc wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about outcomes for female programmers here. You're saying that female programmers don't program, and therefore they deserve to be paid less than male programmers, who presumably do program? Or what? Who are these female programmers who don't program that you're apparently so interested in talking about?

You're saying that female programmers don't program, and therefore they deserve to be paid less This is weird. That's not how I read what leereeves wrote at all. Yet you repeatedly insist that's what he's saying. Are you perhaps projecting an opinion onto leereeves? Preferences can very much influence the outcomes of a training pipeline for a field. (I say this as someone who taught a class attended by Chic Tech stud…

I'm trying to get leereeves to actually explain what he means. What sort of difference do people think exists between men and women that makes them deserve to, for example, be paid less for the same work (i.e. worse outcome) without being worse at the job?

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

#414

Post by frogpelt »

haberman wrote: post #336
frogpelt wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right. E.g.: Google is 70% men. At 100,000 employees: 70,000 Male 30,000 Female If 5% of men are underpaid that's 3,500 men. If 10% of women are underpaid that's 3,000 women. More men are underpaid (3,500 > 3,000). But women are twice as likely to be underpaid (10% > 5%).

The article said disproportionately more underpayment was to men. Therefore your hypothetical scenario (which posits that the difference was measured in absolute terms) is not what Google found.

And it can easily be justified by two assumptions:

1. The average under-compensated man had worked there longer or had been under-compensated longer

AND/OR

2. The average under-compensated man was in a higher paid role.

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

#415

Post by ZeroFries »

mikeash wrote: post #330
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or... may I dare to suggest they simply don't like it? I used to work at school. Not for a long time, but enough to make some observations. One of them: school kids are passionate. If they're interested in something, no amount of persuasion, toxicity or whatever else will distract them.

It’s perfectly reasonable to consider that maybe women are inherently drawn away from the field for whatever reason. There are biological differences between men and women and it’s possible that this is one. What I don’t understand is why so many people insist that this must be the explanation, as if the current state of things is definitely a level playing field (or biased toward women) and the fact that there are s…

Why do you think your last paragraph hasn't prevented women from becoming numerous and successful in many other fields, such as becoming doctors? Could it be because of one of the most reproducable and statistically significant findings in social psychology, that women are generally more interested in people and men more interested in things?

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

#416

Post by renholder »

maxxxxx wrote: post #351
renholder wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are plenty of situations where that better dev gets paid less. salary transparency will address that Plenty of situations? Where? Documented somewhere, I should hope, yeah? Is that better dev from a subjective or an objective perspective? The reason that I ask is because one dev can think that they're better than another and believe that they should be paid more but that could very well be the fault of fevere…

"Also, salary transparency wouldn't actually address anything. It would be a tool to address the salary issue with management and management (plus, HR) would address it, yeah?" The first step to address issues is to gather relevant data so an informed decision can be made. right now we have only very incomplete data.

How can it be a step and also address it? You're creating a dichotomy that you're refusing to resolve here...

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

#417

Post by leereeves »

chc wrote: post #408
ZeroFries wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you still don't understand the third possibility. I wonder if it has something to do with why many hard-leaning leftists also only consider the first two as possibilities.

OK, let me give you an example outcome and maybe you can explain to me how the third possibility applies in a way that is meaningfully distinct from the first two. Outcome: The women working as programmers at FooSoft make on average 10% less than the men working there. Possible reasons: 1. Lack of opportunity (e.g. people in power at FooSoft have bias against them makes it harder for them to have their contributions…

Let's be specific and replace FooSoft with Google.

A quick search suggests that only 20% of programmers in general are female, but 30% of Google programmers are female. I'm not certain these numbers are accurate, but if they are, female programmers are over represented at Google.

That would mean Google hired a greater percentage of female programmers than male programmers. That is, if Google hired the top 0.1% of male programmers, they hired the top 0.15% of female programmers.

If we assume two groups have identical distribution of qualifications, the female programmers hired would have lower qualifications, as an obvious consequence of a hiring policy that favors women. That's not saying women are less qualified, it's saying that Google hires women who are less qualified because they want to hire more women than the 20% that sex-blind hiring would result in.

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

#418

Post by renholder »

maxxxxx wrote: post #349
renholder wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of places with pay transparency and they work just fine. The information imbalance is only to the benefit of the employer. Citations?

For what? For pay transparency look at Congress staffers, lot of state employees, a lot of CEOs, the military or some tech companies. For the second point I think it's pretty well known that markets can only properly function if all participants have the relevant information.

>For the second point I think it's pretty well known that markets can only properly function if all participants have the relevant information.

So the markets have been improperly functioning, this entire time, because they didn't have the relevant information...?

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

#420

Post by pault »

chc wrote: post #408
ZeroFries wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you still don't understand the third possibility. I wonder if it has something to do with why many hard-leaning leftists also only consider the first two as possibilities.

OK, let me give you an example outcome and maybe you can explain to me how the third possibility applies in a way that is meaningfully distinct from the first two. Outcome: The women working as programmers at FooSoft make on average 10% less than the men working there. Possible reasons: 1. Lack of opportunity (e.g. people in power at FooSoft have bias against them makes it harder for them to have their contributions…

You've jumped into a discussion about the ratio of men to women in STEM and started talking about equal pay, when none of the parent comments were taking about pay, and the article we are discussing is a study that found women at Google get paid more than their male peers. I'm not sure what's going on here.
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