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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

#451

Post by devtul »

movedx wrote: post #435
jurassic wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> areas with primarily male coworkers, and creepy bosses This describes basically every tech job I have ever had. Real life engineering woman here reporting in. In 2014 I joined a series B startup as engineer #15 and was the only woman in the office other than the admin; food delivery dudes often brought things to my desk, assuming I must be the office mother. When I was late to work one day after being groped by a s…

I'm honestly quite taken aback by this. I want to say sorry, and I will, but I know it's not personally my fault and I know it won't make much of a difference to your circumstances now or in the future. But still, I'm sorry you've had this experience. I have to be honest and say this, but I think what you've experienced is very much an American culture kind-of-thing. Every time I read a comment like this, besides mak…

> tends to always come from somewhere in America

In a Chinese forum about knitting nonetheless

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

#452

Post by cellularmitosis »

busterarm wrote: post #294
FiddlyPack wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey so I know this is n of 1 and off-topic, but as a liberal arts student, I went from music to signal processing to music theory to music analytics to generative music to software engineer. There can be a lot of STEM in non-STEM degrees. I did take a number of CS, acoustics, and electrical courses as a music major, but my degree still says music. I know once-English majors with a similar story of a passion for what…

Roughly 1/3 of the engineers that I've encountered in my ~17 year career have music degrees (and one guy who went to ballet school and later wrote one of the most well-known O'Reilly books). And this is mostly on the ops side.

This seems to also be a running theme among clojurists, and the opening question on most episodes of the cognicast was inspired by this correlation.

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

#453

Post by Gibbon1 »

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.

> markets can only properly function if all participants have the relevant information.

That's the reason why it's criminal for employers to punish employees for discussing compensation with each other and why employers try their hardest to prevent that from happening.

I posit that in a lot of (most) companies profit is born wholly by the underpaid employees.

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

#454

Post by onetimeusename »

lgleason wrote: post #326
rhegart wrote: post #154

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level…

[edited for typos and grammer] Anecdotally, I've run a couple of tech conferences and know others who have as well fairly recently. We've made a point to hold workshops for under represented groups, had the Codes of Conduct, make a lot of extra effort to reach out to women as speakers etc.. In the end, we would get 5 to 10 times as many talk submissions from men, accept nearly all of the talks by women (often turning…

That's interesting. I have seen a number of female tech personalities being pretty critical of being asked to speak for free. I have never been paid by a conference I spoke at, speaking as a male. I never connected that maybe having that expectation of getting remuneration discourages people from speaking since most conferences probably don't.

That said, I have come to see some pushes for diversity in tech as being extortionist. Some of the tactics used by some specific women who push for diversity in tech are blatantly self-serving like offering workplace diversity consulting but also naming and shaming corporations and individuals for lack of diversity.

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

#455

Post by leereeves »

stcredzero wrote: post #444
leereeves wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mal…

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. Going by the "logic" of outcomes being the "only holistic measure" this would indicate that Google is biased against male programmers within the context of the pool of available candidates.…

> Yet if we change the scope of our consideration to that of the general population, Google would be biased against females.

That would be expecting Google to hire untrained people as programmers, which would be absurd.

If we compare with the general population, any bias found wouldn't be at Google, but in the school system, children's entertainment, parenting, or some other group that influences people long before they apply to Google.

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

#456

Post by dv_dt »

denzil_correa wrote: post #67
naasking wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's not difficult to understand why people believe this might be true, but it is difficult to understand why people accept this as fact when the empirical data of systematic underpayment isn't all that solid.

> but it is difficult to understand why people accept this as fact when the empirical data of systematic isn't all that solid. It would help if you posted the empirical data you refer to.

Here's a study, comparing gender, after adjusting for experience, hours worked, and education. It calculates 0.79:1.00 women to men.

https://www.epi.org/publication/womens-work-and-the-gender-p...

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

#457

Post by TeMPOraL »

whiddershins wrote: post #405
TeMPOraL wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I prefer dynamic systems view. We're oscillating. We've been under the target, overcorrected, and we're above the target now. Like always in (widely-understood) politics, this will be met with another overcorrection; all we can hope for is that there's dampening in the system, so that we'll converge on target at some point.

I don’t really like being accepting of oscillation. Forward movement, progress, shouldn’t be defined as updating who we discriminate against. Progress would be to stop discriminating. Optimizing for equality of outcome seems to be causing discrimination. That doesn’t look like progress to me.

I agree with you strongly. This isn't progress. This is essentially the same shit on a different day, and amplified by social media. I'm by no means accepting of it, I just feel this analogy is more accurate.

I brought up dynamic systems to point out that this isn't and won't be a three-step process of "the extreme, the other extreme, the golden middle". This phenomenon is continuous and oscillating; more than that, it can be dampened, stable or runaway, and which of those it is, depends on a lot of factors. If we manage to dampen it down, then we'll have made progress.

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

#458

Post by leereeves »

chc wrote: post #433
leereeves wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mal…

Let me get this straight: When women are hired less, it's because they're simply not interested. But when men are hired less, it's because they're being discriminated against? I think my hypothesis is simpler: - Women are discriminated against in the industry as a whole - Google actively discriminates in favor of women It's discrimination both times.

What makes you think women are hired less?

When Google (and other top tech companies) actively discriminate in favor of women, that causes the appearance of discrimination elsewhere in the industry, because the top tech companies have taken more of the best female programmers and those who weren't hired by Google et al are, on average, worse than the men who weren't hired by Google et al.

And when I spoke about interests, I was discussing why few women choose to study computer science.

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

#459

Post by kareninoverseas »

This debate is exhausting.

I agree with some previous posters that women may be more favoured by formal systems now, while men remain more favoured by informal systems.

I think that part of the issue is that there are more ways to be male and a successful senior engineer or team lead than there are female.

We tend to look towards people who are similar to ourselves to see how we should advance. There are many fewer female role models than there are male ones. Many women who make it to leadership positions are encouraged to act masculine.

Women who make discrimination claims that later ring false are usually villainized. I think it might be useful to think about why these might be occurring. In particular, I think women as a whole still feel a great deal more insecurity WRT their positions in the workplace. The equality that's been won in the last few decades has been to some extent manufactured, so it feels a lot more fragile.

I don't think that a good reaction to this news article is to feel upset that men are now being discriminated against.

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

#460

Post by chc »

stcredzero wrote: post #425
chc wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. People throw this accusation around all the time, but it doesn't make much sense. Outcomes are the only holistic way to measure opportunity. If you're seeing one group getting lesser outcomes, there are only two possibilities: Their opportunities are being artificially limited somewhere , or one of the groups is simply bet…

Outcomes are the only holistic way to measure opportunity. I'm sorry, but that's "not even wrong" as Pauli would say. what you're really saying is, "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable." Group cultures/subcultures can pass on knowledge, which can then provide advantages and then be transmitted to different groups. No racial or innate superiori…

What you're describing here is a disparity of outcomes reflecting a disparity of opportunity, isn't it? I agree with everything you said here, but you're presenting it as a disagreement, so I'm a little bit confused.
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