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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

#51

Post by thekashifmalik »

ransom1538 wrote: post #34

Flat salaries may fix this? You basically join at the same bracket publicly. No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. For each male hired there must be a female hired. No roles. Everyone has the same title: "Engineer". Off sites are strictly prohibited. Is this what the lawyers want?

Haha that'd be ridiculous! Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much.

That being said, salaries are not determined by how hard you work but rather how much the company needs you to stay.

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

#52

Post by flukus »

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…

> 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.

It's impossible to say without more information but it could just be a case of the old 4 * 1 year experience for her and 1 * 4 years experience for him. Comparing people on years of experience is the sort of irrelevant laziness I'd expect from a recruiter, not a developer.

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

#53

Post by rhizome »

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/…

Sure, lack of advancement indicates a lack of ability. It's an old rationalization, but it's a post hoc fallacy.

That is: lack of ability to do what? Can you clarify?

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

#54

Post by dogruck »

geofft wrote: post #31
dogruck wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let's think about the compensation process. You start with the obvious -- managers assess the value of each employee. Roughly, for each employee you derive a dollar amount that is: 1. Larger than what the employee could be paid elsewhere (otherwise, the employee leaves) 2. Close to the employee's contribution to the company's bottom line. That's a rough science though. #2 is certainly harder than #1. So, next, yo…

#1 directly reflects biases from other companies, which could arise for lots of reasons. If, say, many of your male engineers are getting offers from Uber and the rest aren't comfortable applying, and Uber is giving extremely high comp to lure people away from Google, then your formulaic comp will end up with men getting consistently higher salaries. Google is pretty opaque about how they make salary offers, but from…

I agree with everything you said, and your experiences match my own. I still say that situation leads to formulaic, systematic management.

Let's say that GOOG developed a sophisticated machine learning algorithm that made all hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation decisions. The code is open source, and everyone can see that it doesn't contain explicit logic for bias.

Now, a short, 44 year old, male engineer sues because of a statistically significant observed bias against one of his cohorts. Is the program biased, or just insightful?

With humans, it seems we have no choice but to assume their collective algo is biased. And it often is! But, when you're a massive monopoly with tons of cash, the safest thing is to make formulaic decisions that are statistically clean. It's just good business.

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

#55

Post by 0xbear »

ransom1538 wrote: post #34

Flat salaries may fix this? You basically join at the same bracket publicly. No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. For each male hired there must be a female hired. No roles. Everyone has the same title: "Engineer". Off sites are strictly prohibited. Is this what the lawyers want?

Who would want to work at such a place? Last I checked this is still a free country and you can work wherever you want.

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

#56

Post by brad0 »

nomel wrote: post #21
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…

> Sometimes we might not get what we deserve. Sometimes we deserve less than others. Gender/etc aside, some people are less talented/effective. Society seems to be afraid to say this, but not everyone is created equal upstairs. > They both had four years experience. Obviously, on the job years is almost entirely unrelated to pre-work experience, so this is just silly. I hope there's more to it. I'm curious how their…

Thanks for making these points explicit.

Years experience is not an indicator of seniority. I have two friends that graduated at different years.

One has more than 10 years experience. The other has three years.

10 year guy has been working with jquery and HTML the whole time. He avoids any other problems or domains.

Three year guy wants to work in every area possible. He actively pursues internships and work that provides a wide range of experiences and technical variety.

Now who do you think is more valuable as an employee?

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

#57

Post by skj »

nrmitchi wrote: post #49
jpatokal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, they sort of do, because those terms don't map so cleanly when you begin spreading into a multi-tiered architecture. You could easily end up with 'server side' work, which exists solely to augment or support a UI, and is not part of the 'core' business applications/services.

You could, but at Google "frontend" work means things happening in the browser.

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

#58

Post by Alex3917 »

jpatokal wrote: post #39
Alex3917 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that because of their scale, jobs that would be considered full stack or back end at other companies are probably considered front end at Google.

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 existing libraries might be considered front end, whereas back end might be creating a new database or whatever. I don't claim to know how Google works, but as companies get bigger the back end tends to go further back, and so the 'front end' encompasses more also.

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

#59

Post by kamaal »

KGIII wrote: post #47
kamaal wrote: post #22

This might be true and I hope they win. But unfortunately everything that they say applies to men too. I wonder if this due to lack of negotiation skills. I have seen this problem being under compensation for the same skill and peer levels for men too. At work, In one case I discovered a colleague being paid almost 50% times higher than I was. In another case in only a casual lunch conversation I discovered a colleag…

> This might be true and I hope they win. Can you elaborate on this? Namely, the burden of proof is higher than 'might be true.' I'm guessing you meant something more like, 'If this is true, I hope they win.' I can never tell, anymore.

If this is a merely negotiation problem than the problem gets stated in a different tone.

I have been told many times that I need to work on my negotiation skills. One manager has even asked me whom do I go lunch with. And why don't I go to eat with the big shots. Of course you need to act all pally and buttery, saying yes to anything they say all the while.

What they mean to say is stop expecting the system to be fair and do what it takes to win.

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

#60

Post by skj »

dogruck wrote: post #10

This is noise because these lawsuits are common, and Google has deep pockets. The more interesting investigation is what happens at small companies. For example, look at the early Google employees -- only a few women, and most of those women were not engineers. Once a company is at Google's size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic. Not to mention that Google is a monopoly, with enough excess cash to settle lawsu…

At Google, comp comes from how effective your management chain makes your case. It has a large subjective component.
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