Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men • Hacker News Board

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

#551

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:31 AM UTC

sgift wrote: post #547

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. The pool of programmers "In general" is not relevant for Google. They don't hire programmers in general, but are focused on a specific subset (usually from some big universities).

What's the gender distribution of graduates from those big universities?

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

#552

Post by JBSay » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:31 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #424

MRD85 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand how that works but we're going to need to draw a line somewhere. Going by job, rank, and salary alone could ignore hours worked per week (statistically men tend to do more in the same role), bonuses for high quality work (who knows how this plays out?), etc. I could choose whatever filters I want to frame the data how I want it to, it's one of the biggest tricks of the "women are paid X less than men" ca…

You asked a direct question and I gave you an answer why that question isn't the right one to ask. You are now shifting the debate to be about something completely different. As I have said in other comments in this thread, there is simply not enough information in this article to say definitely whether there is any gender discrimination in pay at Google and if there is, what gender benefits from that discrimination.…

There is never going to be enough information and no matter how you slice the data you have it will always be arbitrary and biased. This whole debate is silly.

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

#553

Post by kamaal » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:38 AM UTC

ralusek wrote: post #103

rifung wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I worked for around 4 years before joining Google and was also hired as an L3. I'm male. Two of my new grad frien…

Also, number of years worked does not dictate how good of an engineer you are.

No, its mostly because turning down a offer(no matter what that is) from Google screams privilege. There are a lot of things related to prestige, and other hiring marketing related things that have built up this enormous clout of you having arrived at a big place in life if you land a job at FAANG companies.

So people just take whatever is offered. Because, there are tens of thousands of people applying for these jobs. Most of them are likely to better than you and they didn't crack all competitive coding style interview to land a job like you did. So people just find it hard to turn down the offer and take it.

It's only later do they realized they are not building the next search engine. Nor building the next gen e-commerce platform, but building Jsons and posting to dataservices. By then you are conditioned to free food and you are not comparing your salary with people outside but inside.

Its always hard to admit you didn't negotiate well or fell for the marketing appeal of the company. Its easy to find conspiracies and accuse others of malice. The later story is more appealing, makes you a victim and makes the other side look bad.

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

#554

Post by pas » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:39 AM UTC

sizzle wrote: post #511

nwienert wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll repeat points that aren’t my original ideas, but are painfully obvious here. It’s very simple what it’s become: sexist against men. This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. I believe we’re in a Kantian second stage. We were sexist against women. Now, we’re sexist against men. The hopeful third step

I'm genuinely curious how we might factor in the differences between genders in occupation selection and that women and men may innately value different types of work e.g. women are more empathic than men and dominate the nursing field etc

By keeping an open mind. It's ok if 90% of women want to just play with kids all day, and 90% of men want to play with guns all day. But telling, suggesting, stopping the other 10% from trying the other side is the problem.

It's inherently hard. After all, statistically 9 out of 10 will match your expectations, but you should embrace the outliers, help them understand, that they're perfectly okay, and capable of doing whatever they think they want, be it guns, C++, teacher, nurse, etc.

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

#555

Post by pas » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:40 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #380

nwienert wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll repeat points that aren’t my original ideas, but are painfully obvious here. It’s very simple what it’s become: sexist against men. This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. I believe we’re in a Kantian second stage. We were sexist against women. Now, we’re sexist against men. The hopeful third step

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.

How do you factor in path dependence? (A kind of inertia, that either requires some affirmative action style correction, or an "unfairly" long time to overcome.)

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

#556

Post by pas » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:44 AM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #394

nwienert wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll repeat points that aren’t my original ideas, but are painfully obvious here. It’s very simple what it’s become: sexist against men. This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. I believe we’re in a Kantian second stage. We were sexist against women. Now, we’re sexist against men. The hopeful third step

It's this kind of thing which gets abused in politics. You see the same thing with a certain countries in the Middle East. So, you're a boring white male who works in one of these industries. You're told constantly that you benefit from "white male privilege". Your experience, the statistics, clearly show this to be bulls t. What do you do? Do you trust anything that other authority figures tell you? Of course not. S…

There are a lot of clueless "progressives" out there. Usually more focused on their ideology/dogma, than on actual problems and solutions.

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

#557

Post by pas » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:47 AM UTC

nwienert wrote: post #343

lgleason wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

I’ll repeat points that aren’t my original ideas, but are painfully obvious here. It’s very simple what it’s become: sexist against men. This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. I believe we’re in a Kantian second stage. We were sexist against women. Now, we’re sexist against men. The hopeful third step

I'm interested in what you think of actions that aim to correct entrenched issues by forcing them. eg affirmative action.

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

#558

Post by pas » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:51 AM UTC

roguecoder wrote: post #513

onetimeusename wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

If conferences were built by men for men and are, in some inadvertent way, less rewarding for women to attend, it would make sense that women substitute monetary compensation for the non-monetary compensation they don't get.

Is there a fairness issue if the conf is not gender diverse enough? (but does blind speaker selection, and offers the same compensation to any prospective speaker)

If it seems like a literal boys club, maybe it's ok if organizers don't cajole women to attend, who don't seem to want to.

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

#559

Post by pas » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 7:56 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #422

Will_Parker wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Pressured is applied to make people fit into the working machine. We're okay with our kids being farmed because we want them to have good money and as good or better a life than ourselves. My dad wanted to go into art school, but he went into engineering instead, got a visa and moved our entire family to the US. I wanted to go into journalism, but my sister kept telling me I needed to think about my future family, so…

> How about we find a way to support artists so they're not selling everything under iTunes/Google/Amazon at a 30% cut!

> We are a factory pipeline of misery.

yep, but even to address that, you need to learn math, reading, and critical thinking.

and unfortunately our schools suck at all of them, and to change that you again need those.

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

#560

Post by pas » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 8:02 AM UTC

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #442

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…

Whatever unfair advantages you think your women colleagues have, unless you are black or latinx, it is unlikely you will ever experience the feelings of isolation and otherness that most women deal with throughout their tech careers. Are these two things mutually exclusive? Women could both have the advantages outlined by OP and feel more isolated.

It's even likely! There are still relatively few women in tech, but they are at the same time pushed, expected to do well (to show they are not just the token gals), and are helped to be there. This is a pretty stressful position to be in.