Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 297 posts

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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

rhizome wrote: post #53
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?

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by neerkumar »

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…

Everyone who worked at Google or a company like Google knows that 90% of people do a job well below their skills. That's how it is in those places.

To sue them because you have back-end skills, but you were doing front end is laughable. There are so many PhDs in ML there writing SQL queries, or PhDs in CS changing the color of some text for an A/B test. That's how it works in the best companies in the world. You get the money and the prestige, but the job is bad.

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

#83

Post by notgood »

econner wrote: post #24
notgood wrote: post #16

Poor 3 things were paid 80K instead of 100K; what and important and news-worthy tragedy; not like the millions of Americans that haven't get an important increase in their [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/wage-chart-2014-6

How does this point invalidate their issue? All you've done is brought up another problem. Now there are 2 problems.

is not about invalidation, its about priorities; have you seen any articles in the front page about those millions of Americans? Me neither; but dozens about how someone somewhere is winning 10% more than other someone and that the gender was clearly the reason.

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

#84

Post by stale2002 »

stretchwithme wrote: post #71
stale2002 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for Google, paying women less because "They can get away with it" (ie, women are less of a flight risk), is still illegal.

I don't think that's the situation I'm describing. If a company could replace an engineer that is more likely to leave with an equally productive one who is likely to stay, they wouldn't hesitate to wave good bye. What amazes me is the confidence with which people equate the work of engineers when they actually have no stake in making that judgement correctly. You see, if you are paying the money and living with the…

The business reason as to why a company would discriminate against certain groups is perfectly rational.

I mean, if a company can get away with paying women 70 cents on the dollar, because women are worse at negotiating or have less negotiation power (ie everyone ELSE is also discriminating against them, therefore they have less counter offers), then of course they would do it.

It has nothing at all to do with "making the correct call". It has to do with making the profit maximizing decision to pay a group of people less because you can get away with it.

That doesn't change the fact that this is still illegal.

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

#85

Post by notgood »

skj wrote: post #66
notgood wrote: post #16

Poor 3 things were paid 80K instead of 100K; what and important and news-worthy tragedy; not like the millions of Americans that haven't get an important increase in their [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/wage-chart-2014-6

If you wouldn't mind, please send me $20k per year. It's nothing to complain about, after all.

Ok, give me a job that pays 80K and I will send you the 20K without complaining.

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

#86

Post by Gustomaximus »

rhizome wrote: post #53
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?

This is a broad and complex question with many variables, especially the human element and needs deep context to answer. From this I am going to avoid the question as as I get the feeling this becomes 'internet nitpicking' at specifics on a broad issue. But if you'd be more specific in the question I'd be happy to discuss. Apologies if I have misunderstood.

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

#88

Post by Spivak »

rhizome wrote: post #53
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?

Or just a lack of drive/desire. In my office almost all of the management positions are filed by women while almost all the technical people are men. I asked about it when I was first hired and most of the people in the office had been offered management positions at some point during their career and they tuned them down because they'd rather do engineering work than human work.

Looking at the demographics you might suppose that there's a lot of bias and discrimination but it couldn't be further the truth. We just have lot of mobility and many options for salary increases without 'climbing the ladder' so everyone individually wound up where they wanted to be.

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

#90

Post by Klockan »

skj wrote: post #57
nrmitchi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked in infrastructure and to us 'frontend' meant user-facing services while 'backend' are services that only other services are talking to.
Post reply on HN