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

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

#91

Post by isoskeles »

brad0 wrote: post #74
isoskeles wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to assume something insidious about Google's intentions, am I allowed assume that you just want to find a female coworker to wife?

I'm not really sure what you're trying to achieve with this comment. In saying that I am curious as to why the GP is looking for females specifically in the team.

The person I replied to was implying that the team he was interviewing for was sexist, to an extent where they simply would not hire women.

I don't think this is an okay implication to make based on such little information (we're supposed to trust that the people he spoke to were "wishy-washy" about "diversity"), and I'm asking if it's just as okay to question his own intentions.

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

#92

Post by kamaal »

osmala wrote: post #50
kevmo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of programmers at Google have compsci degrees? What's the split like within that subset?

What percentage of HIGH PAY ENGINEERING jobs in google have comp sci degrees, that's the true comparison. And then there is bigger issue here. It's really the obsession about percentages of women in X position. Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked? I believe it is both very sma…

>>Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked?

Most people are not in the job because they like create things or build things. They are there because they want a job and nothing more. And they want a job where (unit of money)/(unit of work) has a higher value.

That means they have to either figure out a way to make more money or do less work, or both.

Therefore the question of early interest or passion is meaningless to most people. So as far as they are concerned, it rarely matters how set of people of identity A got to it. They think regardless of that if set A got it, other sets should get it too.

This also creates other problems. Set A is likely to do side projects, write programs and hacks out of personal interest. Other sets looking at job as a return/effort metric will likely see why they are expected to do anything all all apart from working 5 hrs a day between 9 - 5.

The problem is merit is heavily at the side of A and other sets want the reward to not go with merit, but rather with participation itself.

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

#93

Post by Spivak »

stale2002 wrote: post #84
stretchwithme wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "makin…

Bit in the same breath if you can get away with getting an equally talented employee for 70¢ on the dollar then why would you ever hire a man?

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

#95

Post by aceon48 »

stale2002 wrote: post #84
stretchwithme wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "makin…

Your argument is irrational. If a company could get away with paying someone 70%, they would only hire the 70 percenters, or at least disproportionality. Google has roughly 20% female engineers, in line with the 20% female CS grad population.

Seriously... if there's some nefarious bias, it would mean a company hiring more women than expected, bc they can "under" pay them. Silly irrational people.

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

#96

Post by geofft »

dogruck wrote: post #54
geofft wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#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 sue…

This seems essentially like Searle's Chinese room. The program is not biased, in the sense that there is no line of code that adds bias, but the application of the program to the available data clearly produces a biased process.

We've seen this exact thing with other machine learning algorithms - there was the one in the news recently that insisted on classifying a photo of a man in the kitchen as a woman, because all its training data firmly convinced it that women are the only people in the kitchen.

I guess the thing worth explicitly asking is whether biases for entirely logical reasons are defensible - for instance, if you start with an industry where (for whatever reason) men are paid much more highly than women, it's okay to offer people their current salary + fixed delta to poach them from their jobs. I would say no, because the goal of legal policies like this is to achieve a specific result in society, and specifically not to punish bad people in charge of companies, so the question is not whether people had a bad motive, but whether the result is being achieved. If you're allowed to apply a non-biased algorithm to biased starting data and have it yield an equally-biased output, you're not actually solving the bias.

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

#97

Post by fgjjgutjvnu »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #32
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…

> complained that a man was hired a level above her with the same years of experience. > You always get attacked by the very people you're trying to help. helping how?

Google puts lots of effort into hiring and promoting women, and attracting them into tech.

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

#98

Post by kamaal »

Spivak wrote: post #88
rhizome wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>In my office almost all of the management positions are filed by women while almost all the technical people are men.

This again creates a new problem of 'Smart engineers' Vs 'Dumb managers'. To a point eventually you get to reducing management to routine supervision work.

In the past I have seen a situation where a program manager was routinely pissed because he was barely able to understand what engineers were talking about. After routinely under estimating time estimates he came to a point where the entire argument on him could be reduced to a rude statement: 'Why don't you stick to your spreadsheet cell filling work, and let us engineers do real work. Work that matters isn't your cup of tea'

I can see where this would go in case of women managers. In only some time, men would be accused of things like 'mansplaining'.

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

#99

Post by Romanulus »

stretchwithme wrote: post #25

Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I don't think they're thinking "Jim's a dude so we should pay him $50K more than Sally." No, they're paying somebody more because they don't want them to leave. And if they are paying you less than somebody else, it's probably partially because they don't think you are as much of a flight risk. And if Google is wrong about these decisions, I'd guess we'd see…

What you're talking about is referred to as a 'market opportunity', which in this case doesn't hold water since I don't know of any successful all-female (or majority-female) tech companies.
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