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

Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I heard, the specific organization that was pursuing the case was being defunded / split up by the current administration. It sounded like they had some interesting analysis of the data, and I don't think that's ever made it to a courtroom.

I'm pretty unsurprised that leveling is a good way for bias to sneak in. My experience as a man applying for a Google position and also talking to women applying for Google positions is that leveling is extremely opaque, more so than the salary offer, and the same candidate could easily move between L3/L4 or L4/L5 essentially at the whims of the recruiter and the interviewers, and the same role can be filled by multiple levels (e.g. there isn't headcount that's open at L4 but not L5). And this would be consistent with both Google's claims that people of the same role and level are paid consistently, and employees' claims of pay discrepancy.

Also, here's the original complaint: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4044053-Kelly-Ellis-...

Google asked for this. You reap what you sow.

> Ms. Ellis, who left the company in 2014, says that almost all of the female software engineers at Google worked in front-end jobs while men worked in back-end roles.

That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.

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 got promoted into a more suitable position.

Hiring is broken, we all know this. Sometimes we might not get what we deserve. If we want more then you need to work for it. Plain and simple.

Google can't win with its current culture. This is what happens when a company or group is too left leaning. You always get attacked by the very people you're trying to help.

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 lawsuits, fire internal bloggers, and pay up underperformers to clean the stats.