About time someone confronted the obvious discrimination against men.
16
Wait this must be wrong. Wsj just said Obama was wrong to sue oracle because stats showed blacks are underpaid. Relying on stats is wrong saith wsj. So Google must be wrong here too. Right?
Too funny....so the reality is men are being under-paid.
6
It's annoying that we ridicule anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers for ignoring all pieces of evidence that contradict their beliefs, but when a piece of information is presented that conflicts with our mainstream, liberal beliefs, we quickly search for ways to explain it away as bias.
Granted, there is more evidence for wage discrimination than for either of those two conspiracy theories, but if we are unwilling to work with new data that may result from our changing policies, we will never solve these problems of inequality without creating new ones.
9
The question for a company is .. set pay grade (and pay) for potential, for skill set, for performance and results ... any one, two, or all three. Companies who do this well assess all three, treat them differently. Assume "pay for performance". This may or may not affect pay grade, and a company is still left with deciding how to reward people with deep knowledge and superior skill sets (clearly important for mentoring, esp in a technical organization). Last, there is the "potential" question, requiring a rigorous requirement and assessment program. Identifying people with "high potential" is important for succession and selecting both top technical experts for positions and senior leaders. Letting potential govern over all else is a recipe for failure if it accelerates people too rapidly ignoring the need for demonstration of competences and results. Within this some groups need additional attention, coaching and opportunities as long as the appropriate "boxes are checked".
Oh the comments here are so predictable. Leftists really are amusing. Why on Earth would average women's salaries be equal to men's in fields where women consistently show lower levels of interest and participation?
And before you double down with your ridiculous "but partriarchy" arguments, consider that the countries with the highest levels of gender equality (Scandinavia, etc) have the lowest levels of participation by women in STEM.
The gender inequality narrative has utterly collapsed under its own lack of logic. Please stop NYT. Now you're just embarrassing yourself.
10
Doesn't the M in STEM stand for math? Use some.
Given the data provided by the article, you cannot conclude that the average man at Google is more likely to be underpaid than the average woman or that the average man will be underpaid by a greater percent. Given Google's interest in obscuring wage discrimination against women in their own company, the fact that clear conclusions cannot be reached from the data provided is likely to mean that more detail, if disclosed, would reveal women, on average, are underpaid more often and more severely than men. The article reports that the average Software Engineer Level 4 male is more likely to be underpaid than the average female, which, again, suggests women have it worse in every other classification, of which there are many.
4
@John Hardway Frustratingly enough, my comments were based on data that was included in the original version of the article.
The inconclusive data that suppororted the claim below has been removed.
"The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men, is done every year.
The only data they provided (now they provide none) that supported "disproportionate" was that more than 69% of the dollars spent to compensate for underpayment went to men. This could be the result of the men having higher compensation levels but lower percentages of underpayment. This is a likely scenario as men at Google, on average, have longer tenure than women.
It is also worth noting that the study is only focusing on one aspect of pay levels:
"Critics said the results of the pay study could give a false impression. Company officials acknowledged that it did not address whether women were hired at a lower pay grade than men with similar qualifications."
I’m confused: if women are being are widely being given lower pay grades to start with, how does that compute with men being underpaid for the same work?
My three STEM educated daughters have found nothing but benefits to being in their fields, engineering and biology. From the hiring because the companies want to hire women, to advancement.
Maybe they know better than some women how to use their gender, or speak up, or some trait that other women lack.
These companies range from small startups to Dell and Motorola.
3
Yeah, my husband is underpaid...
I find the additional compensation given to men after the study's findings ridiculous. That's because the difference found is in the range of statistical fluctuations, and erasing such fluctuations does not serve the goal of equality and fairness.
roughly $9.7 million divided among 10,677 employees amounts to just over $900 per person, which would be 1% on a $90,000/year salary. The real problem to tackle is not caused by statistical fluctuations but by systemic bias, as illustrated by the example in the article, of a female employee given one pay levels less than a peer.
1
I'm glad to see that the company is taking steps to proactively address this inequity. I work in Silicon Valley and do hear a lot of women state that they are underpaid. The "78 cents" meme is constantly repeated here and is accepted as gospel. That said, if these comprehensive review do discover that women are truly paid less than men in similar jobs for similar output, then this is equally in need of addressing.
1
Google adjusted salaries by $9.7 million across 10,677 employees. That's an average of $908.49 per employee. Considering most of these employees are above $100K per year, and often well above, that means the correction amounted to less than 1%, or noise level. There are many ways to spin this, but the most obvious one is that Google is trying to claim that on average, everyone is compensated fairly. Believe it or not, but they probably spent more on studying the problem than in compensating any perceived errors. The cynic would say that this is part of their legal defense.
4
No one ever brings up underpaying or just not hiring qualified disabled people.the Federal government is notoriously unfair to hiring the disabled.The disabled make up 10% of the populous yet the government only hires at 3/4 of 1%. The top scale in pay for qualified disabled is tier 4 out of 10 . Where is the class action lawsuits for the disabled !
2
This just shows the reverse discrimination men are currently facing in our society in order to placate modern feminism. Companies want innovation. If you are going to have a rigid work environment, with strict pay schedules, will result in less innovation, or men leaving to start their own companies. This is what women should do. If you are not happy with your employer, start your own company! The rewards come with the risks.
6
Oh, right! It's those whiny women who are at fault!
Did you even read the article?l Women were being leveled, that is, pigeonholed or spotted into lower levels than what their experience and qualifications called for. There is deep structural bias.
Even the algorithms used to address inequity are biased in favor of the men, resulting in their receiving the lion's share of the “equity” raises!
2
I recall conducting Internal Reviews for Navy Medicine back in the early '90s in which I studied the tasks that workers actually did in a workday vs. job skills their job description said they did. As part of this I assigned government service (GS) pay grades to discrete tasks. More often than not, it turned up that workers should hav been assigned to lower GS pay levels than those to which they were actually assigned and paid for.
All they need is a Union so that everyone gets the same. Works for cops and firemen.
3
United States is the only place where the company tracks workers’ racial backgrounds... because they're an invention and the US is built on them.
2
I’m amazed that Google jumped to fix the discrepancy. Had it been women earning less, there would have been years investigating why women earn less which would have discovered it was their own fault. I’m a little confused by all this, but it sounds like men received raises and now the investigation will be aimed at figuring out how to get back to paying men more. As some commenters suggested, women don’t do the “hard” jobs, so they shouldn’t get the big money.
2
I have extensive consulting experience in the area of pay equity, and what is most surprising about the Google study is that it did not examine whether or not grade levels were properly established. If, as alleged, women were generally in a lower grade than men for a job with comparable if not identical skill, effort and responsibility requirements, and an incorrect conclusion would be made. Establishing the correct grade level is the first step in determining pay equity.
Even after grade level is rationally and logically established on a non biased basis, one should also examine experience, function, work location , hours worked, and performance if objectively determined. Establishing pay equity is a complex matter. I’m retired now, but my former employer has conducted global pay equity studies by gender, and found pay gaps between men and women all but disappear when controlling for level, job function, and employer. The widely quoted US government findings are based on calculating pay of all men vs all women employed, and on this basis finds a large gap. While accurate, results are misleading. Women are likely paid less for a wide variety of reasons, including functional career choices, length of work experience, hours worked, etc. STEM functions typically pay more, and for entry levels often leveled higher based on criteria such as skill complexity and market. The Google study sounds incomplete, but at least a step in the right direction.
3
So Google finds out it apparently does not pay men enough, so the rest of the article is about why women need to get more and why women are the real victims.
I am probably too old for this kind of strange.
17
Has anyone some staticts how much percent of employees in jobs with high risk allowance (like working on a oil plant or underground) are female?
1
"google seems to be advancing a flawed and incomplete sense of equality by making sure men and women receive equal salaries for similar work"
what a sentence!
the theory originally under examination was that google practices sexist *wage* discrimination, which predicts men being paid more than women for the same work. when this is disconfirmed by experiment, there are two options: 1) rescue the theory with ad hoc modification; 2) reject the theory.
i get that google could be practicing sexist hiring/promotion discrimination, but to test that theory requires a completely different study than the one described in the article. it could very well be true and should be looked into. but in what sense could the findings of the study in the article be, as many say, "surprising," if they did not disconfirm some widely-subscribed theory? i thought i left the goal posts over here...
7
"Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity"
Very rarely have I read such complete double-speak. It is truly worth of Orwell. Let the others suffer until we think they have suffered enough, because we will continue to come up with arbitrary arguments to prolong their suffering until they do.
And you wonder why you are losing the argument?
And no mention in this piece by the (shocked) journalist, of the precipitous decline in STEM choices by young women in the last 20 years - particularly in the "1st world" , or any attempt to understand their reasons? Or coverage that, in medicine, we have had at least a generation of a majority of women in particular specialist fields (Paediatrician, Psychiatry, but not Surgery) where there is clearly equal opportunity but complete diversity in outcome. Is it POSSIBLE that men and women are actuated by different things because they are BIOLOGICALLY different? Heaven forbid. If I were tom take the testosterone coursing through my teenage son and transplant that into my teenage daughter, would I expect to see them to stay the same? I think not...
And no, none of my kids will every work for Google. What a dreadful place.
11
Men are under pricing their labor because the job offers them other, non-monetary incentives. Women are not under pricing their labor because they don't care about those non-monetary incentives. That's just supply, demand and price signalling at work. Standard economics. What's the problem? If I were a Google shareholder, I would want to know why the board is volunteering to pay men more than they want to receive in order to do their jobs. And why the board isn't recruiting more of those under priced men.
1
@Yellow Bird "Men are under pricing their labor because the job offers them other, non-monetary incentives."
Unless I missed something, I did not see that mentioned in the article.
Where does it mention men receiving non-monetary incentives vs women who do not?
What it in a different article?
4
If we are actively trying to make the workplace equal for all genders, then of course at some point there will be some type of over correction! Of course at some point women would be pain more than men. This should be a good sign that we are actually approaching the goal of more than a hundred years of work.
Is there still inequality? Sure. But Google now at least gets to answer the harder and better questions of how to best help its employees more than just saying "pay gap" a million times.
"Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity" Well, that's awkward.
9
My ex-wife has worked at Google for years and I am in no way a fan of the company. She works at the company, but is not an employee, as she is an employee of ManPower, a "temp" or a staffing company. While my ex is a great employee and Google employees have tried to get her hired by Google, they won't hire her and give her benefits. That said, my ex has zero complaints about Google, but I do. They pay a 'spitload' of money to their engineers, but hire much of their support staff 'on the cheap'. I guess, what would you expect from a company that is a vehicle for advertisers and one that sells your personal information?
5
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
11
I worked at Google 2006-2010. Here's the thing: not engineers are the same. The person mentioned in the article, Kelly, was complaining that she got slotted (level she got put on when joining) at level 3 when she had the same experience (number of years) as somebody else who got slotted at level 4. This is laughable, because the slotting level depends on the level at the previous company and to make it at a higher level it's harder to pass the interview, much harder. Moreover, as time passes, and people gather experience at the same pace, you'll see that some people are just better engineers and get promoted, while others don't. Promotions are pretty objective and you can see what one has to do in order to make each level. Experience as number of years is an incomplete measure. This, btw, can be seen even without any experience. Say somebody finishes with a good PhD with 20 papers and another barely 1 paper. Or somebody finishes undergrad at MIT with ACM world competition contests and another just barely thru a community college with little coding experience.
12
@CK
I have worked at jobs where increasing my responsibilities and workload did not result in promotion, because there was no position to promote to. If you felt you were under-appreciated, you had to apply—competing alongside everyone else—for a different job. There are plenty of industries that welcome the opportunity to keep an over-qualified employee in an under-paid and stagnant position.
1
It shouldn't escape us that whenever we start a conversation about an inequality or issue that has specifically to do with men, we end up talking about how it impacts women.
9
We need more transparency and collective bargaining with wages and salaries overall, otherwise abuses of all kinds hide in the shadows. Years ago, I was lucky to have had a boss at a major US co who noticed my salary was lower than that of my male peers even tho I was more highly qualified and had a bigger portfolio. My boss quickly adjusted accordingly, and I so honor him for that, but it turned out the pay differential was just one expression of a broad and pervasive culture of gender bias, even bullying. It's not just salaries, it's budgets, standards, opportunities, respect, safety while traveling w "superiors," on and on, and you figure out fast that HR is not there for you at all...
2
Yeah, a bit like the creative services company I own. The majority of my employees are female. I tell people I’d love to pay them the average of what the men make, but, unfortunately, none of the women want to take a pay cut.
6
Amazing that no men want to work with you.
3
I honestly think the whole call for diversity in this country is getting out of hand. No matter what you do you are unfair to someone.
15
As most men know, who have worked for a big corporation, you don't last if you just perform. It's always been how you produce for the company, how many hours you work, how effective you are in your job, how many significant improvements that have been implemented, and the biggest, how many patents you have invented in your career.
Companies don't want people just to fill slots. They want innovation. There should be enough seed money, from rich women investors, for any women with great ideas to launch their own companies. The only one that comes to mind, in recent years, is Theranos. Any others?
2
"Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity."
One for you, two for me.
7
Google’s so good it makes me want to throw up. Now continue to sell every aspect of my life to anyone stupidly willing to want to pay for it.
5
Measuring competence for such jobs has always been problem in comparison to, say, electric company linesmen. Seems some of these women computer/software engineers working for Google ought to create their own companies rather than sue for what they perceive as "workplace" inequities. Talent has no limits, right?
4
Ahh! The age-old confusion of perception vs. reality!
Isnt it the case that the more one complains about it, the greater the chance the pendulum swings in their favor? The pendulum always swings both ways.
However, now the apologists are going to say that the women are more qualified - funny how this never applies to men or the model minorities!
15
The thing that gets me is how much outrage and energy is devoted to something, software engineering, that is a small sliver of the jobs in the US. This is sliver becomes miniscule if we focus on only the most prestigious companies. I work in tech, and it's a pretty shallow world, where status seems to matter a lot; and perhaps that is the source of all this. It is a very blinkered and elitist view of the world. If you look at the US Department of Labor statistics on gender share by employment, you will see many jobs skewed by gender. 98% of dental hygienists are women, 99% of carpenters are men. There are many more jobs that are gender skewed one way or the other than there are engineering jobs at prestigious companies. I don't disagree that there is discrimination (sexism, ageism, racism) in tech, indeed I am sure I have faced it personally. However I also do not think if you took away these isms would software engineering mirror the general gender and make-up of the country, anymore than if you tried to do the same to truck driving.
12
Give me a couple millennium of women getting the upper hand on... well, everything, then I think we can call it even.
6
@Steel penn
Now now.
1
@Steel penn
Women have already enjoyed millennia of the upper hand. Men were forced to fight wars for the elites and get hacked to pieces as women stayed behind and surrendered to invaders. It’s about time American women fight America’s wars exclusively. And if you all die and fail then I’m happy to surrender to the females of the invading force. Then we can call it even.
4
If over qualified women are at the top of a salary grade, when they should be in higher salary grades with higher pay ceilings, across the entire corporation, then raises for all the men to achieve equity of pay would result.
Of course, I believe all those women employees were actually paid an equal fair salary, after decades of women being underpaid. I am a women, I have experienced unequal pay in the workplace, so yea right of course all those poor men were under paid, I buy it.
1
Hello, Google:
Now that you've addressed those poor, underpaid men, how about addressing age discrimination? I'd like to see a report of pay based on age. Or do you not have enough employees over the age of 40 to make such info statistically significant?
12
Two serious questions:
1) Perhaps women are perennially underpaid because statistically they most likely take maternity leave and leave the job. And, perhaps, the salary disparity compared to male counterparts accounts for the future expense of hiring a replacement...?
2) Can private companies require female employees to sign contracts prohibiting them from becoming pregnant (within a timeframe from date of start)?
7
Society's attempts to create equality are doomed. Real equality is a myth ... a mirage ... a fever dream.
5
My favorite headline of the day. As usual, the left will try to squirm its way out of reality with its standard Greek chorus of "Yes, but..."
We saw this with the Jussie Smollett hoax when the left, facing the ugly truth, responded not with contrition but with the tautological absurdity that “Yes, this was a hoax but hate crimes are everywhere and our eager response to such crimes only PROVES their ubiquity." (Notwithstanding the fact that more hate-crimes were clocked under Bush in 2008 - 7,783 - vs. under Trump in 2017 - 7,175, per the FBI.)
We saw it with the MAGA Covington teens, "Yes, we got that wrong but...let's talk about the noble Nathan Phillips and the plight of the Native American.“ (Notwithstanding the fact that Phillips was soon revealed to be a serial provocateur and fabricator).
Honestly, the far left is as allergic to facts as the far right.
Yes, let's get more women in tech if they so wish. Let's have them join the Boy Scouts (and let the boys join the Girl Scouts!) I'm all for it! But let's stop pretending that women are facing some sort of insurmountable uphill battle in the workplace. It's a narrative pushed by those who would seek to divide us. All of the women I know are doing FAR better than men professionally - and good for them.
Nothing will improve in this country - or bring us together as Americans - until we can remove dogma from our political and social discourse and start dealing with actual facts.
24
@No Bandwagons
Dear bandwagon: As a female graduate of a prestigious college in the 80s, the first question I was always asked was whether I could type. A friend went to secretarial school after graduation so she could get a job.
I don't know one single male that was EVER asked if his primary skill was typing.
So if you want facts about inequality, there's one for you.
15
@Roxy
Also a college graduate in the 80s..Yes, typing opened many doors for me in my early career. I did not look at it as you did as an insult to my intelligence or that I was less capable in the workplace.
I'm retired now and typing (keyboarding) still is a valued skill in my volunteer endeavors. For that, I am grateful..
4
Hard stats, with a little anecdote, followed by a complete anecdote.
A company called GlassDoor did an exhaustive analysis and found women are paid .$94 on the dollar compared to the most often trotted out $.77 on the dollar. Even Obama said the latter as president, and Politifact corrected him. Sometimes, it almost seems that politicians play down progress for political gain! Go figure.
Our country needs more hard facts like these, and less one-off anecdotes.
3
"...a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work..."
I see. Equal pay is associated with a "flawed sense of equality" because the specialness of the person involved may be disregarded.
9
It’s horrible when actual facts contradict deeply held, and inaccurate, beliefs.
It’s nice that Google decided to act on the actual facts rather than popular perception.
16
This article is truly hilarious. Men are being paid less than women. How then can the Times preserve the "truth" that women are discriminated against? By offering the fiction that they were placed in lower positions than they "really" qualified for, so that they were competing against men of lesser ability, hence not only do they deserve to make more than the men but they are still victims anyway because they'd have higher positions, and even more money, if the patriarchy didn't hate them so much.
If the patriarchy is operating as we're told it is, the fact that the women were being measured against men of lesser ability shouldn't result in the women making more than the men. The patriarchy is supposed to privilege men against women – why didn't it do so in this case?
With this bit, the Times falls farther down the rabbit hole than ever.
14
I skimmed this. My hunch is that most female Google employees are white and from name-brand colleges, and that a larger percentage of male employees are non-white (Indian, Asian, Middle Eastern) and from foreign universities. What percentage of female employees are non-white and/or educated outside of America/Europe? My guess is that, in this case, gender is a secondary determinant masquerading as the primary determinant. There must be a term that statisticians and scientists have for that.
15
I love it. This really triggered the triggered the left.
9
I am just curious how and if Ms Ellis’s attorneys obtained salary information of her coworkers prior to filing the lawsuit or if the court allowed them to speculate on this information without any evidence to support the claim.
5
Wow, just this year, for the first time Google discovers that lots of men ar underpaid? Wasn’t it possible to discover this last year or the year before?
1. I don’t believe it.
2. If it is true, I don’t think Google has any kind of a grip on its pay records.
Perhaps Google should use Microsoft Excel (or perhaps Access if they need database level power) to keep track of employee pay!
4
@Bill. HaHaHa - the company doing all kinds of ‘tracking’ of public does not track its own doings. Very hard to believe. But - I have seen this bending over backwards to ‘not bias’ against women -
The Google staff is way smart. So,...Their wiz-bang publicity team comes up with a contrived stat that says, contrary to trends, "we've actually been UNDERPAYING white dudes."
Hey that smart-stat -- pitched to big media -- gets the NYTimes and other influencers off our backs for 6 mos. anyway.
Wake up NYTimes. Yer being played.
4
@RR
This is my take as well.
Give this six months to a year maybe, and we're going to hear how wrong and totally bungled this was.
2
This is just the status quo shadily reasserting itself against women's ongoing fight for equality and, yes, equity. As Aristotle wrote, substantive justice is geometric not arithmetical.
The same reduction of difference takes place every time we're called on to explain, yet again, why racisms aren't perfectly symmetrical, why anti-white racism is in practice mostly unfeasible in America, and why white people can't say the N-word. (Clue: they *can*, and many do, but...)
2
The men commenting here who seem to think that one pay equity study by Goggle somehow overturns decades of data showing inequality and discrimination in the workplace are delusional and dishonest at the very least. I can’t help but wonder how many are tech bros that feel threatened by the very proximity of women smarter than them in their workplaces. The recent article in the times magazine about the role of women in the early years of computer programming shows the white male geek superiority trope for the fraud it is. As their hero Trump might say “sad”.
14
@John Chastain
But the data show over and over that, on average, women get more college degrees and, on some measures, earn slightly more UNTIL child bearing years when significant numbers of women leave the workforce. For instance: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/01/28/how-big-is-the-wage-penalty-for-mothers
Stop casting aspersions! The problem is how we raise children, not how we pay employees.
3
Certain classes of employee are rare. It's no surprise that Google pays more to attract them.
1
@sf Not valid argument. They are SUPPOSED TO pay equally for same work. If they pay the rate commodity more they should up wage the rest.
3
Everyone quick to point out confirmation bias must be careful as it can cut both ways. Who is to say you aren’t looking too hard to find discrimination against females?
It would not be surprising if the underpaid men were overwhelmingly minorities.
8
The result of the Google study didn’t surprise me or my fellow business owners. Only the Times could be surprised by obvious reality.
15
Yikes, what now? Surely there is wage disparity somewhere for which we can blame white guys. Keep digging Google.
5
@BD
Um, BD, there is ...
While $9.7 million in additional compensation sounds like a significant amount, it is likely less than 1% of compensation when divided against a base of 98k employees each earning high 5 or 6 figure salaries.
4
Ha! - this story certainly doesn't jibe with the NYT's usual tack on this issue.
13
Sorry, but women won't believe it.
They do not want their victim card to be removed.
30
How refreshing!
7
Classic NYT spin: "Company found to discriminate against men, women and minorities hardest hit."
Yeah, pay issues are complex, but there is no chance this article would have been written this way had Google's analysis come out differently.
20
I am not surprised by this trend.
No one seems to be complaining, in an organized way at least, that women are now receiving 56% of the graduate degrees and 57% of post graduate degrees. For every 44 men getting that degree there are 56 women who are. In the next four years roughly 22 million Americans will get a college degree, so 12.3 million women versus 9.7 million men. The job-place will reset within the decade and women will most likely migrate (earn) their way upwards and become the majority of management in our work place. The process is underway.
Back in the 80's I did consulting work for an all-woman company who refused to hire men, chuckle, chuckle. And a close friend has run a very successful advertising company and only hires women and has done so since the 90's. She and her three partners still think it's funny though they now have a couple of guys in low ranking positions. Wink, wink, hah, hah?
Some people take a good deal of satisfaction when the shoe is on the other foot. But sometimes that shoe is just on backwards and off we go in another circle until we need to take it off and put on another band-aid.
Everyone wants the playing field to be level but having the wind and the sun to be at your back is often just the toss of the coin. Here's your chance to add your own cliche.
9
@Bill Cullen, Author
New cliche. With women as 57% of graduate students :
"Women take on 16% more debt than men in graduate school"
8
It's clickbait in that the adjustments were pretty small on average ($1000-ish), and perhaps compensating for ill-informed opposite adjustments they made the previous year. Also it's in context of a wage discrimination lawsuit. But I look forward to watching the heads explode of the ignorant yet perpetually aggrieved, as they contemplate how this destroys their narrative.
7
Just goes to show how dumb people are to base theories and
make decisions based on anecdotal evidence.
LOOK AT THE DATA!
10
I'm so glad that this has come out, as it proves something I've long believed, but which was never popular to say in PC or metoo circles: that disparity in pay between men and women isn't always necessarily based in 'sexism'.
Sure, maybe many women have been raised in such a way, or influenced by society, as to value themselves less... to be less confident... less apt to speak up. And maybe men as a whole, the opposite. One could argue then that perhaps some parents are raising their boys vs girls in 'sexist' ways. One could argue that society continues to send messages to men vs women, as to how they should conduct themselves in the world. And all of this in turn, could affect how men and women in the working world see themselves, speak up for themselves (or not), etc. Employers and managers (who then determine salaries) are often simply responding in kind.
As they say, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. I've no doubt that there are some women who make more than other women who are working the exact same role, have the exact same experience and skills, for the exact same employer, but who have different salaries. Because one woman speaks up and/or demands a higher salary than the other woman.
In these ultra-PC times, and the whole metoo thing, I'm tired of assumptions that women=good, men=bad. Women=victims, men=perps. 'Believe women'?? Yawn.
Not all in the world is black and white.
23
Today my spouse worked at home and I inadvertently overheard a meeting about a new Director of Inclusion. The meeting then proceeded to discuss which groups would be included in the new marketing materials. And by extension, which would be excluded.
It seemed odd. If I were a Director of Inclusion, I would ask that members of all groups be included.
11
This has been commented on before, but might be worth pointing out again: the article states that more men than women were underpaid, but it is fuzzy on whether men were more likely to be underpaid than women. In fact, given that 69% of employees are men, it could be the case that more men than women were underpaid and (simultaneously) that women were more likely to be underpaid than men. To illustrate this, consider a hypothetical scenario where *all* women and only half of the men were underpaid. In this case we would have roughly:
31% * 98,771 = 30619 underpaid women
69%*0.5*98,771 = 34075 underpaid men
15
So, let's say Google is made up of 100 people. 30 of them are women, and 70 are men. If 50% of women are underpaid, and 25% of men are underpaid, then that means about 15 women are underpaid and about 18 men are under paid. This means more men are underpaid when compared to women.
So while the headline is true, it can easily be taken to mean something else: the women aren't being underpaid as badly as men are. Men were underpaid, but that doesn't mean the percentage of women underpaid wasn't worse. That information isn't provided.
21
@Jason Lotito the lack of clear metrics on this can only be intentionally misleading. They also did not provide any details about if the men are from underrepresented groups, eg. of color, gay/transgender, disabilities, etc.
Surprising lack of depth for NYT. I know everyone hates math, but c'mon!
8
Thank you! Finally someone who can do math. Given the data provided by the article, one cannot conclude that the average man at Google is more likely to be underpaid than the average woman or that the average man will be underpaid by a greater percentage. Given Google's interest in obscuring wage discrimination against women in their own company, the fact that clear conclusions cannot be reached from the data provided is likely to mean that more detail, if disclosed, would reveal such discrimination.
3
Oh yes, all the men scrambling to say how women really have been getting a better deal all along. Really tired of this. My whole 40 year career has been working in high level technology research labs. Please don't tell me how easy woman have it.
I wanted to join Google around 2005 and would easily have qualified with my level of expertise. But my colleagues who were there (all male) told me that Google wasn't hiring women and on top of that I was out of their age range as I was in my 40s. So I didn't bother. That's just the way it was. I guess we can celebrate that Google was eventually forced to start hiring women.
11
@Rebecca
Marissa Mayer Was employee #30.
4
What I did not see being examined by Google was “similar pay for similar work AND QUALIFICATIONS”. This goes to Ms. Ellis’s main point of being hired at a level lower than her male counterparts. Employees’ qualifications and experience are probably the most important factor here and this is the area where women get ripped off. Also important : to calculate the % of women who have in the past received pay adjustments. Google says it does this biannually. What % of these adjustments have gone to women? I’d like to see the percentages.
8
Define "more" if we are to have an educated discussion.
Scant details about whether this is an absolute number of men, or a proportion of total men (percentage)? It understandably could be a "small" number of men because there are so few women to begin with, and therefore very easy to be "more" than the few women employed at Google.
Additionally, are they men of color, or some other underrepresented group? Frustrating to read through this long article only to have inadequate details to form an opinion.
4
As a woman engineer working in a technical field... I am not convinced.
I find it more likely that the women that are currently being considered overpaid are: i) de facto women with more qualifications working at lower levels of the hierarchy due to an overall underestimation of women's abilities at the point of hire; ii) overachievers that are earning more because they are more productive and work better than their counterparts.
I am 37, and while I have never experienced discrimination that I know of, I have noticed and experienced first hand: i) men colleagues assuming assume I am not interested or skilled in programming; ii) older men in the hierarchical chain attributing my success to a man colleague.
So, the first thing I told a relative female that is now pursuing a career in engineering was: "if you are a woman, to be recognized as much as a man, you need to work twice as hard. Luckily, that is not difficult".
18
Wow someone had a chip on their shoulder, are you saying all men don't work hard?
12
@MS. O go away. Counter argument: men work smarter and can take more risk.
3
Don’t worry, this story doesn’t make me think the wage gap is a “hoax.” But it’s kinda funny no matter how you slice it, right?
1
What will it actually take to convince those who believe any wage differentials are simply gender based and a consequence of the mythological patriarchy? Reality? No, nothing will. It is an entrenched belief that no amount of data and evidence will ever dislodge. These are the ideologies, and many more, that America has helped to breed and disseminate. Reading the comments, I still see how powerful beliefs can be. But these findings are absolutely not a surprise.
20
@James R Dupak
The efforts to get more girls and women involved in STEMM have resulted in institutions competing fiercely to hire and retain female students and employees. So, women get into programs more easily, see their starting salaries bid up, and get promoted to replace older women who continue to leave to become mothers despite all these advantages.
This makes perfect sense. No one should be surprised!
11
Since Google is conducting its own studies they can pretty much get them to mirror their own line of talk. What to know the truth have an independent study conducted not paid for by Google.
5
It is fascinating how any perceived unfairness to men is swiftly and seamlessly rectified.
16
So the unintended consequence of meddling with the market-drivers of salary negotiation is a messed up and distorted internal wage market.
Next thing you will be telling me is that received wisdom from Mount Sinai that women earn 78 cents for every male dollar is completely untrue - say it ain't so.
4
The comment section on this article, unsurprisingly, fails to read into the discussion over institutional and systemic barriers of entry and advancement for women in the industry. Everyone here obsessing over one of the -very- few examples of men being underpaid misses the point that this entire industry is almost exclusively dominated by men. Just saying “aha! I knew it! Liberals and the nyt are saying all men have it easy” is a completely reductive and willfully ignorant interpretation of the discussion around workplace equality.
Pay, equality of opportunity (including maternal leave and education), equality of advancement, harassment, assault, race, sexual orientation, all of these things are intersectional and difficult to properly adjust for. But to think that it all disappears once men and women are paid equally is both intellectually and morally wrong, especially in an industry almost completely dominated by white men. I would have hoped this would be a place to have an in depth discussion about complex issues such as this, but I see this comment section has become yet another forum for knee jerk reactions and tribalism, just like everywhere else.
10
I agree with this, but I'm struck by how misleading the headline is, even with the narrow scope. 8000 woman complain of pay inequity. 10000 salaries are changed (an average of $1000/year, or presumably less than 1%). Google, the firm that claims to set salaries evenly and make no concessions to pressure or negotiation, finds that salaries have been set responsive to pressure and negotiation.
And the bottom line is "lots of guys were underpaid"? Are you kidding me? Someone earned their PR salary today.
4
Pretty obvious how this could be the result of google and other tech companies competing for a limited number of possible women hires in order to increase their diversity. It’s supply and demand, although I’m glad they’re rectifying the situation.
5
There is no such thing as a substantial wage gap.
The 20% gap myth is calculated by taking all wages of men and women and then dividing that by the number of men and women. It does NOT take into account the fact that women do not have the same jobs as men, nor the fact that women on average work less hours than men and are more prone to part time jobs and taking time away from work to raise children. It's the worst kind of misrepresentation.
For example, in the medical field women are more likely to be nurses than men, and those jobs pay less. Among actual doctors, women tend to gravitate to pediatrics, which by its very nature, rightfully pays less than surgeons and specialists of other types.
Women gravitate more to social work, which pays less. More women major in college in things like Communications and Psychology, whereas men gravitate to higher paying careers like business. Higher paying hard labor jobs such as carpenters and plumbers, which pay very well, are dominated by men due to ...choice. This is all simple fact.
Every legit, non-biased study on this subject shows the real gap when those things are taken into account is just.... 4%. Yes, 4%. And that is a far cry from 20% and certainly not worthy of all the leftist hysteria on the subject.
If you don't believe me, Google.. "wage gap 4% AAUW." The American Association of University Women, a women's gender equity group, discovered this themselves.
16
Nope- both my brother and I are MIT engineering graduates- same Dept., same degree. He earns 25% more than I do. We’ve compared our professional growth regularly. It seems to be mainly about opportunities- being ‘picked’ so you have the opportunity to show you are capable. There are different rules for different people unfortunately. Yes, this is an example of one. I’ve compared notes with my classmates and colleagues over the years- some folks get great assignments and some get the ‘office housework’. This is hard to track and make apparent, and it appears that no progress is being made to suss out the real underlying issues. You can try to make your own opportunities- and when successful, often credits are given to some slacker guy, albeit well-liked. I love engineering but if I knew it was this bad, I’d have picked another vocation.
11
Yes, excellent point. Who gets the plum assignments or prominent clients and who gets assigned the scut work makes a huge impact when the managers are looking at summaries of accomplishments when deciding on promotions and raises.
In some types of jobs where the work is more standardized and not much change is expected to be introduced by individuals, the entire team is rewarded together at bonus time so even the employees stuck with ‘housekeeping’ take part in the rewards that the employees assigned more prominent roles.
6
I'll bet Trump supporters don't call this NYT article FAKE News... Its only Fake if it says what they don't want to hear, right?
4
Totally!
Censorship at a liberal paper? Gee, I'm shocked, SHOCKED!
2
I'm betting a lot of that probably has to do with the gay wage gap and underpaying blacks, latinos and maybe even foreign workers who need visa sponsorship.
I'm also betting that straight, white men aren't the ones getting raises. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
3
Interesting! When I read news reports/articles about women being paid less then men, it’s limited to that and the resultant remarks rail only about that! As if in a vacuum!
But when a news report/article comes out about men being paid less than women (for comparable work), it can’t be left at just that.
All the “yeah buts” have to be thrown in about discrimination against women, or it doesn’t show the true (politically correct) picture.
I am sure there could be some “yeah buts” about women being paid less than men in many instances but doing that isn’t pc.
5
Google didn't hire a third party to conduct this review? Hmm, I wonder why.
2
@Jonathan don’t need to - they know EVERYTHING about you!
You have got to be kidding me.
3
Notice how the story turns quickly from the facts, which state that men were underpaid, to the reporter's bias, which wants to write the opposite story.
17
"When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work."
So Google is more racist than sexist?
But still pretty sexist.
1
and guys named Dave really got underpaid. when do I get my money?
Surprising to the NY Times, maybe. The truth is that Google and every other tech company so desperately wants to appear anti-sexist, that they are overcompensating by overhiring women and minorities into positions for which they are not qualified.
15
What is not surprising is that now the facts are in, the narrative switches to the claim that (according to unnamed "workplace experts") women and minorities "do not get the same opportunities" and "must overcome certain biases." Unlike comparative pay, which is difficult enough, these assertions are conveniently unmeasurable. But what if the existence of affirmative action and other programs shows that the reverse is true, i.e. there is bias against white males but companies still cannot find qualified and interested female and minority candidates? Not a problem. The explanation can always be changed to confirm to preconceived assumption.
13
How interesting that at Google men are underpaid, seems like the market is the only objective way to determine what you should make.
2
I'm among the male group who was purportedly underpaid. I don't care that much because it's roughly 10% more or less and our salaries are fine.
On a related a note, obviously there is a gender gap in tech. world but trying to fix it at work place is a bit too late IMO. These need to be fixed before or during school. It should be a cultural shift through which more female students choose STEM majors. In our grad school that was not the case. My [not well researched] opinion is that the pool of male and female tech. talent are of vastly different sizes. Also all these women only scholarships, CS conferences and women only events are IMO doing the opposite what they intend to do: Making it look like women need extra assistance to be successful.
19
If you're willing, any insight on why you might have been "underpaid"? Didn't negotiate? (A 23 year old son did not negotiate in January.). Was told there is no negotiation? (A 27 year old son had this experience w a software co 9 mos ago.) Useful to drill down and figure out what behavior at Google led to this scenario.
And if you saw a 10% adjustment, then many others saw annual adjustments of only a couple hundred dollars ($10 m split among 10k staffers).
1
@Maureen Kennedy
No it wasn't about negotiation. From their study, over a period of time, a subgroup of male engineers compensation was lower than what it should've been based on the data. Since that time period my job level and compensation has changed. So I can't tell how much of my new compensation is due to this adjustment.
The 10% figure was just a number I threw. I don't recall the actual percentage and the specifics are perhaps confidential. So I'd rather not get into it.
Also IMO there's no such thing as "no negotiation" at least in the tech. industry. Right out of school there's less leverage but I'm someone if he comes back with a much higher offer from a competitor then he's in a good position to negotiate a higher salary.
2
@Nima typo: *but I'm sure if he ...
$9.7 mil for 10,677 employees. 69% of the workforce is male. This is roughly $1k adjustment for each employee. Let's be real. $1k and $9.7 million are peanuts in the Google world. AND I really don't understand trumpeting the fact that Google found MORE men needed adjustment when they already make up 70% of your workforce. Shouldn't the fact that men make up the majority of your workforce expect you to find more men with pay discrepancies? Great. The few women you hire are paid fairly (hopefully). Now most of the men are too theoretically. Now get to work on getting your employment demographics to match population demographics. I know that problem is hardly all Google's fault. But still an admirable goal to work towards.
4
@Me The article states men "received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money" which implies that more than 69% of the people who received raises were men.
1
As a guy in tech (mechanical engineer), it amuses me to watch the mental gyrations that people engage in while looking for someone to blame for the lack of women in tech. I graduated in '86 so it has been awhile, but I don't recall seeing many women in my classes. I just assumed that there weren't many women who saw that profession, or the difficult curriculum, as attractive. My son is studying to be an engineer at an exclusively tech college and undergrad guys there complain a lot about the lack of women... so it's still a problem, apparently. That's a shame. Companies will roll out the red carpet for a female engineer.
18
@Zack do you truly believe that the disparities of women in your engineering classes in the 1980s can be chalked up to career preferences? Have you reflected on some of the larger societal forces communicating different expectations for men and women, the disparate levels of access and opportunity between the sexes in the 80s, how those disparities manifest today when there are fewer women in leadership and management roles, and how the disparities up-the-chain translates to entry level men identifying more and bonding more easily with the office power brokers?
6
My wife is finishing her bachelors degree in Computer Science in May. She has been told a few times from other male CS students how unqualified women are hired over men all the time in the field. These are usually the same men who aren't putting in the work to be successful on their own merits.
I encourage companies to look into these things. I also encourage them to follow where that data leads.
5
@Paul ah yes, the infamous beta male CS major. My advice to your wife is to ignore them. They'll fail the technical tests anyway. Keep up the good fight!
I'm intrigued by how many of the explanations for this finding explore ways in which women being paid more actually provide more evidence that they are being discriminated against.
When we know what is happening, collecting additional data is pointless because it only confuses things.
3
The level that you are first hired in at is *key*. Starting at a lower range caps your raises resulting in a slow down in salary increases. Getting promoted is often more difficult than getting raises. As a young woman with a master's degree and industry experience, I found later that I was hired in at a level where most of the men only had bachelors degrees. This depressed my wages for a long period of time.
14
What I'm taking from this article is that at Google some men were underpaid according to the level they were assigned, but that on the whole women were assigned to worse levels than man. I would have appreciated an article which was clearer about this, rather than what we got - a sort of sensationalist "Isn't it surprising" article which does little to inform but does much to excite.
17
Is it possible that the practice of hiring men with less experience into higher pay levels accounts for them being paid less than the women with more experience in those pay levels? If so, Google increasing the men's pay would further exacerbate gender inequity.
6
Google analyzed salaries by gender and then gave a salary bump to 10,000 men. Can we do the math? Each man got a check for about $900. The average salary at Google is more than $110,000. So the discrepancy is about 3 1/2 days pay. Why is this news?
5
"When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work."
I do not mean to sound unsympathetic when I state:
fellas - welcome to my world of disparate treatment when it comes down to the paycheck.
Regardless if the employee is:
white
black
Hispanic
male
female
gay
straight
and everything in between:
employees should receive the same amount of pay for doing similar work.
This is not a difficult nor complicated concept to comprehend. It really comes down to doing what it right, what is fair, what is just. It really is that simple.
9
@Marge Keller
You're right, the concept is easy to comprehend. It's also established law.
2
Passing workplace nondiscrimination laws is well and good, but they also need to be enforced. Currently the standard for proving discrimination occurred is nearly impossible. Anything short of a tape where your employer literally said "I'm treating this employee differently because of their identity" is very unlikely to result in justice being served.
1
50% of med school grads are women
50% of law school grads are women
Approx 50% of demoncratic presidential candidates are going to be women
Yet somehow women cant figure out how to write sentences in c++?
7
@adam s. it's the culture that is difficult, not the material :(
1
Here's some Newspeak for ya: "Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity, said the pay gap correction only served 'to benefit a group that is dramatically overrepresented in engineering, and that faces fewer barriers to access and opportunity in the field.' Google, Ms. Emerson said, seemed to be advancing a 'flawed and incomplete sense of equality' by making sure men and women receive the same salary." --Come again? Equality means equal pay until it doesn't? Some animals are more equal than others? Wow.
11
You have to admit this is amusing.
17
@Jackson
With all due respect, while I find this article a lot of things, amusing isn't one of them. Sorry.
1
Too funny! I guess this is what happens when "progressive" perception meets reality.
15
Why is the NYT writing a story about Google’s reporting of themselves and taking it as Gospel? What evidence do you provide the reader that this study was not fixed by Google, which is worth hundreds of billions and has been caught in many untruths already? Who reached out to whom? Did Google approach the NYT first? Would the paper extend this courtesy to other companies who approached it and said “hey let us share the results of our internal “survey” with you?”
5
This comes as no surprise. Studies have shown that the lowest-earning group of people, below men and all women, is gay men. Always ignored and overlooked in the gender wars, gay men are double victims of feminism.
4
Doesn't it make sense that a nerd with Aspergers (4 times more common in men) will have a poor ability to negotiate hard bargain with an alpha, neurotypical hiring manager?
4
Suppress this piece of news immediately.
This does not fit in with liberal dogma.
Suppress. Suppress.
24
@P&L
It is already supressed. I hade to do multiple searches before this came up. Looking up "Google" and "Google + pay" did nto do the trick!
Forgive my skepticism but I would like to see the results of that study that men were underpaid and I’d like to see the justification for leveling while hiring within Google’s HR department. My experience in tech was that the guys knew what base salary to negotiate up from and the women didn’t have that inside knowledge so they started at the bottom. If you start at a lower salary and your raises are a % of that, you never catch up or earn more without a major unexpected promotion.
2
I was hired at a large tech company straight out of college. When I was applying for a job there, I had to select which types of positions I would be interested in, and the differences between these categories were not clearly spelled out. In particular, a new tester would start at a lower salary level than a new developer. A company representative at the hiring event saw that I had selected both these categories and advised me to only pick the higher-paying one, as I was more than qualified for it.
One of my friends at the company after I joined did not get similar advice. She was hired at the lower level, which then made it difficult for her to change categories, even though she was qualified for her new role.
This is how implicit bias works. This is why the study can fail to find bias, while women remain underpaid.
14
If women are consistently kept at a lower level than men of equivalent experience, then their higher pay is justified, because they have more experience than the men in their same position. If leveling is a concern, as this article notes is likely, then rewarding a man by topping up his salary is insulting to the women who hold the same job but likely have as much as twice the experience. This example demonstrates why using a reverse sexism frame doesn’t work. If a study finds that 70% of pay discrepancies at google are faced by men, you can be certain this isn’t the end of the story. It is highly unlikely that google is some alter universe where gender inequality works in reverse. I’m not sure what is going on at google but my hunch is something like this - both Mary and John come in with 6 years of experience. John gets a manager position while Mary is hired at a lower level as an analyst. Then comes Bill with 4 years of experience (2 less than Mary) and he lands an analyst position easily but his lack of experience means he doesn’t earn quite as much as Mary. Then google does a study and in this situation finds that the discrimination here is actually against Bill whose pay is bumped up to match Mary’s. While Mary still can’t get a promotion equal to John. If leveling is a concern then all google did was give men an unjustified raise. No matter what is occurring, I am quite sure that women are not reaping the rewards of unearned societal advantages. Look deeper google.
10
Maybe Ms. Ellis is just not as good at software engineering as the male who was hired a few weeks later.
Shouldn’t ability be the biggest parameter in the pay equation?
Clearly the opportunities for women are available- on 60 minutes last night they talked about how recent female computer science graduates have “five to seven job offers from tech companies”. Tech companies are desperate to compete for women.
The results showing underpaid men at Google don’t surprise me. I’ve always believed in equality- everyone should compete equally without regard to sex or race or sexual orientation. This is the only definition of equality that makes any sense because if you try to impose artificial quotas based on sex or race like at Google you inevitably end up disadvantaging another group.
6
Wait I love it. We women get told all the time our predominately female careers are paid less because of "market forces." Then when the market puts a premium on women engineers because there are so few of them, all of a sudden this needs to be fixed. Moral of the story, if the market benefits men, that's capitalism, if it benefits women, apparently that is a problem.
11
@Jennifer: Moral of the story: if women are paid less than men, that's discrimination; if men are paid less than women, apparently that is justice.
6
@Jennifer I doubt the people who are saying "well, that's capitalism" see this is a problem to be solved. There is maybe some satisfaction in the irony, and likely some expectation to see if people would stick to their ideology.
The reality, however is that we still see the current popular view on pay equity as bombastic and superficial.
I manage a fairly large group of people (300 employees), and as with any large organization, processes are hard to enforce 100%. As much as people would like to believe it's something nefarious, pay gaps emerge for both men and women because it's *really* hard to operationalize equity into a multivariable process of evaluating talent, adjusting for need in the moment, balancing pay of other potentially disparate groups, current budget, competing offers, etc.
Moral of the story: as with most things, there's more to the story, it's easy to misinterpret, and it's more difficult to fix than you think, even if you are the boss and you have really good intentions.
1
I had to chuckle when I read some of these comments! As one who managed an engineering team for years, please realize even when an organization is trying hard to be fair, the specifics of pay for performance and career planning is very complex. It will never be perfect in everyone’s eyes. All parties need to do the very best they can every day and adjust periodically.
The biggest issue I faced during my era was simply a lack of women who wanted to be design engineers. Note I am not talking about social media companies. I am talking about classical engineering that is really ‘hi tech’, a term that is not owned by Google, Facebook, etc...
22
This report was prepared by a company facing lawsuits and negative reputation impacts based on the findings, so I'm a little skeptical. That said, kudos to Google for attempting to be transparent.
I wonder if part of the reason some women are making more money than men at a given job level is because they are indeed more qualified than the men at the same level. In other words, maybe these women are in job levels that don't reflect their talent and skill because they haven't been able to access promotions that would push them into a higher level (where they'd probably be underpaid).
142
@Wendy
You state, "some women are making more money than men at a given job level is because they are indeed more qualified than the men at the same level."
But this same argument should work with the gender roles reversed. Right?
And it has you ignoring "equal pay for equal work".
130
@Wendy
If men are making more money, its because women are discriminated against. If women make more money, it's also because women are discriminated against.
92
@Tony
What? I have no idea what that means. Sounds eerily similar to "voodoo economics" to me.
4
While absolute pay equity is not something that will ever be achieved, Google appears to be making a welcome attempt to broaden the discussion of pay equity beyond a simple narrative of women and racial minorities as perennially disadvantaged. Noting that other factors beyond historical disadvantage may contribute to pay equity doesn't remove the reality of historical disadvantage, but merely makes it one of a number of possible reasons for better pay. This is a welcome development from Google.
62
Okay, let me get this straight. Google is being investigated by the U.S. Labor Department and is also facing a class action lawsuit about a gender pay gap. So, then they conducted their own study that (conveniently) suggests men may have been paid less than their female counterparts. Now, I'm not saying this research is definitely flawed, but I don't see a link to the details anywhere in this article. Is an outside firm going to review this data as well? Oh and PS, apparently, according to some men on this thread, this single, private study conducted by a private company invalidates decades of established, peer-reviewed research that reaches the opposite conclusion. And high five to the folks running PR over at Google - the New York Times publicizing this study which supports Google's position that they don't have an issue with a gender pay gap is a big win.
28
It’s amazing how quickly companies rush to equalize underpaid men. I’m still waiting to see companies give women parity in sectors that have demonstrated inequity.
219
Great point! How many companies conduct this kind of research at all? They'd rather not create evidence of a problem they're not interested in solving.
8
@John
And which sectors might those be?
20
@John
I've read often that companies quickly correct disparities against women. Do you think they'd drag their feet if they faced lawsuits?
"Salary Secrecy — Discrimination Against Women?" http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/salary-secrecy-discrimination-against-women/
9
A month or two ago NYT published a piece on how women comment less. Most of the time I don't notice it but on pieces about gender it becomes very clear. There are so many comments from men on this piece about how they feel vindicated and that this proves that women have an unfounded victim mentality.
I'm an anthropologist with expertise in the field of gender equality. This one piece of data Google found does not disprove the piles and piles of evidence that exist that women are systematically discriminated against, especially in STEM fields. As we work to correct inequality, we are sure to occasionally misstep. This does not mean that feminists want women to be superior to men (the way men have long been superior to us). We simply want equality, and if we misstep on the way there we will correct it, but we need men to support us in our struggle.
242
@Mindy girls get better marks in school globally. If the wage gap is evidence of sexism against women isn't the mark gap evidence of sexism against boys?
If university educated adult women need same gender role models to succeed, don't 5 year old boys also need same gender role models in the classroom to succeed?
And about here the feminist narrative falls apart.
If girls get better marks because they try harder perhaps men earn more because they try harder?
119
@Mindy What "piles and piles" of evidence? I've looked at those piles, and essentially none of it holds up to even the slightest scrutiny.
In fact, what happened in this case fits the pattern precisely:
1. Claim of discrimination, taken as fact without evidence.
2. Evidence shows the opposite.
3. "There must be some other reason"
122
@Mindy
You are an expert on gender equality. What portion of the difference in pay between men and women are based on discrimination and what portion is not?
29
“When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work.”
Obviously, this conclusion does not fit the politically correct mindset of most Google employees and management (or, for that matter, of the New York Times.)
So, Google is searching for more data, and some explanation, of why the initial conclusion, that salary disparity may not put women at a disadvantage, must be wrong. I’m sure that if the results of the study were the reverse of what they showed, and demonstrated a bias against women, there would have been no head-scratching and no quest for further study.
This illustrates a problem likely present with a great deal of scientific research, especially work in the social sciences. People look for results that match their preconceived notions, and keep looking until they find what they expect. When they find the expected, they stop looking. It’s a potent and pernicious source of bias.
Pay disparities are both complex and important. By all means, Google, and society at large, should study the problem carefully and thoroughly. But we should leave open the possibility, that the truth may not be what we initially believe.
392
@Alex Yeah, the conclusion is fixed. If the data don't fit the conclusion, look for other data. Keep looking until you find data that fits the narrative.
Just like the GitHub sponsored conference that switched to blind reviewing for their talk proposals, because obviously the sexism of reviewers was responsible for the low number of women speakers.
Result: zero women speakers. They cancelled the conference.
89
Oh sure! The biggest handicap for women is their gender and men in management will make all kinds of arguments and excuses not to reward women equitably for the work that they do. This is a societal problem not just a Google problem.
3
best comment. and all the comments searching for a grain of truth of those preconceived notions throughout the article gross me out
3
Now here's some serious gender bias for y'all: "Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity, said the pay gap correction only served 'to benefit a group that is dramatically overrepresented in engineering, and that faces fewer barriers to access and opportunity in the field.' "
In other words, Ms. Emerson's focus is on groups, not on individuals. She's doubtless correct that men as a group are overrepresented in engineering and face fewer barriers. But she couldn't care less about the individual men who were unfairly underpaid.
18
@gtodon, didn't you know: Only groups can experience suffering or injustice; individuals are beneath notice.
2
At last! I worked in a major technology company in a senior position in the defense area for over 35 years. At no time in the last 10 years when I was a VP and had access to the data did I see our women making less than men in comparable positions. In fact, because women engineers were in short supply, they were commanding a premium.
At last the truth comes out from the NYT's. The Left will scream bloody murder because they are making their money from people who they convince are being cheated by Big Business. In fact, the hypocrisy on the left by people like AOC riding in private planes and limo's should be a wake up call that the liberals are being had by their elitist leaders and the press.
What AOC did to Queens on Amazon should be another wake up call. She didn't even understand the math!
14
AOC as you dismiss-ably refer to her gets the same perks as every other congressperson. She travels in private jets, you just hear that on Fox? Oh my gosh, she uses a town car, wow, my friend that was the office manager for a person in congress did the same thing.
Also it was the community that didn’t want Amazon coming in tax free to distrust a neighborhood. Try reading the article that was printed yesterday about how Amazon blackmails communities.
What would make you happy, that she wear a burlap sack a be barefoot? You on the right are utter hypocrites, how about Donnie using not just a 747 but all the support that goes with it (Air Force One never fly’s alone) for his many, many trips to Florida. How about he takes Amtrak? I wonder if they’ll let him fly the 747 to his appointment at Leavenworth.
1
And so the commenting men decry the notion of feminism and its misguided quest towards equality and equity. How foolish those feminist naysayers were, these men sneer--feminism's broad initiatives helping to bring equality those who "need" it. So, they conclude that, now more than ever, they must NOT consider themselves feminists. Thus, they bolster their accusatory-armor against its ideology, that feminism helps everyone especially those who need it most. But how can that ideology be so, they ask, if this example helped someone like me?
1
well, thank goodness for intellectual honesty
2
Well, maybe now men will be more supportive of equal pay laws. This could win votes for Democrats!
This is why you unionize. I knew exactly what I would be making in the future by consulting my union contract. I was a little booklet that I kept handy, especially when upper management claimed I should perform a function that was clearly not my job.
I was a aircraft mechanic at a large airline but people who consider themselves white collar workers, the pilots, had a union contract also.
There isn’t any job that should not be clearly defined and conditions spelled out. My brother is a technical writer, definitely a white collar job and working freelance he always demands a contract in writing.
Unions protect you, they do not encourage lazy workers as described by many commenters in these very pages. A union contract is not like tenure at university, unfit or unwilling workers can be fired easily but it must be for cause. Too many people suffer the whims of their employer or management and get terminated without cause because most companies require a “at will” clause that benefits only the company. Arbitration, forget that, the arbitrator is usually a former upper management type and rarely sides with the worker.
Anyone that thinks unions are bad and doesn’t own the company is a fool that has been suckered by the republicans.
It’s funny how a friend of mine was pro union until the day he opened a small clothing store and I joked that I was going to try to unionize his workers. Of course he was a hypocrite, money does that to some people.
12
It's not really that surprising, is it? Women have a noisy, well-funded and politically powerful lobby constantly agitating for better pay and conditions, often with misleading or unsubstantiated claims that men are doing better.
Men have nothing similar. In our system, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So it's not surprising, to anyone but an ideologue, that many men are underpaid.
Now please have a look at discrimination against boys at school or against men in hiring practices.
For instance:
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360
5
So, is this like when we discovered, after decades telling us otherwise, that it's a myth that women are the victims of domestic violence more on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day?
2
Like a rubber band, we're going from one imbalance to its opposite.
Never mind that most Americans are sensible, rational people.
1
Glad to see that wage equality, even it does blow up the liberal narrative.
3
I find it incredibly humorous that a law exists to not discriminate with regards to gender, race, religion, etc. but companies take those metrics into account and advocate for pure, unbridled diversity that can only be achieved by doing the very thing they are barred from.
I think advocacy in terms of pushing capable females/minorities/underprivileged persons into fields they are historically underrepresented in is something extremely positive. I think forcing companies and individuals to take on those persons in the name of equity, rather than equality, is extremely harmful and an intrusion of freedom. Give the underrepresented a level playing field, but do not require companies to attain 100% equal numbers. It will never happen. We don't go into schools and hospitals and require they be 50% male and 50% female. We shouldn't do that with other sectors either.
It was an interesting find that in the Nordic countries, who push for equity over equality, that the trend has been for women to grow in the roles they are traditionally more represented in. I.e. as they push for more concessions to be made toward women, the differences are becoming more pronounced.
I applaud any person that chooses to follow their dreams regardless of whether they are mainstream or not. If a woman wants to become a CEO or a man wants to become a stay at home father or vice versa I think that both are equally important to the growth and future prosperity of a country.
4
Google is under a lot of pressure to hire more women, so equally qualified women have more bargaining power, so they earn higher wages.
Just supply and demand. I would expect this is true throughout large firms in Silicon Valley.
6
I think you've made Damore look a lot more regressive than he is.
Damore suggested that the fact that women (tend) to value human relationships more than men might be one (of many) factors that lead to fewer women agreeing to take on a job that requires you to stare at a computer screen alone for 60+ hours a week.
He suggested that a better way to recruit and keep women at a job would be to make the workplace more hospitable to women, rather than making a blind quota.
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@Marc Millard
Regressive ideation. I agree with no "quota," but the workplace should be hospitable to men AND women. There are, in fact, MANY women who stare at a computer screen as a full-time job, and I'm certain they are smart enough to pass the classes. In weighing location, comps, etc., there should be NO weight given to gender, race or religion whatsoever.
5
Absolutely hilarious. Interesting what happens when we ignore feel-good outrage in favor of actual data.
81
The so-called "gender pay gap" is largely due to motherhood not discrimination as the NYT wrote just two years ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/upshot/the-gender-pay-gap-is-largely-because-of-motherhood.html
While there are women in tech that I've seen be underpaid, the truth is that they also enjoy pretty unparalleled opportunities to interview repeatedly at top tech companies like Google and Amazon (particularly if they're a minority) because of the focus on diversity.
Ultimately, we all benefit from more transparency and equity around pay, but it's important to not jump to conclusions based on "popular wisdom" that often aren't supported at all in the actual data.
50
Interesting data, though it probably doesn't tell the whole story. Companies that actively look to balance their workforce and give women equal oppprtunity are likely to pay more for a female engineer. Thus, it's not surprising at the lower ranks. If there is a similar attempt at mid-level employees we should see the trend continue.
The open question concerns whether women are getting the chance to move up at the same rate. It is possible that Google reflects a newer tradition spurred by it's short existence so it doesn't have the ingrained biases/old boy system present in older line businesses. Some oldline businesses are also aggressively promoting women to make up for numerical disparities.
It is too early to judge, as more research would be needed. It would be interesting to compare some "new" companies, some "old" companies trying to change, and some "old" companies that think they don't have to change.
2
Do you think some men don’t want an even playing field or really think they are better than women?
Does ‘better than’ necessarily mean ‘right over others’?
Does ‘better than’ necessarily equate to ‘deserve more?’
Do some men only want to be with each other?
1
Google pays market, so when an underpaid person applies to Google, Google offers an amount of money sufficient to get them to join and no more than that. If that amount is "L3" then you are offered "L3" even if you have 20 years experience so not surprised at all that someone with 4 years experience was hired to that level. Google then tries to equalize from within. An L3 can make it to L4 in less than a year and most do it within 2 years, so... I can see why Google's attitude is to be a bit confused by this lawsuit.
2
shouldn't all salaries be merit based? even for employees with the same job description? wouldn't these pay discrepancies be the product of performance. one person performs better than another so they get a bigger raise. doesn't that seem right? isn't that what generates the desire to work hard and get ahead? shouldn't a company reward an employee who is more valuable than another employee. or should we all be civil service workers and teachers who have no incentive to actually perform to the best of their ability because it means nothing for them. that has proven not to work. every single person knows at least 1 teacher they want to see fired because the teacher doesn't care. they cant be fired and they get the exact.same raise as everyone else. so why should they work hard. still be in the same place as the person who works hard because they want to. this system is called socialism folks and it's already proven over and over that it doesn't work.
3
"Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions."....I worked for 30 years for a major corporation and I know of several examples where just the opposite was true; ie women and minorities being given advantages in hiring and promotions. I assume this was done in order to compensate for what was perceived to be a gender and ethnic imbalance in the work force, but it was true nevertheless. I might add that at the very highest levels of the corporation an absence of women or minorities was evident and criticism might be fairly leveled, but in hiring or promotion at mid levels there was not infrequently a bias in the opposite direction.
40
Don't "try" diversity. Just do it. White males are a decreasing minority of the labor force. Most college grads are either women or minorities. Give companies a chance to do it. Economics will prevail over litigation as the most reasonable way to achieve peace.
3
So Charlie, then white males are an increasing majority?
1
I want to know more about the methods Google used in conducting this report. I'm a sociologist and I have seen enough wage gap numbers to be suspicious of a company claiming to have found such a large wage gap favoring women. It just doesn't happen by accident. It's particularly suspicious given that Google has been under fire for its treatment of women and has a vested interest in showing that they treat women well. I would be interested to see the results of independent research on gender inequality at Google.
32
@Mindy This round yielded $908 per adjusted employee. From the narrative of the story it looks like an earlier adjustment benefited more women but may have over-shot equal pay when further evaluated. This story's adjustment is spread over a lot of employees but amounts to under 1% of what's reported as typical Google pay.
"In response to the finding, Google gave $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees for this year."
6
@Mindy
And did the wage gap numbers you saw control for factors such as hours worked, years in continuous employment, willingness to commute further to get a better-paying job, how much the individual reported prioritizing their career and their earnings, whether the individual at any point negotiated other benefits, for instance flexible working, in lieu of extra pay?
The wage gap statistics, as commonly used by feminists, are a confidence trick: an abuse, perpetrated on society. They exclude many variables to artificially reduce a complex picture to a simple one. The are the very apotheosis of "lies, damned lies and statistics."
This is sheer demagoguery. And from a movement that pretends to be about equality to. Or at least used to.
9
Google negotiates new hire packages (as is somewhat standard), so if you have multiple offers you can usually increase your signing bonus and stock compensation significantly.
It seems entirely possible that among new grad hires - included in the report for the first time, and a large part of Google's workforce - women were more likely to have competing offers (perhaps because there are fewer of them and a few standouts will drive up the numbers more).
Regardless, the existence of negotiation will naturally create pay disparities within the same role (though possibly with no disparity between sexes). I think it's a good thing that Google seeks to have people doing the same role receive similar compensation -- what should matter is performance at the company, not negotiation leverage during the hiring process.
11
@Informer
Underrated comment. Negotiation plays a large role in pay-disparity.
1
WHAT???? So after all of eternity with women getting less money than men in every conceivable way (and I guess I mean that literally!), suddenly someone finds that MEN were underpaid and they knock over news cameras in their haste to rectify the injustice? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am disappointed.
65
@Judy No, not "women getting less money".
It's people claiming, without evidence, that women are getting less money. And when they actually looked at the evidence, it wasn't primarily women getting less money, it was men.
You have to distinguish between narrative and facts, between what feels truthy and actual truth, between what you want to be true between what is true.
88
@Judy exactly! Where’s the stampede when it’s discovered that women are underpaid?
3
@Judy
God forbid that men might actually be the victims sometimes.
9
This article needs an editor. It starts talking about men being underpaid and then veers off into a study about women and minorities. Tell me more about the men. Why were they being underpaid. Maybe that's in there somewhere. I don't know because it's buried.
152
@Paul Cantor If you read the article carefully, you will find the facts do not actually support the implication that men are more likely to be underpaid than women at Google. You actually can't conclude from the data provided which group is more likely to be underpaid. You can conclude, however, that Google reported that a very small percentage of its workforce was underpaid and it did not report about the remainder of its workforce regardless of gender -- the people who were paid precisely right and the people who were paid too much. If Google's study and its publication leads to a class action suit from men or women (note that we do not know which group might have grounds) the small number of people underpaid will mean that Google can claim no pattern of discrimination but instead that any underpayment is the result of pure chance.
15
I agree - the article did veer off into quotes from outraged feminists
17
@Paul Cantor. The editor is probably there. After a finding by Google that men were paid less, the NYT needed to divert attention away from this back to its numbing ongoing crusade that women and minorities are victims. Hence, the majority of the article is about this.
24
Ah, the search for metrics and to be PC.
My company? 58% women - and all the senior manager bonus plans have it very clearly written out: you only score well when over 50% of your team is women, so guess what happens? They rush to find women candidates. If you have under a certain amount, you get penalized for 'not being diverse'. I've been in rooms where it's 7 women to only me, entire swaths of vice presidents, some absolutely horrendous that would be PIP'd and walked out with 90% turnover under them, but they meet the bar.
Then their Linkedin, pushing diversity, only showing women, only hiring women, everyone not really caring about hiring quality but just women.
So here we are, equal pay, but tons of women in technical roles when they can't even code, bumbling around finding their place on a technical team, with a non-technical female manager, creating tons of business inefficiencies. I've actually just started ignoring some on my team because they have zero technical experience in Machine Learning/AI, but the men hold advanced Engineering degrees while we load up with humanity degree women. Not kidding.
Good work, PC and diversity metrics.
119
@Scott I can't speak to your experience, but if you read the article carefully, you will find the facts do not actually support the implication that men are more likely to be underpaid than women at Google. You actually can't conclude from the data provided which group is more likely to be underpaid. You can conclude, however, that Google reported that a very small percentage of its workforce was underpaid and it did not report about the remainder of its workforce regardless of gender -- the people who were paid precisely right and the people who were paid too much. If Google's study and its publication leads to a class action suit from men or women (note that we do not know which group might have grounds) the small number of people underpaid will mean that Google can claim no pattern of discrimination but instead that any underpayment is the result of pure chance.
10
@Scott It's a similar situation in my company. What has ended up happening is that the real work gets done in private groups, essentially in secret.
6
@Scott
Ditto - in my experience in Software Design & Engineering for the last 2 decades.
There's another high-paying field I'm more than a little familiar with in which there are virtually no men hires: workers compensation insurance liaisons; the inefficiencies in that domain are almost unbelievable yet those gals pull in the 6 figures and regular major bonuses.
2
This is unsurprising. As someone who works in tech, I can tell you there is an utter obsession with 'diversity' and 'girl power'. I'm glad to see this being rectified.
162
The obsession is well founded when so many women feel unsafe in those environments. When we stop hemoragging girls who might have gone into STEM only to become discouraged in their math and science classes before they even get a chance, then we can stop talking about girl power in STEM fields.
35
Has it occurred to you that despite huge efforts to get girls into STEM fields the reason there are so few girls in STEM is that that might not like it ?
22
@JackC5 As someone who works in tech, I can tell you that "utter obsession" is well founded.
14
$9.7 million spread across 10,677 employees is $908 per adjusted employee. In 2017 it was $1,184 per adjustment. So while the headline grabs attention, these are pretty small adjustments compared to typical Google salaries.
36
Good news - attention to pay can benefit everyone.
Disappointing however, to see negative comments disparaging Google's attempts to correct for historical discrimination....it's yet more evidence of the ongoing hostility minorities and women face.
1
@Shiloh 2012
I am confused I thought in this case men were discriminated upon, being lees paid.
Discrimination against men is rarely acknowledged
21
@Allen Ladd. Because it so rarely happens.
1
@Allen Ladd- that's probably because discrimination against men is so rare.
1
This finding is considered "surprising" only because of the biased, dogmatic assumptions the NYT and others bring to the subject, a worldview in which all women must be victims of rampant sexism, while men face no problems in life. Google's entire process is absolutely laughable: "they decided that more women than men should have their pay adjusted upward to account for factors like how they were compensated relative to their peers, the company said.... One effect of the adjustments was to create a pronounced imbalance in compensation among lower-level software engineers... with a large number of men identified as being underpaid compared with their female peers. To offset that, further adjustments were made..."
This is the logical, absurd conclusion to treating people as groups, which must have equal outcomes on a group level, rather than as individuals with equal opportunities. Perhaps now we can finally stop blaming men for every problem and admit that they face challenges too?
200
@Samuel Russell Absolutely. Woe be to the straight white male. The road ahead looks grim. Oh wait, no it doesn't.
No one argues that men don't face challenges. The only problems arise when men insert their challenges into the discussions of others, when the issue at hand really has nothing to do with men.
And you seem to be implying that equal opportunity and equal pay is the default when you evaluate people individually, but there are mountains of data out there which say otherwise.
Bravo to Google for addressing this, but let's not pretend there was never any basis in the disparities they were trying to avoid.
5
@Galt well considering men die sooner than women, that seems to be a cause for concern, no?
4
This is all kind of stupid. I don't think anyone ever thought that there is a big gender difference in the pay of average employees. The glass ceiling of salary disparity is believed to be in the upper echelons. The glass ceiling for advancement is a different character. I could be that women tended to have higher pay than men in the same duties because women were overqualified and outperforming their male peers, having been held back from advancing, when the men of equivalent qualifications and drive were quickly moved up.
30
So they were holding them back but paying them more? That doesn't make much sense.
5
This headline strikes me as crafted carefully by Google PR. If you have women employed one or two pay grades under their equally experienced male counterparts (such as Kelly Ellis' case, outlined here) they could appear to be better paid. False evidence appearing real. 7 of 10 Google employees are men. And I bet it is even higher at the top 3 levels.
30
@JRoberts
Re: "7 of 10 Google employees are men."
Virtually zero of 10 employees are men at maternity wards, daycare centers, kindergarten....
The fault of discrimination or choice, or both?
"Salary Secrecy — Discrimination Against Women?" http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/salary-secrecy-discrimination-against-women/
9
the idea that women are paid less needs fleshing out and real debate. i have read many things that suggest this is not true, it is a canard.
21
@tbs
Yes. If employers could get away with paying women less, why would they hire any men at all?
“A Comprehensive Look at Gender Equality: The Doctrinaire Institute for Women's Policy Research” www.malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/the-doctrinaire-institute-for-womens-policy-research/
5
So, reality is more complicated than and often inconsistent with current ideology and dogma? Who could have guessed?
177
Well Google officially sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare to work for at this point. Unfortunate - I don't think it was always this way.
2
Did anyone really believe that women made 70% of men for the same job at the same quality? If that was ever the case, companies would've hired all women. They'd save 30% on their payroll overnight, which is unheard of.
279
I’m not sure which is more distressing: your comment or the fact that 118 people have liked it so far. Suffice it to say that you are gigantically, glaringly, insufferably wrong. For every tiny shred of good news about women’s compensation at one company, there are a hundred other stories about women being shafted, overlooked and underconpensated at other firms. Kudos to The Times for reporting on this rare phenomenon. Now, we just need to read about this thirty times a week for the next 300 years and we should be coming somewhere close to even.
13
@Don Q I think you're right, two times.
Everywhere I've worked in the last 20 years is very careful about this. Also, people who have government contracts sometimes have to pay more, to get enough women in some fields.
Now, regarding the second thing you're right about, in the 1980's I was acquainted with a business owner who had a nearly all-female workforce, in a business that was mostly populated with males. When I asked him about it, he told me that he got one-third off, and to top that off he claimed they were better than the average guy. So in the exact reverse of what most people in the industry were doing in the 1980's the guy was discriminating against MEN because he got a huge comparative advantage by hiring women. That was the ONLY man I ever met who was savvy enough to do that. I knew several women business owners who did this, but only one man.
11
Ooops!
Now just change the narrative- "well, it's really not right to look at the same pay for the same job, it's something else..."
The more we go into these games of expecting exactly equal outcomes, the more problems we will find...
91
I find this quote in the story ironic:
"Google, Ms. Emerson said, seemed to be advancing a 'flawed and incomplete sense of equality' by making sure men and women receive the same salary."
Isn't pay equality the point here? I fail to comprehend how that is flawed.
132
Read further down in the article. There is a good example of “leveling” given.
5
The article goes on to talk about opportunities for further raises and promotions. Equality is not just about the paycheck, though that’s a good place to start.
2
@LN That example doesn't take into account anything other than having a college degree and 4 years "experience".
What was that experience in? Was it in a different focus area than the male? Did the male have 2 years of base experience and 2 years of project lead experience? Were there other qualifications like a certificate in a specific type of system or external accomplishments not seen with a basic overview of "degree and experience"? How well was she able to sell herself in the interview?
There are so many factors that go into employment, salary, and level determination that you can't force companies to use a binary system for employment. If it were two males and they both had 4 years experience and a college degree there would be no qualm whatsoever. However, because it is a difference between a male and female they spin it into an issue about gender rather than qualifications. There are executives at Google that are female, so why were they given higher positions than the males in the company? Because they're qualified for the position they took. It has nothing to do with gender.
12
This should not be surprising.
It is well known that women leave the workforce in large numbers to become mothers. When they leave, they are replaced by other, younger women. There is an echo effort on all rungs of the corporate ladder in order to retain gender parity throughout the system. These younger women are of course less experienced than the men around them or the women they replaced. The net effect, though, is that young women are over-paid and over-promoted in the early stages of their careers, resulting in the kind of unfairness to men that Google observed and corrected.
44
Do you have any evidence supporting this conclusion?
5
@Mindy
My comment is what is commonly called an "interpretation" or "explanation" for the evidence that the article reports on. The evidence is in the article that you read.
4
And I suppose you see nothing wrong with the fact women are forced to choose between a career and motherhood.
5
I didn’t work for google, but I did work for one of the other tech companies that faces regular scrutiny for the difference in outcomes between men and women. The only thing that surprises me is that there was any difference in pay at the junior level at all. Tech companies of that size are pretty systematic in how they pay their junior engineers.
This does nothing to address the disparity in hiring or promotion opportunities between men and women, however. Which definitely exist.
12