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Google Accused of 'Extreme' Gender Pay Discrimination By US Labor Department (theguardian.com)
The U.S. Department of Labor is accusing Google of discriminating against its female employees and violating federal employment laws with its salaries for women. "We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce," Janette Wipper, a Department of Labor regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday. The Guardian reports: Google strongly denied the accusations of inequities, claiming it did not have a gender pay gap. The allegations emerged at a hearing in federal court as part of a lawsuit the DoL filed against Google in January, seeking to compel the company to provide salary data and documents to the government. Google is a federal contractor, which means it is required to allow the DoL to inspect and copy records and information about its its compliance with equal opportunity laws. Last year, the department's office of federal contract compliance programs requested job and salary history for Google employees, along with names and contact information, as part of the compliance review. Google, however, repeatedly refused to hand over the data, which was a violation of its contractual obligations with the federal government, according to the DoL's lawsuit. Labor officials detailed the government's discrimination claims against Google at the Friday hearing while making the case for why the company should be forced to comply with the DoL's requests for documents. Wipper said the department found pay disparities in a 2015 snapshot of salaries and said officials needed earlier compensation data to evaluate the root of the problem and needed to be able to confidentially interview employees.
I don't think that was stated as eloquently but as someone who used to be in the industry, I was always challenged on starting salary and raises more by men than by women. I'm in NY and I'm not sure if it's the area or the struggle for men to be considered the wage earners but that was my experience. In one case I had to encourage one of my co-workers to ask for more money because they were one of the most talented and the least paid. You don't get raises if you don't ask, and the men seemed to be more headstrong about asking.
I get that depending on how you slice and dice the numbers there is anywhere from no pay gap to a full blown social crisis.
However, what I don't get is that while there is always ample representation of gender, race, and ethnicity, there never seems to be anything discussed about longevity in the workforce.
Uhhh, almost every single study I've read over the last few decades on gender pay gap takes that very thing (longevity) into account.
If you see an analysis that doesn't in some way take into account longevity, then you know you're looking at a waste of time.
There are many factors that affect these things. Asking for a raise is one factor among many.
The government once sued a university for gender discrimination because they accepted a significantly higher percentage of male students than female. It was a pretty clear case, they accepted something like 60% of male applicants and 40% of female applicants. Here's the weird thing - every department at the school accepted a higher rate of female students. For any given program at the school, women were *more* likely to be accepted than men. At first, that might seem mathematically impossible. Here's how it happened:
The school's crown jewel was its very highly regarded nursing* program. It had some other departments too, but the school was known for the nursing program. The nursing program had a lot more applicants than the available slots. Most people who applied to the nursing program weren't accepted. Also, most people who applied for the nursing program were female.
Therefore, most women weren't accepted, even though the nursing program and every other program at the school were biased toward admitting a higher percentage of female applicants than male applicants. Males just didn't tend to apply for the nursing program as much, and that was the program that had the most competitive admissions.
Statistics are strange sometimes.
Actually, most studies account for the time off. They basically show both the general all men vs all women numbers and ALSO show equivalent comparisons - years at work, degrees, all roughly equal. Not that hard to do statistically. It comes out to about $5,000, on average.
What they usually do NOT account for is height. Every inch of MALE height adds about $789 a year (female salary is not as dependent on height - some studies say not at all.) Men are taller than women by about 5-6 inches, which roughly translates to $4330, which is pretty close to the difference between male and female salaries, after accounting for education and experience.
To add insult to injury, some studies attempt to claim that this is 'justified', as the tall men are supposedly better educated and better socialized - without questioning whether the education and socialization are simply the result of prejudice in their favor when they were children.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I am a man, and have done this for my family. My contract was not renewed for 'poor attendance' with a fortune 100 company in Portland. This feedback was not shared with me until after I had left.
It's not that we don't want to, we aren't *allowed* to.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Problem: If a woman challenges on salary then she doesn't get the job because evaluators decide she's too combative. The bias of too many interviewers cuts off the woman's ability to negotiate higher pay. The perception of a good man as willing to fight for his position and of a good woman as being accommodating to her environment means that a very wise woman who wants a job may very well decide she cannot afford to argue. And that is discrimination.
the entire google topic always saddens me. So much potential to make the world better and now completely undone by corporate cancerism, the American business philosophy that buried capitalism
Some companies never make the transition from the "make it or break it" attitude that make startups successful to the more resilient corporate structure that is a safe haven for all types of workers. That's why Google is struggling. The balls-to-the-wall, 80-hour a week culture means that only the Red Bull crowd will thrive in such organization. That leaves a lot of extremely competent people on the sidelines.
Some of the best techies I work with are pure 9-to-5 workers; you can set your watch by them, at 5 minutes past 5pm they're already out of the building so they can join their family or meet with friends. And yet, during the hours they work, they deliver amazing value to the organization. Those people will never work at Google, and that's Google's loss.
lucm, indeed.
While I agree with you I think the Karma of this is fucking fantastic. Google supports so much of the crazy liberal bullshit in this country it is only fitting that it comes back to bite the hell out of them. I hope they get reamed out.
Same thing happened with Joss Whedon. You cannot satisfy extremist demands (whether from the left or the right); they'll come for you eventually, too, if you're not extremist enough.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I understand and agree with all of that, but my point was that if our main focus was not on equality, but on what is ultimately best for society and economy, then the arguments about the whys and hows and what is fair become irrelevant.
True. The problem with that is that basic freedom and also politically correct bullshit stand in the way of what is "good for society".
For instance, studies show that children raised by foster parents have a better than average chance of achieving success and financial security when they grow up, while children of single moms are massively over-represented in jail. And yet, single moms are treated like heroes in the mainstream media, and any politician who would promote adoption for children of single moms would be crucified in public.
I'm not taking a side in that issue, all I'm saying is that the "good of society" thing is too vague. I think some things are unavoidable - for instance, women give birth, not men - and those things should drive public policy, but even that is asking a lot. I mean, recently people had to choose between a reality TV star and a crooked evil witch for their next President; that's how fucked up society is. We can't expect common sense to prevail.
lucm, indeed.
Now you're reminding me of How Google Works . My short summary is that they seem to be saying they want most of the google employees to be in the Venn diagram intersection of the set of super-productive engineers, the set of hyper-creative dreamers, and the set of extreme money-grubbers, though they describe the last set more diplomatically. They reworded it in terms of a kind of an acute awareness of the economic realities of how to profit. They also want them to be extremely competitive members of all three sets.
When they get people like that, there really aren't any substitutes to be accepted (or they would have hired them already). You suggest that it's reasonable to accept normal working hours, but that isn't how the google picked them in the first place. The hiring process is so skewed that the candidate who also wanted a home and family life was already eliminated from consideration. At least I think that's how it works most of the time, notwithstanding a few anecdotal exceptions.
Specifically relevant to this article, on that foundation they want to reward employees in relative proportion to their success as measured by bottom-line profits. Since some projects produce huge profits and others don't, the people involved with the the lucky projects get much more money. That's where we get to my speculations of how it produces the gender discrimination. The more I think about it the more I'm inclined towards the credit-claiming theory. Work Rules! hinted how difficult it is to assess proper credit so the aggressiveness on the claims may help produce the extreme results in the compensation.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Women can fix this by changing their selection criteria en masse. As long as women only choose those men who can support themselves and others while men choose women with youth and beauty, the future will be still be filled with men who have to compete and women who don't.
Women are working on that now. Have you seen some of the wimpy dolts that couldn't survive on their own for a month, but as long as they speak the correct drivel they have dumb college girls clinging to them?
The balancing force of that species suicide is that when the useless dolts manage to impregnate them, the girls get abortions because they realize that the dolts can't support themselves, much less a new child.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.