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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 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.
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.