Slashdot Mirror
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.
You can Google average salary info for the type of position you are looking for.
No need to specify your gender...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There must be a mistake because google is all about not being evil. Its right their in their corporate motto. That is how we know we can trust them with everything, the motto and the free stuff.
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. Let me explain. If a man starts working right out of college and works continuously to the age of 50 he will have achieved a certain salary, depending upon his career and other factors. If a woman were to do the same I would expect that they would achieve to a comparable level. The same goes for minorities, both men and women. However, if a woman drops out of the fast lane at age 25 or 27 for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, etc., to raise a family (by that I mean either stops working, goes part time, or chooses a different full-time job specifically for the added flexibility or other family-friendly benefits), then at age 50 she simply will not have the same level of experience.
Every time that I hear the gender pay gap brought up I have to wonder if the numbers being analyzed account for that situation. Now, some people advocate making it illegal to be stay at home mom. I don't think that is the right solution. Perhaps we need to encourage fathers to spend more time with their families and less time working.
Either way, boiling it down to a single number: 1) doesn't tell the whole story; and 2) does a disservice to those women who have made a conscious choice to prioritize family above work. My mother did that and I am very happy that she did.
You offer a man $70k and he says no, that's not enough. You offer a woman $70k and she agrees. That's not discrimination, that's women being unwise.
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.
Some men do, but what you're seeing is the difference between anecdotes and statistics. Statistically, men are less likely to do those things than women. When looked at in the aggregate, this creates a bigger wage gap than would otherwise exist.
And the difference doesn't end there. You also have to factor in people choosing whether to ask for a promotion or not. Most people (men and women alike) assume that higher pay means greater demands on their time, and choose not to ask rather than take on the extra responsibility. Women are more likely to not ask, at least in aggregate, because they are statistically more likely to have greater outside responsibilities beyond work.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You don't get raises if you don't ask, and the men seemed to be more headstrong about asking.
Its not just asking, its being willing to leave. I worked at a company part time as a software developer while in school working on a computer science degree. It was a great job, flexible hours to accommodate my class schedule, etc. When I graduated I brought up the topic of my salary, expecting at least the industry average of the region. Management said that would be too large a percentage increase and offered me something below the industry average. I pointed out that I have been with them for over two, am fully trained for their specialties, and have received very good reviews. My manager said his hands were tied, too big a percentage increase. I started a job search that night.
Six weeks later I was back in front of my manager submitting my resignation after accepting a new job elsewhere. He instantly offered to match my current job offer, which was a little above what I had originally asked of him. I asked what happened to the percentage increase problem. He said that in light of the new circumstances that could be waived. I told him I was sorry (I lied) but that I had already accepted the other offer and would not be breaking my word (the truth).
I was happy, liked the work, liked my coworkers, but I was young, aggressive and not going to take that sort of BS.
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.
I forgot the footnote. I don't remember for sure if the competitive program was nursing, or something else. The interesting bit to me is that *every* department admitted a higher percentage of women, but they got sued by the feds because the university as a whole admitted a higher percentage of men. That seems like a mathematical paradox at first, so I was paying attention to the math, not which department it was.
Average would be .98 or so on the dollar, assuming the same job, experience, etc. The majority of the advertised pay gap is from the different jobs that men and women gravitate towards, with a significant additional portion being from women being more likely to take time off for family.
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.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here.
I'm going to agree with you that the wage gap is largely not a result of sexism, but of women having to choose between work and family.
It's more complicated than that. In companies like Google, you have to ask for raises and promotions. While ambition and desire fo better compensation are common across genders and races, the preferred way to get ahead vary.
Imagine you are at a restaurant and you want a second dessert. Would you feel more comfortable if you had to ask a waiter for it, or if you could simply go to the buffet and grab a second one without having to deal with the waiter? Or what about buying sex toys, do you prefer to shop online or do you want to go to the store and ask the sales clerk for that big pink dildo that they keep behind the counter? It's the same thing with raises and promotions; some people prefer to have opportunities presented to them, other are okay with asking.
In theory a good manager should look out for their direct reports and make sure that they are rewarded for productivity and offered promotions when opportunities are available, knowing that not everyone is comfortable asking. But in companies like Google this is not how things work, people who are more comfortable asking for what they want have an edge.
Sure, some women are comfortable asking for what they want and some men are not, but on average it's a behavior more common in males and that explains part of the discrepancy. It's wrong.
lucm, indeed.
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.
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.
I challenge the assumption they are *solely* a data driven company. Any company their size and with their growth and revenue will attract a diverse sample of greedy, scheming assholes. The "data" just serves as a basis for being greedy assholes, it doesn't mean that there are rules that say the data should guide them in being just or fair.
My wife is the corporate rock star in our family and she does very well in an industry where she's often the only woman in the room, but its an old, established industry with good but not Google levels of growth. In management they value her relentless organizing ability (something that's always on the edge of conflict in our marriage).
Men get more money, and more women have access to a lifestyle in which they don't have to work at all, to which men have little access. I'm not saying it's fair; I'm saying it's all unfair, and both genders are maintaining this state of affairs together. With, by the way, a little help from biology. After a birth, men aren't physically debilitated. Only economically :) (like everyone else. god damn kids are expensive.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Whether Google really is violating the law, the prosecution itself is a convenient means of suppressing opposition. Google was "with her" all the way. Could this be a payback from the Trump's Administration?
Or, the other way around, has the previous Administration sat on it because Google was all for the Democratics? Worse, maybe, Google's unprecedented cooperation was due to the subtle blackmail in the first place?
Whatever the answers to these questions, I'd rather they not be asked at all — there should be no thoughtcrimes for the government to prosecute. At all.
Discrimination may be stupid and unethical, but it should not be illegal.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
In companies like Google, you have to ask for raises and promotions.
Promotions yes, raises no (except for the raises that come with promotions). At Google you have to apply for promotion. Raises are just allocated annually by management.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Wage disparity would end almost overnight if we got rid of this ridiculous notion that wages should be a secret. If you knew what everyone else was being paid you'd immediately know if you were getting the short end of the stick. It would be obvious if there was any systemic bias in wages.
Really, why wouldn't you want your peers to know what you make? The only reasons I can only think of are, "I might be getting paid too little and they'd all think less of me if they knew", or "I might be getting paid too much and they'd take it away from me to make it fair".
Keeping it a secret only benefits unscrupulous employers. The ones who will give you a low starting offer and low raises on the grounds that you'll never really know how much better you could be doing if you went elsewhere.
Adam Ruins Everything - Why You Should Tell Coworkers Your Salary
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
There's a lot of things wrong with your statement:
1. The 'majority' of those votes weren't more than the margin of error.
2. The recounts that Jill Stein initiated became silent as soon as the recount was showing in Trumps favor.
3. The electoral college was created to prevent 'ivory towers' from dictating the vote over the rest of the nation.
4. The Internet and the 'social' media that exists there only accounts for a small percentage of the voting population and not representative of any demographic as a whole.
And honestly if you really want to end slavery then you need to join a military and fight Islam. They are the ones selling people *today*. It's Illegal in the 'Western' world and has been for generations. It's alive and well in the middle east.
Please get some perspective.
Our forefathers were far more educated and experienced in the ways of the world than all the young-adults in America today put together. When I was young and stupid I thought like you. Now that I have a family, job and certain responsibilities I see the wisdom that went into creating America. Without the revisionist history or the altruistic ideology that I learned doesn't work. You kids have some nice ideas, but you should spend more time off the Internet learning what makes people tick.
Good luck out there.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.