Slashdot Mirror
Accused of Underpaying Women, Google Says It's Too Expensive To Get Wage Data (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Google argued that it was too financially burdensome and logistically challenging to compile and hand over salary records that the government has requested, sparking a strong rebuke from the U.S. Department of Labor (DoL), which has accused the Silicon Valley firm of underpaying women. Google officials testified in federal court on Friday that it would have to spend up to 500 hours of work and $100,000 to comply with investigators' ongoing demands for wage data that the DoL believes will help explain why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women. Noting Google's nearly $28 billion annual income as one of the most profitable companies in the U.S., DoL attorney Ian Eliasoph scoffed at the company's defense, saying, "Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water."
Its not Googles job to do the governments bidding.
Furthermore, Google has no incentive to comply because even if the data shows that they are entirely innocent, such facts wont matter to the SJW's.
"His name was James Damore."
why isn't their entire workforce made of women, wouldn't it be cheaper that way?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"You can afford it" is not a valid reason why you should have to do something for free.
Even if you can afford it, you shouldn't be required to pay $100k to provide evidence the prosecution wants for a fishing expedition.
If the prosecution wants it, they can pay for it.
Then if you're guilty, maybe the judge will order you to pay that amount in addition to whatever other punishment you get.
They already know everything anyway.
...some sort of search engine, perhaps.
Why are you afraid of honoring the request? That amount is a pittance to you and the WORLD knows it. The only thing I can think of is that you have been underpaying women since the very first one that was hired and by giving this information to the US government you'll have to come clean and pay a pittance of a fine. Boo hoo... Companies are making record profit from what I see on the Internet and they are not paying their help as they should. Then these companies complain they are unable to hire replacements. It's because the companies don't want to pay the potential employees what they are worth. It takes money to make money and companies that don't want to pay their potential employees are only shooting themselves in the foot. Avantare
I have negotiated and gotten a higher pay rate at every single job I've taken except my first out of college. Anticdotally, women I talk to have told me they don't negotiate.
Ive always wondered if this is just a terrible sample or if women just negotiate less often than men.
Google Knows everything about everyone. Where you go, what you spend money on and everything else.
To say that it can't find out wage data is a pile of crock.
Google could if it wanted tell the FBI how much each Agent spent in expenses for the past 5 years.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
When Audi made a cringy, virtue-signaling Super Bowl ad and got called out over it, they ended up debunking the wage gap in a single tweet:
https://twitter.com/audi/statu...
Waiting six months for a callback from Google HR is something every woman recognizes as "I thought I could do better, but I was wrong, so I settled for you".
Skilled women in technology know better than to wait six months for "the perfect job" when they know there's a real chance it won't work out. They'e got a *lot* more offers out there, much as they do in dating.
1) Google showed it was incapable of discrimination due to its process. *facepalm*
2) Google took a government contract and doesn't want to comply with the rules of doing so. *facepalm*
3) Google is spending way more effort/money to not hand of the information than if they had. *facepalm*
This is all kinds of retarded. *facepalm*
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
HP's laser toners are expensive.
--
Google, like any other privacy conscious organization such as banks and the government never use email to communicate or request personally sensitive information.
http://pm1.narvii.com/5779/c3a...
http://i.imgur.com/c7lLo4w.gif
#DeleteFacebook
is now, "Do no work."
It assumes everyone is cisgendered. Not everyone identifies as a man or woman. Shame on you slashdot for publishing this bigoted trash.
They could reduce the cost to $80000 by having women do it.
in an Informix SQL database and is accessed through an SAP R/3 module using a special Fujitsu connector, but Google's SAP support contract lapsed six months ago. They're using a custom-built app written in COBOL as the front end, which provides very specific queries.
They won't stop bitching until their penises are just as long as those of the men.
So it's cheaper to send a lawyer to explain the data is too hard to collate
So it's cheaper to pay the fine or lose the contract
That must tell you something about the cost of "doing the right thing". Not that the cost of obtaining the information is too high, but the cost of fixing whatever the data tells the government is too high.
So we can infer that there IS an issue here. It is also reasonable that Google knows this, or it wouldn't be baulking at providing the data (and exploiting the P.R. benefits of showing "there! we do pay people fairly").
The question is whether Google would consider the odds of getting found out and having to pay people more, AND paying a fine for obstructing some dam' law or other, is worth the effort they are going to, to behave in such a manner.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The government may need Google more than Google needs them
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water."
Well, maybe Google is paying different wages to women, maybe they don't, but one thing is still very much constant in this universe: leave it to a government to spend your money as it were theirs and on top of that talk about it as it was nothing.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Problem with that line of reasoning is the government's single drop of water has a tendency to turn into a rushing river of regulation and costs.
Although feminists will tell you otherwise.
Data driven company unable to get data. Guess if there's no ad they don't bother?
If the rules of federal contracts require this info, then google can follow them or not take government contracts. If the law requires it then they can comply or defend themselves.
The left are devouring their own. It's so ironic that the left-leaning silicon valley firms are now becoming the victim of the identity politics of the same idealogy. Take a look in the mirror, and if you wouldn't want yourself to be judged to the same standard, then stop preaching identity politics to the public.
don't make me laugh...
I'd just like to point out that this is a long-running story. As with all complex issues, there are two sides.
Yes, Google has to provide a certain amount of information to the government, as part of its government contracts. however, they have already provided quite a lot of information. The DoL is now looking for historical information, and wants to interview a wide range of employees throughout the company. This is beyond the usual level of stuff that government contractors have to provide.
The DoL claims that this is because they find discrepancies in male/female pay at Google. Now, I have zero knowledge of Google's internal pay practices, but on the face of it, this is extraordinarily unlikely. First of all, the IT industry wage-gap has already been thoroughly debunked: a gap only exists if you deliberately ignore things like years taken off for childcare, which result in less experience and missed promotion opportunities. Second, Google is big enough, and under enough observation, that their HR department will be extraordinarily careful about issues like this.
All of which leads me to suspect that there's a hidden motive here. Maybe someone in the DoL is trying to make a name for themselves? Maybe there's a private lawsuit waiting in the wings, hoping for a big settlement? Maybe someone is just hoping to be bought off, possibly via a revolving door? Dunno what the agenda is, but I'll give odds that it's something at least borderline corrupt on the part of the DoL...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Seriously - Google is the best in the world at this - no ? They should be able to produce a report in seconds that would blow everyone's minds. Pie charts and shit.
whatever benefits them in the moment. Have you finally, at last, figured out that they are not ethical people and they are not on 'your side'? Has it finally sunk in that if you question one thing it might be time to question EVERYTHING they do, as all of their other activities and services are driven by the same ethos?
Then it shouldn't cost $100k.
Allow a talented engineer NDA'd access to a complete HR database dump and a few minutes with some regex and you're done. Basic tools like grep, sed, and awk would handle this in mere minutes...
Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy...
If there is discrimination a random sample of employee's data should show it. You don't have to account for other factors, just sex and salary. If the average salary for women is less than that for men you have a problem.
Google Knows everything about everyone.
If that were even close to true they would easily know enough about politicians that requests like this would never see the light of day.
They already have an HR portal that tells individuals what their wages are, and it has personal data as well. Providing a current snapshot would take one SQL query. I believe you can also access past pay stubs through the same system -- which doesn't account for unpaid time off, granted, but that same system records time off.
So that ends up as a four stage map-reduce job:
I can see it taking a month or two to figure out where all this data lives and massage it into the appropriate format.
Select * FROM employeeDB where gender='F' ORDER BY role, year DESC
Select * FROM employeeDB where Gender='M' ORDER BY role, year DESC
There you go.
The government already knows how much everyone makes and whether they are female. They should get it from the IRS and mine it themselves.
You don't privacy, do you?
The point of view of the post is utterly wrong. If this were about money, then the DOJ should be able to say "here is the 500k for the time you already spend and here are another 100k for the time and resources to get me what I am asking for".
noooo the government would NEVER impose unnecessary restrictions on people/companies..
Google doesn't cooperate after they feel they've been treated unfairly. I speculate they feel they were treated unfairly over the anti-poaching agreement so now they are lawyering up.
I will attempt to help people understand the Googler's Mind. The specific form in which their arrogance comes is confidence in their own goodness. They react in Machiavellian ways when they think the arena is unfair. It's reasonable for them to consider the arena unfair because the press often writes hysterical hit pieces about them, the EU often uses them as a punching-bag for basically protectionist impulses (ex. blaming Google for their broken tax code), wing nuts and ex-Republican-strategists working for Microsoft claim "Chrome spies on you" when all the source code is right there, etc., but they respond by becoming secretive so there's no story to begin with to make into a hit piece. Now Googlers know how they protect and partition user data but not the public. This feeds their arrogance because it makes the public suspicion appear even more unjustifiable to the Googler, fitting their internal narrative that they don't get a fair shake, even though the suspicion is now coming from their lack of transparency rather than the public's hysteria or desire to write dramatic hit pieces.
Making this leap is difficult for them: they've gone to the best college, moved to the best country, gotten the "best job" (their mother-in-law is very impressed), so you've got an approval-addicted person doing everything he thought he was supposed to and not getting approval. He's sullen and sad and angry. It's pathetic to watch, but it's not evil, at least not directly: it doesn't lead to taking short-cuts and a slow slide to evil, if anything to a redoubling of efforts. At best, people burn out, quit, take a job their mother-in-law likes less, and become a more complete human being. However it does make discussion impossible because everyone's feelings get hurt and ears reflexively close, which opens up too much space for the wave of MBAs and sociopaths to exploit.
Find out they treat them like shit.
It's amazing how "progressive" companies like Google want to hide data about their wage slaves.
Damn, it's almost as if they want illegal immigration and H1Bs to keep wages down, and net neutrality in place to create barriers to entry and to allow large entrenched interests (like Google...) to capture the internet regulatory process.
Gotta pay for the 1%er's private jumbo jet somehow.
Google already jumped on the NoSQL bandwagon.
Some tend to believe salary is paid out as deserved. It is not.
Look at all the components making a salary, it may include education, personality, negotiation skills, track record, experience, etc. How much value can you add to the bottom line? No doubt an employer has to make money from you, thats why you are there. Lets face it, private employers pay the least they can get away with. Individuals negotiate their pay, and seemingly males do better at this.
Besides, it is too hard for Google to handle Big Data. Google may only handle your Small Data requests.
So Google that lives in the epicenter of the bullshit culture that have been infecting and destroying the country for many years now, won't even bother to follow their own bullshit when it costs them money. :D
I am sure that they have bathrooms for all seventy something genders so if you were born a man but feels like a lesbian woman, you are all set.
A universal lightning rod offered up to people who are tired of thinking.
In my experience, either a person already views the world through this lens—in which case it's redundant—or a person tries extremely hard not to open this appalling box until some directly corroborating evidence forces the issue—in which case floating the possibility prematurely without offering up a smoking gun (or at least a lipstick-stained cigarette butt)—is an obnoxious waste of breath.
This particular anxiety harp string is only two strings over from SJW. Expertly woven together they manufacture the beautiful chord of tinfoil minor.
Good idea! They should just Bing it!
This is not being EVIL, how?
I mean, the company's mission statement is literally to compile ALL of the information in the world. But their own pay roll is too hard for them. That's funny.
This may surprise you, but it is illegal to systematically pay women less than men holding the same job position.
If that can be shown from the data (and it most likely can, or Google wouldn't be trying to hide the data), then Google is in for a world of hurt.
>>Google Says It's Too Expensive To Get Wage Data
Yeah.
Google.
Doesn't know how to get data efficiently.
Google.
Yeah.
aaaaaaa
Google just announced to advertisers that they have access to 70% of offline retail credit card data, and they are planning to give it up all for better tracking capability... and they are whinning about costs to keep track of data on the wage of their own employees?
Give me a fucking break.
Trump just wants all the data he can get on top companies before he leaves office.
It’s not Google’s fault. They tried to honour the government’s request, they really did.
It went like this:
“Google Assistant, what are the wages of female employees versus those of male employees at Google?”
“I’m sorry, Sundar, I’m afraid I can’t do that, it would be too expensive and burdensome to produce.”
all they have to do is browse and search the FULL index, not what they let mere mortals access.
Google knows the exact timing, weight, what I was doing the prior 20 minutes, and composition of my turds (and how long it takes me to flush the toilet - after sniffing the fine aroma), and they can't get wag data on their female employees?
Bullshit.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
3D scan of every tree on Earth? Done.
One DB-query with a few `SELECT`, `COUNT` and `SUMS`? Too hard for Google, sorry!
Google's core competency is processing huge amounts of data... so why can't they compile a spreadsheet?
Somehow, this DoL request it "too much" for their data-analysis engineers to handle? I thought you guys were good with data, Google. Are you publicly proclaiming incompetency?
The Google Appliance (https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html) does though.
Have women do the compliance work to catch up with the ongoing demands. That way it will only cost $70,000.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
If you study the google a bit, it seems obvious to me (after reading many of those books) that the extreme incentive policies could easily create the appearance of gender discrimination that reflect actual compensation results. To summarize briefly, if a particular googler is involved in an extremely successful project, then that googler will get obscenely more money than others, even though they are doing the same kind of work. I don't think this favors men because they are inherently more skilled, harder workers, or even luckier. The two most likely causes are related to gender, however: Willingness to take extreme risks and prioritization of work over life. On that basis, I think has two primary secrets they are trying to conceal here:
(1) How they protect losers from failure because they want to encourage risky behaviors. (And even with that insurance, I think women are more risk averse on average.)
(2) That work-life balance at the google is really a lie and the company is dominated in every way (including in compensation) by workaholics.
The strong incentive pay just makes it look worse and might make the google look more EVIL than it is. If that is possible. Makes me sad how the unbounded love of money turned the good google into such a monster. The motto of today's google: "All your attention are belong to us."
The ultimate threat is when people realize that all of the world's information has been prioritized to the BS info the advertisers are paying the google to shove down our throats by abusing our privacy and by raping our personal information. All in a futile quest to solve an unsolvable problem. There is no biggest number and there is no profit that is big enough to "solve" super-greed.
As usual, today's Slashdot has been disappointing, though at least it isn't evil as we measure the google. In particular I lament the lack of funny comments. However I just got the weird idea for units of EVIL measured in googlevils? Should be shorter, but something along those lines.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Yeah but their search engine only has a specialty to deal with cat videos, p0rn and nuclear scien wiki articles.
For Google to provide data that does not make them look bad, they'd need to provide a great deal of information from personnel files, such things as performance reviews and reprimands. That sort of data is properly considered company confidential and could leave Google open to a host of lawsuits (such as for libel) if the data were released.
The Department of Labor (being union stooges) is trying to harm Google. No other fact is necessary to understand the DoL's motivation.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
from "dont be evil" to "dont be weasely"
Posting anon. My wife works for a major pharmaceutical company. She just got a raise not long ago because an internal group whose job it is to retain employees found she was making less than the market average for her position. I'm guessing that this company, which is in the top 3rd of the Fortune 500, is not alone in trying to retain people they've invested a great deal of time and money in (albeit, not as much as she has in herself most likely).
captcha: fragrant
I'd like to see the HR document that shows anyone systematically paying women less.
When the googs challenges the data, charge them with income tax violations.
You don't get what you deserve in life, you get what you settle for. Ipso facto, the women are settling for lower rates of pay. The women need to learn to negotiate more effectively.
DoL attorney Ian Eliasoph scoffed at the company's defense, saying, "Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water."
Sure, they could absorb the $100,000 processing cost, but I'll bet they don't want to absorb the cost of all the lawsuits and settlements that will result from that!
* Because women *do* make less money than men at Google.
* The reason for this is that men outperform women because they are much more likely to favour "work" in work-life balance and to propose risky strategies with potentially high payoff.
* Google does not want to be in a position where it has to publicly state that the reason that men get paid more than women is that men do a better job than women for the aforementioned reason. The press would destroy them, it would sap the morale of their own female employees, and cause divisiveness in the workplace.
Government agencies keep detailed records on salary and promotions. This information includes information such as race, age, years in grade before promotion, etc. Commercial companies owe it to their workforce to do the same
Here's another possible explanation for "why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women": When someone's job is to find possible instances of something, they're apt to find it. Its actual existence is irrelevant to that quest. Appearance is enough.
Could be Google (or rather, some specific person in Google, or group of people) is doing exactly what what the government says. Which would be detrimental to the company, of course, because: (1) they could get caught and there could be negative impacts to its reputation as a firm and as an employer, (2) even if not caught it diminishes the company's ability to hire the best available people for positions.
Once the data is in the hands of the government, they are free to cherry-pick and misinterpret (perhaps innocently, perhaps not -- bureaucrats are people, too) and otherwise make their case.
A smaller company likely would simply knuckle under, regardless of the merits of the claim. Instances of the federal government have to pay serious consequences for being wrong are pretty rare. I suspect instances of that happening to the bureaucrats are even rarer.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Live by the Progressive sword, die by the Progressive sword. I like seeing Google squirm.
I've hired hundreds of people in my life. The one thing remains true across all the candidates is that the women almost never ask for more then the bare minimum I am required to offer to ALL candidates. Probably half of the men counter-offer and I can recall the names of all four women who have asked for more. The company I work for has a pretty basic set of criteria for choosing people to hire and a set amount of money that everyone gets offered. Along with that base amount I am required to offer there is a hidden amount that can be given if the qualified candidate demands more but only when the candidate pool is smaller than we currently require. The end result is that women in the company I work for definitely average less money than the men. From an SJW prospective, we are a horribly sexist company, I'm sure, but the wages we pay are what the candidates feel they are worth.
If the money and time is too much for Google to come up with, then perhaps they could ask their own employees to volunteer the vaunted 5% free time of their own to get the data. Perhaps all 17 women who work there will vounteer ;-)
Oh my, you mean the SJW initiatives Google has been fostering are now starting to backfire on them? The problem with this sort of data is that it will -only- look at the numbers. It won't factor in things like attendance, work reviews, overtime worked, wage negotiations...it's never a case of 'the numbers will show what the numbers will show' in the case of this sort of data request. In order to gain an exact idea of WHY those numbers exist, you have to look into those other factors as well. You can't just say 'but but but SEXISM.'
We run weekly pay reports and we wouldn't have the resources Google have.
Definitely heard of it, for sure. There's no particular reason to think it has much to do with programming performance.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
We don't hire women at all, problem solved.
What utter nonsense. With all the resources, money google has? I hope they realize this is like pissing in the wind. Now it's all over them. The Judge should have a field day with them.
*ONLY* 100,000$ to wipe out all doubt about accusations relating to underpaying women (if Google's line of reasoning is right) - that's a massive bargain! It would cause tens of millions worth of public relations damage if they didn't do that... lame, transparent excuse.
google cares about privacy now?
...Big Data was just a scam ;-) #voteFortran
He was a man who didn't know the meaning of the word "fear"; or the meaning of many other words longer than 3 letters
Our former President used it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I don't believe women are paid less when you correct for experience and other choices women make. Of course to balance these, the US should have 100% single-payer healthcare and mandatory family leave for both men and women.
That said, the claim that getting the accounting data is a trivial lie. This kind of thing is easily available from ANY corporate ERP system with no more than a hour's work. They shoot themselves in the foot making such a self-evidently specious claim.