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."
It's easy to get the numbers for the salaries, but how are you going to accurately get the numbers for job type, productivity, experience and skill level ?
I agree that chances are they are discriminating, like 90 percent of all corporations do.
Thank you for proving parent's "the conclusion has already been drawn" point with your ridiculous statement.
This is big stuff in information economics. Liking numbers isn't enough.
People using information theory in business these days, people who read Stiglitz, understand that information as a cost. That is why wages stagnate instead of dropping during a bad recession; it would cost money to find out what the new balance of worker supply/demand is. If you go too far you would lose workers; by the time you get that feedback, you've already received the harm. There is no free warning system.
Same problem here; wages and worker supply is constantly changing, you'd have to do expensive studies on a continuous basis to ever have this information. No employer does that, and none would. It is just asking too much. Like the summary points out, the actual pay at issue is a tiny amount of money and there is no reason for google to avoid paying it. Which is true; they would certainly prefer to have wage fairness! But they also need to be using a pay system based on perceived merit, so that they have healthy feedback loops.
It might actually be better to have government track worker pay across the economy, and provide the wage information that they want businesses to consider in their hiring practices. Each worker is different and has different value, so you need a detailed system to account for what you value in a worker if you're really going to make decisions that would have improved outcomes. It isn't enough to pay based on an underwear check, because the Shapiro-Stiglitz efficiency wage model requires employers to target wages to minimize shirking. In a factory that is easier, but in professional work it requires individualized pay packages. Even if not personalized, you'd need a large number of pay levels that people can be placed at, and so it is effectively the same and will also have the same marginal problems with bias and fairness.
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.
A steady dose of 17-beta-estradiol (say about 2 milligrams a day) will cause depression in most otherwise healthy males. I suppose depression is "stable", but it isn't healthy.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate