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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."
Another tech guy afraid of getting numbers. The numbers will show what the numbers will show. What's the matter - stats scare you in school? Or was it girls?
That is all.
The requirement to provide the data is part of the government contracts Google has taken on, so yes it is Googles job to do the governments bidding in this case.
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...
...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
Even if the data is critical for this case, it can then be used for other government investigations such as those for tax evasion, H1B abuse, and potentially for civic lawsuits by current and former Google staff for abusive hiring practices. I'm not insisting that there is evidence of such abuses, but rather that the data would then be available for other investigations by other governmental or even private agencies who can subpoena the records.
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 ?
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.
>how are you going to accurately get the numbers for job type, productivity, experience and skill level ?
Traditionally... by ignoring productivity and experience, and using seniority as a stand-in for skill level.
In other words, there is no practical way to do it since you need to individually perform a detailed historical analysis of each person's output, including adjusting for where others have helped or hindered. It'd be faster just to do the work over again.
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.
If Google wants to continue to do business with the government, then it is their fucking job to comply. That effort is either worth it, or it's not. Don't want to comply? Then step away from all government contracts. Plain and simple.
In other words, there is no practical way to do it since you need to individually perform a detailed historical analysis of each person's output, including adjusting for where others have helped or hindered
Which makes the whole debate pointless.
http://pm1.narvii.com/5779/c3a...
http://i.imgur.com/c7lLo4w.gif
#DeleteFacebook
They could reduce the cost to $80000 by having women do it.
Good thing that's not how court orders work.
It is not a court order. It is an administrative request from the DoL.
So it's cheaper to send a lawyer to explain the data is too hard to collate
So it's cheaper to pay the fine or lose the contract
That must tell you something about the cost of "doing the right thing". Not that the cost of obtaining the information is too high, but the cost of fixing whatever the data tells the government is too high.
So we can infer that there IS an issue here. It is also reasonable that Google knows this, or it wouldn't be baulking at providing the data (and exploiting the P.R. benefits of showing "there! we do pay people fairly").
The question is whether Google would consider the odds of getting found out and having to pay people more, AND paying a fine for obstructing some dam' law or other, is worth the effort they are going to, to behave in such a manner.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The government may need Google more than Google needs them
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Although feminists will tell you otherwise.
You can't just say "We paid the men more because they asked for more."
Can you just say, "we paid the people more who asked for more"? That's how salaries work in the US culture, for better or for worse. Malfeasance not required.
One sub-group that gets really screwed: aspies. Don't tell a class-action lawyer that's epigenetic, though.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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.
For a lot of companies that might work as a line of reasoning. But Google's bread and butter is data analysis of behaviors. Their ability to find this data is more powerful than anyone else's and they already have it and use it to make money. So, yes, it is literally their job.
Identifying gender pay disparity is the kind of project they used to knock off in an afternoon, release to the public, then abandon after three years because "only" a few million people used it.
I'm no SJW but it seems to me that the difference between what men and women are paid to do identical work
You're assuming that they do identical work, with identical performance. Before you go any further, you'll need to provide proof that this is true.
Not really -while some SJWs are in it for the money, google's not doing it for the money. They're doing it for a shitload of money.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The government already knows how much everyone makes and whether they are female. They should get it from the IRS and mine it themselves.
He's not "missing the point". He's showing that google's rationale is bogus, so anyone with half a brain should realize that google is lying. You can be sure they've already run the analysis and know that they're in for a world of hurt if they give it up.
Or are their systems so deficient that they can't provide the data? Or alternatively, purposefully designed so as not to be able to easily provide the data?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Can you prove his assumption, that a man gets paid more for the same job, isn't true?
Hey moron, the poster is making the assumption, so he or she needs to provide the proof, moron.
And yet you're arguing about it.
No, I'm not. I'm asking a question.
If you are systematically paying women with the job relevant skills in the same roles different amounts then it's illegal.
Even if the average woman makes less than the average man, that doesn't mean there's a systematic gender bias. It could simply be that the man performed better, asked for a raise, and got one. Does the law say that if one person gets a raise, that everybody else with the same job description should get an identical raise ?
If men are more assertive about asking for raises, then you either need to learn to say "no" or you need to give equal raises to similarly qualified women, whether they ask or not.
Why make an exception for women ? Why don't the non-assertive men get a raise too ?
But if your policy of "give anyone a raise if and only if they ask for one" results in systematically different pay for equally qualified men and women, you are breaking the law.
What if you give a raise to anybody who performs exceptionally well, and that happens to result in more men getting a raise ?
because a systematic bias will show anyway if there is one,
If you don't compensate for job performance, the bias is meaningless. You need to learn a lot more about statistics.
You still have to proove it's systematic bias and not something else. If guys are paid more, it's due to natural reasons, like them working overtimes and not being pregnant for 2 years.
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.
Thanks for the links. According to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, there are plenty of legal ways to pay women less than men, as long as it isn't based directly on sex.
"(d) (1) No employer having employees subject to any provisions of this section shall discriminate, within any establishment in which such employees are employed, between employees on the basis of sex by paying wages to employees in such establishment at a rate less than the rate at which he pays wages to employees of the opposite sex in such establishment for equal work on jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions, except where such payment is made pursuant to (i) a seniority system; (ii) a merit system; (iii) a system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production; or (iv) a differential based on any other factor other than sex: Provided, That an employer who is paying a wage rate differential in violation of this subsection shall not, in order to comply with the provisions of this subsection, reduce the wage rate of any employee.
It doesn't say anything about negotiations.
>>Google Says It's Too Expensive To Get Wage Data
Yeah.
Google.
Doesn't know how to get data efficiently.
Google.
Yeah.
aaaaaaa
WHAT????
I think that pretty much says YES, they must do the governments bidding. At least in this instance.
This sounds like the kind of thing that should be given to an Analytics company. Preferably one that knows a lot of details about everyone on the planet. Seriously, experience? Skill Level? I'll bet you Google could correlate the breakfast its employees eat to their coding style, let alone such basic things you suggest which are stored in a company database somewhere and can be sucked out by an intern with 5min of SQL.
Isn't ad hominem literally sexist?
Not necessarily. Latin homo can, and usually does, stand for "human being" in general. Male and female of the species are vir and mulier, respectively.
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.
Aspies are not a legally protected class.
They are in the UK. It's a learning disability.
Aspergers is not a learning disability, it is a learning advantage. I am an Aspie. Aspies can tune out distractions, and focus on learning and absorbing knowledge far better than neuro-normals. I have little difficulty memorizing copious quantities of information. I could crush any opponent at Trivial Pursuit, back when people still played it. When coding, I can remember the calling convention of every library routine. I can learn a new language in a weekend well enough to debug other people's programs. I seem to be able to juggle information in my mind better than my coworkers, and when I pair program they often ask me to type slower so they can keep up.
We may be at a social disadvantage, and we may be at a disadvantage in jobs that require social skills, but we generally do not have a problem learning technical skills or performing jobs with objective requirements, and those tend to be the jobs that pay well.
Sadly all jobs require social skills and anybody that wants to pursue a career beyond programming kind of needs them.
There are also significant differences in how Aspergers impacts people. Some people can mask their social skill gap, others are defined by it. A support group I used to attend had people present that could barely function in society - they had council appointed carers with them.
So although it may not be preventing you achieving success and being happy, it is recognised as a disability and that does grant a level of protection under UK law.
As an example, a lady with Aspergers has asked her employer to grant her permission to use the disabled toilets so that she doesn't have to cope with the noise of the hand dryers in the female toilets. In UK law that's considered a 'reasonable accommodation' and can make a massive difference to her quality of life and ability to contribute at work.
It has been my experience that any significant bias is already known and an accepted part of the culture, not some well-intentioned effort unknowingly failing to be fair.
And the review processes are usually HR bullshit. And the people pushing them use bad logic and misleading stats to push an agenda.
What you really need is to have a company not run by assholes... or given how rare that is, at least a company whose particular brand of assholes aren't sexist.
And yet.. nobody can find evidence of wage gaps within an employer.
The internet should be full of examples. There should be dozens or hundreds just from the Fortune 500 companies alone.
Yet.. there isn't. There are isolated individual cases. There is bullshit about total career earnings, or comparisons between contact centre staff and board members.
Fuck this shit. I'm bored with it. I get paid less than my peers and I'm doing something about it: I'm quitting and getting another job. I'm not bitching about the fact that one of them is a different skin colour or that another is female, I'm doing something constructive about the situation.
It is illegal to systematically pay equally qualified men and women differently.
Exactly, and since they're not doing that, they don't have information about why there might still be a difference anyway.
If they had a mind-reading machine, they could just scan the HR department and find out who had exercised a bias.
Traditionally, the company is informed that there is a problem by the employee, who provides some of the information. When there is a complaint in an actual instance, they have something they can look into. Here, they're being asked some really general questions that encompass things outside the knowledge of mortals. And it would be expensive to conduct a retrospective "best guess" analysis that purported to contain the information. For the same reason; there is no actual complaint. That's why the company is refusing; they're saying that it is a search. And there is required process for searches. And other companies aren't required to provide the same information.
Google will win this round, it is an investigation started by the government as part of routine compliance, and if they want something special they'll have to do a different type of investigation. They may not even have the legal authority to do the type of investigation they're trying to do. By "they" I mean, the actual office full of humans doing the investigation.
In the end, the Government will do the investigation from the correct office and/or with the correct paperwork, and they'll win that because Google is one of the biggest US Government contractors.
Estrogens also result in increased strength and muscle mass, same fashion testosterone does. But unlike testosterone, it doesn't give rise to unstable emotions, it actually reduces them. And also unlike testosterone, it increases lifespan by 3 years over women who aren't on HRT for menopause. Studies done on male volunteers with just a single 4mg estrogen patch showed a calming influence without any increase in emotional instability.
The "well-documented effect on all manner of behaviours" is bullshit if you're implying a negative effect. It's down to women having to put up with bullshit like having to do an unequal share of work around the house despite supposedly being "equal partners" (20 hours for women each week, vs 8 hours for men) and putting up with job and pay discrimination.
Yes, there is a difference between the sexes - women do a better job. If you want to live longer, get a woman for a doctor. Women doctors are statistically better listeners. Being a better listener means getting more information before making a judgement call. Male doctors also tend to take complaints of pain from women and children less seriously than from men. And let's not forget the "man cold." Suck it up the same as women do, buttercup.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
What the? This is a government reportable, not a money making product. You do the bare minimum and if it doesn't work you claim the "well we tried" card.
But SQL isn't going to tell you whose annual review misrepresents their value to the company because the reviewer had subconscious biases.
That's also not what the government is asking for, and rule one of providing things to the government: Never provide more than you absolutely have to.
Exception to rule 1: Provide absolutely everything and hope they never find what you didn't want them to see in the first place.
Reality has a systematic bias, while social "sciences" have a systematic bias towards being retarded.
An unfortunate combination when they get to give evidence to judge you of thought crime.
Corporation is not a person. Never was really. The idea that it is is just bad jurisprudence taken too far.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Man, those women who get pregnant for 2 years must be pretty pissed off.
Companies that track employee salary based on voluntary reports of income haven't found that to be the case.
https://www.glassdoor.com/research/does-google-have-a-gender-pay-gap/
The Department of Labor hasn’t shared their data or methodology showing how they came to the conclusion that Google has a gender pay problem. In this post, we show that men on average do earn about 16.3 percent more than women at Google.
But that’s not a complete or fair comparison, as it compares software engineers and marketing associates as if they’re in the same pay bracket. Instead, when we make an apples-to-apples comparison of workers with similar jobs and backgrounds, that 16.3 percent gender pay gap largely disappears.
We find an “adjusted” gender pay gap at Google of about 1.6 percent, which is not statistically significantly different from zero. Put differently, there’s no evidence in salaries on Glassdoor of a systematic gender pay gap at Google.
Men and women aren't interested in the same jobs as one another, and some jobs pay more than others, so you're inevitably going to end up with a difference in how one group is paid. Furthermore, stop trying to speak on behalf of real women, you neither think nor behave anything like them.
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
Have you ever seen a woman work an 80 hour week? I haven't.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
Anti-feminists want you to think that bias is undetectable and that all methods of evaluating it are flawed. They would prefer we didn't even try, it seems.
You don't have to be anti-anything to see that a major part of the issue is that some of the more 'enthusiastic' feminists are quite happy to lie about statistics, even when they're easily disproved: "Full time women make 78% of what full time men make" is true, but they have to add "for the same job!" which makes it false. Twisting the results of possibly useful studies into "1 in 3 men would rape it they could get away with it" and "25% of college women are raped". With a single false story Rolling Stone set back the campus anti-rape movement more than almost anything else possibly could have.
If members of a movement make false statements, and double down on them when called out, they have no-one to blame but themselves when other people start assuming that a request for information is just a prelude to a smear campaign. Unfortunately, then only way to fix that is for the less emotionally-invested members to put pressure on the others to stick to the truth.
There is plenty of proof that men get paid more, moron.
Nobody in this thread disputed that.
Proof that there is no pay bias? Hah!
There have been plenty of studies that looked at the wage gap and found that after adjusting for things like hours worked, travel/commute, work environment (indoor/outdoor), and non-financial perks there is only a 2-6% gap left unexplained - roughly the same as the difference between right and left handed people, tall and short men, and other gaps that we know exist but don't care about. And because every single time there was a trade-off to be made men were more likely than women to choose the extra money, it's quite possible that the remaining gap can be explained by some other factor that hasn't been accounted for.
Hey moron ... Open your mind to facts instead of mindlessly believing shit? ... And it doesn't end at work ... Just another reason men die younger. Women get fed up and leave, and they lose their "built-in housekeeper" and can't fend for themselves. ... Or did you think that clean underwear magically picked itself off the floor where you left it, jumped into the washing machine, and snuck back into your dresser? You don't see the disparity because you're so used to it everywhere that you've become blind to it.
Someone asked someone else for evidence, and you responded with a series of bland insults, changed the subject, and went on a rant. The only positive thing I can say about this is that I prefer that bigots be open about their prejudice, and for that I thank you.
On the other hand, this rage against half the human race can't be good for you or the men around you. Please get help.
You don't have to be anti-anything to see that a major part of the issue is that some of the more 'enthusiastic' feminists are quite happy to lie about statistics, even when they're easily disproved:
So? Some of the most enthusiastic anti-feminists and MGTOWs are also prepared to lie about statistics and completely make shit up. If you only focus on the nuttiest people you can find, then you will find that everyone you look at is incredibly nutty.
If members of a movement make false statements,
You can dismiss literally any movement, no matter how sensible, with that. Anything large enough to be a movement is large enough to attract at least one total nutcase. Even if the proportion is low in terms of raw numbers any large movement will have a lot of nutcases.
SJW n. One who posts facts.