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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
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
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)
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.
The government already knows how much everyone makes and whether they are female. They should get it from the IRS and mine it themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.