Oracle Systematically Underpaid Thousands of Women, Lawsuit Says (theguardian.com)

Thousands of women were systematically underpaid at Oracle, one of Silicon Valley's largest corporations, according to a new motion in a class-action complaint that details claims of pervasive wage discrimination. From a report: A motion filed in California on Friday said attorneys seek to represent more than 4,200 women and alleged that female employees were paid on average $13,000 less per year than men doing similar work. An analysis of payroll data found disparities with an "extraordinarily high degree of statistical significance," the complaint said. Women made 3.8% less in base salaries on average than men in the same job categories, 13.2% less in bonuses, and 33.1% less in stock value, it alleges.

The civil rights suit comes as the tech industries faces increased scrutiny of gender and racial discrimination, including sexual misconduct, unequal pay and biased workplaces. The case against Oracle, which is headquartered in Redwood Shores and provides cloud computing services to companies across the globe, resembles high-profile litigation against Google, which has also faced repeated claims of systematic wage discrimination.

Comments

Does not logically follow

[Roger W Moore]

Study after study has shown that women are biologically less inclined in technology and obviously they would be less productive in a high-tech company

Sorry but that does not logically follow at all. Just because it is rarer for women to be interested in technology it does not mean that those individual women who are interested are any less skilled it just means that there are fewer of them. Your point could explain why Oracle hires more men than women but not why it pays them less.

Re:Does not logically follow

[jpaine619]

In education I'd tend to believe you as women, at least in the US, make up the larger proportion of teachers. At the employment level I call Bullshit. Show us your numbers. Your claim flies in the face of every study I've ever seen.

Sweden is frequently cited as one of the most gender neutral countries in the world, yet they still show the typical (western) divisions in labor. Men are the ones doing the manual labor and engineering fields, while women continually pick the more domestic and people oriented jobs.

This absolute denial, by the left, that men and women are different is lunacy. We know we're different.. Yet these rabid SJWs will froth at the mouth if you voice that.

Over the years I've had a handful of job interviews for pretty high paying jobs that involved lots of work outdoors, long hours, and working at height. During those applications, I've never seen a single woman show up EVER. These were jobs that paid in excess of $100K/year. (Roughly double the median income for California and in this area a very good salary. One can be more than comfortable on that pay). But, they don't want to work outdoors, they don't want to work mandatory overtime, and they don't want to work at height. (In this context "they" means the majority. I'm not implying 100%)

At some point the left is going to have to come to the same conclusion that anyone with brains has come to, if women did equal work to men for less pay, why the fuck wouldn't companies hire only women?

This is an aside, but relevant to the differences in biology and mental character: Back when the telephone was still a new thing, brand new really, AT&T (Bell System) hired males as switchboard operators (yes, because of sexist reasons - the feeling at the time was that women should be at home), but that policy was rapidly scrapped once it became clear that men sucked at that job. Men are abrasive, argumentative, combative, and lack the same level of interpersonal skills that most women have naturally. It wan't unusual for male operators to be fired for telling a customer to "go fuck yourself". The female operators didn't do shit like that. Generally (not 100%, but a large percentage) were friendly, polite, and empathetic. They tended to have the personality to soothe customers rather than battle them.

Gender differences are real.. Deal with it. You aren't going to erase millions of years of evolution just because you want to.

The average male is stronger than 85% of women. The strongest 15-20% of males are stronger than 100% of women.. That's a difference.. It's biological.. It's real... It's how it is.. That alone will excluded most women from most physical jobs where any type of heavy lifting is involved. How the hell do you legislate that away?

In other news

[guruevi]

Single women without dependents make 8% more than their male counterparts with same education and experience across the US, in large cities like Atlanta the pay gap is 21%
Women are 50% more likely to graduate from college.

Politifact rates it Mostly True solely because they can't find more recent statistics that disprove their narrative.

Over time, women (as a statistic) make different choices and prefer life over work. They tend to work less hours, take less overtime, are happier, live longer lives and don't die from work-related accidents or diseases (as in >1 percent of work-related deaths are female), they also make only 1-3% less over their lifetime than males (a statistic that reverses when you account for education and single motherhood) but that 3% makes all the difference as this wealth disparity is pretty much concentrated in the top 1%.

Re:In other news

[tomhath]

Cherry picking statistics can show anything.

Cherry picked statistics are the basis of the lawsuit.

Re:In other news

[jpaine619]

The important thing to take away here is that increasing equality benefits everyone.

What the fuck? No it doesn't..

Equality of OPPORTUNITY benefits everyone. Equality of OUTCOME benefits only the most unproductive and lazy members of society.

Equality of opportunity exists in Sweden (and most of the Nordic countries), yet the outcome is nearly the same as in the rest of the western world.. Women and Men self segregate. Women are going into the "social" jobs, while men prefer the "physical/mental" jobs. The only way you can possibly remedy this is to force people into jobs they do not want. This isn't speculation, it's observed reality.

When you give men & women the maximum freedom to choose what they want to do for a living, it turns out that they do not want to do the same things..

I'd like to suggest you read this article: https://www.theglobeandmail.co...
Here's a snippet:

The trouble is that the world's most liberated women aren't leaning in – in fact, many are leaning back. They work fewer hours and make less money than men, just as Canadian women do. In fact, Swedish women are much more likely to have part-time jobs and far less likely to hold top managerial positions or be CEOs. On top of that, Scandinavian labour markets are the most gender-segregated in the developed world.

Women do make up 25 per cent of Swedish corporate boards, but only because of quotas. The greatest concentration of senior managers, CEOs and other highly paid power women isn't in Scandinavia. It's here in North America, where working women's lives are much tougher.

It turns out that all these family-friendly policies have an unintended impact on the gender gap, as Kay Hymowitz and many others have noted. By making it easy for women to drop out of the work force and work shorter hours, they make it harder for women to progress in their careers. Swedish men have these options too, but they don't take them. So women don't advance as far as men. And they are also considered less desirable by corporate employers who need people on the job 24/7.

i.e. when you remove all the legal and fiscal barriers, women don't want to work outside the home.. Sweden proves it...

Possible consequence - equal work hours

[sinij]

I choose to be optimistic, perhaps consequence of this mandatory gendered equal pay is that men will be allowed to "lean out" of crazy overtime and weekend hours that have been expected up to this point.

This is all just a side show, a distraction

[rsilvergun]

Americans are making 20% less than they used to (article says "Millennials" but I don't know about you but I took a paycut when the economy crashed in 2008).

Men and Women are now fighting among ourselves over 1-3% (a percentage that might just be due to men not taking time off for child rearing) while the ruling class is laughing all the way to the bank with that 20%.

This has been modus operandi for centuries: wedge issues. You find something to divide the working class into manageable chunks. Race, creed, sex. Hell, when the Japanese couldn't do it with race because they were all Japanese they made up classes based on jobs and kept books of them by name.

Don't fall for it. Demand better pay for all workers. Support the push for higher minimum wage. Vote in your primary for pro-Union, pro-worker candidates who refuse corporate PAC money. Demand all workers get healthcare that isn't tied to your job so you can switch jobs at will.

We've got bigger fish to fry than this. Don't get into the trenches with your fellow workers fighting while the rich laugh at you

Re:Should be easy to defend

[TimothyHollins]

Correlation is not causation. There is no proof that the inclination is caused by biology, nor the degree of productivity.

I don't know anything about productivity, this is the first time I've heard someone mention it. But the inclination, oh boy.
https://www.thejournal.ie/gend...
There's even a wiki page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As always, I wouldn't trust the wiki page, but the sources might be interesting.

Oh, and here's a documentary from the Norwegian state channel. Don't worry, it's subbed in English. It's a good watch, quite explanatory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

So yes, it seems to be heavily influenced by biology, even more so than findings from not-so-equal countries might suggest.

Re:Devil's adocate

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until today, if Oracle were accused of doing evil thing X, everyone piled in saying "yeah it's Oracle, so probably they did"

If Oracle are accused of doing evil thing X *that benefits them*, then most Slashdotters will agree that they probably did it.

But this case doesn't make sense. Why would they pay men extra, if they could hire women at a lower rate to do the same work?

On the other hand, feminists have also earned themselves a poor reputation - and a spurious lawsuit like his would be entirely consistent with their history. Of the two evils, Oracle is probably, for once, the innocent party here.

Re: Should be easy to defend

[cayenne8]

Irrelevant. It is illegal to pay men and women systematically differently based on any other criteria but job performance. Unless they are salespeople or professional negotiators, paying them differently based on "ability to negotiate" is illegal.

Well, how do you propose it works then?

I mean, I don't really know of any company, that pays everyone with same job title exactly the same.

Employee 1 comes in, and negotiates to work for the company for $50K a year.

Employee 2 comes in and negotiates to work for the company for $45K a year.

Employee 3 comes in and negotiates to work for the company for $55K a year.

All employees are hired one with the salary they agreed to....

That's how it works.

So all 3 employees work for years there, each getting a 5% raise each year.

Alll things being equal, the person that negotiated the best salary, will always be paid the most.

Now, what if employee 2, valued themselves the least starting out...who's fault is that?

If that was a woman, she'll always be paid less than 1 an 3.

Let's say 1 and 3 are both men.

Well, #3 will always be paid more than #1.....

So, where's the discrimination there? There is none.

The company wants to get as much work out of you for the least amount of money, that's how it works, and it is up to YOU as the individual to negotiate to get the best deal you can for yourself and to know your self worth, etc.