Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-pay-gap.html

by fooker • 3 years ago

82 67 3 years ago

shmde• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230816051150/https://www.nytim... (2019)

One can only speculate about this, but it isn't surprising. In a culture where equity and leftist ideals are rampant, and people get their feelings hurt for having a discussion, you'd expect people to err on the side of caution and make everything seem more equal and thus overcompensate, therefore paying men less.

kramerger2• 3 years ago

it isn't surprising. In a culture where equity [sic?] and leftist ideals are rampant,

HN is starting to look like a gaming forum or a comment by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then again, have you seen Paul Graham's tweets lately?

I come here for technical discussions, but at this rate soon reddit will have subs with more substance and less political fights than HN

vouaobrasil3• 3 years ago

Equity wasn't a typo. It refer to the policy of quotas, whether it be official or unofficial. And isn't it a valid social phenomenon to be studied, proved, or disproved? Surely, if equity or pay policies are being gamed, then perhaps it might be useful to look into it.

And obviously, if you are here for the technical discussions, why did you click on a thread about salaries of men vs. women?

Finally...this place is ruled by emotion just like every other place. It's only when everyone agrees that there is rational discussion.

alephnerd2• 3 years ago

I come here for technical discussions, but at this rate soon reddit will have subs with more substance and less political fights than HN

I've been reading HN since 2016. It started decreasing in quality around the COVID pandemic's start, and quickly tanked after most of the YC community moved onto Bookface.

This community has basically become Reddit

pseudo05• 3 years ago

In DEI discussions, equity is typically shorthand for "representation" or "equality of outcome" where if x% of the population is from one group, they should be x% of executives, employees, etc.

Contrast that with equality (now verboten), where everyone gets an equal opportunity at success, but the results are up to individual performance.

Dah00n• 3 years ago

leftist ideals are rampant

Did you have to make it into a political discussion by shouting your political position? I can't see any outcome of doing so that isn't bad for the quality of discussion.

vouaobrasil3• 3 years ago

How do you know my political position? I am not a conservative and never vote for them if that's what you mean...if anything, I dislike all political parties.

But anyway, I was merely stating a possible root cause of the problem, hyper lip-service to a political ideology.

error54• 3 years ago

(2019)

PaywallBuster2• 3 years ago

tl;dr there's no details about

mostly talks about internal policy and an ongoing suit against google for gender discrimination (against woman)

qwe----3• 3 years ago

Meh, not surprising. Google also has a bunch of these racial support groups whose participation in can literally help with promotion and performance reviews for literally every racial group except one.

I don't like them - I've seen them literally help racial based college clubs get projects to work on at Google.

zadler• 3 years ago

for literally every racial group except one.

Those poor Indians can never catch a break.

zo1• 3 years ago

Don't think they're talking about Indians.

questime2• 3 years ago

White people still are the most overrepresented in leadership https://about.google/belonging/diversity-annual-report/2023/ - you can deny reality all you want - there's only one group that is overrepresented. Let me guess the next reply to this will be some form of "White people are better"

Certhas4• 3 years ago

Never let data get in the way of a good victim narrative...

blitzar• 3 years ago

60% of US leadership are White+ against 60% of the US population.

32% of US leadership are Asian+ against 6% of the US population.

Your own source fails to back you up - page 16.

PaywallBuster2• 3 years ago

As a result of the findings, which were first reported by the New York Times, Google provided an additional $9.7 million to 10,677 employees, the majority of whom are men, to compensate them for unexplained discrepancies between their 2018 pay and that of co-workers who have the same responsibilities.

foota• 3 years ago

Sop $1000 on average?

chrisco2555• 3 years ago

Averages hide variance.

Certhas4• 3 years ago

So this sounds like some men and women were earning less than others. If pay has a large variance (e.g. because some people are better at selling themselves), and the workforce is overwhelming male, you would expect exactly this. Even if women on average were to earn less, the majority of those being underpaid would be men.

ithkuil• 3 years ago

This!

Our ability to talk about difficult things in a sensible way is so often thwarted by the unwillingness to just follow the simplest explanation first.

As if humans were designed for preferentially seeking extraordinary explanations

nopcode• 3 years ago

This is the exact quote from the article, it clearly states that men received more relative to their size:

In response to the study, Google gave $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees for this year. Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a higher percentage of the money. The exact number of men who got raises is unclear.

polski-g• 3 years ago

Having the "same responsibilities" does not necessarily mean you are entitled to the same compensation. I am not why this would ever be the case. If employee A is 50% more efficient than employee B -- who both are making widget X -- why would employee B be paid the same as A?

seydor• 3 years ago

one could call it intergenerational justice

vsnf• 3 years ago

The idea that one should not be made to suffer for the sins of their parents is one of the bedrocks of western justice and politics philosophies.

We should strive to correct prior unfairness with some other way than by propagating further unfairness.

blackoil• 3 years ago

While I agree in principle. We mostly enjoy benefits of those sins. The money/land/power gained by ancestors by means which we believe unethical/illegal now continues to provide value for the descendants.

Simon_O_Rourke• 3 years ago

These HN topics are almost verging on dogwhistle politics, where people can't take their head out of the sand for a second to see that the compensation system overall in tech needs to be badly overhauled. Even though this is an old article, it addresses something which should be of interest to most here - namely that whatever color or stripe or creed you are yourself, the odds are that you're personally getting less than you should in terms of compensation.

I know people almost single-handedly keeping valuable back-end systems running, that accrue millions in revenue for a company, but yet the company pays them less than the industry average for their role. Conversely, I have worked with corporate ladder-climbers who contribute nothing beyond endless catch-up meetings that earn more. If you do good work, that directly supports or creates revenue for your company, you deserve a fair slice of that, regardless of how your role is perceived by often technically illiterate HR and management layers.

ajaimk• 3 years ago

This is 4 1/2 year old....

zapdrive• 3 years ago

I am sure the gap has only grown wider.

kisamoto2• 3 years ago

This article is a few years old so I hope it has evened itself out by now.

I wonder why an 'algorithmic' approach to salaries is not more common.. To achieve this there must be a structured career ladder with standardised job descriptions and (most likely) a way to determine a maturity within the role itself, but then it's a case of having a base salary (often heavily influenced by where the employee is) and some multipliers. Out pops a number (or a tight range) and the employee can choose if they take it based on their valuation of their skills. No risk of gender bias and it takes away a lot of the pain of negotiating salaries felt by both management and subordinates.

Regularly reviewing the base numbers to adapt for inflation and market trends will ensure that both new and existing employees are treated fairly.

At my previous position (head of engineering at an old school sales house trying to become more engineering friendly) we had great success bringing in a structured approach to growth and a corresponding salary calculator. Unfortunately the salary numbers were reserved for management as it wasn't rolled out across the whole organisation but it inspired other, non-engineering, departments to adopt a similar pattern. My vision would be to have these figures open company-wide however I understand that in most medium-large companies this is a time-consuming process.

As someone starting a business today I want to ensure that salaries are open (definitely within the company but likely to the world) from the beginning. Employees should feel comfortable knowing that they are compensated fairly for both the work they do and in comparison to others.

If anybody is looking for some open inspiration about how this is done, check out Buffer[0] and PostHog[1] (Gitlab[2] have one too but the numbers are not open).

    - [0] https://buffer.com/salary-calculator/software-engineer-ii/high
    - [1] https://posthog.com/handbook/people/compensation
    - [2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/

Leherenn• 3 years ago

Because you give up a lot of flexibility when hiring people.

If you want to hire someone asking even just a tiny bit more than what the algorithm says, you have to adjust the algorithm and increase everyone else, play with the role level to get what you want or just say sorry not possible.

My experience is that it's often the second one. "Yeah, he's more like level X than Y, but we need someone quickly and he's the only one in the pipeline, so let's bump his level so that it matches his salary demand and sign him." It kinda devalues the whole thing if you tweak the input to get the output you want.

kisamoto2• 3 years ago

True - there is no flexibility but that's kind of the point. The situation you describe is exactly how salary discrepencies and potential gender inequality happen.

Realistically if you have a candidate you want to hire but they are not happy with what the algorithm spits out either your baseline isn't correct for the current market situation (and therefore should be adjusted, affecting every employee), or it's not the right candidate.

The algorithm should be an accurate representation of what your company is willing to pay for an individual at a certain level.

If the candidate is not happy, fine. Can't have everything and they may be overvaluing their skillset. If the company is not happy, a single candidate should not get preferential treatment over the other employees.

foobiekr• 3 years ago

It’s actually better to just assume levels are just pay grades and totally dismiss the idea that it otherwise means something.

Thorrez3• 3 years ago

I've thought about the math related to this a bit.

Let's say you have a certain (role,level,rating) tuple with 2 women and 8 men. You desire gender equality, and thus say that the average pay for women and men must be equal within a (role,level,rating) tuple, and to do this, you'll raise the salary of the less-paid gender.

The women, due to there being less of them, will have an average pay with higher variance than the average pay of the men. If the women's average pay varies down due to random variance, then the solution is not too bad for Google: pay those 2 women more. If the women's average pay varies up due to random variance, the solution is 4x more painful for Google: pay the 8 men more.

Overall, each individual person will on average benefit the same amount from this scheme. But on average, more money will be directed to men due to this scheme than will be directed to women, just due to the fact that more men exist in the company. Similarly, on average, more men will will benefit than women due to more men existing in the company.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on anything related to this.

pseudo05• 3 years ago

Or the employer shifts to a less flexible compensation system, and everyone loses. Some employers will outright refuse to negotiate pay for a given position because HR gives them a grid or a standard formula.

Certhas4• 3 years ago

How does everyone lose?

It seems to me that people worse at negotiating are set to win in this case...

bitshiftfaced3• 3 years ago

Low sample size has the potential to increase variance, but it isn't necessarily true. Also, you're comparing each group to the average of both groups, but we could instead compare them to an objectively determined value of what that job/role/level is worth to the company, regardless of how it compares to the employee average.

Thorrez3• 3 years ago

Comparing salary to the role's worth has 2 problems:

* If you set employees' salaries to how much benefit they give the company, the company's profit will be 0, which will make investors mad.

* If the worth to the company is somewhere between the average pays of the genders, this doesn't achieve equality between the genders, which is the whole goal of this, unless you're willing to decrease employees' salaries, which will make employees mad.

The current system is the minimum change necessary to achieve gender equality without lowering anyone's salary. Any other design either costs the company more, lowers people's salary, or doesn't achieve equality.

ofcourseyoudo• 3 years ago

Important:

"Critics said the results of the pay study could give a false impression. Company officials acknowledged that it did not address whether women were hired at a lower pay grade than men with similar qualifications."

Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity

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