14 ms·

Accused of underpaying women, Google says it's too expensive to get wage data

184 points by dsr12 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kuschku 9y ago
"Too big to comply", now that’s an interesting term. Shouldn’t all this data be in a single consistent database anyway? I mean, Google can manage all historic payments people do via their payment processor, but can’t manage all historic wage payments automatically?
- dboreham 9y ago
  Through a family connection I know quite a bit about how salary data is analysed inside silicon valley companies. That analysis, in turn, is largely driven by the need to comply with various DOL regulations. Based on what I know I find it inconceivable that Google doesn't have this data in a spreadsheet that could be emailed in a few seconds to whoever needs to see it.
- angry-hacker 9y ago
  Of course they can do it, the question is should they and do they want to. The latter is obviously no. You can testify against yourself too if you want to, it doesn't matter that you don t have to. Well, maybe if you have committed a crime you should since you said you're a good person and don't do evil? The amount of smart people thinking and buying the idea that all the social issues companies are working for are being done for nothing besides win your mind and heart amazes me. And then you say advertising doesn't work?!
falcolas 9y ago
Err, too expensive for Google? And pardon my only partially feigned ignorance, but if you're paying them based off the position and not gender, why do you need additional wage data?
- bArray 9y ago
  >And pardon my only partially feigned ignorance, but if you're paying them based off the position and not gender, why do you need additional wage data? Aren't Asians "overpaid" in the US tech industry? Any investigations into this? Of course not. This stinks of hidden agenda.
tyingq 9y ago
Funny with the context of how much, for example, Levandowski was compensated. It also makes you wonder about their statements that they have no gender pay gap. If you can't get the data together, how do you "know"?
oneoff222 9y ago
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
wiz21c 9y ago
Fortunately, with AlphaGo rising, the pay will be optimized by AI, based on what you do and you need (based on history of web searches).
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  If the training set for your payroll AI is biased, your payroll AI will end up biased too.
- mbaha 9y ago
  I hope this will help in reducing bias in the recruiting process, but your statement is a prime example that we just want to move the problem somewhere else in the career pipeline. We won't achieve parity in the workplace simply because there is no parity in STEM programs (and particularly in Computer Science). So, if everything was done w/ IA, I would just force a 50/50 split for employees to encourage girls to take up coding classes (at the tiny expense of coding abilities).
  - wiz21c 9y ago
    I was absolutely and totally cynical here :-)
scarface74 9y ago
So Google can organize the worlds information, has AI good enough to categorize and automatically tag my pictures, has some of the most brilliant minds on earth, but can't do what would be a simple SQL statement for most companies?
- philipov 9y ago
  If Google released such wage data, they would have to pay people more, and that would cost a lot, and so collecting wage data is too expensive. Get it?
  - trendia 9y ago
    This is the truth. Total Cost = Cost to acquire data ($200,000) + Back pay to employees ($20,000,000)
    - nojvek 9y ago
      My respect for Google has gone down significantly. I would not work for Facebook and Google even if I was offered a million dollars. I predict that the Golden years of FB and Google are right now, they will slowly head into a plateau
      - wcummings 9y ago
        Same, their recruiters email me every couple of months... Yeah no thanks. Id sooner work for MSFT these days. How the times has changed.
      - 659087 9y ago
        I never really understood the Google worship. "Don't be evil" was an ingenious PR move which earned them an army of useful idiots willing to defend their every move, but never actually applied internally as far as I could tell. I think the reality was "see how much evil we can get society acclimated to". As for Facebook, I think anyone who ever had a positive opinion of them should be evaluated by a psychiatrist.
someonewhocar3s 9y ago
“We want to understand what’s causing the disparity,” she said. --- Further proof women (!!ON AVERAGE!!) just do not perform as well as men IN THIS INDUSTRY. It should absolutely be solved, somehow, but it's not by harassing a company that hires women for what they're worth. My personal theory is that women are so cherished - they aren't held to the same standards in education. We try to pull them into the CS department by making it easy for them. That should stop. It's ridiculing women, and making them into inferior workers. At the same time women need to proactively become 'beta' and study exact sciences. Put in their fair share of the effort. Fucking social sciences are "fun and easy" - and women outnumber men there. I think women should man the fuck up already. Don't get fair salary? Go away. That's what men do. It sounds weird, but think of it this way: If women came at a discount, why would you ever hire men? At least some companies should realize this. Truth is you can't find a good woman programmer.
- ue_ 9y ago
  Is this sarcasm, or a joke? It's not very funny, and your comments come across as misogynistic and particularly rude. You complain that "CS departments are making it easy for women and ridiculing them" and then go on to say that women should "man the fuck up?". Edit: it would be nice if people could explain why they are downvoting me. What was off with my comment? I cannot improve my comments unless you leave a comment yourselves on how I can do that. I found the comment (now flagged) to be particularly abrasive. I go into detail with the arguments in a grandchild comment to this post.
  - omginternets 9y ago
    If we ignore the form, I think the substance of his argument has some merit. I would appreciate it if you would comment on that, instead. Indeed, if women were systematically underpaid despite equivalent performance, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be hired by the boatload. This might be explained by (1) a lack of women relative to men in the developer workforce and (2) a systematic bias in competence. It's not prima facie absurd to think that affirmative action efforts have perverse effects, namely that they push the actual selection based on competence to a later stage of the employment pipeline. I understand this isn't a conclusive argument, but it does have some merit, and I'm worried by the fact that just bringing it up has one labeled a misogynist. That's not the way forward.
tyingq 9y ago
Apparently, their payroll software for North America is something called "UltiPro": http://www.ultimatesoftware.com/UltiPro-Solution-Features-Payroll-Administration-Tax-Management http://www.ultimatesoftware.com/UltiPro-Solution-Features-Pa... From a job listing for the North America Payroll Core Operations Lead: https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/north-america-payroll-core-operations-lead-google-JV_IC1147431_KO0,42_KE43,49.htm?jl=2420728831 https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/north-america-payroll-... "Advanced scripting and extensive UltiPro knowledge"
sterex 9y ago
How can a corporation like Google that handles Peta bytes of data on a daily basis say it is too hard for them to keep track of their own employee payments? If they were honest enough, they would have found a way to comply. This is just their attempt at lawyering out of the situation.
Oxitendwe 9y ago
Do we know if their quality of work is the same as the men who work at Google? Without that, any discussion of bias or discrimination is impossible.
tajen 9y ago
@someonewhosecar3s: I've witnessed what you describe about women preference in Australia and I'm afraid this culture gets contagious in France. Women get a complete different privileged pathway to jobs, yet studies keep studying "How men and women get educated differently". Here's what I'm doing, and it's time all men do it too: - Started a Youtube channel to provide a counter-analysis to common misconceptions. For example I've dismantled every second of the Always #LikeAGirl ad spot. - Started writing to every single institution that isn't compliant to male equality (i.e. every time an institution is dedicated to women, such as France's "Family and Women's Rights Minister", or France's subventions to help women's careers. - Started petitions on Change.org against political parties who, in their "Gender Equality" chapter, help women for tiny inconveniences and don't help men for e.g. their 3x higher suicide rates. That means calling for people like Trump vote if Hillary's program treats men as disposable. Her exact words, which participated to electing Trump, were: "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." I can't explain enough the level of disdain the general politics represent towards men (and this disdain against men dangerously fuels things like Trump, Brexit, FN, etc). - Ideally I'd like to attack institutions for illegal discrimination when they officially discriminate men (ex: Gender-based help programs), but that requires putting my name in public, and I'm afraid of violent actions. Equality will be when men defend themselves as much as women. Go find a petition today and sign it, at the very least.
- trendia 9y ago
  Perhaps your comment here is premature? In order to know whether there is a wage gap at Google, you need data. Without that data, you are no more accurate than the people you are fighting.
- dang 9y ago
  This falls in the ideological rant category and is off topic on HN. You've posted comments like this before and we've already asked you not to. Please don't do it again.
TP4Cornholio 9y ago
Their attorneys probably cost at least 1000 an hour. Would be cheaper to release the data than to fight this.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  You know what happens if you give up your lunch money to a bully once? Maybe better in the long run to not be seen as an easy mark, even if it causes some short term pain.
  - 659087 9y ago
    Are you really trying to imply that poor little Google is being bullied here?
    - mythrwy 9y ago
      No, I'm suggesting perhaps Google's attorneys understand the general principal of the undesirability of apparent weakness while being cash rich.
rayiner 9y ago
In litigation, there is the expectation that parties shouldn't be expected to bear discovery costs that are out of proportion with the value and relevance of the requested data. "It'll cost too much" is thus a stock answer to discovery requests. Google can absorb the $100k cost--they'll likely spend tens of thousands to just to litigate over the discovery dispute. But they're entitled to hold the government to it's burden of articulating why that data justifies the cost. Obviously the real reason is that Google doesn't want to hand over the data. But you should never just hand data over to the government. Government lawyers can get pretty creative with spreadsheets of numbers.
- ble 9y ago
  Being difficult is indeed pretty normal in our adversarial system of law. Being difficult about something that should actually be pretty easy is a good way to make your judge ornery and, unless your resistance earns you the opportunity to give up less/different information or some sort of other concession, seems like poor legal tactics.
  - threatofrain 9y ago
    That seems like something for a law firm to judge though, rather than a layman trying to model the psychology of a particular judge. It could be that you try to appease the judge, and you find it renders inferior value.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  Google is a federal contractor. These documents are being requested because they do federal business, not because of any civil or criminal inquiry. Now of course these documents might lead to a civil case, but it's within the bounds of each agency's Office of Civil Rights to request this data.
  - ball_of_lint 9y ago
    Would that apply to all of googles employees though? I assume that people working on nongovernmental products would not be included.
peter303 9y ago
You cant google this information?
- 659087 9y ago
  Google doesn't like being Googled. Remember what happened when some journalists Googled Eric Schmidt? http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/ http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/
mythrwy 9y ago
The issue of possible underpayment aside, It has to be in the interest of the company to provide as little information as they can. It's a court case. The attorneys wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't use every legal means at their disposal. And they may in fact have a point (to an extent). Government shouldn't be able to accuse a firm of something, then demand the firm spend money assembling data to prove the governments case. The fact Google "makes a bunch of money so no big deal" (which is what the .gov attorneys are apparently arguing) is irrelevant to that principal.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  Government shouldn't be able to accuse a firm of something, then demand the firm spend money assembling data to prove the governments case. First of all: when you sue someone, you do get to demand exactly that. They also get to demand it of you! It's called "discovery", and it's a bog-standard basic normal everyday part of lawsuits. Second of all: if you have a look through the reporting on this, Google was being audited for compliance with equal-pay laws and refused to supply records the government said were relevant to the audit. So the government is now suing to force Google to hand over the records. Auditors are allowed to do that, and being required to assemble and hand over information is pretty much the literal definition of an audit.
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    This isn't a civil suit though. And fishing expeditions (at the firms cost) shouldn't be allowed. We'll see what the court decides.
    - ubernostrum 9y ago
      An audit isn't a fishing expedition. Being audited for compliance with relevant laws is part of being in business; if it's an unbearable burden, your options are 1. Get out of business, or 2. There is no second option.
      - mythrwy 9y ago
packetized 9y ago
Salesforce can do this, but Google can't? https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/04/salesforce-equal-pay-assessment-update.html https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/04/salesforce-equal-pay...
montyboy_us 9y ago
Couldn't the government paint a pretty accurate picture using IRS data? Title and earnings via W-2 is at least a start.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  That would require the Department of Labor to have that data. They don't have that data; the IRS has it, and they'd probably have to get a court to order the IRS to hand it over, and the court might well not do that.
- itsdrewmiller 9y ago
  Isn't that data what sparked the investigation in the first place?
skywhopper 9y ago
It's the legal team's job to push back on any new requests for data. Obviously there _is_ a reasonable limit of what the government can ask Google to provide. This particular cost is obviously far less than that limit ought to be given the stakes involved and the size of Google, but again, Google should push back too early and the government should ask for too much, and the judge should find the reasonable middle ground. That's fine, that's how our legal system works, and I suspect this article is overblowing a typical procedural step in the process. All of that said, Google is not coming out looking like the good guy by fighting this case so hard. Their compensation analysts ought to be running these sorts of reports themselves. If they truly aren't, then that in itself is evidence (in my opinion) that Google is willfully neglecting its responsibility not to underpay its female employees.
- eastWestMath 9y ago
  If they aren't making efforts with their women employees, it would follow they aren't doing much to help out their black/Hispanic employees either.
  - bArray 9y ago
    Asians are apparently "paid too much", so er, docking wages for being Asian, anybody?
    - helthanatos 9y ago
      White males are certainly paid too much! They should make half of what minority employees do!
      - bArray 9y ago
        I think you've been down-voted because your humour is too subtle. >White males are certainly paid too much! They should make half of what minority employees do! It certainly feels like this won't stop until that's the case.
bobbington 9y ago
This gender discrimination lawsuit is likely total b.s. From an overly zealous agency. It's a simple fact that on average men are 1) much better at engineering type things, and 2) more interested in them. Just like the average woman is obviously better with babies than the average man. While I don't know the facts of the case, so I can't say if there really was gender discrimination, I suspect when actual differences in contribution are accounted for, the gap goes away. It's a woman's world, because winning requires complaining the loudest. Men usually don't complain nearly so much as women so they get stomped in court and public opinion.
JBiserkov 9y ago
Microsoft can do it: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/04/11/ensuring-equal-pay-equal-work/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/04/11/ensuring-equal-p...
bArray 9y ago
I guess Uber is no longer the popular tech company to rip into. I've seen some articles surfacing about Facebook, they'll probably be the next people to hate for a little while. Everything about this is so wrong. It all comes down to laundering money out of Google, thinly veiled with this false idea of "justice" from incorrectly used statistics.
PKop 9y ago
Can someone explain how they would be able to get away with paying women less than men? And if your answer is: "They just pay them less." 1) Why? What is the purpose of them doing this? 2) Why don't they also just pay men less as well? 3) Wages trend, in a competitive market, towards marginal productivity of labor. What is preventing competitors in the market for engineers from poaching all of the underpaid yet equally talented women at below market costs, say half the gap Google is assumed to be creating? Surely this would be a clear path towards extra profits, no?
- mikeash 9y ago
  Wages are set by supply and demand. Systematic discrimination results in less demand for women, which results in lower wages. There is some profit opportunity for companies who take advantage of this, but it's not enough to erase the difference. Consider, for example, how pervasive racial discrimination was (and still is) in business despite the fact that accepting minorities as customers and employees would be financially advantageous.
  - bobcostas55 9y ago
    This view implies there is a huge, and frankly quite easy, money-making opportunity. Why aren't you exploiting it?
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Sure, a moderate percentage savings in labor costs will totally make it easy to compete with Google.
      - PKop 9y ago
        What does "making more money for your company" have to do with competing against Google?
  - hyperdunc 9y ago
    There is no systematic discrimination.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
Suppose that there's compelling statistical evidence that Google underpays women, but no evidence of any specific intent to do so (which, IIRC, is how these things usually play out). Beyond the immediate legal remedies, how do they they fundamentally fix the processes that led to that outcome? Would they even really know where the leaks are in this machinery that admit such biases? How many other companies have the same fundamental problems that go unexamined because their outcomes happen to not suggest a legal issue (e.g. a bias based on alma mater, favorite movies, shared hobbies, etc.)?
loup-vaillant 9y ago
> Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.¹ Yet this particular bit of information is too expensive to make accessible and useful. They have this giant correlation machine, and they don't use it to know as much as they can about their own company? How convenient. I know, "one does not simply", but still: aren't you supposed to keep salary records anyway. Wouldn't you keep them even if you didn't have to, just in case? Wouldn't you run some statistics over them, just to see the trends? Obviously, as rayiner says, Alphabet have other reason not to hand over the data. [1]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/ (meta description tag)
- yeukhon 9y ago
  They do. But they just don't want to release it to the request.
- 659087 9y ago
  Google is a strong proponent of privacy, for Google.
itsdrewmiller 9y ago
If google doesn't have this information readily available it is pretty hard to believe their claim that they analyze salary data every year and definitely don't have a wage gap.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  If gathering salary data was high cost they could still address the question of having a wage gap with random sampling. And that's what they'd have to do anyway -- salary data wouldn't tell you if they had a discriminatory wage gap.
wolco 9y ago
The only way to fix this is to pay everyone the same pay regardless of job title / history / experience. If you are hiring the best you need to offer the best pay across the board. Google does this already.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
skookumchuck 9y ago
Given today's demand for engineers, it's hard to see how Google systematically underpaying a group of them is sustainable.
- sudosteph 9y ago
  Not really. A woman at Google can be paid well above industry average, and still be paid less than her male Google peers. In that case, she would have no incentive to leave for higher pay elsewhere (since few places beat Google pay), but Google would still have broken employment law if that pay discrepancy is pervasive.
  - skookumchuck 9y ago
    Industry average doesn't really apply. What the Silicon Valley local market is does apply, and if there are places that pay better, they'd go there. Why stay at a place where you're underpaid relative to your peers when another place down the street offers more money? I wouldn't. Besides, I've read that there's a lot of job hopping going on in SV for better pay, and that includes googlers. It's hard to see how one could make systematically underpaying a group of people work.
yeukhon 9y ago
Has anyone ever experiment and come up with a fair compensation calculation model? I want to start with base compensation for every seniority and every job title. Then adjust according to both inflation, location, as well as guaranteed yearly growth of salary.
Radim 9y ago
What other individual traits and axes (apart from gender) are "protected from pay discrimination" in the US? I'm genuinely curious -- is there an official enumeration? I ask because there's no limit to the number of ways you can slice and dice a human population, based on a million facets each person has. So I wonder, where did the legislators draw the line? And why? Why not somewhere else?
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
  - Radim 9y ago
    Thanks. That seems a fascinating topic, the emergence and evolution of these "protected classes" over time. I'll try to descend into your links once I have more time, but a TL;DR discussion on "why we drew the line here, not there" would be great too. Is it mainly a function of how vocal or powerful a subpopulation is? Something else? What other subdivisions will become privileged next? Where is this trend headed?
- cLeEOGPw 9y ago
  It's an easy way to divide population and make them fight internally. This tactic is very effective, because if other ones would put focus on law creators, a division of population makes it so people, at least large part, assign blame for injustice to the other side of the division. In this case, the attack on population is two-fold - on one hand you have women that you convince are unjustly paid lower than men doing "same" job, on the other hand you create perceived injustice on men side, where men work hard both at actual work and at negotiations for salary in companies like google, and then they see women getting same as them without putting any effort in negotiation. Or even worse - they see their salaries sliced to match those of women who didn't negotiate/didn't commit enough to their job. With attack like this it's hard to see the actual responsible entity, the top some percent of population by wealth, whom are actually benefiting from these laws. They win in any way - if women don't get paid the same in the end, they create tension between genders, that misdirects attention from their excessive wealth, and if women get paid same, it means they can pay men lower, also creating tension from men side.
PantsMan 9y ago
Sorry legal punks, but the RICHEST company in the world can't use that excuse. Also, this is a systemic issue: Stop paying women less. No wonder people can't get ahead.
kwhitefoot 9y ago
What happened to "Don't be evil"
thinkingemote 9y ago
I was interested to learn about the "Yes at Google" anonymous mailing list for Google employees to report in work sexism etc. is this list discussing this topic too? Are there other internal anonymous lists at the company that would be discussing this?
throwaway-1209 9y ago
Standard strategy. Google has the info, they data mine this to death on a yearly basis only to find that when confounding factors are accounted for there's no "wage gap". That's not something you can publicly say though, if you don't want to be lynched by an angry mob. The only gap they could find was that women are less likely to nominate themselves for a promo, and they've been encouraging them to self nominate for many years. Not a heck of a lot the company can do if you don't want more responsibility though.
ramblerman 9y ago
Google hires in the top echelons of talent for software engineering. Due to forces of society or biology most of that talent is male. By forcing the company to first hire more women it follows that you have to find women who are not in the top. To pay them the same is then just downright naive. tldr Should we not be solving this at the bottom rather than top down, by placing the burden unfairly on the companies?

184 points by dsr12 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

"Too big to comply", now that’s an interesting term. Shouldn’t all this data be in a single consistent database anyway? I mean, Google can manage all historic payments people do via their payment processor, but can’t manage all historic wage payments automatically?

dboreham 9y ago
Through a family connection I know quite a bit about how salary data is analysed inside silicon valley companies. That analysis, in turn, is largely driven by the need to comply with various DOL regulations. Based on what I know I find it inconceivable that Google doesn't have this data in a spreadsheet that could be emailed in a few seconds to whoever needs to see it.
angry-hacker 9y ago
Of course they can do it, the question is should they and do they want to. The latter is obviously no. You can testify against yourself too if you want to, it doesn't matter that you don t have to. Well, maybe if you have committed a crime you should since you said you're a good person and don't do evil? The amount of smart people thinking and buying the idea that all the social issues companies are working for are being done for nothing besides win your mind and heart amazes me. And then you say advertising doesn't work?!

falcolas 9y ago

Err, too expensive for Google? And pardon my only partially feigned ignorance, but if you're paying them based off the position and not gender, why do you need additional wage data?

bArray 9y ago
>And pardon my only partially feigned ignorance, but if you're paying them based off the position and not gender, why do you need additional wage data? Aren't Asians "overpaid" in the US tech industry? Any investigations into this? Of course not. This stinks of hidden agenda.

tyingq 9y ago

Funny with the context of how much, for example, Levandowski was compensated. It also makes you wonder about their statements that they have no gender pay gap. If you can't get the data together, how do you "know"?

oneoff222 9y ago

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

wiz21c 9y ago

Fortunately, with AlphaGo rising, the pay will be optimized by AI, based on what you do and you need (based on history of web searches).

ubernostrum 9y ago
If the training set for your payroll AI is biased, your payroll AI will end up biased too.
mbaha 9y ago
I hope this will help in reducing bias in the recruiting process, but your statement is a prime example that we just want to move the problem somewhere else in the career pipeline. We won't achieve parity in the workplace simply because there is no parity in STEM programs (and particularly in Computer Science). So, if everything was done w/ IA, I would just force a 50/50 split for employees to encourage girls to take up coding classes (at the tiny expense of coding abilities).
- wiz21c 9y ago
  I was absolutely and totally cynical here :-)

scarface74 9y ago

So Google can organize the worlds information, has AI good enough to categorize and automatically tag my pictures, has some of the most brilliant minds on earth, but can't do what would be a simple SQL statement for most companies?

philipov 9y ago
If Google released such wage data, they would have to pay people more, and that would cost a lot, and so collecting wage data is too expensive. Get it?
- trendia 9y ago
  This is the truth. Total Cost = Cost to acquire data ($200,000) + Back pay to employees ($20,000,000)
  - nojvek 9y ago
    My respect for Google has gone down significantly. I would not work for Facebook and Google even if I was offered a million dollars. I predict that the Golden years of FB and Google are right now, they will slowly head into a plateau
    - wcummings 9y ago
      Same, their recruiters email me every couple of months... Yeah no thanks. Id sooner work for MSFT these days. How the times has changed.
    - 659087 9y ago
      I never really understood the Google worship. "Don't be evil" was an ingenious PR move which earned them an army of useful idiots willing to defend their every move, but never actually applied internally as far as I could tell. I think the reality was "see how much evil we can get society acclimated to". As for Facebook, I think anyone who ever had a positive opinion of them should be evaluated by a psychiatrist.

someonewhocar3s 9y ago

“We want to understand what’s causing the disparity,” she said. --- Further proof women (!!ON AVERAGE!!) just do not perform as well as men IN THIS INDUSTRY. It should absolutely be solved, somehow, but it's not by harassing a company that hires women for what they're worth. My personal theory is that women are so cherished - they aren't held to the same standards in education. We try to pull them into the CS department by making it easy for them. That should stop. It's ridiculing women, and making them into inferior workers. At the same time women need to proactively become 'beta' and study exact sciences. Put in their fair share of the effort. Fucking social sciences are "fun and easy" - and women outnumber men there. I think women should man the fuck up already. Don't get fair salary? Go away. That's what men do. It sounds weird, but think of it this way: If women came at a discount, why would you ever hire men? At least some companies should realize this. Truth is you can't find a good woman programmer.

ue_ 9y ago
Is this sarcasm, or a joke? It's not very funny, and your comments come across as misogynistic and particularly rude. You complain that "CS departments are making it easy for women and ridiculing them" and then go on to say that women should "man the fuck up?". Edit: it would be nice if people could explain why they are downvoting me. What was off with my comment? I cannot improve my comments unless you leave a comment yourselves on how I can do that. I found the comment (now flagged) to be particularly abrasive. I go into detail with the arguments in a grandchild comment to this post.
- omginternets 9y ago
  If we ignore the form, I think the substance of his argument has some merit. I would appreciate it if you would comment on that, instead. Indeed, if women were systematically underpaid despite equivalent performance, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be hired by the boatload. This might be explained by (1) a lack of women relative to men in the developer workforce and (2) a systematic bias in competence. It's not prima facie absurd to think that affirmative action efforts have perverse effects, namely that they push the actual selection based on competence to a later stage of the employment pipeline. I understand this isn't a conclusive argument, but it does have some merit, and I'm worried by the fact that just bringing it up has one labeled a misogynist. That's not the way forward.

tyingq 9y ago

Apparently, their payroll software for North America is something called "UltiPro": http://www.ultimatesoftware.com/UltiPro-Solution-Features-Payroll-Administration-Tax-Management http://www.ultimatesoftware.com/UltiPro-Solution-Features-Pa... From a job listing for the North America Payroll Core Operations Lead: https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/north-america-payroll-core-operations-lead-google-JV_IC1147431_KO0,42_KE43,49.htm?jl=2420728831 https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/north-america-payroll-... "Advanced scripting and extensive UltiPro knowledge"

sterex 9y ago

How can a corporation like Google that handles Peta bytes of data on a daily basis say it is too hard for them to keep track of their own employee payments? If they were honest enough, they would have found a way to comply. This is just their attempt at lawyering out of the situation.

Oxitendwe 9y ago

Do we know if their quality of work is the same as the men who work at Google? Without that, any discussion of bias or discrimination is impossible.

tajen 9y ago

@someonewhosecar3s: I've witnessed what you describe about women preference in Australia and I'm afraid this culture gets contagious in France. Women get a complete different privileged pathway to jobs, yet studies keep studying "How men and women get educated differently". Here's what I'm doing, and it's time all men do it too: - Started a Youtube channel to provide a counter-analysis to common misconceptions. For example I've dismantled every second of the Always #LikeAGirl ad spot. - Started writing to every single institution that isn't compliant to male equality (i.e. every time an institution is dedicated to women, such as France's "Family and Women's Rights Minister", or France's subventions to help women's careers. - Started petitions on Change.org against political parties who, in their "Gender Equality" chapter, help women for tiny inconveniences and don't help men for e.g. their 3x higher suicide rates. That means calling for people like Trump vote if Hillary's program treats men as disposable. Her exact words, which participated to electing Trump, were: "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." I can't explain enough the level of disdain the general politics represent towards men (and this disdain against men dangerously fuels things like Trump, Brexit, FN, etc). - Ideally I'd like to attack institutions for illegal discrimination when they officially discriminate men (ex: Gender-based help programs), but that requires putting my name in public, and I'm afraid of violent actions. Equality will be when men defend themselves as much as women. Go find a petition today and sign it, at the very least.

trendia 9y ago
Perhaps your comment here is premature? In order to know whether there is a wage gap at Google, you need data. Without that data, you are no more accurate than the people you are fighting.
dang 9y ago
This falls in the ideological rant category and is off topic on HN. You've posted comments like this before and we've already asked you not to. Please don't do it again.

TP4Cornholio 9y ago

Their attorneys probably cost at least 1000 an hour. Would be cheaper to release the data than to fight this.

mythrwy 9y ago
You know what happens if you give up your lunch money to a bully once? Maybe better in the long run to not be seen as an easy mark, even if it causes some short term pain.
- 659087 9y ago
  Are you really trying to imply that poor little Google is being bullied here?
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    No, I'm suggesting perhaps Google's attorneys understand the general principal of the undesirability of apparent weakness while being cash rich.

rayiner 9y ago

In litigation, there is the expectation that parties shouldn't be expected to bear discovery costs that are out of proportion with the value and relevance of the requested data. "It'll cost too much" is thus a stock answer to discovery requests. Google can absorb the $100k cost--they'll likely spend tens of thousands to just to litigate over the discovery dispute. But they're entitled to hold the government to it's burden of articulating why that data justifies the cost. Obviously the real reason is that Google doesn't want to hand over the data. But you should never just hand data over to the government. Government lawyers can get pretty creative with spreadsheets of numbers.

ble 9y ago
Being difficult is indeed pretty normal in our adversarial system of law. Being difficult about something that should actually be pretty easy is a good way to make your judge ornery and, unless your resistance earns you the opportunity to give up less/different information or some sort of other concession, seems like poor legal tactics.
- threatofrain 9y ago
  That seems like something for a law firm to judge though, rather than a layman trying to model the psychology of a particular judge. It could be that you try to appease the judge, and you find it renders inferior value.
jdavis703 9y ago
Google is a federal contractor. These documents are being requested because they do federal business, not because of any civil or criminal inquiry. Now of course these documents might lead to a civil case, but it's within the bounds of each agency's Office of Civil Rights to request this data.
- ball_of_lint 9y ago
  Would that apply to all of googles employees though? I assume that people working on nongovernmental products would not be included.

peter303 9y ago

You cant google this information?

659087 9y ago
Google doesn't like being Googled. Remember what happened when some journalists Googled Eric Schmidt? http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/ http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/

mythrwy 9y ago

The issue of possible underpayment aside, It has to be in the interest of the company to provide as little information as they can. It's a court case. The attorneys wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't use every legal means at their disposal. And they may in fact have a point (to an extent). Government shouldn't be able to accuse a firm of something, then demand the firm spend money assembling data to prove the governments case. The fact Google "makes a bunch of money so no big deal" (which is what the .gov attorneys are apparently arguing) is irrelevant to that principal.

ubernostrum 9y ago
Government shouldn't be able to accuse a firm of something, then demand the firm spend money assembling data to prove the governments case. First of all: when you sue someone, you do get to demand exactly that. They also get to demand it of you! It's called "discovery", and it's a bog-standard basic normal everyday part of lawsuits. Second of all: if you have a look through the reporting on this, Google was being audited for compliance with equal-pay laws and refused to supply records the government said were relevant to the audit. So the government is now suing to force Google to hand over the records. Auditors are allowed to do that, and being required to assemble and hand over information is pretty much the literal definition of an audit.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  This isn't a civil suit though. And fishing expeditions (at the firms cost) shouldn't be allowed. We'll see what the court decides.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    An audit isn't a fishing expedition. Being audited for compliance with relevant laws is part of being in business; if it's an unbearable burden, your options are 1. Get out of business, or 2. There is no second option.
    - mythrwy 9y ago

packetized 9y ago

Salesforce can do this, but Google can't? https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/04/salesforce-equal-pay-assessment-update.html https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/04/salesforce-equal-pay...

montyboy_us 9y ago

Couldn't the government paint a pretty accurate picture using IRS data? Title and earnings via W-2 is at least a start.

ubernostrum 9y ago
That would require the Department of Labor to have that data. They don't have that data; the IRS has it, and they'd probably have to get a court to order the IRS to hand it over, and the court might well not do that.
itsdrewmiller 9y ago
Isn't that data what sparked the investigation in the first place?

skywhopper 9y ago

It's the legal team's job to push back on any new requests for data. Obviously there _is_ a reasonable limit of what the government can ask Google to provide. This particular cost is obviously far less than that limit ought to be given the stakes involved and the size of Google, but again, Google should push back too early and the government should ask for too much, and the judge should find the reasonable middle ground. That's fine, that's how our legal system works, and I suspect this article is overblowing a typical procedural step in the process. All of that said, Google is not coming out looking like the good guy by fighting this case so hard. Their compensation analysts ought to be running these sorts of reports themselves. If they truly aren't, then that in itself is evidence (in my opinion) that Google is willfully neglecting its responsibility not to underpay its female employees.

eastWestMath 9y ago
If they aren't making efforts with their women employees, it would follow they aren't doing much to help out their black/Hispanic employees either.
- bArray 9y ago
  Asians are apparently "paid too much", so er, docking wages for being Asian, anybody?
  - helthanatos 9y ago
    White males are certainly paid too much! They should make half of what minority employees do!
    - bArray 9y ago
      I think you've been down-voted because your humour is too subtle. >White males are certainly paid too much! They should make half of what minority employees do! It certainly feels like this won't stop until that's the case.

bobbington 9y ago

This gender discrimination lawsuit is likely total b.s. From an overly zealous agency. It's a simple fact that on average men are 1) much better at engineering type things, and 2) more interested in them. Just like the average woman is obviously better with babies than the average man. While I don't know the facts of the case, so I can't say if there really was gender discrimination, I suspect when actual differences in contribution are accounted for, the gap goes away. It's a woman's world, because winning requires complaining the loudest. Men usually don't complain nearly so much as women so they get stomped in court and public opinion.

JBiserkov 9y ago

Microsoft can do it: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/04/11/ensuring-equal-pay-equal-work/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/04/11/ensuring-equal-p...

bArray 9y ago

I guess Uber is no longer the popular tech company to rip into. I've seen some articles surfacing about Facebook, they'll probably be the next people to hate for a little while. Everything about this is so wrong. It all comes down to laundering money out of Google, thinly veiled with this false idea of "justice" from incorrectly used statistics.

PKop 9y ago

Can someone explain how they would be able to get away with paying women less than men? And if your answer is: "They just pay them less." 1) Why? What is the purpose of them doing this? 2) Why don't they also just pay men less as well? 3) Wages trend, in a competitive market, towards marginal productivity of labor. What is preventing competitors in the market for engineers from poaching all of the underpaid yet equally talented women at below market costs, say half the gap Google is assumed to be creating? Surely this would be a clear path towards extra profits, no?

mikeash 9y ago
Wages are set by supply and demand. Systematic discrimination results in less demand for women, which results in lower wages. There is some profit opportunity for companies who take advantage of this, but it's not enough to erase the difference. Consider, for example, how pervasive racial discrimination was (and still is) in business despite the fact that accepting minorities as customers and employees would be financially advantageous.
- bobcostas55 9y ago
  This view implies there is a huge, and frankly quite easy, money-making opportunity. Why aren't you exploiting it?
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Sure, a moderate percentage savings in labor costs will totally make it easy to compete with Google.
    - PKop 9y ago
      What does "making more money for your company" have to do with competing against Google?
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  There is no systematic discrimination.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

Suppose that there's compelling statistical evidence that Google underpays women, but no evidence of any specific intent to do so (which, IIRC, is how these things usually play out). Beyond the immediate legal remedies, how do they they fundamentally fix the processes that led to that outcome? Would they even really know where the leaks are in this machinery that admit such biases? How many other companies have the same fundamental problems that go unexamined because their outcomes happen to not suggest a legal issue (e.g. a bias based on alma mater, favorite movies, shared hobbies, etc.)?

loup-vaillant 9y ago

> Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.¹ Yet this particular bit of information is too expensive to make accessible and useful. They have this giant correlation machine, and they don't use it to know as much as they can about their own company? How convenient. I know, "one does not simply", but still: aren't you supposed to keep salary records anyway. Wouldn't you keep them even if you didn't have to, just in case? Wouldn't you run some statistics over them, just to see the trends? Obviously, as rayiner says, Alphabet have other reason not to hand over the data. [1]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/ (meta description tag)

yeukhon 9y ago
They do. But they just don't want to release it to the request.
659087 9y ago
Google is a strong proponent of privacy, for Google.

itsdrewmiller 9y ago

If google doesn't have this information readily available it is pretty hard to believe their claim that they analyze salary data every year and definitely don't have a wage gap.

SamReidHughes 9y ago
If gathering salary data was high cost they could still address the question of having a wage gap with random sampling. And that's what they'd have to do anyway -- salary data wouldn't tell you if they had a discriminatory wage gap.

wolco 9y ago

The only way to fix this is to pay everyone the same pay regardless of job title / history / experience. If you are hiring the best you need to offer the best pay across the board. Google does this already.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

skookumchuck 9y ago

Given today's demand for engineers, it's hard to see how Google systematically underpaying a group of them is sustainable.

sudosteph 9y ago
Not really. A woman at Google can be paid well above industry average, and still be paid less than her male Google peers. In that case, she would have no incentive to leave for higher pay elsewhere (since few places beat Google pay), but Google would still have broken employment law if that pay discrepancy is pervasive.
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  Industry average doesn't really apply. What the Silicon Valley local market is does apply, and if there are places that pay better, they'd go there. Why stay at a place where you're underpaid relative to your peers when another place down the street offers more money? I wouldn't. Besides, I've read that there's a lot of job hopping going on in SV for better pay, and that includes googlers. It's hard to see how one could make systematically underpaying a group of people work.

yeukhon 9y ago

Has anyone ever experiment and come up with a fair compensation calculation model? I want to start with base compensation for every seniority and every job title. Then adjust according to both inflation, location, as well as guaranteed yearly growth of salary.

Radim 9y ago

What other individual traits and axes (apart from gender) are "protected from pay discrimination" in the US? I'm genuinely curious -- is there an official enumeration? I ask because there's no limit to the number of ways you can slice and dice a human population, based on a million facets each person has. So I wonder, where did the legislators draw the line? And why? Why not somewhere else?

hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class
- Radim 9y ago
  Thanks. That seems a fascinating topic, the emergence and evolution of these "protected classes" over time. I'll try to descend into your links once I have more time, but a TL;DR discussion on "why we drew the line here, not there" would be great too. Is it mainly a function of how vocal or powerful a subpopulation is? Something else? What other subdivisions will become privileged next? Where is this trend headed?
cLeEOGPw 9y ago
It's an easy way to divide population and make them fight internally. This tactic is very effective, because if other ones would put focus on law creators, a division of population makes it so people, at least large part, assign blame for injustice to the other side of the division. In this case, the attack on population is two-fold - on one hand you have women that you convince are unjustly paid lower than men doing "same" job, on the other hand you create perceived injustice on men side, where men work hard both at actual work and at negotiations for salary in companies like google, and then they see women getting same as them without putting any effort in negotiation. Or even worse - they see their salaries sliced to match those of women who didn't negotiate/didn't commit enough to their job. With attack like this it's hard to see the actual responsible entity, the top some percent of population by wealth, whom are actually benefiting from these laws. They win in any way - if women don't get paid the same in the end, they create tension between genders, that misdirects attention from their excessive wealth, and if women get paid same, it means they can pay men lower, also creating tension from men side.

PantsMan 9y ago

Sorry legal punks, but the RICHEST company in the world can't use that excuse. Also, this is a systemic issue: Stop paying women less. No wonder people can't get ahead.

kwhitefoot 9y ago

What happened to "Don't be evil"

thinkingemote 9y ago

I was interested to learn about the "Yes at Google" anonymous mailing list for Google employees to report in work sexism etc. is this list discussing this topic too? Are there other internal anonymous lists at the company that would be discussing this?

throwaway-1209 9y ago

Standard strategy. Google has the info, they data mine this to death on a yearly basis only to find that when confounding factors are accounted for there's no "wage gap". That's not something you can publicly say though, if you don't want to be lynched by an angry mob. The only gap they could find was that women are less likely to nominate themselves for a promo, and they've been encouraging them to self nominate for many years. Not a heck of a lot the company can do if you don't want more responsibility though.

ramblerman 9y ago

Google hires in the top echelons of talent for software engineering. Due to forces of society or biology most of that talent is male. By forcing the company to first hire more women it follows that you have to find women who are not in the top. To pay them the same is then just downright naive. tldr Should we not be solving this at the bottom rather than top down, by placing the burden unfairly on the companies?