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More than 60 women consider suing Google, claiming sexism and a pay gap
- legendiriz68 9y agoThey should be publicly whipped for trying to abuse recent media witch-hunt.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoHow is Google handling pay? Is there a level system with fixed pay levels? Or can anyone negotiate his salary - in limits - when starting his job?
- webvictim 9y agohttps://www.quora.com/What-are-the-salary-ranges-of-each-level-in-Googles-technical-career-track https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-salary-ranges-of-each-lev... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm It seems similar to the way it was at Facebook in that when you start, you'll be assigned a level based on your previous experience and it'll be corrected soon afterwards if it turns out to have been wrong. They mostly corrected up, though - it was very rare for someone to be assigned a high level and then downgraded afterwards. Obviously the Glassdoor link shows that there is a pretty big range in the salary bands - I think some of this is down to people reporting total target compensation (including RSUs, bonuses etc) versus base salary but there was a fairly large range at FB too. It wasn't uncommon to stay at the same level but have your base salary go up by $20-25k.
- arien 9y agoThe ranges are wide to give room for salary negotiations at the beginning of employment, but also to allow for salary raises for people who are not yet considered to be at a higher level. E.g. you could be a junior developer, but a very good junior, who deserves a pay rise because of performance, engagement or whatever, but still a junior technically. If you get quite far into your own salary range but never get promoted (if that's how the company works), it's time for some reflection on the situation, for both yourself and the company. Note that the ranges can also overlap between job levels, in some cases. P.S. Not talking about Google specifically.
- jorgemf 9y agoHow do you move someone from junior to the next level? For me if someone has a better performance he/she should move to the next level regardless of the time he/she has been a junior. Are seniors consider that because of their performance?
- arien 9y agoEach company has its own guidelines. A junior could be for example someone who focuses too much in the particular case of a problem rather than looking at the big picture. In interviews, for example, if they present you with a problem to solve and you don't have any follow up questions, you appear as less senior in the eyes of the interviewer. This is just one of the criteria used, there are more.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoSo there is a band and you negotiate your salary?
- Tyr42 9y agoCheck out the court ruling in the labour vs Google case: https://www.oalj.dol.gov/Decisions/ALJ/OFC/2017/OFCCP_-_SAN_FRANCISC_v_GOOGLE_INC_2017OFC00004_(JUL_14_2017)_195652_CADEC_SD.PDF https://www.oalj.dol.gov/Decisions/ALJ/OFC/2017/OFCCP_-_SAN_... Page 10 has the information: A “compensation team” sets the salary for each hire. Tr. 165-69. The team has no direct contact with the applicant and does not have the applicant’s name, gender, race, or ethnicity. Id. For industry hires, the committee might be given the applicant’s current compensation but no earlier compensation data. Tr. 175-77. For the employees included in the September 2015 “snapshot,” about 20 percent were campus hires. Tr. 197-98. The only circumstance under which Google might increase the starting compensation for a campus hire is when the applicant has a competing offer greater Google’s. Google will not offer a larger salary or annual bonus plan, but it might offer a larger sign-on bonus or one-time stock grant. Tr. 207, 210-16, 223. There are no starting pay negotiations, and Google considers no other factors. Tr. 197-98.
- trobertson 9y agoThat doesn't pass the smell test. They've been paying huge sums of money for some people (deep learning, and Levandowski's $100 million). Their process is far more arbitrary and open to negotiation than that summary claims. Maybe for little people they have a standard process. But certainly not for everyone.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoThanks!
- cristianpascu 9y agoPlease downvote! It's 2017, an introduction to a sentence I totally hate, and 60 women are suing a progressive company for sexism. One freaking hundred years, or something, after women started voting. What happened in that time? Women were blind to say the least? How is this NOT evidence that men and women are different. I've seen countless cases of men fighting and swearing at each other, bragging about themselves, and stuff. And countless cases where women would think and say of themselves all the diminishing things, from I'm not that good to I'm not that pretty. I don't remember a single case where that was true for those women or men. But to say, like so many people say and believe, that men and women think and act that way because they were told so, is abhorrently and viciously and so flagrantly vacuous if not downright false, that it makes you wonder if anybody really and honestly and proactively wants anything better for women working in fields were they are underrepresented, and not actually fame and money for themselves only. Please, downvote! A social phenomena, specially one that is so enduring and prevalent, could hardly be conceived to have been caused just by repeating some magic formula to kids throughout their childhood. Never in my life have I heard, Cristian, be a physicist because that's one men do. Cristian, be a programmer because that's what men do. Cristian, be an entrepreneur because that's what men do. Heck, I didn't even know the word entrepreneur, in English or Romanian, when I started my company by myself, by working on evenings and weekends. Nor did I think 'I act like man!' The dynamic of personal choices and psychology is so complicated and so contingent to personal background and current state, but in the same time if in the middle of all that diversity you see some very specific phenomena happening across cultural and personal backgrounds, then maybe, just maybe, there's something underlying that can not be ignored. And ignoring it would only perpetuate the same evil, if it will not actually make it worse. Please, downvote! LATER EDIT: Regarding the 'I was not promoted because I am a woman', how could we, as readers of an article actually judge the veracity of such statements. If a man thinks of himself to be good enough for a promotion and he's not promoted, what can he do? What if an women is promoted instead? Who's judgement is to take precendence? His, the manager's? The people? The judge? What about all those tiny details about working with the person in case, the small social interactions, the gut feeling? Seems like it's a luxury men can not afford, that is to cry 'sexism'! And it's not like outthere, in the real world, there're no women manager who treat women and men beneath like shit.
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- needlessly2 9y agoFor Google, the rope was already dosed in kerosene. The guy who wrote the manifesto just lit the fire.
- trentnix 9y agoHere is a clue for everyone: you aren't paid according to the value you bring. You are either paid according to some pseudo-arbitrary schedule or you are paid what you can be had for. Unless Google has a secret pay penalty for females, the problem here is women being willing to work for less. No lawsuit is needed to correct that.
- tyingq 9y agoWhat's being alleged is: “They are concerned that women are channeled to levels and positions that pay less than men with similar education and experience,” I have no idea if that's true, but if so, that could be a sort of "secret pay penalty". It is a somewhat difficult path to negotiate at hiring as levels and titles aren't consistent across companies.
- rimliu 9y agoI am pretty sure you can find big pay differences when comparing only men with the similar education and experience.
- xapata 9y agoYou are proposing the model: wage ~ education + experience + error If the errors are correlated with education or experience, that indicates a confounding variable problem. Most data shows that including race and gender as explanatory factors improves the model: wage ~ education + experience + gender + race + error Until the coefficients of gender and race become approximately zero, one can say that the market is discriminatory. The counter-argument is that race and gender are not actually the real explanatory variables, but only proxies for better variables, like "ethic" or "determination". Those kinds of arguments are often viewed as racist and sexist.
- dp-tyvek 9y agoAccording to my understanding, rimliu is proposing that wage ~ education + experience + gender + race + additional_factors + error where additional_factors consists of other unknown factors (e.g. charisma, intelligence, appearance?). In which case, if education, experience, gender and race are kept constant, there is still going to be a fair bit of variance in wage caused by these unknown factors. Either way, it would be pretty hard to model when these factors are far from orthogonal. Imagine the impact race would have on work experience if race is a big factor when hiring people.
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- josteink 9y ago> The document, which was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo? They are re-iterating misconceptions based on Gizmodos original story, where Gizmodo deliberately gave a misleading report, removed sources and incorrectly presented an internal memo for internal discussion as an "anti-diversity manifesto". Even a cursory glance of the actual memo would have shown that none of these allegations hold. Less so that they were "widely condemned" by anyone who had actually read the memo. I has honestly expected The Guardian to hold higher standards.
- trentnix 9y agoThe narrative must be maintained, comrade!
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- humanrebar 9y agoThere was an Atlantic piece about this specific thing that hit the HN front page. It was flagged as a dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967440
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- jsnell 9y agoAnd correctly so, since the exact same article already was on the front page with 400 points a day earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959601
- ebola1717 9y agoEvery time an article like this pops up, I see the same sort of response. It's always - Women don't negotiate - Women get pregnant - Women work in lower pay professions And 90% of the time, the article already accounts for the nuances of those topics. Not to mention these arguments have been answered thoroughly many times over, and a cursory google would reveal that. I just wish people would do some basic research before posting, especially in the light of the Google memo.
- AckSyn 9y agoAnd it's also been proven time and time again that the "gender pay gap" is a lie. A myth propagated by people who don't know how to read statistics and raw data, instead curating it to be something it isn't.
- jorgemf 9y agoEven if those facts are true, Google must have programs to make things fair. For same responsibilities same salary. You can say women are different than men or say they are exactly equals. Whatever is your position for the same job you must have the same salary. There shouldn't be any discussion here.
- throwaway9853 9y ago> For same responsibilities same salary. Why is that? If there is someone who is willing to take on those responsibilities for less pay, well that's just fine for the company and I think that people tend to forget that Google (and many other IT companies) is a for-profit company. For me at least, I've always seen salary negotiations as somewhat of a "right person at the right moment". If you're very lucky and the company really needs they will be willing to pay you more than what you would make at a different company on the same role, maybe more than what others are doing on the same role, just because you were there, at that time, when they were most in need. It may not always be like that, but think of it as demand/offer relationship. So regardless of gender/race it's the need of the company that comes first. Because as a employee you fulfill a need that the company has and you are being paid for that.
- weberc2 9y agoI've been a bit of a Google fan for a long time, but I'm also afraid of leftist authoritarianism, and their handling of the memo had galvanized me against them. I'm not one for boycotts or overreactions, but the "silencing cultural dissenters" business is simply the antithesis of liberal values, and it's especially wrong coming from a company that purports to be a bastion of freedom and defender of rights. So on the one hand, hang 'em high, but on the other hand, not for failing to sufficiently toe the party line.
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- return0 9y agoGoogle might have set a trap on itself by aggressively pursuing "affirmative" policies. They are now being sued by both sides.
- boona 9y agoIt's fascinating that management at google didn't speak to fact that the memo points to the very real issue in silicon valley that the culture there openly shames those who are right of center into silence. Discrimination is something both the left and the right can do, but in the current landscape, the left seems to get away with it, and are sometimes even praised for it (see virtue signaling). This could be a wake up call, and I suspect that secretly it is for many people.
- throw2016 9y agoThis incident confirms tech is indeed a hostile place for women full of insecure men, who will grasp at anything to retain privilege. And women should be rightfully wary of all these fragile men who will watch them like hawks looking for any excuse to confirm their bias. The kind of comments these threads are full of are a shocking reflection of a complete lack of understanding of history, sexism, privilege and women. But the root cause is some people have convinced themselves they are so 'special' and 'superior' only a tiny 'approved' elite can do the jobs they do and anyone who diminishes this supremacist insecure identity will pay with bad science. The irony is all these self appointed 'geniuses' who can 'decide' all by themselves about their own skill level and 'lowering the bar' do not have anything remotely approaching science or measure to explain how they came to this fruity conclusion about themselves and others. This is beyond absurd. This is out of control self importance and hubris fuelled by SV culture and is as far away from rational scientific discourse as any self obsessed victimhood peddling supremacist.
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- GlobalServices 9y agoIf sixty people are suing google, then the 'manifesto' author may have had a point: there is something wrong.
- zoner 9y agoIf women are getting paid less for the same work, that's wrong. But I sense this is not what's happening here: we are paid less for whatever the reason and we are suing google for it because there's this new religion, that's having a huge bias against discrimination. I'm sick of seeing this everywhere. Well f that. I'll have 15 children and my wife will stay at home all the time. Our civilisation survived because this was the healthy family model for thousands of years, I'm not participating for this sick liberal experiment any more.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoPeople think everyone is the same when it's their pay, but totally agree on wide spreads in athletes pay.
- boona 9y agoIt seems that HN is flagging all articles that mention the Google Memo. Which speaks to the need to have this conversation even more. For those who are interested, James has a new interview with psychology professor Jordan Peterson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU