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Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

• SeanLuke 8y ago
  I don't know what the results really were but: > it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work NY Times needs to learn the difference between absolute numbers and rates. This is awful reporting.
• ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I am sure the Labor Department will absolutely love Google giving raises specifically to men whilst under investigation for "systematically" underpaying women.
  • sokoloff 8y ago
    I strongly suspect they'll be fine giving raises to anyone specifically being underpaid while under such investigation.
    • jandrese 8y ago
      I've seen a couple of studies that suggest that the pay gap isn't so much sexism as it is men just being better at negotiating in general. But with all generalizations it's not true for the entire group, so there will be some women who are better at negotiating and some men that are worse and have salaries that reflect that. Basically the real world is a lot more complicated than people think and there are many factors that lead to pay discrimination. Claiming that it is due to sexism is an oversimplification.
      • blattimwind 8y ago
        The by far largest part of the pay gap is purporting it is upwards of 20 % in the first place.
      • repolfx 8y ago
        That's the explanation when men get paid more than women. When women are getting paid more than men, there are no known explanations beyond sexism. Especially at Google who notoriously fired Damore for stating that maybe men and women have different preferences - it's pretty clear from the article, biased though it is, that the issue here is really Google managers systematically awarding pay increases to women rather than men, in order to try and boost their numbers.
  • Impossible 8y ago
    A lot of people's pay at big tech companies is based on ability to negotiate at time of offer, not on job performance at the company. I know some women in the same role as me that got better initial offers because they were in a better position to negotiate. My assumption is that women that are underpaid because they didn't negotiate, or due to some other bias, or just due to random factors, would also want men in similar situations to be compensated equally. Ideally two individuals in the same or similar roles, with similar performance over time in that role, should have the same salary regardless of background or negotiation ability. The major issue with this is that you can't reduce pay of rockstar negotiators (who may or may not be rockstar performers), and a correction that pays everyone as much as the highest earning equivalent employee might be hard for even Google to swallow.
  • dv_dt 8y ago
    It's really not difficult to understand that women are systematically paid less than men, and also that minorities (men and women) are systematically paid less than non-minorities. And that beyond pay disparity at a given job title, there is also an issue with higher titles underrepresenting women in general, as well as minorities.
    • naasking 8y ago
      > It's really not difficult to understand that women are systematically paid less than men, and also that minorities (men and women) are systematically paid less than non-minorities. It's not difficult to understand why people believe this might be true, but it is difficult to understand why people accept this as fact when the empirical data of systematic underpayment isn't all that solid.
      • denzil_correa 8y ago
        > but it is difficult to understand why people accept this as fact when the empirical data of systematic isn't all that solid. It would help if you posted the empirical data you refer to.
        • tomschlick 8y ago
          Not OP but almost every one of these studies takes the total sum of money men make vs the total sum of money women make and compares it that way without taking into account the job title, years of experience, time off, etc.
          • naasking 8y ago
            Those are mainly mainstream articles, politicians' and celebrity talking points. They don't even account for the type of job, hours worked, danger of the job, etc. There are some good studies on this subject that I've read over the years though, for instance one among lawyers in a firm in which women were paid about 2-3% lower than men, on average IIRC. But these often don't or can't take into account personality characteristics. For instance, women on average are more agreeable and so often don't negotiate as hard as men on their salary. When controlling for all factors, wage differences largely disappear.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• maxxxxx 8y ago
  That's why we need salary transparency to really address this. There are a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women. Making this into a male vs. female issue does nothing to address the fact that people are underpaid.
  • xienze 8y ago
    I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference in pay in that situation is cause for concern. But that's not how a lot of jobs, software development included, work. It's entirely possible for someone fresh out of school to be a far more valuable team member than someone with ten years experience... yet we would point to a disparity in pay between those two people as [sexist, ageist, whatever-ist]. Now let an experienced employee find out they're getting paid less than someone with far less experience? Hooo boy, talk about creating a toxic environment.
    • chillacy 8y ago
      Performance is one explanation between differences between two people but will it explain differences between one sample of thousands and another sample of thousands? Are men really less performant than women on aggregate?
      • xienze 8y ago
        > Are men really less performant than women on aggregate? I don't think that's the conclusion being reached here. What I'm getting at is performance is a VERY hard thing to quantify to everyone's satisfaction (after all, I doubt anyone thinks that they aren't a valuable employee, and everyone has numerous examples of "well this other guy sucks, I'm much better than him"), but it has a major impact on pay. But for this specific case, there's one of two things happening: 1. As another poster said, "men" is code for "men working under H1-B visas." 2. In an effort to not look sexist, Google let the pendulum swing the other way and pay women more out of general principle.
• myrandomcomment 8y ago
  I love the irony of this. Accused of underpaying women - their reaction is "let us get some data". Nope. underpaying men. This is the way you do things. You collect the data, analyze and react. Wash rinse repeat.
  • xienze 8y ago
    A similar thing has happened with companies that go to great lengths to make sure they don't have any gender bias in their hiring process (no face-to-face during interviews, voice altering during phone interviews, etc.) only to find that they still selected more men than women. The conclusion, of course, is that they must be doing something wrong because it's simply impossible that they wouldn't be selecting a perfect 50/50 mix of men and women. Similarly, I think imagine Google will find similar flaws with how these numbers were generated.
    • myrandomcomment 8y ago
      Well it depends on the field. What is the ratio of male to female CS graduates? A quick check seems to say that in 2015 is was only 15% female.
      • billfruit 8y ago
        That figure is almost reversed in many third world countries. In my CS undergrad, there were 40 women and 20 men.
    • crooked-v 8y ago
      It's extremely difficult to actually hide all signs of gender, even with the measures you mentioned. Even simple things like the way a job advertisement or a resume is worded can suggest the genders of the people involved in a statistically predictable way. For example: http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/static/documents/Gaucher-Friesen-Kay-JPSP-Gendered-Wording-in-Job-ads.pdf http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/static/documents/Gauch...
  • sokoloff 8y ago
• treis 8y ago
  Should we read "Many Men" as "Those on H1B visas"?
  • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    $60K and the privilege of working for a FANG should be good enough for everyone.
    • leesec 8y ago
      Pretty sure this is a troll but if it's not then I Disagree.
      • munk-a 8y ago
        I'm almost certain that's a troll or else someone that forgot a "/s"
        • logfromblammo 8y ago
          > should be good enough for everyone This is an "inside" indicator, referencing that ol' ungenerous-but-pithy paraphrase of a since-disavowed Bill Gates quote regarding 640 kB of personal computer memory. It's like the phrase "modest proposal", in that you only know it's marking something as insincere with some out-of-band knowledge.
        • usepgp 8y ago
          Or maybe we shouldn't need /s's to make an obvious joke
  • munk-a 8y ago
    I would actually be surprised if big corps didn't try to pull in more diversity from H1Bs, American universities are particularly bad at producing gender balanced graduating classes.
    • benatkin 8y ago
• fromthestart 8y ago
  The only surprising part to this is that it was made public. >Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions. My problem with these kinds of "intrinsic biases" that white men are accused of is that they can only be shown to exist by accepting the fundamentally unproven assumption that we all enter the workforce equally capable in all industries, a position which is clearly untenable at a minimum because of cultural differences. This is practically the definition of ideological, institutional bias, and the results will either be reduced efficiency across the workforce, or a violent swing of the ideological pendulum.
• danaliv 8y ago
  Do read the fine article for the details: But the study did not tell the whole story of women at Google or in the technology industry more broadly, something that company officials acknowledged. Most significantly, it did not address ingrained issues that, according to workplace experts, cannot be overcome simply by considering how much different people are paid for doing the same job: Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions. Etc.
  • nostromo 8y ago
    > according to workplace experts The media really needs to stop this practice of just saying "experts say" without any attribution. I suggest when reading any article, when you read, "experts agree" or "sources say" or "critics have said" or "others are saying" -- just replace it with, "I, the author of this article, think ..."
    • naasking 8y ago
      Seriously, I read that and I immediately wondered who these experts are and what their data actually says, considering the entire article is about how empirical data actually debunked the commonly accepted narrative.
    • bitwize 8y ago
      "Some [who?] say..."
    • pnw_hazor 8y ago
      Big if true...
    • whyaduck 8y ago
      From the article: Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity, said the pay gap correction only served “to benefit a group that is dramatically overrepresented in engineering, and that faces fewer barriers to access and opportunity in the field.” Also, from the article: “We know that’s only part of the story,” Lauren Barbato, Google’s lead analyst for pay equity, people analytics, wrote in a blog post set to be made public on Monday. “Because leveling, performance ratings, and promotion impact pay, this year, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of these processes to make sure the outcomes are fair and equitable for all employees.” So...workplace experts said.
• notadoc 8y ago
  Many companies avoid these kind of issues by having a strict experience-based salary scale for all positions. Gender or any other identity factor is then irrelevant if pay is based entirely upon candidate experience, right? Edit: I have no knowledge of how Google handles salary. If anyone knows, feel free to share.
  • jimbokun 8y ago
    Sounds like a union shop.
    • notadoc 8y ago
      I don't know of any tech cos or startups with unions, do you?
• impossiblytrue 8y ago
  Now women will start justifying why they deserve that overpaid salary.
• syndacks 8y ago
  Can't wait to see how Jordan Peterson uses this one... [edit: minor wording change; why am I being downvoted? I'm seriously asking]
  • notanum 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html apparently
  • ptd 8y ago
    If I had to guess, a)Not adding anything to the discussion, b)the implication that Jordan Peterson has anything of value to add to the conversation, and c)the tone of the message.
    • eecks 8y ago
      Jordan Peterson has been controversial in this topic in the past. I'm not really read up on the specifics though and I guess OP could have added more opinions to his post
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• oarabbus_ 8y ago
  Reminiscent of Simpson's Paradox, the most famous example being a gender discrimination lawsuit alleging UC Berkeley discriminated against women in admissions (57% men vs. 43% women). It turned out there WAS bias - in favor of the women! "The lawsuit triggered a study. The study results showed that not only were women not discriminated against, but that women had a statistically significant advantage! Here’s what happened. Some departments had high acceptance rates and some had low acceptance rates. Women applied to more competitive departments. Men applied to more accessible departments. Taken on the whole men had an advantage. When broken down per department it was women who were more favored." https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/my_favorite_paradox/ https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/my_favorite_paradox/
  • 77pt77 8y ago
    Exactly what I thought. How this is even considered a paradox is a paradox to me. Human beings just have very strange presuppositions regarding probability and statistics that are almost always wrong.
    • kingo55 8y ago
      Simpson's paradox is a statistical phenomenon where you can measure one outcome in aggregate (e.g. total average pay by gender) and the opposite outcome when you segment (e.g average pay by gender AND job). Univariate analyses can hide lots of interesting things! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
      • klodolph 8y ago
        Simpson's paradox is easily my favorite paradox. Anyone interested in interpreting stats, even from a lay perspective, should familiarize themselves with it.
    • oarabbus_ 8y ago
      what is not paradoxical about it
  • 8y ago
• voctor 8y ago
  Off-topic: Why almost all words in the title begin by an uppercase letter?
  • Raphmedia 8y ago
    It's Title Case. https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/capital_letters_title_case.htm https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/capital_letters_titl...
  • wincy 8y ago
    Are you asking in general? That’s one of the first things a student learns in middle school English is that the title is all capitalized except for words like “the, to, and, or”, unless those words are at the beginning of the title. This site looks like it has the rules more formalized, if you’re interested. I think it’s something most native English writers do without thinking by adulthood. https://capitalizemytitle.com/ https://capitalizemytitle.com/
    • voctor 8y ago
      I've often noticed this pattern but only ask myself now, so, yes, in general. From what I remember I never learnt that in school, but I'm obviously not a native English writer. @Raphmedia already gave me a good link, but thank you for the one you gave me too.
• johnny313 8y ago
  > Kelly Ellis, a former Google engineer and one of the plaintiffs in the gender-pay suit against the company, said in a legal filing that Google hired her as a Level 3 employee — the category for new software engineers who are recent college graduates — in 2010 despite her having four years of experience. > Within a few weeks of Ms. Ellis being hiring, Google hired a male engineer for her team who had also graduated from college four years earlier. But he was hired as a Level 4 employee, meaning he received a higher salary and had more opportunities for bonuses, raises and stock compensation, according to the suit. Other men on Ms. Ellis’s team whose qualifications were equal to or less than hers were also brought in at Level 4, the suit says. This feels like a part of the issue, but could be really hard to analyze easily.
  • AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
    I'm sure Google will learn from this mistake and will mandate the experience to match the qualification. You've spent four years of your career doing some crappy data entry job? Undershot. Rejected. You've been running your own company after the college? Overshot. Rejected.
  • CydeWeys 8y ago
    A lot of it depends on interview performance (which itself is an entirely separate can of worms, including potential gender factors). Many people who get hired on at a more junior level probably wouldn't get offers at all if they were mandated to be a more senior level based on years of experience.
  • akhilcacharya 8y ago
    Isn’t Google known to downlevel everyone that doesn’t come from FB?
  • colonelxc 8y ago
    The main thing is that Google prefers to downlevel people who have external experience. I (male) had 5 years of experience, still was hired at L3. I know many others who have the same story. So the L4 person probably had some better story/negotiation which allowed them to start at L4. It of course could be bias. It was really frustrating for me to be at the same level as new grads, though on reflection, I was not at a the same level as other L4 employees around. Some transparency around these processes I think could help candidates a lot. I think the bigger issue is that new-grad phds are almost always hired at L4. They are often less experienced at software engineering than someone with a bachelors and a few years of experience. So unless the person is being hired into an area that actually makes use of their phd, it seems that Google is just willing to pay for the title.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• benatkin 8y ago
  > Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money. If women were underpaid, things are less equal on average. If men were underpaid, as the study suggests, things are more equal on average. That said, would it be fair to keep underpaying some people in order to keep it more equal on average? I think not.
  • logfromblammo 8y ago
    Using aggregate measures like that rolls up the wrong numbers into a final metric. It tells me that the men who were underpaid had a lesser gap between what they were being paid and what they should be paid, or that the men who were overpaid were overpaid to a greater extent. They needed to compare the number of men who were underpaid as a proportion of all men to the number of women who were underpaid as a proportion of all women. Using bum-pulled numbers, your company has 1000 employees, 667 are men, and 333 women, and they all do pretty much the same job. Your payroll is $100M, and 70% of it goes to the male employees. The mean pay for men is $105k, and the mean pay for women is $90k. Mean pay is $100k--let's say this is fair pay for the work. Overall, the men are overpaid, and the women underpaid. But the mean is a fool's game; the median is more telling. Now say 445 men get $90k, and 222 get $135k. 2/3 of men are underpaid. Now let's say 222 women get $101k, and 111 get $68k. 1/3 of women are underpaid. On a per-person basis, a man working for the company is twice as likely to be underpaid as a woman, but the amount by which they would be underpaid is much less. Going by the aggregate numbers, one could say "men at Company X are overpaid, compared to the women" and then any given underpaid man might not even realize they are being underpaid, thanks to the misleading statistic. When one of the $68k-paid women complains (naturally, as the worst-off of the bunch), and the company analyzes its own payroll at a more detailed level, it realizes that men are more likely to be underpaid than women (and also that increasing its payroll by 8% would make no-one underpaid).
• ScoJoh 8y ago
  If you look at the amount they increased wages by, 9.7 million and by 10667 employees and just take an average... that's only 908 bucks a person. Don't get me wrong, 908 bucks a year is 908 bucks. But take into considering hours, that's only a pay increase of just under 44 cents an hour. So at the end of the day, they weren't severely underpaying employees. Good to see a company take this step. I had this happen to me at one company I worked for... it actually resulted in a pay increase of over 4 bucks an hour, now THAT was nice!
• magneticnorth 8y ago
  I've talked to one expert about a similar result in a company where I worked, and the flip side to results like this is sometimes promotion velocity - women looked "overpaid" for their level relative to the men, and that was often because they had been at that level much longer than most men at the same level. If you set initial salaries fairly with respect to gender but promote men more quickly, then you end up with a company where it looks like women are paid more when you control for job title.
  • ordinaryradical 8y ago
    So would you say the accurate way to study this is to examine "lifetime pay"--look at the pay of demographics over a time period at the company? That would show if men are making more in 5 years of accumulated employment vs women, right, and potentially unearth some of this "promotion velocity" numerically?
    • bluGill 8y ago
      That is one part of the picture. This situation is so complex that I don't believe everybody has actually figured out all the important parts to study in the first place.
      • shados 8y ago
        This is it, and definitely step 1. Step 1: Let's agree that this is a complicated problem, and that quick feel good knee jerk reactions may end up having negative impacts. Step 2: Work on solutions to complicated problems. Easier said than done, but few things worth doing are simple, and there's already a lot of people doing great work on sustainable, informed solutions (but too many people just going "lets pay everyone the same, its the only way to be fair!!!" hurting everyone else)
  • bitwize 8y ago
    > women looked "overpaid" for their level relative to the men, and that was often because they had been at that level much longer than most men at the same level. Usually it's the opposite but for the same reason: women seem underpaid but when you correct for experience on the job, they make something like 98 cents on the dollar compared to men.
• esturk 8y ago
  I read the article first and then came in to read the comments. I feel that most people commenting did not actually read the whole article. To put it simply: It is not just about pay equity in a particular level. It is also about the ingress and egress rate of a level. As the article mentions, some woman was hired as L3 while all of her co-workers were hired as L4. Was she overpaid as a L3? Maybe. But she was underpaid overall because she could've gotten L4. Similarly, women and under represented minorities also face similar issues in promotions.
  • tziki 8y ago
    Sure, but there's zero data to suggest either of those are a factor at Google. That's just moving the goal post.
    • organsnyder 8y ago
      How is that moving the goal post? The question at hand is whether individuals are fairly compensated based on their amount of experience and ability to contribute. Compensation is affected by job title, therefore job title is absolutely relevant.
      • renholder 8y ago
        >Compensation is affected by job title, therefore job title is absolutely relevant. Levels (on hiring) can be affected by negotiation. You can, quite literally, negotiate a better level before signing the employment contract. Why Miss Ellis' level was only Level 3 and everyone around her seemed to be hired at a Level 4, I won't even presume to know but I think it is a disservice to argue over facets surrounding something not publicly known specifically because those facts aren't known. For example, the man that was hired - after Ms. Ellis was hired - was also hired four years after he graduated university and came on at Level 4. Did he graduate with a master's? Did he have the same (or more) experience dev'ing? Is there any other plausible reason than the nefarious one we assume? If not, then, sure let's deride away. If so, then are we saying that prior experience and education level[s] (or quality) should not matter? That there should be a "maximum minimum level" for all workers entering the force?
• thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > In response to the finding, Google gave $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees for this year. Doesn't sound like they were underpaying by very much...
  • izzydata 8y ago
    On average $900 additional salary per employee. Probably not a huge raise for most of them.
• oarabbus_ 8y ago
  To me the key takeaway is that google systematically underpays both men and women.
  • slg 8y ago
    I don't even think there is enough information to say that. We have no idea how many people at Google are overpaid. Without more salary transparency, any company that pays market rates is going to have some employees that are underpaid and some that are overpaid.
  • kgwgk 8y ago
    The takeaway is that compensations are not perfectly aligned with whatever model was used in the study. Which is expected because compensations were not set using that model, so they won’t be exactly the same. And at that point, if the model is calibrated for everage compensation to be the same, it’s obvious that some people will get compensations below the prediction of the model and some people will get compensations above the prediction of the model.
    • oarabbus_ 8y ago
      > And at that point, if the model is calibrated for everage compensation to be the same, it’s obvious that some people will get compensations below the prediction of the model and some people will get compensations above the prediction of the model. This is true of most models (in practice - any model which models salary in the real world) yet not every company is being accused of these payment discrimination lawsuits.
      • lstodd 8y ago
        > yet not every company is being accused maybe because attacking them is not worth it?
      • lazyasciiart 8y ago
        How many companies have this data available to someone who might sue them?
• miramardesign 8y ago
  When you build your whole narrative around the wage gap lie instead of data .
• sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap is a problem has a solution. They are pushing equality of outcome. They want everyone to be paid exactly the same. That's the problem that they have. They don't care that they are comparing apples to oranges. They want pay to be exactly the same.
  • crooked-v 8y ago
    Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.
    • smokeyj 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
      • bandrami 8y ago
        Nope, not that, either: the supply of doctors, for instance, is deliberately restricted by the American Medical Association; whereas the supply of elementary teachers is not restricted by the CAEP. Supply and demand are still second-order effects here.
        • WillPostForFood 8y ago
          If the supply of doctors is restricted, then you'd expect them to get higher pay, and vice versa with teachers. I agree it is a secondary effect. The cost of training/education required to perform the job is bigger, though it ultimately has the same effect of reducing supply.
• zouhair 8y ago
  One word: Union. Unionize and wage equity magically disappears.
  • plainOldText 8y ago
    And so does the ability of talented individuals to negotiate their own salaries.
    • 8note 8y ago
      of individuals talented at negotiating* not necesarily talented at doing the job
      • plainOldText 8y ago
        There will always be exceptions. But I don't think most people go to an interview without having googled "how to ..." about the interview process first. Thus even those not naturally talented at negotiation have a reasonable chance at negotiating decently. Talent/job competence + a little bit of research and preparation prior to interviewing will ensure superior results IMHO.
    • zouhair 8y ago
      I've seen many many hacks with huge salaries and many many talented people toiling for peanuts.
  • Fins 8y ago
    Somehow I always get downvoted for saying that, but I worked at a place where all developers (well, everybody) were unionized. Magic did not happen. Bullshit did.
    • zouhair 8y ago
      And right now we live in bliss?
      • 8y ago
• repolfx 8y ago
  > Google, Ms. Emerson said, seemed to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive the same salary This quote would appear to sum up the entire debate, using the term generously. There is a large and vocal minority in society who abuse the word "equality" to mean "more money and power for women". They don't care about equality. They want inequality, but they know they can't say that, so they simply redefine equality to mean inequality in the Orwellian style and carry on as if the language hadn't just been horribly violated. Ms. Emerson should stop talking until she can say what she means, although given her job is 'diversity consulting' I'm going to guess she will never be able to say what she means.
  • joshuamorton 8y ago
    The next line is very important: >That is not the same as addressing “equity,” she said, which would involve examining the structural hurdles that women face as engineers. Consider the following situation: Men get promoted faster than women for similar work. They're seen as more assertive or something. Managers, noting the systemic inequality, take individual action to compensate women fairly for their contributions, despite the failure of the larger system. The structural hurdle: that women find it more difficult to get promoted, is not addressed. And as a result, they end up paid less for similar work, despite attempts by ground level mangers to address the inequity. The HN guidelines suggest that you >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. I think this should apply to articles posted as well.
    • repolfx 8y ago
      But that's not what the word "equity" means either. Regardless, if she wants to define a word to mean "the structural hurdles that women face as engineers" specifically she should not criticise other people for using the word equality to mean equal treatment. She definitely has no right to claim those who disagree with her have a "flawed and incomplete" understanding of anything - she simply has no intellectual leg to stand on. Put differently, there is simply no plausible interpretation of what she's saying here that isn't a nasty attempt to manipulate the language.
• krn 8y ago
  As a side note: I have recently come over a university which promised a gender equality in "all our science degrees", which it explained as an "admission of 50% males, 50% females". But how can it be a "gender equality", if 80% of the applicants are males?
  • NotAnEconomist 8y ago
    They don't mean "equality" as in "treating people the same regardless of their gender, sex, race, etc" -- they mean "equality" as in "we're going to use increasing levels of force to coerce society to ignore any variation between people, and make every facet of society a paint-by-numbers picture regardless of individual preferences".
  • esarbe 8y ago
    Well, this is about "equality in outcome", which is deeply flawed if you aim for a meritocratic approach. In the situation you describe, there can only be equality in outcome if you heavily discriminate against men.
  • int_19h 8y ago
    Was it in advertising or other official materials? If so, could you reference them?
    • krn 8y ago
      It was one of the universities in Germany, but I cannot find the source now. I was primarily reading material on the postgraduate studies. As a semi-reference, this Spegiel article[1] explains how important the perception of gender equality has become in German academia in recent years. [1] http://spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/potsdam-university-removes-masculine-generic-from-official-documents-a-909696.html http://spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/potsdam-university...
  • OJFord 8y ago
    Equality vs equity: http://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IISC_EqualityEquity.png http://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/I... (Equity being what some here are referring to as 'equality in outcome'.) In this image, it's hard to argue that equity isn't clearly better. In other cases like admissions, it's much more debatable, and personally I think equality ('in opportunity') makes more sense there.
• dominotw 8y ago
  from my experience women get promoted to managerial positions much sooner and much more ease than men. Upper managment finds women more agreeable, less threatening, less combative and more likely to run with their plans without question and make upper manager look good. Women are also eager than men to move out of coding roles into JIRA management roles. My last two managers were women both of them given that position for purely reasons I described above.
• EGreg 8y ago
  I sometimes find that I have to write a comment questioning the very premises of the discussion, whether it's Net Neutrality (Title I vs Title II) or the Pay Gap (women vs men). This is one of those times. There are many factors for why women are paid less than men for the same type of position. Many of these factors have to do with hours worked and expectations around child rearing. And when this is taken out, the women are found to make as much or more than men. My position can be summed up like this: The corporate world is about 100 years old, with its crazy commutes and uses of energy just to sit in a chair. This comes at the expense of future generations (fossil fuels), and current family values (taking care of children, elderly, etc.) Why do we say that women have to keep learning from men on how to move up the corporate ladder, work long hours and get paid more. Perhaps men should learn more from women about how to have a healthy work-life balance, take care of the kids more, and their parents. Today's kids are overmedicated with methamphetamines for ADHD, there is an opiod crisis among adults, 1 in 4 middle aged women is on antidepressants, the elderly are in nursing homes. The wages have stagnated largely because both sexes flooded the labor pool, globalization and outsourcing and automation caused everyone to go into a race to the bottom. Now both parents are working for corporations. Fewer working Americans are becoming parents. They're in a Red Queen rat race, 1/3 of Americans are one paycheck away from homelessness. Is this really the best outcome for Americans? Today's world isn't that of your grandfather, the company man who had loyalty both ways for decades and got a pension. Today we have two year stints, gig economy, part time work. Andrew Yang wants to do what Nixon almost did, and institute a UBI for all Americans like the Permanent Fund in Alaska (lowest inequality of all states, year after year). Why do we think Corporate Careers should take so many of our hours a week? Why should we trade time with our children and elderly for more money, just to survive? In the past, indirectly, child rearing was valued because one of two parents simply didn't take the job, so there was less available labor, so one parent could pay for the whole thing. The system is broken, and we are accomplices by talking about how women can match the men in their "career opportunities" of long hours, instead of talking about parental leave for men like in Scandinavian countries, making the school day shorter, etc. Read this for more info: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286
  • crooked-v 8y ago
    Along with making family life in general easier, a basic UBI program would also be a huge boost to small business ownership, since it acts as a general-purpose safety net in that sort of situation.
• blaze33 8y ago
  We're nowhere near any common definition of what a fair wage should be. Especially for knowledge workers whose work ain't easy to value. Say I build some engine and buy a bunch of identical bolts I need: each one obviously costs the same. But now I'm building a business and need some human cogs to run it, why would I have to discuss the particular cost of each one? Same work, same pay. But... unique person and custom pay? How do we reconcile this apparent contradiction?
• flowerlad 8y ago
  I don’t get this. It is not possible to underpay (when there is no allegation of discrimination) because if a person X is willing to work for salary Y then that’s exactly what he should be paid. In capitalism, corporations have a fiduciary duty to pay no more than is necessary to keep the employee.
• Glyptodon 8y ago
  "You're in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode." How obnoxious. (I think trying to make people using private browsing register is offensive. FWIW you can also stop the effect by blocking requests to their graphql subdomain.)
  • gnicholas 8y ago
    FYI, you can get free accounts through many public library systems, including those around Silicon Valley. They don't give unlimited access to all content (recipes and crosswords are apparently excluded), but you can read all the articles you want.
• rhegart 8y ago
  High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. The actual discrimination against women comes in PhD programs, programs where their success is determined by 1 or 2 superiors (mostly men in advanced research programs), areas with primarily male coworkers, and creepy bosses. The area with most discrimination for women is in non major liberal cities. I went to the Midwest twice and saw more blatant sexism in the workforce than I have my entire life. 2 friends confided that they were asked to trade sexual favors for promotions albeit this was 20 years ago and that was the deciding factor for them moving to the Bay. These things are horrible and I can’t imagime the emotional trauma for that. However, in the Bay Area and the majority of society the pendulum has swung way too far the other way. I don’t care if people think me sexist, these are my observations over my lifetime from both sides and unlesss convinced otherwise this is what I believe.
  • adamsea 8y ago
    > No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?
    • rhegart 8y ago
      I’d wager it’s the same as the composition of females in any Engineering program. If there were 25 women in your CS program out of a 100 (being generous), they can’t magically multiply and somehow end up 50 in the workforce. No one is forcing them to NOT join a STEM field. Everyone is telling them to specifically join STEM and giving likely billions of dollars in support aiding the increase.
• alecco 8y ago
  Let's see how long is this post allowed to stay in the front page before it gets flagged out. I'm surprised it stayed 2hs.
• MRD85 8y ago
  Talking about the additional compensation - "Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money." Doesn't this imply that men, per capita, were being underpaid more than women?
  • justinmchase 8y ago
    That seems to be what the article is concluding.
  • lallysingh 8y ago
    Wait, that sounds backwards. Men == 69% of workforce, and receive >69% of money?
    • MRD85 8y ago
      This is the compensation fund for underpaid workers. Men received more than their share of it since it was found they were more underpaid than women.
  • slg 8y ago
    Yes, which is why the per capita number is not the proper way to measure this. For example, imagine a company with 7 male employees and 3 female employees. That company has 9 engineers and one administrative assistant. All the engineers are underpaid. The male engineers are underpaid by $1000 and the female engineers are underpaid by $1200. The administrative assistant is a woman who is fairly compensated. That means the men are underpaid by $7000 total and the women are underpaid by $2400 total. Men make up 70% of the employee workforce and are roughly 75% of the underpaid total. More men are underpaid than women. The per capita underpayment of men is $200 more than the underpayment of the average woman. There are plenty of ways to frame this data that make it look like men are the biggest victims and yet woman engineers are all payed $200 less than their male counterparts.
    • MRD85 8y ago
      I understand how that works but we're going to need to draw a line somewhere. Going by job, rank, and salary alone could ignore hours worked per week (statistically men tend to do more in the same role), bonuses for high quality work (who knows how this plays out?), etc. I could choose whatever filters I want to frame the data how I want it to, it's one of the biggest tricks of the "women are paid X less than men" camp.
• losvedir 8y ago
  Well. Glad that's settled then.
• scarmig 8y ago
  Someone should write a manifesto.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• golemiprague 8y ago
  These days women are grossly overpaid comparing to their actual contribution to the economy. The wage gap should be 50% if not more. Women don't create new businesses, they hardly work in anything that actually create economic value. Many of them work for the government and in all kind of care taking jobs, from social workers to teachers, nurses and a myriad of jobs in corporates with fancy titles which are actually just being a secretary. The average housewife is contributing more to the economy than the average working woman. She cleans, cook, give mental support to the kids, help their homework and in general give them all daycare functionalities, take care of the elders and wash the laundry. Think about the cost of all those jobs which men usually pay for with their taxes or it comes directly off the woman fake job. Instead of husbands giving some of their earnings directly to their housewives they give it to the government and other outsourcing entities which use it much less efficiently, just a drag on the economy. And I don't even want to start with the implications like raising house prices, extra cars necessary etc. Someone should research the whole thing but I am sure nobody will do it because they are all afraid from the results and it goes against the common ideologies in the academia. And no, I am not saying women should go back to the kitchen, each one can do whatever they like and want, but we need to be realistic about it and we need to stop valuing women working outside so much.
• eqdw 8y ago
  If you assume: a) Google is about 70% men; and b) The "error" in pay (eg how under- or over-paid you are) is randomly distributed Then it will be trivially true that more men than women are underpaid If you, in addition to this, assume some level of sex discrimination, such that in addition to (b) there is additional 'error' in womens' pay, depending on the relative strengths of each of these errors, the following two things can both be true at the same time: 1) A higher percentage of women are underpaid than are men. 2) Most of the people who are underpaid are men. If this is surprising to anybody, they should be taking a remedial statistics class immediately. To illustrate, assume that Google is 100 people: 30 women, 70 men. assume that 25% of men are underpaid, and 50% of women are underpaid. That means that 0.2570 =~ 18 men and 0.530 = 15 women are underpaid. That means that more men are underpaid than women. That means that 18/(18+15)*100 =~ 55% of the people who are underpaid are men. So in my hypothetical, is Google biased against men? Or is Google biased against women? Or is Google not biased at all?.
  • haberman 8y ago
    The information provided in the article directly contradicts your hypothetical. It says that the raises resulting from the study disproportionately went to men. Not just in absolute terms, but proportional terms: > The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men, is done every year [...] > 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.
• rootusrootus 8y ago
  I keep telling my wife she should learn Python and become a developer. Women are highly valued in tech right now, at least in corporations of any significant size.
  • FartyMcFarter 8y ago
    I suppose that is one way to give someone imposter syndrome...
• jbmorgado 8y ago
  After all this, Google would do well to issue a formal apology to James Damore.
• thewizardofaus 8y ago
  I once applied for a scholarship that did not advertise itself as a Male or Female only scholarship. In the fine print it quoted: "women will receive first priority for this scholarship."
• asveikau 8y ago
  Nobody in these discussions seems to attack the elephant in the room: performance review systems. These are openly meant to overpay some employees and underpay others. Though they can be coated in HR-speak to appear neutral and objective, the decisions that come out of them are typically arbitrary; they enforce biases of all kinds. So we should not be surprised at the results.
• charliebrownau 8y ago
  In Australia we now have 75-85% of women in - * Nursing * School teaching * Child Care * Elderly care Its predicted between 2020-2020 we will have NO MEN in those fields of work Mah "Diversity" and " Inclusion "
• YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  >> One effect of the adjustments was to create a pronounced imbalance in compensation among lower-level software engineers, one of Google’s largest job groups, with a large number of men identified as being underpaid compared with their female peers. The article refers throughout to "numbers" rather than "proportions", or "ratios", "percentages" etc, meaning that it is actually a larger absolute number of men rather than a larger relative number of men who are underpaid, compared to women. Most of google's engineers are men, so even if equal proportions of men and women were underpaid, the absolute number of men being underpaid would be higher. Google obviously has people good enough with numbers to know this. However, it's perhaps not surprising to see that there seems no mention of it in the above article. Google is, after all, defending a lawsuit by some of its former female software engineers who allege they were underpaid compared to their male peers. There is a clear incentive to allow a certain lapse from google's usual pride in employing people who understand numbers.
• AcerbicZero 8y ago
  Didn't google fire a guy for trying to talk about this topic?
• 40acres 8y ago
  Here's what I think happened: women become a hot commodity. Tech companies have been trying to get their diversity numbers up for years know and the best way to do so is to hire some URMs, but the supply is still low, thus the cost to hire URMs has risen, leading to the higher average salary, and the subsequent adjustment.
• jiveturkey 8y ago
  #himtoo
• avivo 8y ago
  It's interesting how this sort of discussion is actually leading HN to be more of an echo chamber. Most of my female friends in tech completely avoid it now because it seems that discussions that get voted up tend to ignore or belittle their experiences—even if there may be lots of great points and perspectives mixed in. In fact, the only response I noticed explicitly from someone who identified as female was being downvoted last I checked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19306248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19306248 That can feel rather insulting and demoralizing, and why would anyone want to subject themselves to that? Instead many women just avoid HN—which in turn means that it becomes more male dominated, with more upvotes and mindshare to comments about experiences of "the other" that may not by particularly well informed—because it's not worth the time of a woman to even chime in. Regardless of your opinions on these specific issues, this dynamic of driving away women decreases the likelihood of everyone gaining a well informed perspective. It doesn't just impact gender issues. It impacts discussions on the importance and potential markets of startups that provide products which aren't just male focused. And you can end up with more things like: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-w... Not an easy dynamic to "fix", but a useful thing to remember when thinking about communities, incentives, and impacts...
  • Waterluvian 8y ago
    I've resigned to never talking during any discussion that has to do with any form of inequality. As a young, middle class, educated, employed, healthy white male, I'm perceived as the "default settings" of society. No groups are advocating for me because I apparently already have plenty of support. There's nothing I can do to celebrate who I am because the conversation is so zero-sum. If I'm a white guy making a lot of money in tech, I'm part of the problem. It's exhausting. Instead of being a booster for causes I think are important, I just stay on the sidelines. I wonder if all the upvoters are just quieter than the down voters.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > accurate opinions You can have an accurate or inaccurate belief on a question of fact, but “accuracy” is not a measure that applies to matters of opinion.
• Cyclone_ 8y ago
  Too bad they fired James Damore for simply wanting to have a discussion about it. I think discouraging people from speaking up on issues is ultimately how we got here.
• tchaffee 8y ago
  Google is being sued by the government for under paying women. This result, which is based on some objective and some subjective criteria sure does come at a convenient time for the company.
• kareninoverseas 8y ago
  This debate is exhausting. I agree with some previous posters that women may be more favoured by formal systems now, while men remain more favoured by informal systems. I think that part of the issue is that there are more ways to be male and a successful senior engineer or team lead than there are female. We tend to look towards people who are similar to ourselves to see how we should advance. There are many fewer female role models than there are male ones. Many women who make it to leadership positions are encouraged to act masculine. Women who make discrimination claims that later ring false are usually villainized. I think it might be useful to think about why these might be occurring. In particular, I think women as a whole still feel a great deal more insecurity WRT their positions in the workplace. The equality that's been won in the last few decades has been to some extent manufactured, so it feels a lot more fragile. I don't think that a good reaction to this news article is to feel upset that men are now being discriminated against.
  • eecks 8y ago
    > I don't think that a good reaction to this news article is to feel upset that men are now being discriminated against. Why not? It's good and bad news for men but men definitely shouldn't be discriminated against
• soheil 8y ago
  How did this fall off the front page with almost 500 points and less than 6 hours? There are submissions with fewer points and older that are still pretty high on the front page. Can anyone explain? Is it possible this is getting flagged too many times?
• el_don_almighty 8y ago
  Do you want the government to set pay scales for all STEM employees? Keeping digging this hole and see whose grave you find at the bottom...
• hylianwarrior 8y ago
  None of this analysis accounts for leveling. If women are disproportionately hired at lower levels, pay equity will still be _very_ off, even if the data says otherwise on the surface-level. Ex: Woman w/ 4 years experience hired at T3. Man w/ 4 years experience hired at T4. Both are "in range" of their median comp per level, but the man is being paid more for his expertise.
• roguecoder 8y ago
  Systems that can serve the least-privileged fairly are more fair for everyone. The people who are resistant to making things more fair are usually the people afraid they are getting away with something.
  • malvosenior 8y ago
    The only "fair" wait to do things is to reward people based on merit. Artificially propping up someone because they're less "privileged" (as determined by ?) is the epitome of unfair.
• memmcgee 8y ago
  The solution to this is the solution to many problems in tech: unionization. Many tech workers think unions cap the maximum achievement and result in people getting underpaid. In reality, we're _already_ underpaid when you look at how much the ownership of a company gets. Additionally, Hollywood's unionization hasn't hurt their pay.
• habosa 8y ago
  HN is a very civilized place, and this thread is the closest I have ever seen to a toxic environment. A lot of people (men) here complaining about women getting things too easy in tech. Talk to a woman in tech. Look around you and see how many women there are. Men are still running the show.
  • malvosenior 8y ago
    Why can't we talk to men in tech? Are they not allowed to voice their concerns? If men are running the show, why were they being systematically underpaid at Google? Why are there so many anecdotes from men in this thread about watching less qualified women move ahead of them? Do you not believe the data? Men being upset by this isn't "toxic", it's a natural, healthy and correct reaction to the data they were presented with.
• MarkMc 8y ago
  Several related facts: 1. In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... 2. In the past 30 years women have made gains in traditionally male areas like law and medicine, but have gone backward in software engineering 3. Men are disproportionately on the autism spectrum It seems to me that aiming for 50% female representation in software engineering is not necessarily something we should be aiming at