4 ms·

Remember when Google did a company-wide study to find out for how much women at Google were underpaid? And it turned out that women in the same job were actuall

by 101404 7y ago

Remember when Google did a company-wide study to find out for how much women at Google were underpaid? And it turned out that women in the same job were actually earning much more than their male colleagues doing the same thing. Now imagine "open salaries" making it obvious that the "women underpaid" is just a lie. An entire industry of "feminism" would die. Maybe NYT should not push too hard for this "openess".

vilts 7y ago
Do you have reference to that Google study? I'd really like to read it.
- dnissley 7y ago
  https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/ensuring-we-pay-fairly-and-equitably/ https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/...
  - e12e 7y ago
    Thanks, if that's what was referenced above, it certainly isn't a study to see if women were underpaid - but to see if anyone was underpaid. And reading the brief content: > There are a couple of reasons that the pay equity analysis required more adjustments in 2018, compared to 2017. First, the 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women. Secondly, this year we undertook a new hire analysis to look for any discrepancies in offers to new employees—this accounted for 49 percent of the total dollars spent on adjustments. I suppose a natural question would be if an overpaid se4 is an underpromoted se5, or if an underpaid se4 is an overpromoted sr3. I understand the try to correct for "similar roles" - but that doesn't mean the promtion/roles are accurate. Either way; interesting link.
xhkkffbf 7y ago
Is Susan Dominus going to reveal how much she was paid to write the piece? I doubt it. She's probably one of the better paid people there and it would just generate animosity with the younger feminists.
thebean11 7y ago
Extrapolating from "women at Google aren't underpaid" to "women aren't underpaid" is a huge leap. Big tech competes heavily for women engineers because they are so scarce, which is not the case in every industry.
- 101404 7y ago
  I wasn't extrapolating from "women at Google aren't underpaid". I was extrapolating from "men at Google are underpaid while the official narrative pushed to make all believe that women were". What industry do you have in mind?
joshuamorton 7y ago
> earning much more than their male less than 1% is not "much more". Please don't editorialize. Especially when the data I have (and I have more than most!) on Google's internal salaries shows that women do appear to be underpaid by some measures.
- 101404 7y ago
  What are those "some measures" and where is the 1% coming from?
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    "We provided $9.7 million in adjustments to a total of 10,677 Googlers." -> just under $1000 per adjustment, on average. Note that since the comment here is that the affect group (L4 men) was large and led to the majority of the changes, we can generally discount ideas like "oh there were a small number of massive adjustments and a large number of tiny ones", or we can believe that's the case, but then the L4 men adjustments would be smaller on average, not larger. The average L4 SWE at Google is taking home more than $200K annually, and has a salary well over 100K, so these changes amounted to less than half a percent of total comp, and less than one percent of salary. As for "some measures", the short answer is that when you control for performance rating and level, as Google did here, things generally look reasonable. The problem is that there are good reasons to believe that historically equally performing women were less likely to be promoted (for various structural reasons that I won't get into, weren't malicious, and have been at least somewhat addressed). The result then is that high performing women may still be under-leveled or under-compensated in relation to their actual performance. So a completely reasonable interpretation of this sequence of events is that women were as a group, somewhat under-leveled. Their managers, individually, noticed this and did (as Google leadership suggests) what they could to use manager-discretionary compensation to address this underpayment. Again, individually and stochastically. The overall analysis notices this, and because one stochastic process (promotion) previously had a bias against women, and because the recent analysis didn't control for that, I get an extra $1K. Which is nice, but it's not anything particularly special.

by 101404 7y ago

vilts 7y ago

Do you have reference to that Google study? I'd really like to read it.

dnissley 7y ago
https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/ensuring-we-pay-fairly-and-equitably/ https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/...
- e12e 7y ago
  Thanks, if that's what was referenced above, it certainly isn't a study to see if women were underpaid - but to see if anyone was underpaid. And reading the brief content: > There are a couple of reasons that the pay equity analysis required more adjustments in 2018, compared to 2017. First, the 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women. Secondly, this year we undertook a new hire analysis to look for any discrepancies in offers to new employees—this accounted for 49 percent of the total dollars spent on adjustments. I suppose a natural question would be if an overpaid se4 is an underpromoted se5, or if an underpaid se4 is an overpromoted sr3. I understand the try to correct for "similar roles" - but that doesn't mean the promtion/roles are accurate. Either way; interesting link.

xhkkffbf 7y ago

Is Susan Dominus going to reveal how much she was paid to write the piece? I doubt it. She's probably one of the better paid people there and it would just generate animosity with the younger feminists.

thebean11 7y ago

Extrapolating from "women at Google aren't underpaid" to "women aren't underpaid" is a huge leap. Big tech competes heavily for women engineers because they are so scarce, which is not the case in every industry.

101404 7y ago
I wasn't extrapolating from "women at Google aren't underpaid". I was extrapolating from "men at Google are underpaid while the official narrative pushed to make all believe that women were". What industry do you have in mind?

joshuamorton 7y ago

> earning much more than their male less than 1% is not "much more". Please don't editorialize. Especially when the data I have (and I have more than most!) on Google's internal salaries shows that women do appear to be underpaid by some measures.

101404 7y ago
What are those "some measures" and where is the 1% coming from?
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  "We provided $9.7 million in adjustments to a total of 10,677 Googlers." -> just under $1000 per adjustment, on average. Note that since the comment here is that the affect group (L4 men) was large and led to the majority of the changes, we can generally discount ideas like "oh there were a small number of massive adjustments and a large number of tiny ones", or we can believe that's the case, but then the L4 men adjustments would be smaller on average, not larger. The average L4 SWE at Google is taking home more than $200K annually, and has a salary well over 100K, so these changes amounted to less than half a percent of total comp, and less than one percent of salary. As for "some measures", the short answer is that when you control for performance rating and level, as Google did here, things generally look reasonable. The problem is that there are good reasons to believe that historically equally performing women were less likely to be promoted (for various structural reasons that I won't get into, weren't malicious, and have been at least somewhat addressed). The result then is that high performing women may still be under-leveled or under-compensated in relation to their actual performance. So a completely reasonable interpretation of this sequence of events is that women were as a group, somewhat under-leveled. Their managers, individually, noticed this and did (as Google leadership suggests) what they could to use manager-discretionary compensation to address this underpayment. Again, individually and stochastically. The overall analysis notices this, and because one stochastic process (promotion) previously had a bias against women, and because the recent analysis didn't control for that, I get an extra $1K. Which is nice, but it's not anything particularly special.