5 ms·

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

82 points by fooker 3y ago

error54 3y ago
(2019)
shmde 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230816051150/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-pay-gap.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230816051150/https://www.nytim... (2019)
vouaobrasil 3y ago
One can only speculate about this, but it isn't surprising. In a culture where equity and leftist ideals are rampant, and people get their feelings hurt for having a discussion, you'd expect people to err on the side of caution and make everything seem more equal and thus overcompensate, therefore paying men less.
- kramerger 3y ago
  > it isn't surprising. In a culture where equity [sic?] and leftist ideals are rampant, HN is starting to look like a gaming forum or a comment by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then again, have you seen Paul Graham's tweets lately? I come here for technical discussions, but at this rate soon reddit will have subs with more substance and less political fights than HN
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Equity wasn't a typo. It refer to the policy of quotas, whether it be official or unofficial. And isn't it a valid social phenomenon to be studied, proved, or disproved? Surely, if equity or pay policies are being gamed, then perhaps it might be useful to look into it. And obviously, if you are here for the technical discussions, why did you click on a thread about salaries of men vs. women? Finally...this place is ruled by emotion just like every other place. It's only when everyone agrees that there is rational discussion.
    - RangerScience 3y ago
      > equity https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizelting/2022/09/22/stop-saying-quotas-dont-work-because-they-demonstrably-do/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizelting/2022/09/22/stop-sayin... https://www.upstate.edu/diversityinclusion/policies-and-procedures/aa/myth_reality.php https://www.upstate.edu/diversityinclusion/policies-and-proc... Like... it ain't hard to read up on this.
    - kramerger 3y ago
      > if you are here for the technical discussions, why did you click on a thread about salaries of men vs. women? Because maybe I would learn that certain positions or areas are better/worse paid than others? Or that managers at Google are really bad at math? Or who knows, maybe the CEO hires really expensive prostitutes and pay them with company money disguised as salaries?? Not everything needs to be political you know.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > I come here for technical discussions, but at this rate soon reddit will have subs with more substance and less political fights than HN I've been reading HN since 2016. It started decreasing in quality around the COVID pandemic's start, and quickly tanked after most of the YC community moved onto Bookface. This community has basically become Reddit
    - 9dev 3y ago
      I’ll spare the mods the work on this one: HN is not turning into Reddit, and hasn’t the last bazillion times people have been suggesting so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262474
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        I've been lurking on HN since 2016, and actively contributing since 2019. I can safely say the discourse on here has definetly tanked. These kind of passive aggressive comments are the equivalent of an ostrich putting their head in the sand.
    - dontupvoteme 3y ago
      "Orange Reddit" strikes again. That's not surprising as COVID was when many sites offically came out as echo chambers for the State by banning wrongthink.
  - pseudo0 3y ago
    In DEI discussions, equity is typically shorthand for "representation" or "equality of outcome" where if x% of the population is from one group, they should be x% of executives, employees, etc. Contrast that with equality (now verboten), where everyone gets an equal opportunity at success, but the results are up to individual performance.
    - RangerScience 3y ago
      > equality (now verboten), where everyone gets an equal opportunity at success I wound strongly contest that this is because, on the one side of the implementation spectrum, this turned out to impossible in a practical sense, and on the other side, it's far too easy to have the appearance of equality but not the actuality. On the other side of things - (IMO) equity is also just a better concept - give people what they need to do reach their excellence, and you have far more people being excellent. (Although it sounds like we might have different ideas as to what "equity" even is)
      - pseudo0 3y ago
        > I wound strongly contest that this is because, on the one side of the implementation spectrum, this turned out to impossible in a practical sense, and on the other side, it's far too easy to have the appearance of equality but not the actuality. Perfect equal opportunity is the goal, not necessarily the reality. It's not like we can go around handing out genes to make people NBA basketball players or genius mathematicians. Sometimes we might undershoot, other times overshoot, but it's a great ideal to aim for. > equity is also just a better concept - give people what they need to do reach their excellence What does that actually mean, and how does your definition differ from the one that I described?
        RangerScience 3y ago
        AFAIK+IMO, perfect equal opportunity turns out is a terrible goal, and is unreasonably impossible - you can't even get close, and getting close wouldn't end up being a good thing anyway - for pretty much the reasons you point out. Birth circumstances (genes, parents, etc) mean that the opportunities would never be equal, and (IMO) you wouldn't want them to be - people deserve to be able to be different. AFAIK, "equity" is what you actually want. [Here's](https://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-equity/ https://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-eq...) the usual explanation I see. Interestingly - I think "fairness" here is going to use the same definition as used in AI/ML, which (AFAIK) is "these inputs should not affect the outputs". Or, as it usually get encoded into English inside my head - find out what each person needs to succeed, and then give it to them. Now you have a lot more people succeeding than you did when their circumstances had to be a good match for the opportunity. I do think there's a bit of legitimacy in the reactions against all this, in one very specific way - I think a lot of times it's assumed that this or that member of "privileged" life circumstances has had some specific need met - aka "the white guys don't need any help" - when a specific individual might not have. Personally, I really would have benefited from any mentor at certain crucial times of my life - college in particular comes to mind - and I think people assume I had them, or had access. I didn't, even if people "like me" did. (side note - that's also why rule #1 is: don't make statements about other people's lives, only ever ask questions) > differ Near as I can tell, your definition limits "equity" to only concerning itself with outcome - and specifically equality of outcome - instead of (overly simplifying) methods plus outcome of maximized and/or sufficient success. That is - "equity" as I understand it doesn't need everyone to reach the same degree of success, it's more about making sure everyone reaches enough success ("to see over the fence") and beyond that to reach as much success as they each person can. As freakin' always, here's the best tirade on "means vs ends" I've ever seen: https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/ https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/
- Dah00n 3y ago
  >leftist ideals are rampant Did you have to make it into a political discussion by shouting your political position? I can't see any outcome of doing so that isn't bad for the quality of discussion.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    How do you know my political position? I am not a conservative and never vote for them if that's what you mean...if anything, I dislike all political parties. But anyway, I was merely stating a possible root cause of the problem, hyper lip-service to a political ideology.
PaywallBuster 3y ago
tl;dr there's no details about mostly talks about internal policy and an ongoing suit against google for gender discrimination (against woman)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
qwe----3 3y ago
Meh, not surprising. Google also has a bunch of these racial support groups whose participation in can literally help with promotion and performance reviews for literally every racial group except one. I don't like them - I've seen them literally help racial based college clubs get projects to work on at Google.
- zadler 3y ago
  > for literally every racial group except one. Those poor Indians can never catch a break.
  - zo1 3y ago
    Don't think they're talking about Indians.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      He means white guys. White guys get no sympathy.
      - idontwantthis 3y ago
        Am white. Do receive sympathy. It’s pretty awesome to be honest. I’m happy to help anyone else because I know I won’t have to ask anyone to help me.
        chrisco255 3y ago
        Can you point me to a white guy career support group that you've participated in? I've never seen one at any university or company.
        idontwantthis 3y ago
        It’s called “the company” or “the university”. That’s my point. Instead of looking at what you don’t have, try appreciating what you already do and use it to help others. I’ll ask you a similar question: when is white history month?
PaywallBuster 3y ago
> As a result of the findings, which were first reported by the New York Times, Google provided an additional $9.7 million to 10,677 employees, the majority of whom are men, to compensate them for unexplained discrepancies between their 2018 pay and that of co-workers who have the same responsibilities.
- foota 3y ago
  Sop $1000 on average?
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Averages hide variance.
    - onion2k 3y ago
      The article also states "At the end of 2017, it adjusted 228 employees’ salaries by a combined total of about $270,000", which is a very similar figure. You can assume there's a wide variance, but all that would mean is that most employees are paid basically correctly with a few outliers. If anything, that would diminish the value of the story.
- Certhas 3y ago
  So this sounds like some men and women were earning less than others. If pay has a large variance (e.g. because some people are better at selling themselves), and the workforce is overwhelming male, you would expect exactly this. Even if women on average were to earn less, the majority of those being underpaid would be men.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    This! Our ability to talk about difficult things in a sensible way is so often thwarted by the unwillingness to just follow the simplest explanation first. As if humans were designed for preferentially seeking extraordinary explanations
seydor 3y ago
one could call it intergenerational justice
- vsnf 3y ago
  The idea that one should not be made to suffer for the sins of their parents is one of the bedrocks of western justice and politics philosophies. We should strive to correct prior unfairness with some other way than by propagating further unfairness.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    While I agree in principle. We mostly enjoy benefits of those sins. The money/land/power gained by ancestors by means which we believe unethical/illegal now continues to provide value for the descendants.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      The overwhelming majority of people live in cities on land that has no relationship whatsoever to their distant family and have no power whatsoever. As for money, look at any table of income by ethnicity/race [1] in the US, and the top earners are overwhelmingly Asians. Similarly for religion [2] where the highest earners are Jews and Hindus. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... [2] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/11/how-incom...
  - Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
    These HN topics are almost verging on dogwhistle politics, where people can't take their head out of the sand for a second to see that the compensation system overall in tech needs to be badly overhauled. Even though this is an old article, it addresses something which should be of interest to most here - namely that whatever color or stripe or creed you are yourself, the odds are that you're personally getting less than you should in terms of compensation. I know people almost single-handedly keeping valuable back-end systems running, that accrue millions in revenue for a company, but yet the company pays them less than the industry average for their role. Conversely, I have worked with corporate ladder-climbers who contribute nothing beyond endless catch-up meetings that earn more. If you do good work, that directly supports or creates revenue for your company, you deserve a fair slice of that, regardless of how your role is perceived by often technically illiterate HR and management layers.
ajaimk 3y ago
This is 4 1/2 year old....
- zapdrive 3y ago
  I am sure the gap has only grown wider.
kisamoto 3y ago
This article is a few years old so I hope it has evened itself out by now. I wonder why an 'algorithmic' approach to salaries is not more common.. To achieve this there must be a structured career ladder with standardised job descriptions and (most likely) a way to determine a maturity within the role itself, but then it's a case of having a base salary (often heavily influenced by where the employee is) and some multipliers. Out pops a number (or a tight range) and the employee can choose if they take it based on their valuation of their skills. No risk of gender bias and it takes away a lot of the pain of negotiating salaries felt by both management and subordinates. Regularly reviewing the base numbers to adapt for inflation and market trends will ensure that both new and existing employees are treated fairly. At my previous position (head of engineering at an old school sales house trying to become more engineering friendly) we had great success bringing in a structured approach to growth and a corresponding salary calculator. Unfortunately the salary numbers were reserved for management as it wasn't rolled out across the whole organisation but it inspired other, non-engineering, departments to adopt a similar pattern. My vision would be to have these figures open company-wide however I understand that in most medium-large companies this is a time-consuming process. As someone starting a business today I want to ensure that salaries are open (definitely within the company but likely to the world) from the beginning. Employees should feel comfortable knowing that they are compensated fairly for both the work they do and in comparison to others. If anybody is looking for some open inspiration about how this is done, check out Buffer[0] and PostHog[1] (Gitlab[2] have one too but the numbers are not open). - [0] https://buffer.com/salary-calculator/software-engineer-ii/high - [1] https://posthog.com/handbook/people/compensation - [2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/
- Leherenn 3y ago
  Because you give up a lot of flexibility when hiring people. If you want to hire someone asking even just a tiny bit more than what the algorithm says, you have to adjust the algorithm and increase everyone else, play with the role level to get what you want or just say sorry not possible. My experience is that it's often the second one. "Yeah, he's more like level X than Y, but we need someone quickly and he's the only one in the pipeline, so let's bump his level so that it matches his salary demand and sign him." It kinda devalues the whole thing if you tweak the input to get the output you want.
Thorrez 3y ago
I've thought about the math related to this a bit. Let's say you have a certain (role,level,rating) tuple with 2 women and 8 men. You desire gender equality, and thus say that the average pay for women and men must be equal within a (role,level,rating) tuple, and to do this, you'll raise the salary of the less-paid gender. The women, due to there being less of them, will have an average pay with higher variance than the average pay of the men. If the women's average pay varies down due to random variance, then the solution is not too bad for Google: pay those 2 women more. If the women's average pay varies up due to random variance, the solution is 4x more painful for Google: pay the 8 men more. Overall, each individual person will on average benefit the same amount from this scheme. But on average, more money will be directed to men due to this scheme than will be directed to women, just due to the fact that more men exist in the company. Similarly, on average, more men will will benefit than women due to more men existing in the company. Disclosure: I work at Google but not on anything related to this.
- pseudo0 3y ago
  Or the employer shifts to a less flexible compensation system, and everyone loses. Some employers will outright refuse to negotiate pay for a given position because HR gives them a grid or a standard formula.
  - Certhas 3y ago
    How does everyone lose? It seems to me that people worse at negotiating are set to win in this case...
    - pseudo0 3y ago
      Pay transparency measures were touted to reduce the "negotiation gap" but ended up undermining the bargaining power of individual workers, so I would be wary of unintended consequences. > Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages. A key insight is that employers credibly refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others under transparency. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28903 https://www.nber.org/papers/w28903
ofcourseyoudo 3y ago
Important: "Critics said the results of the pay study could give a false impression. Company officials acknowledged that it did not address whether women were hired at a lower pay grade than men with similar qualifications."

82 points by fooker 3y ago

(2019)

https://web.archive.org/web/20230816051150/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-pay-gap.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230816051150/https://www.nytim... (2019)

vouaobrasil 3y ago

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

kramerger 3y ago
> it isn't surprising. In a culture where equity [sic?] and leftist ideals are rampant, HN is starting to look like a gaming forum or a comment by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then again, have you seen Paul Graham's tweets lately? I come here for technical discussions, but at this rate soon reddit will have subs with more substance and less political fights than HN
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Equity wasn't a typo. It refer to the policy of quotas, whether it be official or unofficial. And isn't it a valid social phenomenon to be studied, proved, or disproved? Surely, if equity or pay policies are being gamed, then perhaps it might be useful to look into it. And obviously, if you are here for the technical discussions, why did you click on a thread about salaries of men vs. women? Finally...this place is ruled by emotion just like every other place. It's only when everyone agrees that there is rational discussion.
  - RangerScience 3y ago
    > equity https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizelting/2022/09/22/stop-saying-quotas-dont-work-because-they-demonstrably-do/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizelting/2022/09/22/stop-sayin... https://www.upstate.edu/diversityinclusion/policies-and-procedures/aa/myth_reality.php https://www.upstate.edu/diversityinclusion/policies-and-proc... Like... it ain't hard to read up on this.
  - kramerger 3y ago
    > if you are here for the technical discussions, why did you click on a thread about salaries of men vs. women? Because maybe I would learn that certain positions or areas are better/worse paid than others? Or that managers at Google are really bad at math? Or who knows, maybe the CEO hires really expensive prostitutes and pay them with company money disguised as salaries?? Not everything needs to be political you know.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > I come here for technical discussions, but at this rate soon reddit will have subs with more substance and less political fights than HN I've been reading HN since 2016. It started decreasing in quality around the COVID pandemic's start, and quickly tanked after most of the YC community moved onto Bookface. This community has basically become Reddit
  - 9dev 3y ago
    I’ll spare the mods the work on this one: HN is not turning into Reddit, and hasn’t the last bazillion times people have been suggesting so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262474
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      I've been lurking on HN since 2016, and actively contributing since 2019. I can safely say the discourse on here has definetly tanked. These kind of passive aggressive comments are the equivalent of an ostrich putting their head in the sand.
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    "Orange Reddit" strikes again. That's not surprising as COVID was when many sites offically came out as echo chambers for the State by banning wrongthink.
- pseudo0 3y ago
  In DEI discussions, equity is typically shorthand for "representation" or "equality of outcome" where if x% of the population is from one group, they should be x% of executives, employees, etc. Contrast that with equality (now verboten), where everyone gets an equal opportunity at success, but the results are up to individual performance.
  - RangerScience 3y ago
    > equality (now verboten), where everyone gets an equal opportunity at success I wound strongly contest that this is because, on the one side of the implementation spectrum, this turned out to impossible in a practical sense, and on the other side, it's far too easy to have the appearance of equality but not the actuality. On the other side of things - (IMO) equity is also just a better concept - give people what they need to do reach their excellence, and you have far more people being excellent. (Although it sounds like we might have different ideas as to what "equity" even is)
    - pseudo0 3y ago
      > I wound strongly contest that this is because, on the one side of the implementation spectrum, this turned out to impossible in a practical sense, and on the other side, it's far too easy to have the appearance of equality but not the actuality. Perfect equal opportunity is the goal, not necessarily the reality. It's not like we can go around handing out genes to make people NBA basketball players or genius mathematicians. Sometimes we might undershoot, other times overshoot, but it's a great ideal to aim for. > equity is also just a better concept - give people what they need to do reach their excellence What does that actually mean, and how does your definition differ from the one that I described?
      - RangerScience 3y ago
        AFAIK+IMO, perfect equal opportunity turns out is a terrible goal, and is unreasonably impossible - you can't even get close, and getting close wouldn't end up being a good thing anyway - for pretty much the reasons you point out. Birth circumstances (genes, parents, etc) mean that the opportunities would never be equal, and (IMO) you wouldn't want them to be - people deserve to be able to be different. AFAIK, "equity" is what you actually want. [Here's](https://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-equity/ https://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-eq...) the usual explanation I see. Interestingly - I think "fairness" here is going to use the same definition as used in AI/ML, which (AFAIK) is "these inputs should not affect the outputs". Or, as it usually get encoded into English inside my head - find out what each person needs to succeed, and then give it to them. Now you have a lot more people succeeding than you did when their circumstances had to be a good match for the opportunity. I do think there's a bit of legitimacy in the reactions against all this, in one very specific way - I think a lot of times it's assumed that this or that member of "privileged" life circumstances has had some specific need met - aka "the white guys don't need any help" - when a specific individual might not have. Personally, I really would have benefited from any mentor at certain crucial times of my life - college in particular comes to mind - and I think people assume I had them, or had access. I didn't, even if people "like me" did. (side note - that's also why rule #1 is: don't make statements about other people's lives, only ever ask questions) > differ Near as I can tell, your definition limits "equity" to only concerning itself with outcome - and specifically equality of outcome - instead of (overly simplifying) methods plus outcome of maximized and/or sufficient success. That is - "equity" as I understand it doesn't need everyone to reach the same degree of success, it's more about making sure everyone reaches enough success ("to see over the fence") and beyond that to reach as much success as they each person can. As freakin' always, here's the best tirade on "means vs ends" I've ever seen: https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/ https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/
Dah00n 3y ago
>leftist ideals are rampant Did you have to make it into a political discussion by shouting your political position? I can't see any outcome of doing so that isn't bad for the quality of discussion.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  How do you know my political position? I am not a conservative and never vote for them if that's what you mean...if anything, I dislike all political parties. But anyway, I was merely stating a possible root cause of the problem, hyper lip-service to a political ideology.

PaywallBuster 3y ago

tl;dr there's no details about mostly talks about internal policy and an ongoing suit against google for gender discrimination (against woman)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

qwe----3 3y ago

Meh, not surprising. Google also has a bunch of these racial support groups whose participation in can literally help with promotion and performance reviews for literally every racial group except one. I don't like them - I've seen them literally help racial based college clubs get projects to work on at Google.

zadler 3y ago
> for literally every racial group except one. Those poor Indians can never catch a break.
- zo1 3y ago
  Don't think they're talking about Indians.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    He means white guys. White guys get no sympathy.
    - idontwantthis 3y ago
      Am white. Do receive sympathy. It’s pretty awesome to be honest. I’m happy to help anyone else because I know I won’t have to ask anyone to help me.
      - chrisco255 3y ago
        Can you point me to a white guy career support group that you've participated in? I've never seen one at any university or company.
        idontwantthis 3y ago
        It’s called “the company” or “the university”. That’s my point. Instead of looking at what you don’t have, try appreciating what you already do and use it to help others. I’ll ask you a similar question: when is white history month?

PaywallBuster 3y ago

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

foota 3y ago
Sop $1000 on average?
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Averages hide variance.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    The article also states "At the end of 2017, it adjusted 228 employees’ salaries by a combined total of about $270,000", which is a very similar figure. You can assume there's a wide variance, but all that would mean is that most employees are paid basically correctly with a few outliers. If anything, that would diminish the value of the story.
Certhas 3y ago
So this sounds like some men and women were earning less than others. If pay has a large variance (e.g. because some people are better at selling themselves), and the workforce is overwhelming male, you would expect exactly this. Even if women on average were to earn less, the majority of those being underpaid would be men.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  This! Our ability to talk about difficult things in a sensible way is so often thwarted by the unwillingness to just follow the simplest explanation first. As if humans were designed for preferentially seeking extraordinary explanations

seydor 3y ago

one could call it intergenerational justice

vsnf 3y ago
The idea that one should not be made to suffer for the sins of their parents is one of the bedrocks of western justice and politics philosophies. We should strive to correct prior unfairness with some other way than by propagating further unfairness.
- blackoil 3y ago
  While I agree in principle. We mostly enjoy benefits of those sins. The money/land/power gained by ancestors by means which we believe unethical/illegal now continues to provide value for the descendants.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    The overwhelming majority of people live in cities on land that has no relationship whatsoever to their distant family and have no power whatsoever. As for money, look at any table of income by ethnicity/race [1] in the US, and the top earners are overwhelmingly Asians. Similarly for religion [2] where the highest earners are Jews and Hindus. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... [2] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/11/how-incom...
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
  These HN topics are almost verging on dogwhistle politics, where people can't take their head out of the sand for a second to see that the compensation system overall in tech needs to be badly overhauled. Even though this is an old article, it addresses something which should be of interest to most here - namely that whatever color or stripe or creed you are yourself, the odds are that you're personally getting less than you should in terms of compensation. I know people almost single-handedly keeping valuable back-end systems running, that accrue millions in revenue for a company, but yet the company pays them less than the industry average for their role. Conversely, I have worked with corporate ladder-climbers who contribute nothing beyond endless catch-up meetings that earn more. If you do good work, that directly supports or creates revenue for your company, you deserve a fair slice of that, regardless of how your role is perceived by often technically illiterate HR and management layers.

ajaimk 3y ago

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

zapdrive 3y ago
I am sure the gap has only grown wider.

kisamoto 3y ago

This article is a few years old so I hope it has evened itself out by now. I wonder why an 'algorithmic' approach to salaries is not more common.. To achieve this there must be a structured career ladder with standardised job descriptions and (most likely) a way to determine a maturity within the role itself, but then it's a case of having a base salary (often heavily influenced by where the employee is) and some multipliers. Out pops a number (or a tight range) and the employee can choose if they take it based on their valuation of their skills. No risk of gender bias and it takes away a lot of the pain of negotiating salaries felt by both management and subordinates. Regularly reviewing the base numbers to adapt for inflation and market trends will ensure that both new and existing employees are treated fairly. At my previous position (head of engineering at an old school sales house trying to become more engineering friendly) we had great success bringing in a structured approach to growth and a corresponding salary calculator. Unfortunately the salary numbers were reserved for management as it wasn't rolled out across the whole organisation but it inspired other, non-engineering, departments to adopt a similar pattern. My vision would be to have these figures open company-wide however I understand that in most medium-large companies this is a time-consuming process. As someone starting a business today I want to ensure that salaries are open (definitely within the company but likely to the world) from the beginning. Employees should feel comfortable knowing that they are compensated fairly for both the work they do and in comparison to others. If anybody is looking for some open inspiration about how this is done, check out Buffer[0] and PostHog[1] (Gitlab[2] have one too but the numbers are not open). - [0] https://buffer.com/salary-calculator/software-engineer-ii/high - [1] https://posthog.com/handbook/people/compensation - [2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/

Leherenn 3y ago
Because you give up a lot of flexibility when hiring people. If you want to hire someone asking even just a tiny bit more than what the algorithm says, you have to adjust the algorithm and increase everyone else, play with the role level to get what you want or just say sorry not possible. My experience is that it's often the second one. "Yeah, he's more like level X than Y, but we need someone quickly and he's the only one in the pipeline, so let's bump his level so that it matches his salary demand and sign him." It kinda devalues the whole thing if you tweak the input to get the output you want.

Thorrez 3y ago

I've thought about the math related to this a bit. Let's say you have a certain (role,level,rating) tuple with 2 women and 8 men. You desire gender equality, and thus say that the average pay for women and men must be equal within a (role,level,rating) tuple, and to do this, you'll raise the salary of the less-paid gender. The women, due to there being less of them, will have an average pay with higher variance than the average pay of the men. If the women's average pay varies down due to random variance, then the solution is not too bad for Google: pay those 2 women more. If the women's average pay varies up due to random variance, the solution is 4x more painful for Google: pay the 8 men more. Overall, each individual person will on average benefit the same amount from this scheme. But on average, more money will be directed to men due to this scheme than will be directed to women, just due to the fact that more men exist in the company. Similarly, on average, more men will will benefit than women due to more men existing in the company. Disclosure: I work at Google but not on anything related to this.

pseudo0 3y ago
Or the employer shifts to a less flexible compensation system, and everyone loses. Some employers will outright refuse to negotiate pay for a given position because HR gives them a grid or a standard formula.
- Certhas 3y ago
  How does everyone lose? It seems to me that people worse at negotiating are set to win in this case...
  - pseudo0 3y ago
    Pay transparency measures were touted to reduce the "negotiation gap" but ended up undermining the bargaining power of individual workers, so I would be wary of unintended consequences. > Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages. A key insight is that employers credibly refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others under transparency. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28903 https://www.nber.org/papers/w28903

ofcourseyoudo 3y ago

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