6 ms·

Google Pay Study Finds It Underpaid Men for Some Jobs (2019)

78 points by wslh 2y ago

dijit 2y ago
I have a huge amount of respect for the fact that they would even publish the information. I mean; zeitgeist at the time was that it’s unconscionable to ever give men any equity in the discussion about equality. The only narrative that was permitted was that men were “superior” to women for time immemorial and men today should be punished, that they are over represented in everything of any importance and given much more favourability in all endeavours. - at least, as a person who grew up stunningly poor, surrounded by drugs and violence but happening to be a white man, this was how it felt. The reality is of course much more nuanced than that, however it remained the only discussion permissible. It must have took a great deal of courage to publish something that went against this, especially from a company that’s so widely promoting the narrative. In fact, it makes me believe their other initiatives are more genuine than I would have thought otherwise. PS: I don’t mind if what I said makes you uncomfortable. It was my truth and made me resoundingly bitter; because I couldn’t even talk about it.
- SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
  The messaging of men needing to be punished is definitely how it was felt and that produces the sort of society we’re living in right now. I still don’t believe that’s the actual intent but it can still be perceived that way and it’s important to consider.
  - erikerikson 2y ago
    I had a professor organize a group of older women to encircle me and shout insults and tell me how horrible I was because of my race and gender. The rationale was that those women were taking out their frustrations from being abused by men on me. Ironically, they were unaware that I had been beaten, molested, and burned by my mother. There are social actors with whom this isn't just a communication perception problem. It is just as stupid for abuse to happen by the hands of women as it is at the hands of men. There is deep historical precedent with a lot of lasting ramifications. An eye for an eye makes us all blind and all that.
    - SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
      I’m sorry that happened to you, that’s terrible and a pretty shameful thing to do to another innocent person. I would have raised hell if I was treated that way, especially for a class I was paying a load of money for. Unacceptable. Edit: I would have also raised hell if I saw someone else getting treated this way by a professor.
      - erikerikson 2y ago
        Yes and my revenge is living life better than that. Spreading as much prosperity as I can. The problem is not that I have privilege but that others don't and to any extent I don't spread it. Sustainability comes quickly into account but that's a different comment...
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  Well, it was 2019, that was roughly the start of the accelerated increase in censorship that peaked roughly less than a year ago. Certainly, a year ago, there would be no way they would have published this, but in 2019 it was still relatively acceptable.
djohnston 2y ago
> Joelle Emerson, chief executive of the consulting company Paradigm, told The New York Times that Google was advancing a "flawed and incomplete sense of equality." Google should instead address "equity," she said, examining structural issues faced by women engineers. And from the linked 2019 article: > Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity. Unreal XD. I genuinely do not understand how you can find yourself siding with these termites.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Perhaps a minor point, but I think your argument would have been stronger and more convincing if you didn't refer to people you disagree with as "termites". I think the top NYT comment on this article highlights a very real problem that infested a lot of academia and places in corporate America. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that many of these places, especially in academia, have done real soul searching and considered that there are real problems that they were responsible for. Instead, I feel that in a lot of places you just see a "backlash to the backlash", i.e dismissing fair criticism as "the tide of unintellectual MAGA-ism": > “When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work.” Obviously, this conclusion does not fit the politically correct mindset of most Google employees and management (or, for that matter, of the New York Times.) > So, Google is searching for more data, and some explanation, of why the initial conclusion, that salary disparity may not put women at a disadvantage, must be wrong. I’m sure that if the results of the study were the reverse of what they showed, and demonstrated a bias against women, there would have been no head-scratching and no quest for further study. > This illustrates a problem likely present with a great deal of scientific research, especially work in the social sciences. People look for results that match their preconceived notions, and keep looking until they find what they expect. When they find the expected, they stop looking. It’s a potent and pernicious source of bias. > Pay disparities are both complex and important. By all means, Google, and society at large, should study the problem carefully and thoroughly. But we should leave open the possibility, that the truth may not be what we initially believe.
aredox 2y ago
[flagged]
tomohelix 2y ago
I once saw a manager proudly put on a presentation that her team has a 5:1 ratio of female to male employee, as if it is something to be celebrated. Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately not rare in that company. This is a large multinational corp in a highly technical field, as in STEM master and PhD are normal requirements. That event gave me a shock and made me realize why there is such a huge backlash against the DEI folks these days. It is easy to have a perception of "the pendulum has swung too far" when these things happen often enough.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- WWLink 2y ago
  Maybe they were hiring all the unrecognized talent the other companies were passing up on because the talent happened to be women. Perhaps they offered better benefits or had better outreach? I agree that 5:1 sounds extreme, but you're also giving us a pretty vague description of a company and not naming them, so there's no evidence to back your claim up. Also random things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/why-women-led-companies-are-better-for-employees/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/w...
  - coffeeaddict1 2y ago
    Why would you guess that? Is there any evidence that companies are not hiring women despite them being equally/more talented than their male counterparts?
    - WWLink 2y ago
      About as much evidence as there are companies hiring women over men 5:1 lmao.
      - coffeeaddict1 2y ago
        Except no one made that claim. Parent comment was sharing a personal anectode they witnessed. You on the other hand weren't.
runeblaze 2y ago
Useful information for HN from the original Google blog-post: > 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. In other words, "some jobs" here is mid-level software engineers.
tdb7893 2y ago
Some context from the time: Google was facing a class action lawsuit for systematically underpaying women that they eventually settled for 118$ million dollars. It's a complicated thing and definitely not just Google hating men (their track record at the time on things like payouts to male executives accused of malfeasance shows that). https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/google-to-pay-118-million-after-being-accused-of-underpaying-15500-women/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/google-to-pay-11...
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  also since early 2010s google and others were hapilly underpaying everyone, true inclusivity. i bet any category researched would show lower pay by seniority since market was illegaly/artificialy not adjusting thanks to the shady no poach backroom deals. all this show is a correlation of seniority with males. https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/silicon-valley-poaching-case/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/silicon-valley-p...
throwawaydjf 2y ago
[flagged]
- bell-cot 2y ago
  Read up on the psych experiments where they've tested how hard people are willing to work to get a dollar they don't have, vs. how hard they're willing to work to keep a dollar that they do have. No "male ego is so brittle" assumptions are needed, to explain why many men (and other groups) get so worked up over DEI issues.
- scarab92 2y ago
  > Women have been screwed over forever and still are. The first part of this sentence is correct, the later part isn’t. Women are now significantly privileged over men in educational and early career opportunities. The idea that this “balances out” is obviously false, because you’re talking about different generations. Young men being discriminated against now is just as unfair as it was to previous generations of women that were discriminated against in the past.
  - throwawaydjf 2y ago
    Not in my experience. I’ve seen teams come up with justifications like that female candidates don’t have enough experience in certain technologies, won’t be good cultural fits, or not team players, all rationales that don’t get applied to male candidates. My favorite example is when hiring rockstar developers who are anti-social or toxic. For some reason, it’s ok to hire men who act that way, but totally unacceptable when women do. In startups, leadership goes along with it because they don’t have time to deal with it. In corporate environments HR doesn’t know enough to pushback or their KPIs are if they filled the open positions. The problem is that if you don’t want to hire someone, there so many different ways to disqualify them.
    - scarab92 2y ago
      The problem is you’re clearly talking about this from the perspective of a personal anecdote. If you look at the general experiences of a young men, you’ll see that they are discriminated against in university admissions, in early career hiring and in early career promotion. This is justified by data points which average outcomes over different age groups. The result may be company wide gender balance, but when you break it down by age you see that the it’s not really a balance, it’s just discrimination against women in some cohorts and discrimination against men in others.
busterarm 2y ago
Ever since my career started in finance and tech 20 years ago, every company I've worked for _bragged_ openly that they paid women more than men in every position. Usually it's around 4-5%. If they're all[1] doing it... [1]: Top tier hedge funds and big tech.
bena 2y ago
I think this may be a case where people are reacting to the title rather than the content. The article seems to point out a reason why Google would publish this information. > Google is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by women who allege systemic underpayment. And the Department of Labor is investigating whether Google pays women less. With that context, the Google study's findings is almost comical. They're basically saying "Oh, we're not underpaying women, we're actually underpaying men." Also the manner in which the pay gap was distributed. > The Washington Post explains that in Google's 2018 study, "Managers had dipped into the discretionary funds more often for women engineers, creating a pay gap for men in the same job category."
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  I recall there being a few discussions calling out the irony at the time. Unfortunately, the misguided political fervor behind the equally misguided lawsuit only ramped up since then.
anna41517 2y ago
[flagged]

78 points by wslh 2y ago

I have a huge amount of respect for the fact that they would even publish the information. I mean; zeitgeist at the time was that it’s unconscionable to ever give men any equity in the discussion about equality. The only narrative that was permitted was that men were “superior” to women for time immemorial and men today should be punished, that they are over represented in everything of any importance and given much more favourability in all endeavours. - at least, as a person who grew up stunningly poor, surrounded by drugs and violence but happening to be a white man, this was how it felt. The reality is of course much more nuanced than that, however it remained the only discussion permissible. It must have took a great deal of courage to publish something that went against this, especially from a company that’s so widely promoting the narrative. In fact, it makes me believe their other initiatives are more genuine than I would have thought otherwise. PS: I don’t mind if what I said makes you uncomfortable. It was my truth and made me resoundingly bitter; because I couldn’t even talk about it.

SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
The messaging of men needing to be punished is definitely how it was felt and that produces the sort of society we’re living in right now. I still don’t believe that’s the actual intent but it can still be perceived that way and it’s important to consider.
- erikerikson 2y ago
  I had a professor organize a group of older women to encircle me and shout insults and tell me how horrible I was because of my race and gender. The rationale was that those women were taking out their frustrations from being abused by men on me. Ironically, they were unaware that I had been beaten, molested, and burned by my mother. There are social actors with whom this isn't just a communication perception problem. It is just as stupid for abuse to happen by the hands of women as it is at the hands of men. There is deep historical precedent with a lot of lasting ramifications. An eye for an eye makes us all blind and all that.
  - SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
    I’m sorry that happened to you, that’s terrible and a pretty shameful thing to do to another innocent person. I would have raised hell if I was treated that way, especially for a class I was paying a load of money for. Unacceptable. Edit: I would have also raised hell if I saw someone else getting treated this way by a professor.
    - erikerikson 2y ago
      Yes and my revenge is living life better than that. Spreading as much prosperity as I can. The problem is not that I have privilege but that others don't and to any extent I don't spread it. Sustainability comes quickly into account but that's a different comment...
Ferret7446 2y ago
Well, it was 2019, that was roughly the start of the accelerated increase in censorship that peaked roughly less than a year ago. Certainly, a year ago, there would be no way they would have published this, but in 2019 it was still relatively acceptable.

djohnston 2y ago

> Joelle Emerson, chief executive of the consulting company Paradigm, told The New York Times that Google was advancing a "flawed and incomplete sense of equality." Google should instead address "equity," she said, examining structural issues faced by women engineers. And from the linked 2019 article: > Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity. Unreal XD. I genuinely do not understand how you can find yourself siding with these termites.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Perhaps a minor point, but I think your argument would have been stronger and more convincing if you didn't refer to people you disagree with as "termites". I think the top NYT comment on this article highlights a very real problem that infested a lot of academia and places in corporate America. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that many of these places, especially in academia, have done real soul searching and considered that there are real problems that they were responsible for. Instead, I feel that in a lot of places you just see a "backlash to the backlash", i.e dismissing fair criticism as "the tide of unintellectual MAGA-ism": > “When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work.” Obviously, this conclusion does not fit the politically correct mindset of most Google employees and management (or, for that matter, of the New York Times.) > So, Google is searching for more data, and some explanation, of why the initial conclusion, that salary disparity may not put women at a disadvantage, must be wrong. I’m sure that if the results of the study were the reverse of what they showed, and demonstrated a bias against women, there would have been no head-scratching and no quest for further study. > This illustrates a problem likely present with a great deal of scientific research, especially work in the social sciences. People look for results that match their preconceived notions, and keep looking until they find what they expect. When they find the expected, they stop looking. It’s a potent and pernicious source of bias. > Pay disparities are both complex and important. By all means, Google, and society at large, should study the problem carefully and thoroughly. But we should leave open the possibility, that the truth may not be what we initially believe.

aredox 2y ago

[flagged]

tomohelix 2y ago

I once saw a manager proudly put on a presentation that her team has a 5:1 ratio of female to male employee, as if it is something to be celebrated. Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately not rare in that company. This is a large multinational corp in a highly technical field, as in STEM master and PhD are normal requirements. That event gave me a shock and made me realize why there is such a huge backlash against the DEI folks these days. It is easy to have a perception of "the pendulum has swung too far" when these things happen often enough.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
WWLink 2y ago
Maybe they were hiring all the unrecognized talent the other companies were passing up on because the talent happened to be women. Perhaps they offered better benefits or had better outreach? I agree that 5:1 sounds extreme, but you're also giving us a pretty vague description of a company and not naming them, so there's no evidence to back your claim up. Also random things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/why-women-led-companies-are-better-for-employees/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/w...
- coffeeaddict1 2y ago
  Why would you guess that? Is there any evidence that companies are not hiring women despite them being equally/more talented than their male counterparts?
  - WWLink 2y ago
    About as much evidence as there are companies hiring women over men 5:1 lmao.
    - coffeeaddict1 2y ago
      Except no one made that claim. Parent comment was sharing a personal anectode they witnessed. You on the other hand weren't.

runeblaze 2y ago

Useful information for HN from the original Google blog-post: > 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. In other words, "some jobs" here is mid-level software engineers.

tdb7893 2y ago

Some context from the time: Google was facing a class action lawsuit for systematically underpaying women that they eventually settled for 118$ million dollars. It's a complicated thing and definitely not just Google hating men (their track record at the time on things like payouts to male executives accused of malfeasance shows that). https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/google-to-pay-118-million-after-being-accused-of-underpaying-15500-women/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/google-to-pay-11...

1oooqooq 2y ago
also since early 2010s google and others were hapilly underpaying everyone, true inclusivity. i bet any category researched would show lower pay by seniority since market was illegaly/artificialy not adjusting thanks to the shady no poach backroom deals. all this show is a correlation of seniority with males. https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/silicon-valley-poaching-case/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/silicon-valley-p...

throwawaydjf 2y ago

[flagged]

bell-cot 2y ago
Read up on the psych experiments where they've tested how hard people are willing to work to get a dollar they don't have, vs. how hard they're willing to work to keep a dollar that they do have. No "male ego is so brittle" assumptions are needed, to explain why many men (and other groups) get so worked up over DEI issues.
scarab92 2y ago
> Women have been screwed over forever and still are. The first part of this sentence is correct, the later part isn’t. Women are now significantly privileged over men in educational and early career opportunities. The idea that this “balances out” is obviously false, because you’re talking about different generations. Young men being discriminated against now is just as unfair as it was to previous generations of women that were discriminated against in the past.
- throwawaydjf 2y ago
  Not in my experience. I’ve seen teams come up with justifications like that female candidates don’t have enough experience in certain technologies, won’t be good cultural fits, or not team players, all rationales that don’t get applied to male candidates. My favorite example is when hiring rockstar developers who are anti-social or toxic. For some reason, it’s ok to hire men who act that way, but totally unacceptable when women do. In startups, leadership goes along with it because they don’t have time to deal with it. In corporate environments HR doesn’t know enough to pushback or their KPIs are if they filled the open positions. The problem is that if you don’t want to hire someone, there so many different ways to disqualify them.
  - scarab92 2y ago
    The problem is you’re clearly talking about this from the perspective of a personal anecdote. If you look at the general experiences of a young men, you’ll see that they are discriminated against in university admissions, in early career hiring and in early career promotion. This is justified by data points which average outcomes over different age groups. The result may be company wide gender balance, but when you break it down by age you see that the it’s not really a balance, it’s just discrimination against women in some cohorts and discrimination against men in others.

busterarm 2y ago

Ever since my career started in finance and tech 20 years ago, every company I've worked for _bragged_ openly that they paid women more than men in every position. Usually it's around 4-5%. If they're all[1] doing it... [1]: Top tier hedge funds and big tech.

bena 2y ago

I think this may be a case where people are reacting to the title rather than the content. The article seems to point out a reason why Google would publish this information. > Google is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by women who allege systemic underpayment. And the Department of Labor is investigating whether Google pays women less. With that context, the Google study's findings is almost comical. They're basically saying "Oh, we're not underpaying women, we're actually underpaying men." Also the manner in which the pay gap was distributed. > The Washington Post explains that in Google's 2018 study, "Managers had dipped into the discretionary funds more often for women engineers, creating a pay gap for men in the same job category."

Ferret7446 2y ago
I recall there being a few discussions calling out the irony at the time. Unfortunately, the misguided political fervor behind the equally misguided lawsuit only ramped up since then.

anna41517 2y ago

[flagged]