U.S. Labor department sues Google for compensation data | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Labor department sues Google for compensation data

reuters.com

54 pointsaaronyy84 comments

The OFCCP is now demanding Google provide names and private contact information of tens of thousands of employees and ex-employees (some of which haven't been been associated with Google for years)[1]. Unless the OFCCP can give a really compelling reason why this sensitive info is suddenly now required for their "compliance evaluations", Google has a very real obligation to fight overbroad data requests in ALL cases.

[1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...

If Google didn't want to reveal this information, they shouldn't have taken federal contracts.

Do you know that they are in breach, or are you just assuming?

That's the whole reason the government is taking them to court: Google and the Labor Department have a disagreement and a judge will figure it out.

This is not how compliance works, you need to prove you are compliant not the otherway around.

It sounds like Google views the information requested as not being necessary for certifying compliance and that they have supplied other information requested.

OTOH, Google is essentially forced to take federal contracts, and cannot provide a reason that is acceptable to shareholders on why not.

Google isn't forced to take anyone's business. The small group of preferred shareholders still have total control over the company and have no obligation to explain their reasons to other shareholders.

This is the same office that is shaking down Palantir for not hiring more than 44% of Asian engineer applicants. Asians only make up 4.4% of the population. Looks like they're trying to find out who's got money at Google.

Google already publishes diversity statistics. So the purpose of this audit has to be something else - such as making sure that e.g. women are not being systematically paid less than men in the same position.

They want names and contact information of all 2015 and 2014 employees to go with the money. You don't need that to compare wages.

They don't publish statistics on employees' ages, disabilities, or veteran status, though.

Google already publishes diversity statistics.

Oh, of course! It seems so obvious. I see why so many people say the government is dumb and inefficient now. Why didn't they just check Google's marketing materials, take them at face value, and not want to know anything else in the first place?

>This is the same office that is shaking down Palantir for not hiring more than 44% of Asian engineer applicants. Asians only make up 4.4% of the population.

How is this relevant? Are you implying that Palantir's engineering team should consist only of 4.4% Asians?

Also, that 4.4% comes from US demographics, right? Should Palantir not consider international applicants?

>Are you implying that Palantir's engineering team should consist only of 4.4% Asians

You got it. Otherwise it is evidence the other 95.6% are being discriminated against. Are you implying that women in tech should not be 50%?

>Should Palantir not consider international applicants?

No it should not.

Women in _tech_ being 50% of all hired applicants (assuming equality of ability on average) is not the same as women at _Palantir_ being 50% of all hired applicants.

The same goes for Asians. If 85% of people applying to Palantir are Asian and we continue to assume equality of ability, then 85% of hired applicants should be Asian.

I'm not saying that Palantir is discriminating, these are averages - I'm sure there are tech companies out there where 15% of applicants are Asian but 85% of the work-force is Asian.

Palantir is a business, it's here to make as much money as possible. If it can make more money by also recruiting international applicants, I see no reason why it shouldn't.

>Asians only make up 4.4% of the population.

The percentage of Asians in the population of the United States is irrelevant to the question of whether Palantir discriminates against Asian job applicants because Asians make up a much larger percentage of applicants to Palantir than they do of the general population.

In one case, 130 people applied for a position, 78% of whom were Asian, but only 4 of the 21 people hired were Asian.[1] In another case. 1,160 people applied for a position, 85% of whom were Asian, and only 14 of the 25 people hired were Asian.[2]

Palantir gave a reasonable-sounding response[3], and I don't think there's conclusive evidence that they committed racial discrimination, but I'm not sure why you're so dismissive of the possibility that they might have.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-tech-discriminati...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/26/u-s-department-of-labor-su...

[3] http://fortune.com/2016/10/14/palantir-discrimination-lawsui...

Obviously this labor office couldn't play the same game with Google because Google has large offices all over Asia that have 100% asian workforce and 100% asian applicants.

Any other perspectives on this? Racial and gender diversity is clearly lacking in tech and I have a feeling that's even more concentrated at the "top" employers.

Not sure if we can do much about it though. Anyone that's been to school can see it's clearly something happening before college level. Seems like 5% or less of CS program students are women or minorities besides Asians, that doesn't give tech companies much to choose from.

The lack of diversity is being driven by something at highschool level or below, it's stupid to blame tech companies for something so obvious.

It's actually more like 20% women in CS programs now, and it was 30% a decade ago. It would be stupid to attribute that 50% decline to changes at high school or below though, wouldn't it?

And what does any of this have to do with equal compensation? If 0.01% of CS graduates were women they should still receive the same pay as men do.

> It would be stupid to attribute that 50% decline to changes at high school or below though, wouldn't it?

Why?

Because there have not been changes at high school. Meanwhile there have been huge and obvious changes in tech itself (mobile) and the way the tech industry is viewed in the media, which would be the obvious place to start looking for answers.

I agree that the institution that is high school has not significantly changed wrt this in the last decade, however there is plenty of room for the experience of being a high school to have changed in the last decade.

It's not anything near 20% from what I've seen. I've worked at fairly random companies and went to a pretty large school and women are consistently outnumbered at least 10-1 everywhere.

Even at Google and Facebook a lot of their female employees are just tangentially related to development. The core dev teams are probably 95% male just like everywhere else.

How about someone do a name-gender scan on GitHub to check???

What you are seeing is inter-profession gender segregation. When a minority enters a profession, they tend to go into sub groups where they can be majority in a local context.

Its similar to male teachers. Teaching has similar to tech a about 80-20 gender split, but you don't find 20% of say English teachers to be male if you did a random poll. Instead men go into typical male teacher roles such as physical activity (sport), after school activity (sport again), and math. They still went to teaching school, have a title thats recognized as teacher, so statistics will still give a 20-80 ratio.

So the 20% women in CS is there, you just have to figure out what sub-group in CS which is designed as typical female CS.

I always use plumbing as an example. You never hear about that being not diverse enough. Look, I'm all for equal pay, but I didn't see those ladies in my classroom 10-15 years ago. Only after it became "cool" to be a nerd, seeing that there is money to be made being a nerd, and realizing that living in a major city can't be subsidized by whatever they chose to study, did they start hammering on about this.

Equal pay will be very difficult to enforce unless you make salaries public. I can assure you that among your peers there are plenty of differences in compensation.

It's not fair to compare them, plumbing requires physical strength, whereas tech jobs don't. Women have anywhere from 40-60% of the strength men do, and men have especially greater hand strength than women https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physi... Given that you need really good hand strength to do plumbing, it's never something that will see sex diversity.

I worked in remodeling before and during college, including plumbing. It requires less physical strength than what you are implying.

The parent comment makes a good point. There are few (if any) calls for diversity in regards to "dirty" jobs.

Are you a male? You think it takes less physical strength because what's physically easy for a male would be harder for a female. Ever been asked to open a jar for your wife?

Yes, I'm male. No, I've never opened a jar for my wife. My wife actually has as much physical strength as I, perhaps more.

For what it's worth, there were 3 female crew members with which I worked at the remodeling company. None of them had issues turning a pipe wrench. It's seriously not as strenuous as you seem to think. Have you tried it?

Edit: I also feel like you are missing the point, which is that there is relatively little call for diversity outside of "more women in STEM".

> I always use plumbing as an example. You never hear about that being not diverse enough.

I suspect that people who work in tech, closely follow tech news, and spend their free time posting in tech-industey-centered forums often miss things like campaigns for diversity in skilled manual labor not because such campaigns don't exist, but because of where their attention is focussed.

http://news.sky.com/story/white-van-woman-held-back-by-sexis...

> The lack of diversity is being driven by something at highschool level or below, it's stupid to blame tech companies for something so obvious.

What basis is this statement founded on? It is also stupid to make unfounded claims without any indication that you have substantiated them. I am genuinely curious what the cause is and if grade school so be it but let's not point fingers at something just cause.

>What basis is this statement founded on?

The graduation statistics from schools. You can't expect to have 50% men and 50% women of the same quality in an company without unfair hiring practices if the ratio from schools is 80/20.

No, the enrolment statistics for schools tell us nothing about why the trend is occurring. It could just as easily be due to the industry being perceived as being distinctively male and that puts off young women from enrolling in CS.

And anyway, the article is not about unfair hiring, it's about unfair pay.

We need to trace when the issue is happening. College enrollment teaches us a lot more than job statistics where most people have made up their minds 10+ years ago.

The enrollment statistics represent people making up their minds right after highschool, so logically something before college is skewing the statistics.

Some exposure to young people is causing the demographic rift and these statistics can tell us that which is more than nothing

>It could just as easily be due to the industry being perceived as being distinctively male and that puts off young women from enrolling in CS.

Quite possibly. That perception lies 100% on the idiots that write articles/comments/facebook posts/tweets parroting the idea that the industry is sexist because of the ratio though. Every time there is an article questioning what the industry can do about "it's sexism problem", it just makes things worse.

Large companies actually do better in terms of diversity.

As far as doing things, there is definitely many things to be done! You are right that the problem starts well before college. In America there is a culture that being CS is nerdy, and not girly. This is largely in part due to Hollywood's attempts, but this can be combated at a more local level.

> Not sure if we can do much about it though.

I just saw this in my Facebook feed today, which seems like a positive step!

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-harvey-mudd-tech...

That's not exactly what the research shows. The great book "Unlocking the Clubhouse" shows off some research to suggest that culture within CS departments and software development companies are largely, but not entirely, to blame.

I can't see any way that could be proven with any rigor.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

Gender warfare? Go back to the 60's. Women outnumber men in college significantly and are graduating with much better grades. The biggest difference is college major which has a huge influence on lifetime earnings.

It's not like you get accepted to a school and forced to study philosophy. These student have a choice and for some reason they're not picking the ones that make good money

Philosophy students tend to make good money.

I agree. That's why it's going to be difficult to get rid of these diversity bureaucracies.

I guess if you can't imagine it then it's impossible.

Note the other discrimination category Google is currently under fire for: age. There's currently a class action being assembled for people over the age of 40 who interviewed at Google: https://secure.dahladmin.com/HEATH/Index

My guess is that this is the reason Google is fighting it, not sex or racial discrimination. Google's lawyers took one look at the age distribution of the company (or of new hires) and said "oh dear."

"lack of diversity"

If two groups are different enough that, when you put them together, you call it "diversity"; then why would you expect them to be statistically identical when you pull the groups apart again?

In other words, if the concept of diversity exists at all, you would expect some groups to be overrepresented in one area and underrepresented in others. Why is any of this a surprise?

Note that I am not saying there are any kinds of inherent limitations on what people can accomplish. It could be any number of factors that cause two groups to diverge: culture, life experience, preferences, etc.

But it's pure madness to celebrate diversity and the attack any differences in outcomes.

This whole topic is very bothersome, as many of the comments in the thread so far have pointed out.

For anyone who is generally for these kinds of policies (equality, diversity, whatever), can you please explain your position from the ground up? I am genuinely asking, because from my point of view there are huge assumptions made that seem to me, on the surface, to be unjustified.

One version is: we're still crawling out from under the very long shadow of centuries (in the US, arguably millennia in many other places) of codified society-wide discrimination, enforced by law and by custom, to ensure that people of a certain gender or a certain race aren't allowed to pursue particular career paths or do particular things with their lives.

It is ludicrous to think that this has been completely toppled and undone with no lingering sequelae whatsoever, entirely within living memory (large, organized nationwide movements in the US for sexual and racial equality have only reached the point of realistically being able to even start fighting for equal access to industries and jobs in the last 50-60 years or so), and that now we just somehow know that the distributions of people in industries we happen to see right now are the "natural" distributions, produced free of bias, prejudice or discrimination. Especially when high-paying/high-prestige industries still disproportionately are made up of (relative to the general population) the gender and race which historically rigged things to their benefit. Any claim that bias has been removed and we still got this result is incredibly suspicious in the face of historical evidence.

Thus, explicit, active measures should be employed to watch for and counteract the bias which is highly likely to still exist and be in operation.

Another version is: because every time an industry has claimed to be meritocratic in its hiring process, that low diversity is because "that group just isn't interested in our field", etc., it's turned out -- on actual inspection -- to be false. The classic example is orchestra blind auditions: once reviewers were unable to know the gender of a candidate, suddenly a lot more women were discovered to be qualified to play in orchestras!

Given how often this type of thing has happened in other fields, there is no reason to presume that tech is some sort of special exception. Think of it like the principle of mediocrity in cosmology, where constantly-recentered claims of "well, where we are is special and unique" continually got blown out of the water until people learned to assume that where we are is average. Attempts to label tech as the one industry that really is somehow a unique outlier in being free of bias and that a majority of the human race just "naturally isn't interested in" or "naturally aren't as good at" are overwhelmingly likely to be blown out of the water sooner or later. Where we are now is not some special ordained natural law engraved into our DNA.

And yet people consistently argue that tech is that one unique special outlier where it really is the case that women/black people/etc. "just aren't interested" or "naturally aren't as good".

Thus, explicit, active measures should be employed to watch for and counteract the bias which is highly likely to still exist and be in operation.

Labor department can't access IRS filings?

Everything has a process, it is not surprising government entity X cannot access government entity Y stuff automatically. Would you assume the CIA can access the FBI documents? Its not always so obviously simple.

> Would you assume the CIA can access the FBI documents?

Legally, or realistically?

> Would you assume the CIA can access the FBI documents?

You picked a bad example.

I'm not a lawyer but it looks like the IRS is basically prohibited from releasing tax records unless there is a court order or the request has something to do with tax administration, social security, or medicare.

So I'm not sure the IRS would be able to give the Labor department those records.

https://www.irs.gov/government-entities/federal-state-local-...

I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws. They were originally designed for manual labor jobs and the like. I would be willing to compromise by limiting them to these kinds of jobs.

You're seriously suggesting legalizing racial and gender discrimination for all jobs except digging ditches?

Please consider any group that you were born into, and imagine being denied entry to an industry based solely on your inclusion in that group. Or perhaps being admitted, but at a fraction of the pay off someone bit in your group.

Anti discrimination laws exist because historically dominant groups in the US have treated people from protected classes very, very poorly in matters of employment, housing, and access to services. Removal of these laws could very easily lead to reinstatment of segregation or other kinds of severe abuses that we as a society have decided are odious. We can see this directly with the pretty blatant anti black voting laws being enacted in many of the southern states after the supreme Court gutted the voting Rights act recently.

Manual labor was just an example. The key is that the job performance for example is easily measurable.

Are you arguing that discrimination should be illegal only when it's difficult to cover up? Not sure I see where you're coming from here.

Well, you need evidence to prove discrimination, and not all discrimination leave evidence. This is unlike things like theft or injury.

Luckily, the courts require evidence to make a decision. With a large company, systematic pay discrimination can certainly be observed (or not, if no pay discrimination is taking place). If, for example, all women at a large enough company were being parted a fraction of what men in comparable positions were making, we would have strong statistical evidence of discrimination, and the courts could make a decision against that company.

Requesting data from Google is presumably for this kind of a statistical investigation into whether systematic discrimination has taken place. Google, for its part, is arguing that the particular kinds of data being requested are beyond what is needed for this kind of analysis.

But there are things like "PIPs" that have problems, just to name one example. Of course, it is probably a good idea to mention that some of this stuff varies by state. I think California is one of the most strict in this area, making it even worse (a lot of posters mentioned this when Yishan, a former Reddit CEO, posted against an employee).

As the filing says, Google signed a contract which included a clause agreeing to "permit the Government to inspect and copy any books, accounts, records (including computerized records), and other material that may be relevant" etc.

What did they expect would happen?

They're only required to provide information that is "pertinent to compliance...". The question is whether or not the private contact details of tens of thousands of employees and ex-employees is pertinent. Google thinks not.

I'd argue the CNN article contains more info: http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/04/technology/google-labor-depa...

And links to the actual lawsuit: https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease...

"Google has repeatedly refused to provide names, contact information, job history and salary history details that the government has requested for its employees."

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