Google accused of extreme gender pay discrimination by Department of Labor | Hacker News Reader

Google accused of extreme gender pay discrimination by Department of Labor

theguardian.com

59 pointshudibras15 comments

So what's the data? Why even bother discussing (this specific case) without that?

Assume the ideal of simmilar pay for simmilar positions: Here google might employ 3 top tier female programers and 7 top tier male programmers with equally high pay, while the rest of the workforce is split even, also with simmilar pay. So they might have sourced from the top tier of progammers where there might be a gender imbalance and it would cause the average pay of men to rise.

On the other hand discrimination might have a far bigger impact on which roles equaly qualified men or women get in the first place and how many promotions they get. I also wonder how broad job "roles" are defined. You'd need that bo be quite detailed to compare equal roles and avoid the scenario above.

Why should a gender imbalance among top tier programmers cause the average pay of men to rise?

Uh, outlier skew?

In lower tiers you might be able achive something closer to a 50/50 gender balance. So you have e.g.:

low tier: 50 women, 50 men

high tier: 30 women, 70 men

So the average man as more paid like a high tier employee.

I strongly suspect this is a DoL methodology problem. Can we really believe that the same company that puts huge effort into retaining women through its maternity policies (5 months maternity leave with full pay [paternity is 7 weeks] and a $500 stipend for takeout meals after a baby's born, among other things) has a conspiracy reaching the highest levels to short change women, such that its legal department refuses to comply with court orders to hand over data in order to hide its crimes?

Wasn't google a conspirator in Job's illegal scheme to depress engineer wages? I don't see what's shocking about the notion that a company that conspires to suppress wages may do so again.

Yes http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-anti-trust-2013-...

Well, we are there again. This is the very common Berkley Gender Admission Bias all over again. DoL just forgot to check their base rates of female developers and points to a relation nevertheless. I wouldn't be surprised if, when accounting for the distribution of female developers, it were to be the other way around. That Google is paying a bit more to retain them.

Women don't negotiate comp as often as men do. They leave money on the table. It's somewhat of an open secret among execs who have managed large teams inside these companies. Absent a cultural shift among women to ask for more (which they should, because they'd get it - and rightfully so as they are doing the same work), there aren't a lot of great solutions to this. Do you narrowly fix comp like law firms do for associates? Do you assign each employee a headhunter to negotiate on their behalf? Each potential solution creates other problems. It's fair to point out that this is a problem outside of tech also, but the rapid growth in salaries in tech, and especially in the Bay Area, have made the disparity more extreme and noticeable.

Almost no one negotiates comp with Google -- because their recruiters strongly discourage it and all decisions are made by committee.

Have you ever heard of the term lipstick on a pig?

I love it when real news like this gets 40 upvotes but stuff that's blatant PR gets hundreds.

HN is now a place to discuss corporate press releases and little more.

Depends if the company is in the hivemind's favor or not. IE what you are saying holds true for Google. For Uber, Microsoft, and really recently Apple, the inverse is true.

I'm sure people will treat this the same way they treated Uber for the same thing /s

Unsurprising given the stories.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com