Google is in the core of Silicon Valley, extremely liberal, socially conscious, etc. etc., pretty much from top to bottom. To be honest, if the government were correct here my reaction to this news isn't a renewed belief in the need to do better... my reaction is that if even Google, hypothetically (since I'm not assuming that Google is necessarily wrong), couldn't manage to have equal pay, with all of its immense resources, its obvious desire to handle this correctly for all kinds of reasons, and with all of the money that is metaphorically sloshing down every hallway for them, it's time to just pack it in and give up on the idea of doing any better than Google. (Note that doesn't mean everybody else is "done", but that they shouldn't be expected to do any better than Google.) That would imply to me and probably most people that apparently this problem is just unsolvable past this point; what is anyone else who isn't as abundantly resourced as Google supposed to do that Google isn't already doing?
I'm actually inclined to believe Google on this one moreso than a government, because as much as for any other company in the world they have the resources to create a reasonable definition of parity and then not particularly blink to achieve that parity by simply paying certain people more, with no other compromises needed. (Most companies would need some sort of compromise to use that plan, because one way or another the books need to balance.)
(And please do me the favor of reading this message carefully again if you're really enraged by it and want to just smash the downvote button... if that's your reaction you may need to double-check your reading.)