More than 60 women consider suing Google, claiming sexism and a pay gap

“They are concerned that women are channeled to levels and positions that pay less than men with similar education and experience,”

I have no idea if that's true, but if so, that could be a sort of "secret pay penalty".

It is a somewhat difficult path to negotiate at hiring as levels and titles aren't consistent across companies.

Market value, however, is something that can be measured quite effectively. And I think most of developers on HN do it regularly, when they go to interviews without any real intention of changing their workplace.

As soon as you cost more than the value you bring, the business will lost interest in keeping you anyway.

> No lawsuit is needed to correct that.

If they can either get Google to settle or convince a jury they deserve compensation, they've retroactively increased their pay. It's a high and expensive bar, but if they clear it they get paid more for work they already did.

So to put it into the perspective you're espousing, these women are simply negotiating their rate after the fact.

You can say women are different than men or say they are exactly equals. Whatever is your position for the same job you must have the same salary. There shouldn't be any discussion here.

I've read the article a third time, I can't find how "the article already accounts for the nuances of those topics."

Could you point me to what I'm missing?

[Edit] I'm not making the case for negotiations, I'm a proponent of https://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator

Which isn't a problem in itself. But these are gatekeeping mechanisms that are gatekeeping what may become the ONLY good jobs in the future as everything becomes automated.

It's not about proving your worth but looking out for people trying to cram into the departing boat.

Whether there's enough space or if the boat can grow or even if the boat is as useful as it claims is another story.

Goverments used to burn books not because peasants could read them but because of the lifeline it extended. An opportunity to challenge.

Tech exponentially creates more and more knowledge requiring more and more specialization. It's not enough to throw scraps because difference can still grow if the scraps are small enough. Even though the rising tide lifts all boats, the difference in speed creates master/slave like riers.

Certain societies and cultures place more emphasis on the responsibility of the powerful to create these lifelines. Others are more individualistic.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm

It seems similar to the way it was at Facebook in that when you start, you'll be assigned a level based on your previous experience and it'll be corrected soon afterwards if it turns out to have been wrong. They mostly corrected up, though - it was very rare for someone to be assigned a high level and then downgraded afterwards.

Obviously the Glassdoor link shows that there is a pretty big range in the salary bands - I think some of this is down to people reporting total target compensation (including RSUs, bonuses etc) versus base salary but there was a fairly large range at FB too. It wasn't uncommon to stay at the same level but have your base salary go up by $20-25k.

https://www.oalj.dol.gov/Decisions/ALJ/OFC/2017/OFCCP_-_SAN_...

Page 10 has the information:

A “compensation team” sets the salary for each hire. Tr. 165-69. The team has no direct contact with the applicant and does not have the applicant’s name, gender, race, or ethnicity. Id. For industry hires, the committee might be given the applicant’s current compensation but no earlier compensation data. Tr. 175-77.

For the employees included in the September 2015 “snapshot,” about 20 percent were campus hires. Tr. 197-98. The only circumstance under which Google might increase the starting compensation for a campus hire is when the applicant has a competing offer greater Google’s. Google will not offer a larger salary or annual bonus plan, but it might offer a larger sign-on bonus or one-time stock grant. Tr. 207, 210-16, 223. There are no starting pay negotiations, and Google considers no other factors. Tr. 197-98.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967440

Reading the memo is irrelevant to the fact claim you quoted, which is about the response to the memo, not about it's content. (It's also completely accurate; the memo has been widely condemned on the basis stated.)

> Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo?

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the document was widely condemned as being both of those things. Reporting that those condemnations occurred (they did) isn't an implicit validation of said condemnations.

The document has been inaccurately labeled (I've seen a Slate op-ed making statements that are blatantly false) , but the people who are acting like it is some kind of academic work have apparently never done academic work.

The guy took a few academic sources and mixed in stuff from the New York Post. It's not well sourced. What people do see is an academic study linked and say "see, this is scientific", but most people aren't trained to read that literature so it's just psuedo-scientific garble.

Why is the tech world turning itself upside down for a mediocre undergrad paper?

... what? It's the Guardian. It's a left-wing version of Breitbart. The vast majority of their 'reporting' is ideology-based fact spinning. I keep wondering why people somehow say that it's a 'respectable newspaper'.

Everything after that is handwaving and ipse dixit. Egregiously, the memo takes it for granted that software is "thing-oriented" rather than "people-oriented." That defies reality. Software development is far more collaborative and social than, say, being a historian (a field where women receive 45% of the PhDs).

The memo also asserts, without proof, that these observed differences are stable across cultures. That's just false. Take education, for example. In India, men are overrepresented in teaching (80% of teachers are men).[1] And gender representation in STEM majors varies dramatically between different countries. Women are 40% of the STEM workforce in China. Over a third of the USSR's engineers were women, even in the 1960s.

In short, the reasoning in the article is so flimsy I'd be embarassed to be that sloppy in an HN post, much less in a company-wide memo. Which brings me to sexism. I have a hard time believing that anyone smart enough to work at Google actually finds such sloppy reasoning convincing. Instead, the memo smacks of the sort of grasping at straws rationalization used to justify existing prejudices.

[1] The underlying study also makes egregious assumptions about whether professions are "people oriented" versus "thing oriented." Figure 1 depicts a people-things axis and an ideas-data axis. It puts "teacher" at the far end of the "people" axis, and characterizes that as a feminine profession. The study also characterizes "biologist" on the masculine side of the column, even though a significant majority of biology majors in the U.S. are women.

But if they make the claim that a document, person, or company is misogynistic or scientifically inaccurate, stating it as fact, then they are liable.

This is why so much reporting today is sprinkled liberally with the word "alleged". It's more common (and reasonable) in reporting on crime, when police or prosecutors claim that someone is guilty before the trial is complete, but it seems to be a habit that seeps into all reporting.

>Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo?

Well, they were quite clever, weren't they. They didn't make any claims about the document itself, just about its reception.

And so what they write is technically true, the memo was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate, even if those condemnations were completely wrong.

And of course the impression the sentence gives is that the document was these things. Journalists are good with words, they do this sort of thing all the time.

I used to read "Der Spiegel" a lot, one of the premier German weeklies. And I used to take what I read at face value. Until they started writing about stuff I had first hand knowledge off. Which tended to be comically inaccurate.

And then I started looking more closely, and noticed that they would pull these little language tricks all the time: giving an example, then an absolute number of one thing, comparing it to a percentage of another thing. Creating impressions and "causal" connection between events or facts by simply mentioning them next to each other, without ever making the claim. Etc.

It is actually entertaining to analyze, but don't expect to get too much useful information.

And no, I am not yelling "Fake News", most of the alternative news sources are far, far worse, not relying on linguistic trickery but just simply lying.

Anyway, the ones that do this the least (that I know of), are the Economist (their pro-finance, pro-CEO bias is transparent enough not to be much of a problem), the BBC (they actually really try hard) and Die Zeit (German).

Fun!

EDIT: An important "not" was missing. Sigh.