At Google, Employee-Led Effort Finds Men Are Paid More Than Women
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm not a big fan of large companies, I don't think they can win. Even if you have good numbers, that doesn't fit the narrative of "Silicon Valley has established itself as the boys’ club". Say for example, we applauded companies who are doing better, maybe even close to statistical significance, then you could say, "Hey, it's still not quite there yet, but it's close and we're doing better than others. Come work for us and help us make it right." And then that would be actionable advice, and companies would have a great reason to strive for this. But we'd also have to be honest about statistical error rates, and maybe some other stuff.
I'll close on this, I've heard people say stupid and offensive shit when they're drunk, but never "Hey, let's pay women less", although I'm not an executive. So I feel like it isn't a common thought... unless you keep reading articles like this one.
Here's what I think a big driver is (you're going to have to walk down premise lane with me as I don't want to spend the time on citations ATM): Presuming that women are in general more agreeable than man in the workplace and that they don't fight as hard and as often for raises, I would expect an otherwise equal male counterpart that is more aggressive to have higher pay. Why? Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Every year when we did promotions we'd start out with a zero-sum raise pool. Let's say if everyone got exactly the same, they'd get 2%. But if I give Bob a raise of 4% I have to go 'take' that extra 2% from people or everyone. If I'm worried about Bob leaving, or he's asked for a raise and plead a good case, he's going to get it. If Alice or Charlie have been silent all year but have been doing an otherwise good job, they're going to get what's leftover- in general.
There have been a number of cases where we idtenified someone silently kick major ass and threw money at them, but that I think it is because we had very conscientious managers that worked closely with their subordinates, unlike BigCo.
I'm not even going to touch on all the other reasons that people have laid out as possible reasons why women tend to earn less. I think if you've got two people working well, doing the exact same job and producing the exact same outputs, they should be paid nearly equally, but we're humans and life is messy. Some people haggle better than others, some had a very low salary before that the new job used to baseline, etc.
If you really want to maximize your salary at an given job, argue for every last penny coming in. All future raises (for the most part) will be based off that number and it will haunt you for your entire tenure at the company- most likely.
1. You approach a manager with expanded responsibilities that would justify more pay. Or a detailed account of your undocumented responsibilities that justify more pay. Don't come at me asking for more money for the same job if you're not already (or plan on) doing more work than we agreed to.
I went from Architect to Director this way.
2. You have another offer from another company and give your old company a chance to match. This could have ramifications that everyone goes around and around about. The general rule of thumb is not to do this, but if you believe in your current company, what you're doing them is informing them you're below market for YOU, and they've got an opportunity to fix that.
I did this at one company and it worked fine, but I left a year later anyway. There's some stats that say a large portion of people who do this are gone within a year.
...and Alice and Charlie just find another job in a few years because their raises haven't been keeping up with market rates. It's not necessarily the direct managers' fault unless corporate gives:
* estimates of market rates
* recommendations that an average employee gets an X% raise to track with market rate (or even stay ahead of it)
* a big enough pile of money to compensate everyone in line with market rates
* even more money to reward high achievers (and probably squeaky wheels, too)
This seems like a tall order to most budget-makers, so instead wise employees change jobs every so often to make sure their salaries keep up with market rates.
If you like your colleagues and the work you do, leaving the company for a raise seems more aggressive than first telling your manager that you are unhappy with your pay.
Every year when we did promotions we'd start out with a
zero-sum raise pool.
If I'm an employee and I do some great work that brings the company an extra $X per annum, and I ask for a raise of $0.1X the company is welcome to take that out of the $X I made them.
If the company decides to instead take the $0.1X from someplace else, that's their decision not mine - claiming raises are zero-sum is just bullshit to make people feel guilty about asking for a raise.
We can debate how that $X should be divided between workers, executives, creditors, shareholders and reinvestment. But there's no "financial reality" that means workers' share has to be zero.
Every organisation has rules and budgets and procedures, but they're made by people and if they don't work right they can be fixed by people. It's not like the CEO received the budget from God on stone tablets on a mountain 2000 years ago.
If I wanted to work in some calcified bureaucracy where rules were more important than outcomes and worker performance was irrelevant, I wouldn't be working in the private sector!
It's also highly unlikely that your singular effort created 10K more profit. That 10K was likely the culmination of a number of people who had varying levels of participation in the effort.
Unless you're working at a company that tracks your hours to every single possible project you're working on, there's often a huge blind spot as to where exactly your effort is going as it pertains to revenue. Unless your in professional services or some other type of billable position, then I actually agree with your notion to a degree...
With regards to people in billable positions, I once workthink d for a company that did something I really thought was neat. At the end of every quarter they'd announce a profit sharing rate based off of whatever it was that defined the rate. Since we were all billable this rate was at $X per billable hour. So if you billed more, you participated in a greater share of the revenue. I frequently saw $10-20K quarterly bonuses based entirely off my effort. It was quite motivating.
Because the profit sharing was the same rate for everyone and took in to account the entire company's financials, you were assured that your billable efforts were going to be rewarded on the same scale as the next person.
If you fly too close to the sun and your weekly pay directly relates to the value you put in that week you'd might have job security but you'd have absolutely no income security!
There was no stack ranking or any other political BS. Here's your pool, do with it as you wish. So, if you ask me, zero sum sucks, but it at very least lets the person closest to the action get a chance to make a call.
It also prevented the managers from just handing out raises for no real reason. For example, you've got two people that have had great years and another that's just been treading water. If you give them the raise you want to, you're going to wind up with nothing left for the third. With an unlimited sum of money at your disposal you may kick that person a percent or two to prevent hurt feelings, now you've got to make the hard call.
Or, if that third person also had a good year and you want to fight for them, you can run it up the chain and shake out a few percent for them. It was always there for the asking if you felt like going through some effort to get it.
So yeah, there's better ways to do it, but it's also not completely awful either.
If that were true, wouldn't the salaries start off the same and then diverge? Doesn't seem to quite match up with these unofficial numbers.
Besides, at most $MegaCorp, isn't compensation reviewed periodically, and some kind of peer review is included? Which means that agreeableness is less of a factor, which means the process is working.
If there existed statistics for such strategy, I wonder if it would have a gender attribute to it.
No, because starting salary is something that is negotiable, too. And you need to push back on the offer and ask for more if you want to make more. If you're not the type to push back, you start lower.
> At Google, Employee-Led Effort Finds Data Scientists Are Paid More Than Web Designers
> At Google, Employee-Led Effort Finds AI Researchers Are Paid More Than Project Managers
I could do this all day...
Any chance they'll release the data that backs up this statistical claim?
It was probably a pretty half baked, self-reported Google form so the data may not be worth much.
Are you suggesting that different jobs might occupy the same level but have widely differing compensation? That might be true - I don't know Google well enough - but that's not how salary bands usually work.
If you have women who largely choose to work in Foo with a compensations which puts them at the top of the band 1 and at the bottom of band 2, and men who work in Bar that starts with compensation at the bottom of band 1, but a promotion gets you to the middle of band 2, then you'll get that in band 1, women earn more, but in band 2, men earn more. This is why you must know the actual distributions (which includes weighting and deviation/variance), and the job role.
Indeed, in level 2, seems like women earn more - maybe? might not even be significant though.
In any case, I'll bet job role correlates far more strongly with compensation than gender.
I highly doubt it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ1JeII0eGo
They recount the ways people have been misrepresenting James' (rather meek) position, right down to accusations of sexism, nazism, malicious removal of academic references and outright lies. A sad testimony of this day and age and the current media climate in the US.
It's like people think covering their ears shouting "LALALA NOT TRUE, WILL NOT DISCUSS" has ever been a constructive way of addressing social issues.
I wish Google would come clean and release the raw stats. I understand that's one politically loaded and sensitive dataset, but nothing beats drawing your own conclusions. Right now, Google is getting flak from all sides, lose-lose.
The fact he couched it in pseudo-science, doesn't make that any less true. That's harmful to Google's image, and no woman would want to work with him after that, so he's toxic. They have every right to fire such a person.
I've been at several companies where literally all managers are men and women no more than objects that are hired based on their looks. Executive meetings are spent discussing female coworkers attributes and who has managed to get laid with who.
I have no idea how google rates on any employee scale but why "surely"?
I will say (anecdotally) that the women that I hired as individual technical contributors and promoted to managers were (on average -- with a small sample size) better at adapting to their new responsibilities than the men.
I didn't hear much of the kind of talk you are talking about -- but I discouraged employee fraternization of that type -- and maybe I was wrong to do so. (This was a while back - maybe norms have changed?)
Assuming women and men employees are (generally speaking) equally skilled yet differently compensated (for whatever reason), rational employers would actually prefer to hire women over men. Just like with any other purchase, all things being equal, cheaper is better.
Perhaps "old" companies with a "tradition" might have a status-quo bias, but new startups/smart CEOs that really try to minimize their burn rate would obviously see this.
Over time more and more women employees would be sought after more then men, which would eventually lead to an equilibrium and remove the pay gap.
So why hasn't this happened (yet)?
In the case about 20% of college graduates who studied Computer Science are female, and about the same proportion are seen employed as Software Engineers in the industry. Those women are not any cheaper than their male counterparts, because they're just as qualified.
Why women and men make different choices in aggregate, as well as if any of that is problematic, are topics of further debate that I don't think we have concrete answers to yet.
A possible explanation is that men, in the aggregate, are more motivated by compensation and willing to put up with more hardship or danger in exchange for more money.
There are a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money because they're dangerous, like working on an oil platform. Suppose those people get paid $90,000 whereas below average tech workers get paid $70,000 and above average tech workers get paid $100,000+. If you're a below average male tech worker who is in it for the money, maybe you take the oil job instead for the extra $20,000/year. The equivalent women take the $70,000/year non-dangerous job, causing the male average for "tech jobs" to be higher than the female average.
It's also possible that more men than women are willing to work longer hours or jobs with less flexible hours in exchange for a higher salary. Employers rationally pay people willing to do that more than people who aren't.
Ironically, thats the type of talk that can get you fired from Google. We have to be able to address the reasons if we want a solution, even if it hurts your sensibilities.
That to me is the answer to this question: So why hasn't this happened (yet)?
Have you seen how many people on here report they have to change jobs to get a raise? Or how often companies will spend $200 worth of employees' time on bureaucracy before replacing a $100 broken chair?
Well there's your problem.
Humans are mostly irrational. Massively so. Rationality isn't the default state, it's not to be expected, it's a rare and precious jewel.
So many nerds dismiss the idea of systematic bias because "rational people wouldn't do that." This is true. It's also true that leprechauns wouldn't do that. Both statements are equally tied to reality.
Obviously, it's because everybody in that field is either a frat boy or evil, and there can be no other explanation /s
The alternative is not that everybody in that field is a frat boy or evil. It's that they're... human.
We are all biased. The only differences are a matter of degree, and whether or not we acknowledge it.
That should even out then, right? Or is bias somehow not normally distributed?
I'm happy to call BS on "bias" and "irrational" explanations - sounds like something you make up when you want to dismiss something and can't be arsed to come up with a proper explanation.
There are preferences for prettiness/beauty and especially tallness. They are biologically routed, well documented, and have good predictive power. I guess you could call that a bias. From looking at high competency fields such as doctors or lawyers, there doesn't seem to be a gender bias, neither biologically, nor culturally.
So which systematic bias are you proposing that would employers to act so irrationally, but yet somehow opt for the more expensive labour cost. Even if e.g. a CEO is racist, he's not going to lose sleep over offshoring jobs. Is gender different, if so why/why not?
On the flip side, if it is a systematic bias like tallness, do we have an obligation to combat it? Height doesn't get nearly the same treatment. Either way, the "bias"/"irrationality" argument is lazy and incomplete.
Do you seriously suggest that bias should be evenly distributed? For every person biased against women in some field, there's another person equally biased against men?
After all of these discussions about this topic on HN, I'm starting to wonder if HN actually has users posting from a parallel universe. Because some of the things being described don't match the one I live in at all.
Actually I don't remember, I wasn't alive or in the US for that. But from my understanding, calling that "bias" is a bit of an understatement.
> For every person biased against women in some field
What bias and which people? A general anti-women bias in society? In all men? White men? Only in tech? Only men in tech against women in tech? Any specifics at all for your hypothesis?
Fact is, there are fewer women than men doing CS degrees, about 20% AFAIK. That seems broadly to carry over to the ratio of genders in tech roles. Women seem to earn less than men. We don't really know why either is the case, but people are working hard to "correct" that, even though we have no idea what correct looks like. Some people think 50% would be good, because that's roughly the ratio in the general population. Looking at other majors and fields, 50% sometimes happens, sometimes doesn't.
Maybe there are better ways to approach this than to claim everybody is prejudice - maybe that's true, but is it constructive? Why is the ratio in tech disproportionate? Why is the ratio in veterinarians disproportionate? Are these equally important issues? Are they getting the same amount of coverage?
At the moment, it seems that all the nuance we've got is a hammer, and publications like the New York Times are sure reporting on a lot of nails.
Bonus question: Is Big Bang Theory good or bad for the tech industry, and do you think it will increase, decrease, or have no effect on gender ratios in tech?
There's a lot of reporting on nails because there are a ton of nails. Gender bias has been a thing literally since before recorded history. There are blatant examples quite recently, too. Until the 1970s, it was routine for banks to refuse to issue credit cards to women without their husbands' permission. Am I to believe that his problem, which is literally thousands of years old (probably more) has been solved in the past 40 years?
I have no idea about Big Bang Theory, never saw it.
Even if Google were perfectly fair internally, women coming in from academia are likely to have faced gender bias [1], meaning less impressive resumes and therefore lower starting positions. Similar logic applies to women coming in from industry: one component to hiring pay and title is previous pay and title; external bias can easily be imported.
But it would be a miracle if Google were perfectly fair internally given our society's long history of sexism, documented gender bias in academia (from which Google draws some of its culture and a lot of its people), and the ongoing issues in the tech industry. I'd expect Google's promotion ladder to reflect that to one extent or another, meaning that the levels themselves have some level of bias to them.
[1] e.g., http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract and http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl-0000022.pdf
To play devil's advocate, if the performance review process was good/perfect and skill = compensation, factors like "less impressive resumes" should even out pretty quickly, right?
But even at a place that didn't have slow-down-there bias built in to the promotion process, the way you prove you're qualified for the next level is by doing work that's above your current level. Nobody will give staff engineer work to somebody in an entry level position; there's too much jockeying for that work by people one level down. So there's a practical limit to the rate at which somebody can advance even with no bias.
I'm more concerned about stuff that wouldn't show up in this data. For example, assuming a woman who is equally qualified as a man, I expect that the woman would be at a lower level on average, because e.g. of studies like those cited in [2]. I suspect that Google is better about this than most places, but I have heard too many stories from my woman coworkers to believe that things are perfectly fair. But I suspect this article makes things out to be perhaps slightly worse than they are, at least on the compensation front.
[1]: https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-05-30/women-underestimate-s... [2]: https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men
> women coming in from academia are likely to have faced gender bias
Did you mean bias in their favor ?
"Women have substantial advantage in STEM faculty hiring, except when competing against more-accomplished men" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611984/
"Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions" http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-o...
"Study of accreditation exams reveals biases actually favor women in STEM positions" https://phys.org/news/2016-07-accreditation-exams-reveals-bi...
https://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-...
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Myth-That-Academic-Scie...
https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/michae...
The study about French would-be teachers seems of very low relevance to me to software engineers.
And no, I don't have to do better than that. It's not my job to argue some random anonymous dude into understanding sexism. The people who want to understand the topic will do the work of contextualizing that one study.
Those who never really wanted to understand, like you and the anonymous dude who tried using that study as a trump card, will go on with your opinions no matter what anybody tells you.
Ironically enough, based on the above evidence, the last statement likely applies to you.
I'll add that I have evidence for my assumption that dudes are biased when evaluating material about sexism. Aside from my 20 years of experience talking with dudes in tech about tech's gender bias, there's also a study showing this effect: https://www.wired.com/story/why-men-dont-believe-the-data-on...
So let's see your data.
Of course, some disclaimers apply. Any conclusions you draw based on a study have to stay faithful to its constraints. And you have to keep in mind that some fields are more trustworthy than others. E.g., so-called 'social sciences' seem to be as much overrun by extreme-left fanatics as the 'progressive' mass media, which is evident in ignoring obvious control factors (e.g. taking into account marital status and number of children reverses results on sex bias [1]) and in publication bias [2].
Also, it's you who needs to prove something wrong, since it's you who doubts a scientific study. And please stop linking news articles, I'm no longer entertained to learn more ways in which the mass media spins the Damore story.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/pdf/pna...
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/...
You also get to ignore any article about scientific research (even if it is written by a scientist) because of those darned politically biased journalists. Fake news!
You have constructed a nice, comfortable political bubble for yourself. One you're only willing to talk about under cover of anonymity. This could be because you are the true lone genius you see yourself as. Or it could be because you are picking and choosing anything that you find politically inconvenient. Perhaps, as a genius, you can guess which one I'm thinking here.
So it's okay from your point of view that major news outlets, such as Bloomberg TV, switch into propaganda mode and start making anti-factual claims, such as 'there is no research to support the idea that there are biological causes for the lack of women in tech' [1]. It might be too much to expect commercial media to be objective, but outright fabricating facts is nothing less than betrayal of everything journalism stands for.
Is that a singular case of leftist propaganda? Far from it. If you took a look at Google News the week this story was hot, you'd see your run-of-the-mill articles that open by twisting facts in the title. E.g., 'Anti-diversity manifesto' was apparently considered a mild way to describe it [2]. Some of them proceeded to make false claims, e.g. that Damore was "criticizing the company’s efforts to increase diversity" (no he was not, he considers diversity a good thing and suggests better ways to increase it) or arguing that Google "should stop offering programs to minorities and women" (he was only discussing racist and sexist programs, not _all_ programs) [3].
As to 'fake news' - I take it you're trying to paint me as a Trump supporter. So let me tell you I'm not one, and I didn't even know what that was all about (as I never bothered with US mainstream media before) before it hit me where it hurts with the Damore story. Now I don't know how much pro-Trump media twisted facts, maybe it was the same. All I know is I was shocked to find the mainstream US media to be so ideologically charged as to attack a guy for his [very mild and well-substantiated] opinions with forged facts and labels. Because I know that guy could have been me.
In summary, you, together with the mainstream US culture, need to pop your own obvious, well-documented and plainly visible ideological bubble before you start making claims that people with true liberal, pro-science, pluralistic views like myself are in one.
[1] https://youtu.be/s4WoeOkj2Ng?t=2m1s
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/5/16101978/google-employee-w...
[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/google-fires-employe...
Because "men are paid more than women" alone simply says NOTHING.
In the company I used to work there were HUGE salary differences between men with the same job title, and the difference sometimes could run up hundreds of euros. The main reason was that the better paid men negotiated their terms of employment WAY better than those that got paid less.
I suspect to see something very much alike here. Also, I would like to see the salary distribution within men and women, because I can almost certainly guarantee that some women are paid more than some men, but I don't think we will ever see that because that would destroy the entire "all men are paid more than women for no reason other than they are men" narrative some people are still trying to push, while it is related to a LOT of other things other than just pure gender.
BTW, if a salary difference is SUCH a big problem why stick with the companies who do this? Why not find employment somewhere else, or start your own company with better working conditions? It isn't like you are FORCED to work for Google or any other of the big corps in Silicon Valley if you don't like how they treat people there.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/pdf/pna...
That's all I needed to see. Nothing worthwhile here. The people who'll tend to report will be the people who are worried about how much they earn. I'd say all this shows is that men are less worried about how much they earn than women.
What are they hiding? They must know what that data will reveal is the only explanation.
Education and extra-curricular activities don't seem to be taken into account, which can easily explain the gap in the lower tiers.