Google faces new discrimination charge: paying female teachers less than men
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Three men isn't remotely statistically significant. They can't make any kind of statistical claim based on that.
Second a gender ration of 1 male to 50 females is obscene. Tech is supposedly incredibly sexist for having a gender ratio of less than 2 to 1.
Teaching, especially pre-K teaching, has long been held out as an extreme examples as a field extremely effected by unequal social gender roles, and one where that distortion is particularly socially harmful. And Google is pretty much dead average for pre-K teaching with this ratio.
What kind of programs can be put in place for gender equality in teaching? Is there some sort of National problem?
Seems like Google is no better than anyone else when it comes to using letting "market rate" limit the income opportunities of workers in "pink collar" jobs like this. Google could easily give a decent 55-60k salary to each skilled education professional that works full-time in their pre-k program. The fact that they would play games with this woman's economic well-being over a petty 3$/hr shows that they've coasted on their reputation as a good place to work for much longer than deserved. Hope they pay out well for this.
Sounds like affirmative action is drastically needed. Hire some men to increase diversity in the workforce. It's especially important to ensure men are equally represented in the more senior roles at level 2 and above...right?
Speaking seriously, if you want to normalise women in roles where they aren't you need to normalise men in roles were they aren't either.
If more men go in to teaching, there are more roles for women to take up, or speaking in the inverse - if you exclude men from roles (such as teaching) they need to find jobs elsewhere, and thats usually in positions where men are the majority.
To be fair, they are at almost exactly the national pre-K average there.
> Speaking seriously, if you want to normalise women in roles where they aren't you need to normalise men in roles were they aren't either.
OTOH, given finite demand in each field, getting more women into high-paying professions that currently are disproportionately male should naturally result in more men in low-paying professions that are currently disproportionately female as a natural consequence.
And Google's representation of women in software engineering roles is also around the industry average.
To your second point, it's not either or. You can both better incentivize women in tech and men in teaching.
Sure. And both scenarios need industry-wide efforts to increase gender equality. But Google is basically an irrelevant factor in the pre-K teaching industry, and a giant one in the software industry.
> To your second point, it's not either or.
Societally, sure. In the case of particular firms, their ability to impact different fields with the same expenditure of resources is highly dependent on their position in the various fields.
Is it the case in Silicon Valley that many of the executives are women?
Agreed. I am male as well and while my school did not have many male teachers, I definitely benefited from the few male teachers that did exist.
> We should probably pay teachers more to encourage more high performers of both genders. I suspect paying better would attract more men as well.
At the (public) schools I went to, teacher pay was solely determined by credentials and seniority. Anecdotally, men seem to be more attracted to positions where compensation is determined through performance and risk. If that's true, perhaps changing teacher pay to be more reflective of performance would increase the number of men.
1.) Did it because they found the work extremely meaningful 2.) Were already used to living in poverty and accepted that it would continue as a professional. 3.) Knew that any future family/kids would be dependent on having a spouse that earned more than them.
I've talked to some men who considered that path, but a few told me they wouldn't pursue it because they'll need to be the breadwinner if they want a family some day, and they can't do that comfortably (without a second job) on a teacher's paycheck.
Sorta makes sense though, the men who are most talented and interested in working with children are also most likely to want children of their own. And unfortunately societal pressures do still tell men that they are responsible for providing economically, and that doing so is critical to being attractive as a partner. Hopefully that will change going forward. I know far more partnerships where a woman makes more money among my peer group than my parents know among theirs.
If the teacher is a woman, ah shucks how cute.
If the teacher is a man, he's a perv.
No sane male would take a teaching job in today's climate.
A pipeline problem caused by unfair assumptions about someone's suitability for a career based on their sex.
Weird, that feels so familiar...
The pipeline issue is caused, in every industry and not just tech, by either a mismatch of people's preferences and the working conditions of a job, or by the way the working conditions of a job are structured. As an example of a change over time that flips gender indifferences, men dominated Veterinarian roles while it was about livestock and birthing cows, but women now dominate (80%+) when it has become much more about cute little suburban pugs and kittens.
Damore's memo - which I'm gonna assume everyone knows - made the generally accepted statement that women prefer people over things AND he offered a (rarely discussed) solution: a larger emphasis on peer programming.
I think that sounds, in theory, like a very reasonable approach to the pipleline problem. If the standard mental model for programming changed from the Richard Hendrix sitting all alone in a dark, locked room belting out the code for Pied Piper "middle out" encryption in techo blaring headphones, to peer coding with human interaction at its core, that would be far more attractive to those with a people vs things preference.
The fact that technical classes in programming are typically electives in high school, and not just mandatory science classes is a big part of it. Guys are more likely to self-select into those classes and take those classes with other guys (in part because video games are a great pathway to programming), and guidance counselors and parents are more likely to steer them towards it over girls as well. This ends up making it so that by the time college starts, many of the guys in intro programming classes have experience and set an unrealistic bar for total noobs who don't. Add in the fact that it's easy for a woman to feel singled out in a class like that, and it's no wonder they don't pick it up in college either. I was one of two women in a class of 50ish for CS 101, and even though I had prior experience, I felt pressured to over-assert myself so that guys would stop coming over every opportunity to offer "help". They weren't being jerks, but they were typical 18 year old dudes who wanted to show off and get my attention, and I just wasn't there for that. I'm not exaggerating though when I say it was typical for the other girl (who was a noob) to have 4-5 guys around her for any assignment seeing how they could "help" while noob guys were pretty much ignored. Harvey Mudd has an excellent program that addresses this directly, I definitely recommed reading up on it: http://beta.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-harvey-mudd-tec...
The single biggest factor that was common among women I know who switched into CS later (but did not initially consider it a major) was that their parents and school never exposed them to it as a career. Both are very rational and logical people, one was doing bio, and another was doing chemical engineering. Neither of them had ever taken a class about comp sci, or even really talked to a programmer before college. One never even had a game console because ultra-religious parents disapproved (though they gave her brother one). When I talked to them more about what I did day-to-day with programming, and how it was very creative and fulfilling for me (plus $$), they gave it a try and ended up switching majors and becoming software engineers. Obviously there are women I talked to who didn't switch, but those two are exactly the kind of people who might have missed out on a great tech career due only to gender socialization differences which seem mild at first glance. I strongly believe mandatory CS classes at the high school level would do a huge part in making sure minds like theirs have the chance to get on board sooner.
Yet Google news finds more than 600 articles with titles such as:
- Male teacher drought may hurt boys
- How do we recruit boys into female-dominated professions?
- Our schools are failing boys, which is bad news for Britain
- Most schools would love to have more male teachers to serve as role models for boys, but not many volunteer. (first line of article, not headline)
etc...
https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&biw=1324&bih=1190&tbm=n...
The higher salaries for the male teachers this very article is about may actually be a sign for Google's attempts to improve the gender ratio.
I have no knowledge of how these salaries are set. It's possible they're decided individually, because these jobs are rather different than most others at Google.
In that case, I could imagine the people in charge of the daycare facilities trying to attract more men and (possibly without much active thought) making higher offers to them.
Those two phrasings call for completely different action.
Now we're moving the goalpost.
But anyway, I doubt your impression.
["women in it" discrimination] get 1.2 million hits on google, while ["women in it" culture] gets 37.5 million hits.
Note that "changing culture" means nothing else but "making the job more attractive for women", or "women don't want to work in IT".
Here's the first headline I get on Google News for ["women in IT"]: "Why We Should Encourage More Women to Work in IT"
That's awfully close to the "How do we recruit boys[..]" I cited above.
It's simply not worth the harassment and suffering to attempt to be involved in child education if you're a male.
This would be a great chance for google to show the world how its done on equality, and have a google branded push for more males in teaching and more women in tech.
It would definitely show the critics of hiring more women in technology, that it really is about equality.
Given that they haven't done this does that mean that critics of hiring more women in tech are right in their conclusion that it isn't about equality?
However I'd be disappointed in Google if they didn't try to even out the gender ratio of the teachers and hire some more males as well. I can understand it would look like hypocrisy to some.
In an article about a position in which 1 in 50 employees is a man, the article includes the line "Across Google, women make up only 31% of employees."
There are many, many tech jobs where almost all the qualified people are men (think high end security, really low level packet optimisation stuff, pretty much any extreme fringe skill). That means to address the 31% figure company wide, tech giants need to fiddle with the numbers in jobs where it is not mission critical, e.g. you can't get to 50% in security, but you can make sure that 100% of the cleaners are women. Of course, this discriminates against under-skilled men and massively exacerbates the gender pay disparity internally, but that is impossible to fix company wide whilst being defendable on a department by department basis (e.g. employees of position X irrespective of gender are paid equally), whereas the company wide ratio is fixable.
Here are some examples of measures that could fix the 31% company wide figure quoted, without touching pay disparity:
1. Hirings in non-essential roles are to approach 100% female - think cleaners, admin staff, low level accountants.
2. Hiring in roles that support the essential roles are to approach 75% female - I'm thinking here of CFO support staff, account managers, project managers, anyone who supports people writing code. Why 75%? Because there will be some really good men that you can't afford to lose.
3. If a role is non-essential but predominantly male to the point an all female hiring policy is tough, just hypothetically here think garbage collection, outsource to another company. This removes these men form the headcount.
4. If a role is outsourced but could be 100% female hires, pre-school teachers is a great example, insource it.
5. Find ways to move more men from employee to contractor. This is a double win because while it massively inflates the unfixable wage disparity in real terms, i.e. what men are women are actually paid, it really changes the wage disparity on paper, while also fixing the 31% figure.
6. Create new divisions in separate entities whose numbers are not counted against Google employee numbers. Contractors on steroids.
I predict we will see big tech companies utilise some or all of these measures.
Last point on this, there are lots of ways to fix the wage disparity ON PAPER while making things in reality worse, and I fear these are coming as well. Most involve finding ways to better disguise male compensation - by changing it from salary to something else. More options, payments for extraneous things as a non-salary allowance (rent compensation, massive relocation fees, education allowances), pay higher bonus to salary percentages. That will be then end game here, sadly.