Leaked Google pay data shows how much employees report making
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Isn't this famously false, given that they pay large disparities depending on someone's country in which they work? This only holds true within a specific country.
Doesn't Google also try to dock your pay if you move out of a HCOL city, too?
Whether that’s fair or not is a matter of belief system.
Google’s Bay Area compensation isn’t a result of some intrinsically just meritocracy - they’re a wealthy business competing with other wealthy businesses over an extremely high-demand labor pool.
Yet Google happily uses this opportunity to pay wildly different amounts to people doing the exact same work.
In any case, this clearly invalidates the first claim, that people are paid based on what they do. They're paid actually based on their replacement cost in the place they are legally restricted to do it.
To make a contrived example, this means that a woman in a LCOL country/city will earn less than a man in an HCOL country/city, for the exact same work.
All of this pay equity stuff is total nonsense and posturing as long as Google is taking advantage of labor market arbitrage (which their staff cannot easily do, not being multinational themselves).
If they truly believe in equal pay for equal work, it should plainly apply across national borders that staff cannot cross. Anything else is lip service.
The fact that some tiny lucky subset of people with very specific credentials can get permission to move across borders does not change this at all. (In fact, H1Bs generally making less than others for the same work reinforces my point.)
"Those people make less because they are all lower level" is not a mitigating factor for pay discrimination.
You absolutely need to normalize for level when determine pay discrepancies. As well as hiring, retention, and promotion rates. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. Frankly a lot of companies fail to do this and are convinced they have huge problems when in fact things are pretty fair at the individual level and on track to gradually diversify over time. But you can’t just snap your fingers and diversify the top of an org. It takes a long time.
The significant restructuring (affected several hundred people) that you describe did in fact occur.
This idea is surely much more expensive to implement than just paying the women more. It’s also fairly easily discovered by an audit of any competence or whistleblower. And the women would surely have a strong negative reaction to this which is an operational risk of them just leaving.
What you are proposing happened is illegal discrimination to begin with, but it’s also really difficult to do. Seems more likely a willing company would prefer to simply lie
To some extent imo, provided an org isn’t overtly discriminatory, the most important thing is to make sure that hiring channels include diverse sources for candidates.
I would bet that the pay discrepancy here is entirely due to differing levels, which in turn is because Google's DEI efforts are ~5-7 years old and when new hires come in at L3, it takes that long or more to get to the high-paid levels. That and people who were hired a while ago are sitting on lots of appreciation in their stock grants.
There used to be. In the “member of technical staff” era, most new hires were down-slotted within a year.
They got rid of it. I think they changed it to "everyone comes in at L3/L4, and if you're good you'll rapidly get promoted to your true level" around 2012, and then sometime between 2014-2020 it changed to "sure, you can come in at L6+ and we don't really care if you're incompetent".
Leveling is likely the major component, but thats also a legitimate concern!
Of course it is. People with more experience and higher performance get paid more.
If the accusation is instead that certain groups are being promoted less often because of their immutable characteristics, it requires some evidence to substantiate.
If you want to read a book that directly talks about this, check out Thomas Sowell's "Economic facts and fallacies". There are chapters for both gender and race economic differences. Even though the book is ~14 years old, it counters these kinds of arguments.
Has Sowell, or maybe one his acolytes, updated his rhetoric to incorporate the findings of all the ongoing research into the gender pay gap?
Let's say there is an employer who systematically wants to underpay women to save money by exploiting the pay gap. If there are no women in agreeing to the pay the employer will adjust upward in an attempt to either hire women or ignore the disparity, pay more, and appear bias.
I would argue that women who want more pay must discriminate more than their potential employer.
If it is true that women are likely to offer discounts, it questions why for-profit companies hire men at all? Meanwhile we worry about companies not being willing to hire women, not men.
Wiktionary - Underpaid: "Getting too little financial compensation for one's work." Meriam Webster - Underpay: "to pay less than what is normal or required" Cambridge Dictionary - underpay: "to pay (a person) too little" Dictionary.com - underpaid: "not paid enough"
Only the Cambridge version of those could imply (to me) only the definition of receiving less than what was agreed upon.
I personally like the Meriam Webster definition. If a software engineer is normally paid $ X, and you are paying $ 0.5*X, then that person is underpaid.
Exactly. There is nothing in there about agreeing to take less than you might have been able to get if you chose to charge more.
> If a software engineer is normally paid $ X, and you are paying $ 0.5X, then that person is underpaid.*
The general opinion is that people are not fungible. Why do you believe that they are?
I see this pattern all over the place. Often with conservatives. Asking a reasonable question that puts the fundamental concept in doubt. But never actually wanting to know the answer because a simple search would have revealed lots of thorough and existing discussions answering the question.
Would this be the fallacy of an appeal to authority?
My point is simply that your question is valid, but has been asked and answered a thousand times before. Nothing in your question is specific to this audience that we'd have a twist on the answer that isn't represented in any of the thousand existing answers.
I'm curious, since you didn't get much discussion on your question here, did you take a minute to answer your question elsewhere?
I am not discussing whether this is fair, equitable, or even kind. I just do not care for the misrepresentation of the situation.
I could argue I am both overpaid or underpaid based upon my perspective. Having been on the other side of the negotiations with friends and strangers the situation is the same. They want as much value as they can extract. I too want as much value as I can extract - within agreement. Now that I am back to being an employee I have requested more compensation. They were open and asked why: apart from desire, I have not provided additional value (yet) and thus am not entitled nor deserving.
You're joking, right? Otherwise why stop at AI? Why not go directly to the source and read Twitter?
What makes you think it's a joke?
You would think that anyone presenting statistics that call into question some kind of differential treatment by race, ethnicity, or gender would take a moment to point out the cautions in the data. Or even express some doubt about writing the story to begin with.
But no, for some reason, we are fascinated by the "0th order analysis" of inequities by race, almost want to see it blown up into incorrect interpretations and incentivize reporters to produce such stories.
I think there should be a code of ethics where reporters should be questioned about what they seek to accomplish with half-assed analyses like this, if they fail to accompany it with huge warnings about what it hasn't taken into account that could explain differences:
-- age
-- experience
-- selection biases in employees tenure (both hiring and departures)
etc.
Without this kind of info, all these stories do is shout an alarmist call that "this isn't fair" and then fail to produce any backup for the claim, but rile everyone up.
I personally feel like it is not the companies business to know this about me. Is there a legal requirement around this ?
It is useful as far as it goes, but one can only draw limited conclusions from what is there.
Business Insider doesn’t really caveat it’s reporting very well here. And it should.
Perfect example is the report that "The employee with the highest base salary reported being a level 7 software engineer with a base salary of $718,000 and a total compensation package of just under $800,000."
I suppose there might be some engineer making $720k in base and $80k in bonus/equity combined, but I've never heard of such a thing. There are obviously errors in the data. Yet BI doesn't question the data at all.
Disclosure: I work at Google. Opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.
Besides , is it anyone’s business as to what I identify as ? Is it ethical to force me to reveal this ?
The person leaking it is acting unethically though. It has no whistleblower value of any kind, and betrays those who filled it out thinking it would be internal only.
Maybe not the exact same spreadsheet, but the first one. It would be surprising if it was different though.
I can't access the article, even via the archive link (infinite captchas), so idk what what BI is reporting. But the original sheet is employee-created, so identity stats are probably not coming from the company's own database.
I was asking about the leaked spreadsheet which has the data on Google US's 200k employees.