Ugh. Don’t show diversity outcomes without breaking them down by level at the same time.
"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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.