Google owes executive $1M after losing gender bias lawsuit
theverge.com
theverge.com
Not to dox the Google exec here (you can search her LinkedIn): But, to be fair, she seems to have an extraordinary career history. Went from presumably an entry level position at UBS to the executive class in just 12 years. Does that kind of disposition allow someone to bypass the "level gatekeeping" at Google? Maybe, maybe not. I wish I had whatever wizardry she's using.
Her argument was that she should have come in at level 9.
The Bloomberg article clarified it like this:
"She came into the job with 23 years of experience in the financial services and technology field but was hired as a level eight employee while other men who were hired at the same time as her, and allegedly had less experience, were hired at level nine. As a level eight employee, Rowe made about $750,000 a year while some of the level nine employees made over $1 million a year."
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/google-must-pay-fe...
The root of the issue is that Google’s comp is highly subjective, just as it is anywhere else.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/13/14599186/google-waymo-sel...
Can a man sue on similar grounds? I have a friend who’s been passed up for promotion several times while women were given greater titles. The company actually gave him an equivalent raise to assuage him, but he still doesn’t have a fancy title despite doing equivalent work. It’s basically an open secret they’re doing this for gender parity. This is at a Fortune 500.
Does he have grounds to sue?
Not a lawyer… etc…
If they do “strain his future”, wouldn’t that be retaliation for a complaint, and wouldn’t that then be illegal? Again, not a lawyer.
And no, you definitely won’t have a future there.
It didn’t use a state labor commission or the federal EOCC
so the answer is probably, but its a much greater gamble, as the commissions use public funding to strong arm companies to settle, while providing a path for representation in the courts alongside your own counsel
It takes a big place of privilege to circumvent that and use a different state law and go straight to court
Whereas the labor commissions would absolutely take your case and try to get you compensated
Actually, it's right! Speaking up against inequality is strong and brave. We really need to see men who do that the same way, instead of "what a crybaby".
We don't have any objective evidence e.g. when they say "equivalent work" on what basis is that being determined.
1. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...
The woman in your situation with the greater title is being paid no more than your friend with a lower one, or women with the same title are being underpaid. If and when the man is promoted to the same title as the woman with the greater one they will be paid more than the woman despite doing “equivalent work”.
Unless your friend is required to do the work above their title it seems like a non issue and literally your friend is the one with the advantage…
This is what the OP is implying is happening (I'm not going to rule on fact). Or at the very least, the person is voluntarily doing work above their title.
In the first case they are paid the same as someone with a higher title, and when promoted inevitably they will be paid more than someone with the same title.
In the second case they are paid more than people with their same title who may be performing all of the duties required, and this is not to say that there are not others also performing equivalently who did not received this equivalent wage.
This sort of situation is exactly why people need to talk to their manager, to avoid over performing and being resentful about it. The fact the person was able to get a raise without a promotion is literally the best case scenario. If their work is actually the same they’ll be promoted and get another raise, resulting in higher pay than those with the same title…
You act like promotions are automatic, but you're ignoring case where they never get promoted, and can't leverage their resume nearly as effectively because of the lower title.
In which case, all they got was a temporary pay bump in exchange for doing extra work, but didn't get any credit for that work.
The hypothesis is that they are not being promoted because of the demographic they belong to, so that is not a given.
I imagine the women who were promoted above him, but are nevertheless earning the same amount of money as someone below them on the org chart (and presumably, less than some of their peers) might have a more compelling case in court.
An "I'm being overpaid for my job title" situation is going to require a pretty nuanced approach when it comes to showing damages, compared to a lot of other job discrimination lawsuits, I would think.
(this seems like something where a lawyer would say "you want to do what?")
The difficulty with this sort of case is showing causation, because the company will always produce some alternate reasons other than gender to justify its decision. It’s a surmountable hurdle, but not every case is strong enough to even make it to a jury.
Of course, on a practical level, you have all of the politics surrounding this. Depending on your judge and jury pool, you may or may not have a fighting chance.
> Damages can be shown from the loss of career opportunities that a fancier title would carry.
The guy is going to sue his employer because, while he's arguably overpaid in the way that's easy to measure (pay for a given job title) he's arguably underpaid in the way that's difficult to quantify (was he provably more worthy of a promotion than the person who got it?).
And not even he claims that he is not receiving equal pay for equal work?
Honest question - has anyone (a person that can be named, not a message board hypothetical) ever won a lawsuit like that? Did the victory involve anything more than a court ordering that they be awarded a "fancier title?"
You’re confusing two different things: equal pay and discrimination. These are separate issues with (in California) separate code sections governing them. So, this hypothetical person would bring a discrimination claim, not a pay claim. The relevant elements he has to prove are that he experienced an “adverse employment action” (denial of a promotion is textbook for this), that his gender was a “substantial motivating reason” for the adverse action, and that he was harmed in some way by the loss of the promotion.
The fact that his pay was advanced might be evidence to undercut the causal element (“why no, we would never discriminate against a man - look at his paycheck”). But it’s not conclusive. Suppose there was a documented policy that men cannot qualify for VP roles. Then, pay becomes almost irrelevant - we have discriminatory animus on paper.
Anyway, yes, this is purely hypothetical. You need real facts to breathe life into a case and know if it has legs. Especially when it presents an uncommon application of the law. You need 3 things: facts that tick the right legal boxes; evidence that establishes those facts; and a compelling narrative that presents a real injustice that someone experienced.
> Honest question - has anyone (a person that can be named, not a message board hypothetical) ever won a lawsuit like that?
I can’t think of an example for this specific pattern, but employees do win (or settle favorably) in cases you might not expect. Many companies have implemented diversity policies in ways that actually do break the law, and I expect to see an uptick in claims challenging this.
This is a good question because “sue” and “convince a jury” are used interchangeably. It is a good thought experiment because if we treat the act of filing a lawsuit and the act of winning one as the same thing, this does make the outcome of this trial proof positive of reverse sexism.
Some kooks might say “in America you can sue anyone for anything and your chance of winning depends on myriad factors” but that is just a distraction. One woman won one case, so it stands to reason that we must ask if the system is set up so no man can win any case.
Grounds to sue mean at least wanting to sue, feeling that an injustice was made, having a legal avenue of suing, and predicting good probability of a favorable outcome.
Whether it’s likely he would get a favorable outcome depends on the legal system as well as its components. In case law countries, this might be a strong precedent-setting lawsuit, where the defendant will have an advantage due to the very lack of precedent. In civil law countries, it might be easier as no precedent is needed and discrimination would almost definitely not involve a jury. So if the laws are unbiased, a man and a woman would be treated exactly the same in that case.
In 2019 Google found that some male SWEs were being underpaid and issued extra raises that IIRC came out to around $10m/year
The amount of politics in these sort of situations is intense. I don't think it is reasonable for executives - male or female - to sue their employers over promotion decisions. I'm going to point at "Another male colleague’s background was in physics, not engineering, and he did not satisfy the requirement that candidates have an MS in Computer Engineering" - in and of itself that suggests the male was better at the job than she was. We know from Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing. Amongst people actively working in a field, qualifications are a negative signal of quality.
Female executives using an Equal Pay Act to fight executive skirmishes undermines the look of this sort of legislation. Maybe some people want to pretend that Google executives are delicate daisies that need special legal protections but it just isn't true. This executive shouldn't be getting special treatment because of her gender.
> This executive shouldn't be getting special treatment because of her gender.
But you're perfectly fine with her getting worse treatment because of her gender? Since you don't believe in her right to sue to remedy this.. I'm sorry, but your post reeks of "these thing's don't affect me and therefore don't need fixing".
I've not read the specifics of the case, but based on her complaint? I'm completely OK with her losing a HR struggle for stupid reasons [0]. Judges don't need to be involved. I just wish we could all be mistreated with that sort of compensation and power.
> So you want to detract from a case about bias (that was won), because you have another bias about this male having been better because of their lack of correct qualifications?
I'm happy to admit to being biased in favour of basic statistics. Berkson's paradox isn't some weird edge case, it turns up all the time. If you don't like it there isn't much you can do, even moving to a different universe isn't enough to escape math.
Based purely on her complaint, Google could quite reasonably have been chosing someone with a signal of higher quality. In the same paragraph she complains about 19 vs 22 years of experience as though that matters too, which keeps undermining my outrage.
[0] I'm not even taking a position on whether the reasons are gender related. I've seen this sort of thing play out among male executives based on height, tone of voice, random luck, coincidence, nepotism and all sorts of silly factors. It could even be legitimately good reasons. I don't see why, especially legally speaking, anyone needs to care. Nobody has a solid metric to measure executive quality, or we'd just use that.
Why not view it as good that an executive risks much to remove the glass ceiling, and perhaps prove biases in the processes affecting the whole chain? It reads as since you don't want this specific woman to sue or win (without even having read the documents), no woman should ever be able to, even in other positions.
The law states that (from the judge's opinion): "Rowe must demonstrate that Google failed to pay her equally to a man in the same geographic area for (a) equal work on a job the performance of which requires equal skill, effort and responsibility, and which is performed under similar working conditions, or (b) substantially similar work, when viewed as a composite of skill, effort, and responsibility, and performed under similar working conditions.", but this is kind of an unreasonable standard to really prove gender discrimination IMHO.
So any male getting paid more than any female can only be explained by discrimination? In some cases it's probably a factor. In others: probably not? Hard to distinguish the two however.
All we can really do is statistics over a large group, and then say something about that group. But that says nothing about individuals. There are short Dutch people, tall Indonesians, and Germans with a sense of humour.
If a woman/man was bringing in more sales than men/women that were promoted over her?
Or in rare cases you might get written/recorded damning evidence.
It depends; being better in sales does not automatically make a person a good team lead, or whatever else they're being promoted to.
And even "bring in more sales" is not that simple because if you're a curmudgeon that makes everyone around you miserable then that's probably going to be factor. Stuff like that.
Source. Because on the surface this looks like a pretty ridiculous take.
And you seem to have missed the whole point of the lawsuit which is that she wanted the company to simply follow their normal processes.
Is it really? If you put up a significant barrier to a group of people, and only the exceptional can cross those barriers, it's shouldn't be that surprising when the pool that make it past those barriers is filled with a higher percentage of exceptional people.
Sort of like how a surprising percentage of women in the sciences before 1960 were of Ada Lovelace quality. The women who were merely competent weren't allowed to work in the sciences.
Which the lawsuit we are talking about explicitly alleges is not the case.
No, my example very much does not. It's about the exact the opposite, where extra barriers are put in front of one group, but not the other.
& that isn't the point of the lawsuit, I think the point was more that Google misrepresented to her that she'd get paid more than she did after some period of employment and she also believes that there is a gender aspect to that. It isn't reasonable to tell a company that your interpretation of their policies is more correct than theirs.
IMO someone is born yesterday if they buy the "we're not going to agree to that wage now but we will in a while" line from a corporation, but whatever.
I do believe that rich parties should pay for their use of precious court time,
I think you're right that the world of executives is less like "employment" and it's kind of insulting to pretend it is.
But I also think it's fine for executives to sue the companies they represent. I think the government should have a role in corporate governance. I would even support having a government appointed representative like the Federal Reserve has.
But I'm just a communist :p
At the same time, people can sue each other based on laws, why not? If you don’t like that, you should join those working to overthrow the current system.
I think it’s also potentially useful, at least rhetorically, for gender discrimination to be an issue even among the ruling class.
Why? We have all kinds of rules about discrimination, they can and do include promotion decisions.
>We know from Berkson's Paradox in statistics that people without formal qualifications who get a job anyway tend to be good at what they are doing.
This would only be true if you assume that interviews are consistently perfect judges of job performance, which is well-known to not be the case.
>Maybe some people want to pretend that Google executives are delicate daisies that need special legal protections but it just isn't true.
It isn't special legal protection. It's very regular legal protection. It's the kind of legal protection which should be provided to everybody (and in practice is provided to everybody who can afford a lawyer).
To her credit, gender discrimination is hard to prove and perhaps she felt she really had a strong case (based on the risk she took - this action may close some doors for her), but allowing these arguments to go through really erodes what facade of meritocracy we have left in the industry.
The claims seem to be have gone as far as saying she should have been hired as VP. Her background was senior tech management at a bank, which no doubt is a significant appointment, but I don't think it's easy for anyone to argue that bank tech management easily transfers to big tech.
Giving L8 and presumably a sizeable raise from her bank role means Google already valued her experience very highly. Much more highly than I would have tbh; if someone was top level management in an bank, effectively at least partially responsible for the poor culture of bank tech, and then hired as senior tech management at my company, us grunts would be running for our lives. As she didn't get consistently stellar performance reviews as L8 (which Google uses as argument), the only thing one can argue for is that the performance reviews were biased - which again to her credit tends to be hard to prove - but there's no reason to believe that say a third party looking at those reviews would have given her a promotion.
I also can't fathom someone is arguing in good faith that at this level MS in CS should be a barrier. It should be clear to any Google L8 that MS in CS means absolute jack shit for anyone who manages to get to L6, if not L5. It should only be a factor in junior-ish hiring. For one, Google's technical work even at L6 level can literally shape curriculums at universities. It may just be a legal tactic but I don't want US courts to lend any credibility to this argument, and anyone who wants the court to sanctify this point is basically someone that damages my profession and I don't want near my jurisdiction.
A true milestone in YC’s and HN mods transition to the alt right that the top comment currently on this article is so brazenly sexist. There is nothing curious about unzipping a thesis like this and airing it out. Battle of the Sexes gets won by hard work, team work, and leaving behind the game (“battle”) which was pointless anyways.
Eugenics is also rooted in basic math and statistical observations. Now that HN has become totally disinterested with social equality, maybe eugenics will fall under ‘curious conversation’ and fill the forums here.
Mods please fix link.