Google Pay Study Finds It Underpaid Men for Some Jobs (2019)
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Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately not rare in that company.
This is a large multinational corp in a highly technical field, as in STEM master and PhD are normal requirements.
That event gave me a shock and made me realize why there is such a huge backlash against the DEI folks these days. It is easy to have a perception of "the pendulum has swung too far" when these things happen often enough.
Also random things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/w...
In many countries (UK in my case) "positive discrimination" (an oxymoron, if you ask me) is enshrined in law and actually allow to discriminate candidates based on gender.
At least 3 of my clients work with recruiters that bring candidates who are only female or non white. (I'm not white myself but I found the clients outside of recruitments, I hope I'm not a diversity hire!).
Beside, whenever you start applying non meritocratic filters, the pool of talent shrink and you are forced to pick among a smaller pool, which inevitably will have less of the most talented folks.
There's always going to be more men interested in this field than women, which means you'll see more men in class and more men in industry (read Damore's essay for why).
However, that doesn't mean that at an individual level there is bias against women. In practice, in most tech companies, there is significant bias towards hiring and promoting women.
As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment.
I think you don't realise this because men are more prevalent. The majority of promotions may go to men, but that's simply because there are more men in this field, not because at an individual level they are each receiving preferential treatment over you.
As a man in this field, I can pretty concretely say I have never experienced the problems getting hired or getting promoted she just described.
The only reason people think differently is because they see more men than women, and mistake that prevalence for bias.
You keep making claims like this, but never with data. Got any? Because I only ever see this backed by anecdotes.
Women-only recruiting events exist.
Companies incentivise managers to hire and promote women over men. I’ve seen companies use KPIs/quotas, and companies where you are allowed more headcount if you hire majority women.
So, anecdatum, yes, but until studies come out like the one posted then nobody is allowed to even express these anecdotes.
BTW that experience was not a fun one as it really harmed my self-image, I really felt like I was less valuable as a person and made me quite bitter for a while, I will admit that right-wing rhetoric became very comforting, luckily I was not seduced but I can understand how people could be.
> nobody is allowed to even express these anecdotes
I mean, you just did and don't appear to be that concerned about someone linking it back to you.
I find the whole "we aren't allowed to talk about this" thing a bit of an ironic response here, because if you take a look at this thread it started with a woman sharing her experiences from her career, with them being brushed off as anecdotal, and obviously, she's privileged, and it's men who are disadvantaged now.
It looks to me like she got the exact same pushback the male anecdote did. Is she also "not allowed to express her anecdotes"?
Please don't mistake the courage to speak up as being easy, because it's really not, it's deeply uncomfortable and a quite scary.
It's fair to liken my experiences to others, I don't think that anyone shouldn't be permitted to share anecdotes. However the major differing factor here is that there are intentional support networks along with a social understanding that we should be sympathetic to the anecdotes of women. Unintentionally that forces out the anecdotes of men. Perhaps because unscrupulous men use them as bad faith attacks to drown out conversations that women needed to have in the past- however given than there were 8 workshops explicitly for women in gaming last year in my building and 2 for any other kind of gaming (meaning women were permitted to attend 100% of the workshops and I was permitted to attend 20%), they definitely have a space to express their anecdotes.
If anyone is drowning them out, it's a fringe minority.
I also doubt that any female computer science mentors are going to tell everyone that it's an easy job where being female gives you significant tailwinds, whether or not that's true.
Fact is, it's highly competitive. 18% of CS graduates are female. Even assuming that they are twice as likely to be promoted as their male counterparts, if only 10 of every 100 engineers are promoted each year, that means 4 promoted female engineers against 14 non-promotions. So much more likely that a prospective mentor will tell you that it's a hard job than tell you about their easy promotion, even assuming a strong tailwind.
When you remove all indicators of gender companies hire fewer women, which means knowing that a candidate is a woman results in higher likelihood to hire than not knowing gender.
Women were rarer in CS, but still more common than female software developers I've encountered in my working life. All of the ones I've worked with were excellent.
Getting more women and getting more women-majority teams is a net good not only to the hilarious gender disparity in tech but also for the individual engineers, especially women, who don’t have strong, similar-to-themselves mentors and people to look up to.
Such a gender disparity in tech is relatively recent and pretty much since the iPhone and the flood of zero-interest money into the industry. And yet all of the big FAANGs hire lots of women.
And as someone who has done lots of hiring across the industry, generally women don't even apply to jobs that aren't big recognized brands anymore.
I would say it's since the dot-com crash, I went to university in 2003 and it was like 100:1 men in the CS courses back then.
It’s concerning how many people don’t see other people as individuals and instead see them as classes. This intellectual laziness results in discriminatory outcomes because it presumes that balance can be achieved by punishing different individuals within the same class.
It’s terrible that a 50 year old woman experienced discrimination, but privileging a 20 year old women doesn’t fix that. You’re ignoring the individuals that were harmed, privileging someone else that doesn’t need it, discriminating against 20 year old men to “balance” the privilege that 50 year old men received.
None of this makes sense.
Those 20 year olds aren’t ignorant of the fact that they are being discriminated against, and they will one day be our future voters and politicians.
Can we be surprised when they want to burn it all down? Can we be surprised when they flock to anyone offering a sympathetic ear?
Reverse discrimination is a fundamentally short term and self-defeating strategy.
I doubt its HN itself, and it seems positive for some things (anything that could be seen as pro-startup, pro-company, anti-regulation), while negative for other things (anything pro-europe, or political in a way that could be misconstrued as an endorsement of the right- even if the comment itself is actively admonishing the right).
I have contemplated experimenting with short lived comments (essentially: spam) to see how they are manipulated and to confirm this behaviour, but I doubt dang would approve, so I have refrained.
Case-in-point: this comment was downvoted within 1s of being posted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
If you look at the general experiences of a young men, you’ll see that they are discriminated against in university admissions, in early career hiring and in early career promotion.
This is justified by data points which average outcomes over different age groups. The result may be company wide gender balance, but when you break it down by age you see that it’s not really a balance, it’s just discrimination against women in some cohorts and discrimination against men in others.
This is the root problem with DEI. You’re punishing one generation for the actions of a different generation, and pretending that’s fair.
You stop evil wherever you see it. If you see actively discriminatory practices, kill them.
However, you do not commit an evil, to right another evil. You do not discriminate against anyone, even the over-represented majority, to accomplish any goals, or they can and will one day react violently and probably win.
Fighting fire with fire burns the world down. It’s not a fun answer; people who like being activists and feeling morally superior don’t like being told to stand down, but that’s the only thing that will work.
You cannot fix the discrimination an individual experiences by discriminating against a different individual in return.
You cannot "balance" the discrimination a group of people experienced in the past, by discriminating against a different group of people today.
Doing so will just result in an oscillation, with men of the past being privileged over women, leading to women of today being privileged over men, leading to men of the future being privileged over women etc.
don’t be silly. insane statements like this you’d have to back with (non-existent) data. so just stop it with this absolute garbage. men, especially white, have every fucking imaginable advantage possible in this country from the time they are born until they are 6 feet under. and of course many find ways to fuck it up and then blame society for it. fucking hell
The worst life available to you in the west is only afforded to white men, you don't even register that they're human.
the best life available to you in the west is only afforded to white men.
Stop trying to promote suffering of the former because of the perceived injustice of the latter, it's sick.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/poverty-hurts-the-boys-th...
Of course not so sit down until the answer to this question is different (it will never be)
> Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately quite common in that company.
You have to ask yourself: why does nobody speak up? This is because of the loss of worker power. Corporate MBA flunkies don’t give a fuck about pay equity. If they can under pay (man|woman|non-binary) folk, they will do it and use politics/fake economics as cover to do so.
Tech workers not unionizing has fucked not only people of today. But people of tomorrow (your children and grand children).
But sure, yea let’s keep that fantasy alive of “yea we should unionize but I want to be a billionaire too and exploit others so let’s not do that. Also I get paid 6 figs to not care about others”
That's not the problem and not the solution.
Nobody speaks up because if you do you are canceled and branded as racist / mysoginist. Society is too polarised and freedom of speech is just a memory.
That said, I noticed (for the first time) people complaining and leaving 0 stars reviews at the last DEI training so maybe the times are changing.
Your best workers would be underpaid and leave, your worst overpaid and stay.
Plays on your emotions but besides fear it doesn’t have any legs to stand on.
That’s not much of a problem in most low skill roles where employee productivity exists in a narrow band, but it will never be tolerated by high skill workers.
It’s not just unions, you also see this effect when employers use pay guides to limit wages. The best employees leave because they are no longer being paid in proportion to their value.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/google-to-pay-11...
all this show is a correlation of seniority with males.
https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/silicon-valley-p...
> Google is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by women who allege systemic underpayment. And the Department of Labor is investigating whether Google pays women less.
With that context, the Google study's findings is almost comical. They're basically saying "Oh, we're not underpaying women, we're actually underpaying men."
Also the manner in which the pay gap was distributed.
> The Washington Post explains that in Google's 2018 study, "Managers had dipped into the discretionary funds more often for women engineers, creating a pay gap for men in the same job category."
> First, the 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women.
In other words, "some jobs" here is mid-level software engineers.
If they're all[1] doing it...
[1]: Top tier hedge funds and big tech.
I mean; zeitgeist at the time was that it’s unconscionable to ever give men any equity in the discussion about equality. The only narrative that was permitted was that men were “superior” to women for time immemorial and men today should be punished, that they are over represented in everything of any importance and given much more favourability in all endeavours. - at least, as a person who grew up stunningly poor, surrounded by drugs and violence but happening to be a white man, this was how it felt.
The reality is of course much more nuanced than that, however it remained the only discussion permissible. It must have took a great deal of courage to publish something that went against this, especially from a company that’s so widely promoting the narrative. In fact, it makes me believe their other initiatives are more genuine than I would have thought otherwise.
PS: I don’t mind if what I said makes you uncomfortable. It was my truth and made me resoundingly bitter; because I couldn’t even talk about it.
It is just as stupid for abuse to happen by the hands of women as it is at the hands of men. There is deep historical precedent with a lot of lasting ramifications. An eye for an eye makes us all blind and all that.
Edit: I would have also raised hell if I saw someone else getting treated this way by a professor.
And from the linked 2019 article:
> Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity.
Unreal XD. I genuinely do not understand how you can find yourself siding with these termites.
I think the top NYT comment on this article highlights a very real problem that infested a lot of academia and places in corporate America. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that many of these places, especially in academia, have done real soul searching and considered that there are real problems that they were responsible for. Instead, I feel that in a lot of places you just see a "backlash to the backlash", i.e dismissing fair criticism as "the tide of unintellectual MAGA-ism":
> “When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work.” Obviously, this conclusion does not fit the politically correct mindset of most Google employees and management (or, for that matter, of the New York Times.)
> So, Google is searching for more data, and some explanation, of why the initial conclusion, that salary disparity may not put women at a disadvantage, must be wrong. I’m sure that if the results of the study were the reverse of what they showed, and demonstrated a bias against women, there would have been no head-scratching and no quest for further study.
> This illustrates a problem likely present with a great deal of scientific research, especially work in the social sciences. People look for results that match their preconceived notions, and keep looking until they find what they expect. When they find the expected, they stop looking. It’s a potent and pernicious source of bias.
> Pay disparities are both complex and important. By all means, Google, and society at large, should study the problem carefully and thoroughly. But we should leave open the possibility, that the truth may not be what we initially believe.