It feels like these things become self-fulfilling prophecies, because of the way this issue is reported on. If "seven of nine technology companies, including Apple, Amazon.com and Microsoft, [disclosed] that data", would it be too much for an article to compare the unofficial Google numbers to that data?
I'm not a big fan of large companies, I don't think they can win. Even if you have good numbers, that doesn't fit the narrative of "Silicon Valley has established itself as the boys’ club". Say for example, we applauded companies who are doing better, maybe even close to statistical significance, then you could say, "Hey, it's still not quite there yet, but it's close and we're doing better than others. Come work for us and help us make it right." And then that would be actionable advice, and companies would have a great reason to strive for this. But we'd also have to be honest about statistical error rates, and maybe some other stuff.
I'll close on this, I've heard people say stupid and offensive shit when they're drunk, but never "Hey, let's pay women less", although I'm not an executive. So I feel like it isn't a common thought... unless you keep reading articles like this one.
I've hired plenty of people, and been in three times as many discussions of pay with everyone from the janitor to the CEO and I've never heard someone insinuate that we could pay less because the person is female, but I've heard people say "...and we get the bonus of having her be female to make our numbers look better..." before.
Here's what I think a big driver is (you're going to have to walk down premise lane with me as I don't want to spend the time on citations ATM): Presuming that women are in general more agreeable than man in the workplace and that they don't fight as hard and as often for raises, I would expect an otherwise equal male counterpart that is more aggressive to have higher pay. Why? Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Every year when we did promotions we'd start out with a zero-sum raise pool. Let's say if everyone got exactly the same, they'd get 2%. But if I give Bob a raise of 4% I have to go 'take' that extra 2% from people or everyone. If I'm worried about Bob leaving, or he's asked for a raise and plead a good case, he's going to get it. If Alice or Charlie have been silent all year but have been doing an otherwise good job, they're going to get what's leftover- in general.
There have been a number of cases where we idtenified someone silently kick major ass and threw money at them, but that I think it is because we had very conscientious managers that worked closely with their subordinates, unlike BigCo.
I'm not even going to touch on all the other reasons that people have laid out as possible reasons why women tend to earn less. I think if you've got two people working well, doing the exact same job and producing the exact same outputs, they should be paid nearly equally, but we're humans and life is messy. Some people haggle better than others, some had a very low salary before that the new job used to baseline, etc.
If you really want to maximize your salary at an given job, argue for every last penny coming in. All future raises (for the most part) will be based off that number and it will haunt you for your entire tenure at the company- most likely.
Yes, it would be nice to see the raw data, but note that they've bucketed Level 1 through Level 6 employees, and have still found gender discrepancies.
Are you suggesting that different jobs might occupy the same level but have widely differing compensation? That might be true - I don't know Google well enough - but that's not how salary bands usually work.
For a good (if scary) insight into the "hidden bias" and "forced diversity" culture inside Google, have a listen to the recent James Damore interview at Joe Rogan's podcast:
They recount the ways people have been misrepresenting James' (rather meek) position, right down to accusations of sexism, nazism, malicious removal of academic references and outright lies. A sad testimony of this day and age and the current media climate in the US.
It's like people think covering their ears shouting "LALALA NOT TRUE, WILL NOT DISCUSS" has ever been a constructive way of addressing social issues.
I wish Google would come clean and release the raw stats. I understand that's one politically loaded and sensitive dataset, but nothing beats drawing your own conclusions. Right now, Google is getting flak from all sides, lose-lose.
Heck, if I recall, Google hasn't even disclosed what exact part of their own code of conduct Mr. Damore was in violation of. Kind of important, don't we think? I suspect these things are purposefully written to be so vague that virtually anything can be interpreted as being in violation. Their reluctance to disclose what specifically he violated (they wouldn't even him when they fired him) suggests they know they would be laughed at.
I don't understand why Google gets so much heat when they seem to be one of the better companies in the world in regards to diversity.
I've been at several companies where literally all managers are men and women no more than objects that are hired based on their looks. Executive meetings are spent discussing female coworkers attributes and who has managed to get laid with who.
That doesn't sound like the kind of behavior anyone would want to encourage.
I will say (anecdotally) that the women that I hired as individual technical contributors and promoted to managers were (on average -- with a small sample size) better at adapting to their new responsibilities than the men.
I didn't hear much of the kind of talk you are talking about -- but I discouraged employee fraternization of that type -- and maybe I was wrong to do so. (This was a while back - maybe norms have changed?)
I'd ask what constitutes "same level", and what's the overtime gap between genders, if there is one, but why do that when we can have a good ol' laugh at how Google made their own bed, and now we can watch them use the same "it's more complicated than that" arguments used by people who Google think are "propagating sexist stereotypes".
I keep wondering what is the economical explanation for the existence of the gender pay gap?
Assuming women and men employees are (generally speaking) equally skilled yet differently compensated (for whatever reason), rational employers would actually prefer to hire women over men. Just like with any other purchase, all things being equal, cheaper is better.
Perhaps "old" companies with a "tradition" might have a status-quo bias, but new startups/smart CEOs that really try to minimize their burn rate would obviously see this.
Over time more and more women employees would be sought after more then men, which would eventually lead to an equilibrium and remove the pay gap.
A possible explanation is that men, in the aggregate, are more motivated by compensation and willing to put up with more hardship or danger in exchange for more money.
There are a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money because they're dangerous, like working on an oil platform. Suppose those people get paid $90,000 whereas below average tech workers get paid $70,000 and above average tech workers get paid $100,000+. If you're a below average male tech worker who is in it for the money, maybe you take the oil job instead for the extra $20,000/year. The equivalent women take the $70,000/year non-dangerous job, causing the male average for "tech jobs" to be higher than the female average.
It's also possible that more men than women are willing to work longer hours or jobs with less flexible hours in exchange for a higher salary. Employers rationally pay people willing to do that more than people who aren't.
Because it's more complicated that. Hiring decisions, career progression decisions, salary decisions are not made by an algorithm trying to balance the sheets. They're made by humans with biases.
It seems that the most likely explanation for the pay gap is the gap in dedication and energy spent at work. Until recently, many studies had found a bias against hiring women women in education and tech. But once corrected for lifestyle/marital status (i.e. single men without children compared against single women without children, etc), we observe the opposite picture. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/pdf/pna...
Humans are mostly irrational. Massively so. Rationality isn't the default state, it's not to be expected, it's a rare and precious jewel.
So many nerds dismiss the idea of systematic bias because "rational people wouldn't do that." This is true. It's also true that leprechauns wouldn't do that. Both statements are equally tied to reality.
Companies actually do irrational things all the time.
Have you seen how many people on here report they have to change jobs to get a raise? Or how often companies will spend $200 worth of employees' time on bureaucracy before replacing a $100 broken chair?
Because the "pay gap" comes from the fact that men and women in aggregate make different choices with respect to how they develop their human capital. When you compare groups of men and women who make the same choices with regard to their careers and what to study, the gap disappears.
In the case about 20% of college graduates who studied Computer Science are female, and about the same proportion are seen employed as Software Engineers in the industry. Those women are not any cheaper than their male counterparts, because they're just as qualified.
Why women and men make different choices in aggregate, as well as if any of that is problematic, are topics of further debate that I don't think we have concrete answers to yet.
One of the things this misses is that even if these numbers were even, systemic gender bias means that things would likely be unfair.
Even if Google were perfectly fair internally, women coming in from academia are likely to have faced gender bias [1], meaning less impressive resumes and therefore lower starting positions. Similar logic applies to women coming in from industry: one component to hiring pay and title is previous pay and title; external bias can easily be imported.
But it would be a miracle if Google were perfectly fair internally given our society's long history of sexism, documented gender bias in academia (from which Google draws some of its culture and a lot of its people), and the ongoing issues in the tech industry. I'd expect Google's promotion ladder to reflect that to one extent or another, meaning that the levels themselves have some level of bias to them.
Another thing to bear in mind: this is self-reported data. Even if the population numbers were perfectly fair, there are known differences in the way men and women report things in surveys (example[1]). Personally, I conjecture that this bias and biases in response rates that affect men and women differently account for some of the reported differences in salary.
I'm more concerned about stuff that wouldn't show up in this data. For example, assuming a woman who is equally qualified as a man, I expect that the woman would be at a lower level on average, because e.g. of studies like those cited in [2]. I suspect that Google is better about this than most places, but I have heard too many stories from my woman coworkers to believe that things are perfectly fair. But I suspect this article makes things out to be perhaps slightly worse than they are, at least on the compensation front.
> Even if Google were perfectly fair internally, women coming in from academia are likely to have faced gender bias [1], meaning less impressive resumes and therefore lower starting positions.
To play devil's advocate, if the performance review process was good/perfect and skill = compensation, factors like "less impressive resumes" should even out pretty quickly, right?
It's unfortunate that Alphabet declined to present their data, that way we'd likely be able to correct for things like location and seniority along with having solid deviation rates.
Did they also look at the reasons why men are paid more?
Because "men are paid more than women" alone simply says NOTHING.
In the company I used to work there were HUGE salary differences between men with the same job title, and the difference sometimes could run up hundreds of euros. The main reason was that the better paid men negotiated their terms of employment WAY better than those that got paid less.
I suspect to see something very much alike here. Also, I would like to see the salary distribution within men and women, because I can almost certainly guarantee that some women are paid more than some men, but I don't think we will ever see that because that would destroy the entire "all men are paid more than women for no reason other than they are men" narrative some people are still trying to push, while it is related to a LOT of other things other than just pure gender.
BTW, if a salary difference is SUCH a big problem why stick with the companies who do this? Why not find employment somewhere else, or start your own company with better working conditions? It isn't like you are FORCED to work for Google or any other of the big corps in Silicon Valley if you don't like how they treat people there.
We would need a lot more data, I work for a much smaller company vs Google yet we can easily have people who while formally at a lower level can make beyond VP level comp. because of their unique tech. skills and experience. I imagine Google has a fairly large group of famous eng. etc. who could scew results greatly should they get to be part of the sample.
I wonder whether the effort in question was scientific. In particular, did it control for life-style (e.g., single without children, married with children)? Sociological results on sex-related biases have been reversed when properly controlled for this parameter [1], which warrants skepticism towards any study that doesn't give it a serious consideration.
It doesn't just matter that men are paid more than women, it also matters why. The article is more nuanced than the title on this point, but it still doesn't come off as very nuanced. But then none of the discussion around this topic ever does.
> The self-reported Google salary spreadsheet [...]
That's all I needed to see. Nothing worthwhile here. The people who'll tend to report will be the people who are worried about how much they earn. I'd say all this shows is that men are less worried about how much they earn than women.
What Google pays men versus women is at the heart of a dispute with the Department of Labor. The company is fighting over how much data it needs to hand over
What are they hiding? They must know what that data will reveal is the only explanation.
how does that apply for salaried positions google doesn't pay by the hour outwith janitorial and similar blue collar staff - who are probably out sourced
[+] [-] guitarbill|8 years ago|reply
I'm not a big fan of large companies, I don't think they can win. Even if you have good numbers, that doesn't fit the narrative of "Silicon Valley has established itself as the boys’ club". Say for example, we applauded companies who are doing better, maybe even close to statistical significance, then you could say, "Hey, it's still not quite there yet, but it's close and we're doing better than others. Come work for us and help us make it right." And then that would be actionable advice, and companies would have a great reason to strive for this. But we'd also have to be honest about statistical error rates, and maybe some other stuff.
I'll close on this, I've heard people say stupid and offensive shit when they're drunk, but never "Hey, let's pay women less", although I'm not an executive. So I feel like it isn't a common thought... unless you keep reading articles like this one.
[+] [-] manyxcxi|8 years ago|reply
Here's what I think a big driver is (you're going to have to walk down premise lane with me as I don't want to spend the time on citations ATM): Presuming that women are in general more agreeable than man in the workplace and that they don't fight as hard and as often for raises, I would expect an otherwise equal male counterpart that is more aggressive to have higher pay. Why? Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Every year when we did promotions we'd start out with a zero-sum raise pool. Let's say if everyone got exactly the same, they'd get 2%. But if I give Bob a raise of 4% I have to go 'take' that extra 2% from people or everyone. If I'm worried about Bob leaving, or he's asked for a raise and plead a good case, he's going to get it. If Alice or Charlie have been silent all year but have been doing an otherwise good job, they're going to get what's leftover- in general.
There have been a number of cases where we idtenified someone silently kick major ass and threw money at them, but that I think it is because we had very conscientious managers that worked closely with their subordinates, unlike BigCo.
I'm not even going to touch on all the other reasons that people have laid out as possible reasons why women tend to earn less. I think if you've got two people working well, doing the exact same job and producing the exact same outputs, they should be paid nearly equally, but we're humans and life is messy. Some people haggle better than others, some had a very low salary before that the new job used to baseline, etc.
If you really want to maximize your salary at an given job, argue for every last penny coming in. All future raises (for the most part) will be based off that number and it will haunt you for your entire tenure at the company- most likely.
[+] [-] OzzyB|8 years ago|reply
> At Google, Employee-Led Effort Finds Data Scientists Are Paid More Than Web Designers
> At Google, Employee-Led Effort Finds AI Researchers Are Paid More Than Project Managers
I could do this all day...
Any chance they'll release the data that backs up this statistical claim?
[+] [-] to_bpr|8 years ago|reply
It was probably a pretty half baked, self-reported Google form so the data may not be worth much.
[+] [-] alexashka|8 years ago|reply
I highly doubt it.
[+] [-] gyardley|8 years ago|reply
Are you suggesting that different jobs might occupy the same level but have widely differing compensation? That might be true - I don't know Google well enough - but that's not how salary bands usually work.
[+] [-] Radim|8 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ1JeII0eGo
They recount the ways people have been misrepresenting James' (rather meek) position, right down to accusations of sexism, nazism, malicious removal of academic references and outright lies. A sad testimony of this day and age and the current media climate in the US.
It's like people think covering their ears shouting "LALALA NOT TRUE, WILL NOT DISCUSS" has ever been a constructive way of addressing social issues.
I wish Google would come clean and release the raw stats. I understand that's one politically loaded and sensitive dataset, but nothing beats drawing your own conclusions. Right now, Google is getting flak from all sides, lose-lose.
[+] [-] bedhead|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Kiro|8 years ago|reply
I've been at several companies where literally all managers are men and women no more than objects that are hired based on their looks. Executive meetings are spent discussing female coworkers attributes and who has managed to get laid with who.
[+] [-] stephenr|8 years ago|reply
I have no idea how google rates on any employee scale but why "surely"?
[+] [-] ci5er|8 years ago|reply
I will say (anecdotally) that the women that I hired as individual technical contributors and promoted to managers were (on average -- with a small sample size) better at adapting to their new responsibilities than the men.
I didn't hear much of the kind of talk you are talking about -- but I discouraged employee fraternization of that type -- and maybe I was wrong to do so. (This was a while back - maybe norms have changed?)
[+] [-] dreta|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] air7|8 years ago|reply
Assuming women and men employees are (generally speaking) equally skilled yet differently compensated (for whatever reason), rational employers would actually prefer to hire women over men. Just like with any other purchase, all things being equal, cheaper is better.
Perhaps "old" companies with a "tradition" might have a status-quo bias, but new startups/smart CEOs that really try to minimize their burn rate would obviously see this.
Over time more and more women employees would be sought after more then men, which would eventually lead to an equilibrium and remove the pay gap.
So why hasn't this happened (yet)?
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|8 years ago|reply
A possible explanation is that men, in the aggregate, are more motivated by compensation and willing to put up with more hardship or danger in exchange for more money.
There are a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money because they're dangerous, like working on an oil platform. Suppose those people get paid $90,000 whereas below average tech workers get paid $70,000 and above average tech workers get paid $100,000+. If you're a below average male tech worker who is in it for the money, maybe you take the oil job instead for the extra $20,000/year. The equivalent women take the $70,000/year non-dangerous job, causing the male average for "tech jobs" to be higher than the female average.
It's also possible that more men than women are willing to work longer hours or jobs with less flexible hours in exchange for a higher salary. Employers rationally pay people willing to do that more than people who aren't.
[+] [-] paperpunk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirillkh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
Well there's your problem.
Humans are mostly irrational. Massively so. Rationality isn't the default state, it's not to be expected, it's a rare and precious jewel.
So many nerds dismiss the idea of systematic bias because "rational people wouldn't do that." This is true. It's also true that leprechauns wouldn't do that. Both statements are equally tied to reality.
[+] [-] michaelt|8 years ago|reply
Have you seen how many people on here report they have to change jobs to get a raise? Or how often companies will spend $200 worth of employees' time on bureaucracy before replacing a $100 broken chair?
[+] [-] thehardsphere|8 years ago|reply
In the case about 20% of college graduates who studied Computer Science are female, and about the same proportion are seen employed as Software Engineers in the industry. Those women are not any cheaper than their male counterparts, because they're just as qualified.
Why women and men make different choices in aggregate, as well as if any of that is problematic, are topics of further debate that I don't think we have concrete answers to yet.
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
Even if Google were perfectly fair internally, women coming in from academia are likely to have faced gender bias [1], meaning less impressive resumes and therefore lower starting positions. Similar logic applies to women coming in from industry: one component to hiring pay and title is previous pay and title; external bias can easily be imported.
But it would be a miracle if Google were perfectly fair internally given our society's long history of sexism, documented gender bias in academia (from which Google draws some of its culture and a lot of its people), and the ongoing issues in the tech industry. I'd expect Google's promotion ladder to reflect that to one extent or another, meaning that the levels themselves have some level of bias to them.
[1] e.g., http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract and http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl-0000022.pdf
[+] [-] renaudg|8 years ago|reply
> women coming in from academia are likely to have faced gender bias
Did you mean bias in their favor ?
"Women have substantial advantage in STEM faculty hiring, except when competing against more-accomplished men" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611984/
"Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions" http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-o...
"Study of accreditation exams reveals biases actually favor women in STEM positions" https://phys.org/news/2016-07-accreditation-exams-reveals-bi...
[+] [-] googlethrow821|8 years ago|reply
I'm more concerned about stuff that wouldn't show up in this data. For example, assuming a woman who is equally qualified as a man, I expect that the woman would be at a lower level on average, because e.g. of studies like those cited in [2]. I suspect that Google is better about this than most places, but I have heard too many stories from my woman coworkers to believe that things are perfectly fair. But I suspect this article makes things out to be perhaps slightly worse than they are, at least on the compensation front.
[1]: https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-05-30/women-underestimate-s... [2]: https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men
[+] [-] guitarbill|8 years ago|reply
To play devil's advocate, if the performance review process was good/perfect and skill = compensation, factors like "less impressive resumes" should even out pretty quickly, right?
[+] [-] lagadu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrash|8 years ago|reply
Because "men are paid more than women" alone simply says NOTHING.
In the company I used to work there were HUGE salary differences between men with the same job title, and the difference sometimes could run up hundreds of euros. The main reason was that the better paid men negotiated their terms of employment WAY better than those that got paid less.
I suspect to see something very much alike here. Also, I would like to see the salary distribution within men and women, because I can almost certainly guarantee that some women are paid more than some men, but I don't think we will ever see that because that would destroy the entire "all men are paid more than women for no reason other than they are men" narrative some people are still trying to push, while it is related to a LOT of other things other than just pure gender.
BTW, if a salary difference is SUCH a big problem why stick with the companies who do this? Why not find employment somewhere else, or start your own company with better working conditions? It isn't like you are FORCED to work for Google or any other of the big corps in Silicon Valley if you don't like how they treat people there.
[+] [-] qaq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirillkh|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/pdf/pna...
[+] [-] wolco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curtis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Veratyr|8 years ago|reply
That's all I needed to see. Nothing worthwhile here. The people who'll tend to report will be the people who are worried about how much they earn. I'd say all this shows is that men are less worried about how much they earn than women.
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
What are they hiding? They must know what that data will reveal is the only explanation.
[+] [-] rakshithbekal|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] sysdyne|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sctb|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwaway-g|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] imaginenore|8 years ago|reply
Education and extra-curricular activities don't seem to be taken into account, which can easily explain the gap in the lower tiers.
[+] [-] walshemj|8 years ago|reply