[korkoros]

Considering that the company I work for tried to hide their gender pay discrimination by "releveling" all the women who were getting systematically underpaid, you should in fact report these data without disaggregation.

"Those people make less because they are all lower level" is not a mitigating factor for pay discrimination.

[jncfhnb]

As someone who’s done a bunch of DEI analyses for companies, I don’t really believe you understood what you’re saying happened. That really does not make sense. It would be a massive organizational change for some niche cherry picked reporting stats that few people look at. Does not sound plausible at all. This stuff is genuinely hard to implement.

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.

[korkoros]

I work for a federal defense contractor that is required to prove in Department of Labor audits that pay is not discriminatory. The possibility of losing those federal contracts is an existential threat to the company. Definitely not "niche cherry picked reporting stats that few people look at."

The significant restructuring (affected several hundred people) that you describe did in fact occur.

[moneywoes]

Very interested, what type of analysis do you do?

[nostrademons]

There's no such thing as downleveling or demotion at Google, and hiring & promotion rates are tracked by race and gender.

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.

[jeffbee]

> There's no such thing as downleveling or demotion at Google

There used to be. In the “member of technical staff” era, most new hires were down-slotted within a year.

[joshuamorton]

The numbers here don't take into account stock growth.

Leveling is likely the major component, but thats also a legitimate concern!

[Jensson]

Reporting without disaggregation means that companies would be discouraged from hiring junior women, and that would just make the issue worse not better. Be careful with what you wish for.

[Gareth321]

> “Those people make less because they are all lower level"

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.

[kyrra]

This has been a mantra of many since the 1990s, and I continues to get proven false (generally). There are so many variables here.

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.

[lazide]

It kind of misses the point though - many of the folks saying these things are well aware, but it benefits them. Which is why they say it.

[specialist]

2nd edition 2011.

Has Sowell, or maybe one his acolytes, updated his rhetoric to incorporate the findings of all the ongoing research into the gender pay gap?

[pizzafeelsright]

How is anyone underpaid? If they agree to the negotiated compensation, isn't that equitable?

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.

[avg_dev]

Often people take what’s offered, whether it is a fair deal or not. Everybody isn’t out there negotiating their best possible rate all the time. Corporations have long taken advantage of whomever they can to earn a buck - it’s a time honored “tradition”.

[josho]

I can only assume you don’t actually want your question answered. Because if you did want an answer you could have asked an ai or searched as there is plenty written on the topic.

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.