Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

Reminiscent of Simpson&#x27;s Paradox, the most famous example being a gender discrimination lawsuit alleging UC Berkeley discriminated against women in admissions (57% men vs. 43% women).<p>It turned out there WAS bias - in favor of the women!<p>&quot;The lawsuit triggered a study. The study results showed that not only were women not discriminated against, but that women had a statistically significant advantage!<p>Here’s what happened. Some departments had high acceptance rates and some had low acceptance rates. Women applied to more competitive departments. Men applied to more accessible departments. Taken on the whole men had an advantage. When broken down per department it was women who were more favored.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forrestthewoods.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;my_favorite_paradox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forrestthewoods.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;my_favorite_paradox&#x2F;</a>

The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I&#x27;m sure everyone here knows this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.oecd.org&#x2F;earnwage&#x2F;gender-wage-gap.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.oecd.org&#x2F;earnwage&#x2F;gender-wage-gap.htm</a><p>The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly.<p>The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap is a problem has a solution. They are pushing equality of outcome. They want everyone to be paid exactly the same. That&#x27;s the problem that they have. They don&#x27;t care that they are comparing apples to oranges. They want pay to be exactly the same.

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed.<p>No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying.<p>The actual discrimination against women comes in PhD programs, programs where their success is determined by 1 or 2 superiors (mostly men in advanced research programs), areas with primarily male coworkers, and creepy bosses. The area with most discrimination for women is in non major liberal cities. I went to the Midwest twice and saw more blatant sexism in the workforce than I have my entire life. 2 friends confided that they were asked to trade sexual favors for promotions albeit this was 20 years ago and that was the deciding factor for them moving to the Bay. These things are horrible and I can’t imagime the emotional trauma for that.<p>However, in the Bay Area and the majority of society the pendulum has swung way too far the other way. I don’t care if people think me sexist, these are my observations over my lifetime from both sides and unlesss convinced otherwise this is what I believe.

I&#x27;ve talked to one expert about a similar result in a company where I worked, and the flip side to results like this is sometimes promotion velocity - women looked &quot;overpaid&quot; for their level relative to the men, and that was often because they had been at that level much longer than most men at the same level.<p>If you set initial salaries fairly with respect to gender but promote men more quickly, then you end up with a company where it looks like women are paid more when you control for job title.

If you assume:<p>a) Google is about 70% men; and b) The &quot;error&quot; in pay (eg how under- or over-paid you are) is randomly distributed<p>Then it will be trivially true that more men than women are underpaid<p>If you, in addition to this, assume some level of sex discrimination, such that in addition to (b) there is additional &#x27;error&#x27; in womens&#x27; pay, depending on the relative strengths of each of these errors, the following two things can both be true at the same time:<p>1) A higher percentage of women are underpaid than are men. 2) Most of the people who are underpaid are men.<p>If this is surprising to anybody, they should be taking a remedial statistics class immediately.<p>To illustrate, assume that Google is 100 people: 30 women, 70 men. assume that 25% of men are underpaid, and 50% of women are underpaid.<p>That means that 0.25<i>70 =~ 18 men and 0.5</i>30 = 15 women are underpaid.<p>That means that more men are underpaid than women.<p>That means that 18&#x2F;(18+15)*100 =~ 55% of the people who are underpaid are men.<p>So in my hypothetical, is Google biased against men? Or is Google biased against women? Or is Google not biased at all?.

&gt; Kelly Ellis, a former Google engineer and one of the plaintiffs in the gender-pay suit against the company, said in a legal filing that Google hired her as a Level 3 employee — the category for new software engineers who are recent college graduates — in 2010 despite her having four years of experience.<p>&gt; Within a few weeks of Ms. Ellis being hiring, Google hired a male engineer for her team who had also graduated from college four years earlier. But he was hired as a Level 4 employee, meaning he received a higher salary and had more opportunities for bonuses, raises and stock compensation, according to the suit. Other men on Ms. Ellis’s team whose qualifications were equal to or less than hers were also brought in at Level 4, the suit says.<p>This feels like a part of the issue, but could be really hard to analyze easily.

That&#x27;s why we need salary transparency to really address this. There are a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women. Making this into a male vs. female issue does nothing to address the fact that people are underpaid.

As a side note: I have recently come over a university which promised a gender equality in &quot;all our science degrees&quot;, which it explained as an &quot;admission of 50% males, 50% females&quot;. But how can it be a &quot;gender equality&quot;, if 80% of the applicants are males?

This debate is exhausting.<p>I agree with some previous posters that women may be more favoured by formal systems now, while men remain more favoured by informal systems.<p>I think that part of the issue is that there are more ways to be male and a successful senior engineer or team lead than there are female.<p>We tend to look towards people who are similar to ourselves to see how we should advance. There are many fewer female role models than there are male ones. Many women who make it to leadership positions are encouraged to act masculine.<p>Women who make discrimination claims that later ring false are usually villainized. I think it might be useful to think about why these might be occurring. In particular, I think women as a whole still feel a great deal more insecurity WRT their positions in the workplace. The equality that&#x27;s been won in the last few decades has been to some extent manufactured, so it feels a lot more fragile.<p>I don&#x27;t think that a good reaction to this news article is to feel upset that men are now being discriminated against.

I read the article first and then came in to read the comments. I feel that most people commenting did not actually read the whole article. To put it simply:<p>It is not just about pay equity in a particular level. It is also about the ingress and egress rate of a level.<p>As the article mentions, some woman was hired as L3 while all of her co-workers were hired as L4. Was she overpaid as a L3? Maybe. But she was underpaid overall because she could&#x27;ve gotten L4.<p>Similarly, women and under represented minorities also face similar issues in promotions.

To me the key takeaway is that google systematically underpays both men and women.

Too bad they fired James Damore for simply wanting to have a discussion about it. I think discouraging people from speaking up on issues is ultimately how we got here.

Do read the fine article for the details:<p><i>But the study did not tell the whole story of women at Google or in the technology industry more broadly, something that company officials acknowledged.</i><p><i>Most significantly, it did not address ingrained issues that, according to workplace experts, cannot be overcome simply by considering how much different people are paid for doing the same job: Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.</i><p>Etc.

How did this fall off the front page with almost 500 points and less than 6 hours? There are submissions with fewer points and older that are still pretty high on the front page. Can anyone explain? Is it possible this is getting flagged too many times?

Several related facts:<p>1. In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem&#x2F;553592&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-more...</a><p>2. In the past 30 years women have made gains in traditionally male areas like law and medicine, but have gone backward in software engineering<p>3. Men are disproportionately on the autism spectrum<p>It seems to me that aiming for 50% female representation in software engineering is not necessarily something we should be aiming at

It&#x27;s interesting how this sort of discussion is actually leading HN to be <i>more</i> of an echo chamber. Most of my female friends in tech completely avoid it now because it seems that discussions that get voted up tend to ignore or belittle their experiences—even if there may be lots of great points and perspectives mixed in. In fact, the only response I noticed explicitly from someone who identified as female was being downvoted last I checked: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19306248" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19306248</a><p>That can feel rather insulting and demoralizing, and why would anyone want to subject themselves to that? Instead many women just avoid HN—which in turn means that it becomes more male dominated, with more upvotes and mindshare to comments about experiences of &quot;the other&quot; that may not by particularly well informed—because it&#x27;s not worth the time of a woman to even chime in.<p>Regardless of your opinions on these specific issues, this dynamic of driving away women decreases the likelihood of everyone gaining a well informed perspective. It doesn&#x27;t just impact gender issues. It impacts discussions on the importance and potential markets of startups that provide products which aren&#x27;t just male focused. And you can end up with more things like: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;lifeandstyle&#x2F;2019&#x2F;feb&#x2F;23&#x2F;truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;lifeandstyle&#x2F;2019&#x2F;feb&#x2F;23&#x2F;truth-w...</a><p>Not an easy dynamic to &quot;fix&quot;, but a useful thing to remember when thinking about communities, incentives, and impacts...

Should we read &quot;Many Men&quot; as &quot;Those on H1B visas&quot;?

Talking about the additional compensation - &quot;Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.&quot;<p>Doesn&#x27;t this imply that men, per capita, were being underpaid more than women?

I keep telling my wife she should learn Python and become a developer. Women are highly valued in tech right now, at least in corporations of any significant size.

&gt;&gt; One effect of the adjustments was to create a pronounced imbalance in compensation among lower-level software engineers, one of Google’s largest job groups, with a large number of men identified as being underpaid compared with their female peers.<p>The article refers throughout to &quot;numbers&quot; rather than &quot;proportions&quot;, or &quot;ratios&quot;, &quot;percentages&quot; etc, meaning that it is actually a larger <i>absolute</i> number of men rather than a larger <i>relative</i> number of men who are underpaid, compared to women.<p>Most of google&#x27;s engineers are men, so even if equal proportions of men and women were underpaid, the absolute number of men being underpaid would be higher.<p>Google obviously has people good enough with numbers to know this. However, it&#x27;s perhaps not surprising to see that there seems no mention of it in the above article. Google is, after all, defending a lawsuit by some of its former female software engineers who allege they were underpaid compared to their male peers. There is a clear incentive to allow a certain lapse from google&#x27;s usual pride in employing people who understand numbers.

I love the irony of this. Accused of underpaying women - their reaction is &quot;let us get some data&quot;. Nope. underpaying men. This is the way you do things. You collect the data, analyze and react. Wash rinse repeat.

Nobody in these discussions seems to attack the elephant in the room: performance review systems.<p>These are openly meant to overpay some employees and underpay others. Though they can be coated in HR-speak to appear neutral and objective, the decisions that come out of them are typically arbitrary; they enforce biases of all kinds. So we should not be surprised at the results.

None of this analysis accounts for leveling.<p>If women are disproportionately hired at lower levels, pay equity will still be _very_ off, even if the data says otherwise on the surface-level.<p>Ex: Woman w&#x2F; 4 years experience hired at T3. Man w&#x2F; 4 years experience hired at T4. Both are &quot;in range&quot; of their median comp per level, but the man is being paid more for his expertise.

The solution to this is the solution to many problems in tech: unionization.<p>Many tech workers think unions cap the maximum achievement and result in people getting underpaid. In reality, we&#x27;re _already_ underpaid when you look at how much the ownership of a company gets. Additionally, Hollywood&#x27;s unionization hasn&#x27;t hurt their pay.

Here&#x27;s what I think happened: women become a hot commodity. Tech companies have been trying to get their diversity numbers up for years know and the best way to do so is to hire some URMs, but the supply is still low, thus the cost to hire URMs has risen, leading to the higher average salary, and the subsequent adjustment.

I don&#x27;t know what the results really were but:<p>&gt; it found that more men than women were receiving less money for doing similar work<p>NY Times needs to learn the difference between absolute numbers and rates. This is awful reporting.

I once applied for a scholarship that did not advertise itself as a Male or Female only scholarship. In the fine print it quoted: &quot;women will receive first priority for this scholarship.&quot;

If you look at the amount they increased wages by, 9.7 million and by 10667 employees and just take an average... that&#x27;s only 908 bucks a person. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, 908 bucks a year is 908 bucks. But take into considering hours, that&#x27;s only a pay increase of just under 44 cents an hour.<p>So at the end of the day, they weren&#x27;t severely underpaying employees.<p>Good to see a company take this step. I had this happen to me at one company I worked for... it actually resulted in a pay increase of over 4 bucks an hour, now THAT was nice!

I am sure the Labor Department will absolutely <i>love</i> Google giving raises specifically to men whilst under investigation for &quot;systematically&quot; underpaying women.

from my experience women get promoted to managerial positions much sooner and much more ease than men. Upper managment finds women more agreeable, less threatening, less combative and more likely to run with their plans without question and make upper manager look good. Women are also eager than men to move out of coding roles into JIRA management roles. My last two managers were women both of them given that position for purely reasons I described above.

&gt; In response to the finding, Google gave $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees for this year.<p>Doesn&#x27;t sound like they were underpaying by very much...

HN is a very civilized place, and this thread is the closest I have ever seen to a toxic environment.<p>A lot of people (men) here complaining about women getting things too easy in tech. Talk to a woman in tech. Look around you and see how many women there are. Men are still running the show.

Systems that can serve the least-privileged fairly are more fair for everyone. The people who are resistant to making things more fair are usually the people afraid they are getting away with something.

Google is being sued by the government for under paying women. This result, which is based on some objective and some <i>subjective</i> criteria sure does come at a convenient time for the company.

Didn&#x27;t google fire a guy for trying to talk about this topic?

We&#x27;re nowhere near any common definition of what a fair wage should be. Especially for knowledge workers whose work ain&#x27;t easy to value.<p>Say I build some engine and buy a bunch of identical bolts I need: each one obviously costs the same. But now I&#x27;m building a business and need some human cogs to run it, why would I have to discuss the particular cost of each one?<p>Same work, same pay. But... unique person and custom pay? How do we reconcile this apparent contradiction?

&gt; Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.<p>If women were underpaid, things are less equal on average. If men were underpaid, as the study suggests, things are more equal on average. That said, would it be fair to keep underpaying some people in order to keep it more equal on average? I think not.

&gt; <i>Google, Ms. Emerson said, seemed to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive the same salary</i><p>This quote would appear to sum up the entire debate, using the term generously.<p>There is a large and vocal minority in society who abuse the word &quot;equality&quot; to mean &quot;more money and power for women&quot;. They don&#x27;t care about equality. They want inequality, but they know they can&#x27;t say that, so they simply redefine equality to mean inequality in the Orwellian style and carry on as if the language hadn&#x27;t just been horribly violated.<p>Ms. Emerson should stop talking until she can say what she means, although given her job is &#x27;diversity consulting&#x27; I&#x27;m going to guess she will never be able to say what she means.

Do you want the government to set pay scales for all STEM employees?<p>Keeping digging this hole and see whose grave you find at the bottom...

#himtoo

Well. Glad that&#x27;s settled then.

I don’t get this. It is not possible to underpay (when there is no allegation of discrimination) because if a person X is willing to work for salary Y then that’s exactly what he should be paid. In capitalism, corporations have a fiduciary duty to pay no more than is necessary to keep the employee.

&quot;You&#x27;re in private mode.<p>Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode.&quot;<p>How obnoxious. (I think trying to make people using private browsing register is offensive. FWIW you can also stop the effect by blocking requests to their graphql subdomain.)

Someone should write a manifesto.

Off-topic: Why almost all words in the title begin by an uppercase letter?

The only surprising part to this is that it was made public.<p>&gt;Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.<p>My problem with these kinds of &quot;intrinsic biases&quot; that white men are accused of is that they can only be shown to exist by accepting the fundamentally unproven assumption that we all enter the workforce equally capable in all industries, a position which is clearly untenable at a minimum because of cultural differences.<p>This is practically the definition of ideological, institutional bias, and the results will either be reduced efficiency across the workforce, or a violent swing of the ideological pendulum.

Let&#x27;s see how long is this post allowed to stay in the front page before it gets flagged out. I&#x27;m surprised it stayed 2hs.

I sometimes find that I have to write a comment questioning the very premises of the discussion, whether it&#x27;s Net Neutrality (Title I vs Title II) or the Pay Gap (women vs men). This is one of those times.<p>There are many factors for why women are paid less than men for the same type of position. Many of these factors have to do with hours worked and expectations around child rearing. And when this is taken out, the women are found to make as much or more than men.<p>My position can be summed up like this:<p>The corporate world is about 100 years old, with its crazy commutes and uses of energy just to sit in a chair. This comes at the expense of future generations (fossil fuels), and current family values (taking care of children, elderly, etc.)<p>Why do we say that women have to keep learning from men on how to move up the corporate ladder, work long hours and get paid more. Perhaps men should learn more from women about how to have a healthy work-life balance, take care of the kids more, and their parents.<p>Today&#x27;s kids are overmedicated with methamphetamines for ADHD, there is an opiod crisis among adults, 1 in 4 middle aged women is on antidepressants, the elderly are in nursing homes.<p>The wages have stagnated largely because both sexes flooded the labor pool, globalization and outsourcing and automation caused everyone to go into a race to the bottom. Now both parents are working for corporations. Fewer working Americans are becoming parents. They&#x27;re in a Red Queen rat race, 1&#x2F;3 of Americans are one paycheck away from homelessness. Is this really the best outcome for Americans?<p>Today&#x27;s world isn&#x27;t that of your grandfather, the company man who had loyalty both ways for decades and got a pension. Today we have two year stints, gig economy, part time work.<p>Andrew Yang wants to do what Nixon almost did, and institute a UBI for all Americans like the Permanent Fund in Alaska (lowest inequality of all states, year after year).<p>Why do we think Corporate Careers should take so many of our hours a week? Why should we trade time with our children and elderly for more money, just to survive? In the past, indirectly, child rearing was valued because one of two parents simply didn&#x27;t take the job, so there was less available labor, so one parent could pay for the whole thing.<p>The system is broken, and we are accomplices by talking about how women can match the men in their &quot;career opportunities&quot; of long hours, instead of talking about parental leave for men like in Scandinavian countries, making the school day shorter, etc.<p>Read this for more info: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;magarshak.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=286" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;magarshak.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=286</a>

Can&#x27;t wait to see how Jordan Peterson uses this one...<p>[edit: minor wording change; why am I being downvoted? I&#x27;m seriously asking]

One word: Union.<p>Unionize and wage equity magically disappears.

Many companies avoid these kind of issues by having a strict experience-based salary scale for all positions.<p>Gender or any other identity factor is then irrelevant if pay is based entirely upon candidate experience, right?<p>Edit: I have no knowledge of how Google handles salary. If anyone knows, feel free to share.