Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

&gt; (women) hold only 20 percent of the company’s higher-paying engineering jobs.<p>I believe women make up less than 20% of comsci graduates? So wouldn&#x27;t this be about right then.<p>Also I&#x27;m assuming women in comsci have lower workforce participation than men do (as in broader economy) so Google must be hiring women at a higher ratio than men from the available pool.<p>I&#x27;m 100% in support of open workplaces for gender&#x2F;race&#x2F;politics&#x2F;sexuality&#x2F;dress and whatever &#x27;work ability&#x27; irrelevant preferences. And cases like Susan Fowler are absolutely disgusting. I also feel a bunch of people increasing complain about their lack of success due to gender or race and are not willing to see they have a fair crack at their career but dont have the talent&#x2F;drive etc and cant see this lack of ability in themselves.

One of the women suing complained that a man was hired a level above her with the same years of experience. They both had four years experience.<p>I joined one of the big 4 eight years into my career. Similar to her I was placed at an entry level position. When I started I saw that I had the same ability as people higher than me. I made sure that I displayed that ability to my peers and manager. And what do you know, I got promoted into a more suitable position.<p>Hiring is broken, we all know this. Sometimes we might not get what we deserve. If we want more then you need to work for it. Plain and simple.<p>Google can&#x27;t win with its current culture. This is what happens when a company or group is too left leaning. You always get attacked by the very people you&#x27;re trying to help.

Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re thinking &quot;Jim&#x27;s a dude so we should pay him $50K more than Sally.&quot;<p>No, they&#x27;re paying somebody more because they don&#x27;t want them to leave.<p>And if they are paying you less than somebody else, it&#x27;s probably partially because they don&#x27;t think you are as much of a flight risk.<p>And if Google is wrong about these decisions, I&#x27;d guess we&#x27;d see a lot more female engineers leaving Google to start their own companies. But is that what we see?

The media should practice more circumspection when reporting about lawyers seeking plaintiffs or suing for class action status or at least mention how it’s a money making endeavour for that lawyer&#x2F;law firm.<p>Many of these lawyers are vultures trying to capitalize on topical matters and they rely on this sort of coverage for free marketing, it’s as likely for this to be thrown out as it is for any other outcome, and the media should consider that before obliging with the reputational damage.<p>Edit: not sure why I&#x27;m being downvoted, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve made any non factual or offensive statements.

The fun part of these articles is reading all the comments that <i>literally post proximate causes for the gender wage gap</i> and somehow conclude from that that the gap (which they just validated) does not exist.<p>This whole process infuriates me. The gender wage gap is an empirical question. It exists. If we believe it&#x27;s a problem (I do; you may not), it has the easiest solution in the world: give women more money. Seriously, I just solved the gender pay gap, right there: give women more money.<p>There&#x27;s all kind of ways you could do that (wage mandates, tax credits, etc.) and they all have pros and cons, but searching for proximate and ultimate causes here is kind of stupid. It exists; if you think it&#x27;s a problem, the solution is breathtakingly obvious.

I wonder if their skills are on the same level as the men who were paid more. And I&#x27;m curious, did they ask every single man in Google how much they get paid? Probably, there are some men who make even less than they do (or did).<p>Please don&#x27;t consider me a sexist, but this kind of stuff is everywhere now and it&#x27;s hard to tell whether it&#x27;s a truth or not.

Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I heard, the specific organization that was pursuing the case was being defunded &#x2F; split up by the current administration. It sounded like they had some interesting analysis of the data, and I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s ever made it to a courtroom.<p>I&#x27;m pretty unsurprised that leveling is a good way for bias to sneak in. My experience as a man applying for a Google position and also talking to women applying for Google positions is that leveling is extremely opaque, more so than the salary offer, and the same candidate could easily move between L3&#x2F;L4 or L4&#x2F;L5 essentially at the whims of the recruiter and the interviewers, and the same role can be filled by multiple levels (e.g. there isn&#x27;t headcount that&#x27;s open at L4 but not L5). And this would be consistent with both Google&#x27;s claims that people of the same role and level are paid consistently, and employees&#x27; claims of pay discrepancy.<p>Also, here&#x27;s the original complaint: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;4044053-Kelly-Ellis-Et-Al-v-Google-Inc-Complaint.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;4044053-Kelly-Ellis-...</a>

Flat salaries may fix this? You basically join at the same bracket publicly. No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. For each male hired there must be a female hired. No roles. Everyone has the same title: &quot;Engineer&quot;. Off sites are strictly prohibited.<p>Is this what the lawyers want?

&gt; Ms. Ellis, who left the company in 2014, says that almost all of the female software engineers at Google worked in front-end jobs while men worked in back-end roles.<p>That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.

Ladies, please, never take the first offer. My wife did that (she&#x27;s also a programmer) and she&#x27;s getting paid shit salary by a shit company to get shit on all day.<p>From Sheryl Sandberg&#x27;s <i>Lean In</i><p><i>&quot;But what&#x27;s interesting,&quot; she says, &quot;was that when my brother-in-law and my husband were saying &#x27;negotiate, negotiate, negotiate&#x27; – when I finally said OK I&#x27;ll do it, because no man would take the first offer, I then thought to myself, I felt like I needed a justification for doing it. And it turns out that&#x27;s what the data says: men can negotiate without apology or justification. It&#x27;s expected. If women negotiate, they need to justify it. It can&#x27;t be that you want more for you. Because that&#x27;s what men get to do.&quot; As she writes in the book, &quot;success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.&quot;</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;theguardian&#x2F;2013&#x2F;mar&#x2F;15&#x2F;facebook-sheryl-sandberg-lean-in" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;theguardian&#x2F;2013&#x2F;mar&#x2F;15&#x2F;facebook...</a>

A purely capitalist solution would be to fire all the men and keep only the women because they are doing comparable work for less pay. In a capitalist market why hasn&#x27;t this happened already ? This is exactly what happened when much of manufacturing moved away from USA to china, but for some reason this has not happened in the male female salary disparity. A company can earn diversiy points and save money by not hiring expensive male engineers.

This might be true and I hope they win.<p>But unfortunately everything that they say applies to men too. I wonder if this due to lack of negotiation skills. I have seen this problem being under compensation for the same skill and peer levels for men too.<p>At work, In one case I discovered a colleague being paid almost 50% times higher than I was. In another case in only a casual lunch conversation I discovered a colleague at the same level having RSU&#x27;s almost triple my entire compensation. I also discovered while I moved to US from India(I moved back for Visa expiry reasons) that some colleagues had even negotiated green cards through really acrobatic legal work. Promotions, foreign travel, bonuses etc.<p>Over 10 years in this industry I have seen ability to program well, or even do bigger software work like build scalable and stable systems isn&#x27;t worth two shoes in this industry.<p>One must have the ability to be politically skillful, negotiate well, know how to be well connected up management and use that leverage to further your career in both money and positions. I&#x27;ve tried to learn this, and failed. Unfortunately this turns out to be not something you can RTFM and learn.

Somebody at Google could write a memo proposing that sexism might not be the <i>only</i> possible explanation of why a majority of their top engineers are male.

These ladies are behind the times. Gender politics at Google are now so advanced that feminism isn&#x27;t even a thing. The &quot;non-binary&quot; and &quot;genderqueer&quot; have thrown the feminists under the bus. Frankly I&#x27;m shocked that the informal voluntary salary survey had the bad taste to try to classify gender.

What is the end goal here? Companies being forced to publish and formalize pay tiers?<p>Can Google publish a report on non-pay differences by sex at Google? Sick (or personal) leave taken, overtime worked, vacation time availed of, etc. by sex?<p>Obviously with everyone being equal and doing equal jobs, the above shouldn&#x27;t really be an issue?

There is an empirically proven wage gap, yet almost every comment to this article is people conjuring up social constructs to explain how that is perfectly fair.<p>It&#x27;s not fair though, that&#x27;s the entire point of the inequality in the wage gap.<p>What I do t understand is why people so fiercely defend this wage gap. If women were paid equal to men, we would have lost nothing.

Disagreeable personalities tend to get paid more. When a man is disagreeable, people usually get wide eyed, but then accept him as kind of abrasive, but lovable. Women are either less likely to be disagreeable personalities, or less liked when doing so.<p>If women get paid less, why doesn&#x27;t google hire only women to save money?

I gather that Google has pay grades. But are they reviewed in periodic performance reviews?<p>And to what extent is salary synced to that negotiated at hire? I mean, if women (as I&#x27;ve read) generally don&#x27;t negotiate on salary as hard as men do, are they indefinitely paid proportionately less?

I don&#x27;t know much about civil suits... Is the complaint a matter of public record already? Would be interesting reading.

Really?

Google asked for this. You reap what you sow.

I&#x27;ll be shocked if its true. I&#x27;m working in the tech industry for like 13 years now, I&#x27;ve never heard of anyone getting a lesser pay on account of gender (at-least here in India). What has gender got to do with knowledge is beyond me !

This is noise because these lawsuits are common, and Google has deep pockets.<p>The more interesting investigation is what happens at small companies. For example, look at the early Google employees -- only a few women, and most of those women were not engineers.<p>Once a company is at Google&#x27;s size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic. Not to mention that Google is a monopoly, with enough excess cash to settle lawsuits, fire internal bloggers, and pay up underperformers to clean the stats.