
Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men - lmcnish14
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-gender-pay-lawsuit.html
======
Gustomaximus
> (women) hold only 20 percent of the company’s higher-paying engineering
> jobs.

I believe women make up less than 20% of comsci graduates? So wouldn't this be
about right then.

Also I'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.

I'm 100% in support of open workplaces for
gender/race/politics/sexuality/dress and whatever 'work ability' 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/drive etc and cant see this lack of ability in
themselves.

~~~
rhizome
Sure, lack of advancement indicates a lack of ability. It's an old
rationalization, but it's a post hoc fallacy.

That is: lack of ability to do _what_? Can you clarify?

~~~
Spivak
Or just a lack of drive/desire. In my office almost all of the management
positions are filed by women while almost all the technical people are men. I
asked about it when I was first hired and most of the people in the office had
been offered management positions at some point during their career and they
tuned them down because they'd rather do engineering work than human work.

Looking at the demographics you might suppose that there's a lot of bias and
discrimination but it couldn't be further the truth. We just have lot of
mobility and many options for salary increases without 'climbing the ladder'
so everyone individually wound up where they wanted to be.

~~~
kamaal
>>In my office almost all of the management positions are filed by women while
almost all the technical people are men.

This again creates a new problem of 'Smart engineers' Vs 'Dumb managers'. To a
point eventually you get to reducing management to routine supervision work.

In the past I have seen a situation where a program manager was routinely
pissed because he was barely able to understand what engineers were talking
about. After routinely under estimating time estimates he came to a point
where the entire argument on him could be reduced to a rude statement: _' Why
don't you stick to your spreadsheet cell filling work, and let us engineers do
real work. Work that matters isn't your cup of tea'_

I can see where this would go in case of women managers. In only some time,
men would be accused of things like 'mansplaining'.

------
brad0
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.

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.

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.

Google can'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're trying to help.

~~~
neerkumar
Everyone who worked at Google or a company like Google knows that 90% of
people do a job well below their skills. That's how it is in those places.

To sue them because you have back-end skills, but you were doing front end is
laughable. There are so many PhDs in ML there writing SQL queries, or PhDs in
CS changing the color of some text for an A/B test. That's how it works in the
best companies in the world. You get the money and the prestige, but the job
is bad.

~~~
solotronics
there is probably some kind of sweet spot where you get to do whatever really
cool stuff you can think of and your company is just pretty good

~~~
TheArcane
Probably in R&D departments of tech companies.

------
stretchwithme
Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I don't think
they're thinking "Jim's a dude so we should pay him $50K more than Sally."

No, they're paying somebody more because they don't want them to leave.

And if they are paying you less than somebody else, it's probably partially
because they don't think you are as much of a flight risk.

And if Google is wrong about these decisions, I'd guess we'd see a lot more
female engineers leaving Google to start their own companies. But is that what
we see?

~~~
slyfocks
This assumes venture capitalists don’t exhibit a bias towards male founders.
Depending on the extent of bias (if any), female engineers would lose a bit of
bargaining power with Google.

Also, empirically, women tend to be more risk-averse than men on average, so
Google (and other companies) could be paying less knowing the chance they’d
leave is lower than a man of similar skill.

~~~
runevault
It doesn't even have to be for the startup life. They could just leave to work
at another established company. Though the rest of your point about being risk
averse and so sticking with a job (and therefore being less of a flight risk)
is more interesting and would be worth exploring.

------
dontnotice
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/law firm.

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.

Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted, I don't think I've made any non
factual or offensive statements.

~~~
geofft
Of course class-action lawsuits are a money-making endeavor for law firms. We
live in a capitalist society, where the way we make things happen is that we
make them profitable. In particular, class-action lawsuits exist so that law
firms can find it profitable to take on cases where there is a wrong to be
righted, but any single individual isn't going to find the cost of going to
court and paying a lawyer to be worthwhile.

If you think that lawyers being motivated by money corrupts the legal system,
well, I would agree and apparently so would Judge Richard Posner, who retired
this week because he suddenly realized how unjust this all was. But, well,
this is the system we have now.

~~~
srtjstjsj
Posner's an interesting case. He claims that he is sick of how the under-
lawyered get mistreated in the courts, but he's been a consistent advocate of
many legal theories to harm marginalized people and animals: he's anti-privacy
for citizens, but pro-privacy for police, anti-souveillance but pro-
surveillence-by-State, anti-animal-rights, anti-antitrust, in favor of a free
market for selling children, opposed to equality of educational opportunity
even though he doesn't believe in genetic racial intelligence and does believe
that Black children are systematically oppressed, and even though he thinks
copyright/patents go to far he believes hyperlinking and paraphrasing news
should be illegal!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career)

------
bandrami
The fun part of these articles is reading all the comments that _literally
post proximate causes for the gender wage gap_ and somehow conclude from that
that the gap (which they just validated) does not exist.

This whole process infuriates me. The gender wage gap is an empirical
question. It exists. If we believe it'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.

There'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's a problem, the
solution is breathtakingly obvious.

~~~
apk-d
The confusion here is between "women get paid less on average" and "women get
paid less on average because of sexist treatment/assumptions". If the latter,
more specific statement is true, then we have a problem. However, if women are
paid less because of less career-oriented personal life choices, maybe making
an issue out of it is an overreaction.

Left-handed people earn less on average than righties. Tall people earn more.
With a sufficiently large sample you'll probably find a correlation between
salary and hair color, hand size, skin pigmentation, freckle density and _a
million other arbitrary factors that we 've long decided are not worth
fighting about_.

~~~
bandrami
Why are the motivations of the people paying women important to you? The gap
is an outcome of a complex system, and the outcome is what is problematic.

~~~
Eridrus
Mandating equality in outcome is probably a stance on fairness that the vast
majority of Western society disagrees with. It cuts to the core of what we see
as fairness. It's entirely unsurprising that this gets people riled up, though
most of it is as the GP said about whether the cause is discrimination or
women's own choices.

Personally I think the left in general need to grapple with the fact that
we're not all equal, rather than saying that idea is tabboo because it has
lead to horrible places before. The fact that the left has largely focussed on
suppressing this idea that many people believe (and on an individual level is
self evident) rather than tackling it head on is what leads to the backlash
against political correctness because people feel like the emperor has no
clothes, but they can't say so.

------
johndoe90
I wonder if their skills are on the same level as the men who were paid more.
And I'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).

Please don't consider me a sexist, but this kind of stuff is everywhere now
and it's hard to tell whether it's a truth or not.

~~~
pentae
This is ideological warfare, it has nothing to do with logic.

------
geofft
Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I
heard, the specific organization that was pursuing the case was being defunded
/ split up by the current administration. It sounded like they had some
interesting analysis of the data, and I don't think that's ever made it to a
courtroom.

I'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/L4
or L4/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't headcount
that's open at L4 but not L5). And this would be consistent with both Google's
claims that people of the same role and level are paid consistently, and
employees' claims of pay discrepancy.

Also, here's the original complaint:
[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4044053-Kelly-
Ellis-...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4044053-Kelly-Ellis-Et-Al-
v-Google-Inc-Complaint.html)

~~~
mpweiher
> Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently?

Last I heard was the judge denying a request for more information, saying DoL
was on a "fishing expedition" and didn't have anything to back their case and
justify said fishing expedition.

~~~
AlexCoventry
Got a link?

~~~
drather19
WaPo article (with provisional ruling linked as well):

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2017/07/16...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2017/07/16/the-labor-department-just-lost-a-battle-with-google-over-
its-alleged-gender-pay-gap/)

~~~
geofft
Well that's odd. Why would DoL need names and email addresses and phone
numbers of employees? Didn't they already claim to have a statistical analysis
of salaries based on previously-gathered data?

Is this related to the thing where Google says getting the data would be too
hard (i.e., do they want to do their own analysis of competitive salaries
based on scraping LinkedIn or something)?

------
ransom1538
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:
"Engineer". Off sites are strictly prohibited.

Is this what the lawyers want?

~~~
thekashifmalik
Haha that'd be ridiculous! Imagine working all night and getting paid the same
as someone who works half as much.

That being said, salaries are not determined by how hard you work but rather
how much the company needs you to stay.

~~~
kamaal
>>Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works
half as much.

You don't. And that's where it will all begin to break down. Things as a whole
will be mediocre.

------
CobrastanJorji
> 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.

That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.

~~~
geofft
Anecdotally, I spent a couple of months this summer going through team
selection at Google NYC, with a specific request for back-end, low-level,
preferably C++ roles (app security, build systems, etc.). I didn't meet or
talk to a single woman through the entire process, with the exception of
reception, another candidate, and someone who was covering for my recruiter
when he was on vacation. I asked every manager I talked to about diversity on
their team, and they all gave wishy-washy answers (at best; one told me that
women just weren't interested in his team's work). If I'm remembering right,
of the teams that I could have accepted an offer from, exactly one had exactly
one woman.

This wasn't the only reason that I ultimately turned down the Google offer
(and spent so long in team selection after passing the interview), but it was
certainly one of them.

There are some back-end teams at Google that have lots of women; Chrome
security comes to mind (I don't know if that's "back-end" in the common sense
of the term, but it was the sort of team I was interested in). But I don't
find it particularly dubious that these are the exception and not the rule.

------
Clubber
Ladies, please, never take the first offer. My wife did that (she's also a
programmer) and she's getting paid shit salary by a shit company to get shit
on all day.

From Sheryl Sandberg's _Lean In_

 _" But what's interesting," she says, "was that when my brother-in-law and my
husband were saying 'negotiate, negotiate, negotiate' – when I finally said OK
I'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's what the data says: men can negotiate without apology or justification.
It's expected. If women negotiate, they need to justify it. It can't be that
you want more for you. Because that's what men get to do." As she writes in
the book, "success and likability are positively correlated for men and
negatively correlated for women."_

[https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/mar/15/facebook...](https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/mar/15/facebook-
sheryl-sandberg-lean-in)

~~~
rootlocus
On a related note, my company raises salaries yearly as a percentage of the
current salary. Even though those with lower salaries get a slightly larger
percentage, everyone gets somewhere between 8% to 15%. Having a higher initial
offer and asking for a higher raise (and arguing that you earned it) results
in better raises. Nobody expects everyone to get the same salary.

------
j7ake
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'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.

~~~
romanovcode
Someone tried this already, didn't go as well as planned.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-
handbags-tears-toilets-When-producer-launched-women-TV-company-thought-shed-
kissed-goodbye-conflict-.html)

~~~
bb611
At best a story about someone running a company with no idea of how to hire or
manage for culture fit, at worst a fiction made to bring in some cash from the
daily mail, a publication generally known for their lack of journalistic
depth.

------
kamaal
This might be true and I hope they win.

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.

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'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.

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't worth two
shoes in this industry.

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've tried to learn this, and failed.
Unfortunately this turns out to be not something you can RTFM and learn.

~~~
WalterBright
We are all salesman - and a better salesman gets better results. As nerds we
tend to discount, dismiss, overlook, whatever, salesmanship skills. But they
still count big time.

We sell ourselves all the time, like it or not. Might as well try to learn how
to get better at it.

All aspects of ourselves can be tweaked to better our salesmanship - grooming,
dress, posture, getting our teeth fixed, tone of voice, words used, email
protocol, etc., the list is endless.

This all started with the book "Dress For Success" by Molloy who noted that
businessmen wearing tan overcoats did better than those wearing black
overcoats.

~~~
kamaal
What you have written is 100% true. Especially about the dress part. A while
back I started wearing a shirt and pant to work. People, especially juniors do
tend to take you a lot more seriously if you look formal and well dressed,
compared to say showing up in denims and t-shirt.

But the negotiation and sales part. That's the issue. Its not easy to get good
at that.

~~~
WalterBright
I noticed early in my career that people who dressed better got noticed more -
i.e. promotions. Habitually wearing flipflops and track shorts to work won't
work.

> But the negotiation and sales part. That's the issue. Its not easy to get
> good at that.

You're right. I work at it all the time, and I have a very long way to go. It
will always be a "work in progress" for me.

But at least one can try to not be simply terrible at it. I still shudder at
the stupidity of some of the things I did that clearly damaged my career.

------
unescape
Somebody at Google could write a memo proposing that sexism might not be the
_only_ possible explanation of why a majority of their top engineers are male.

------
the_evacuator
These ladies are behind the times. Gender politics at Google are now so
advanced that feminism isn't even a thing. The "non-binary" and "genderqueer"
have thrown the feminists under the bus. Frankly I'm shocked that the informal
voluntary salary survey had the bad taste to try to classify gender.

------
to_bpr
What is the end goal here? Companies being forced to publish and formalize pay
tiers?

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?

Obviously with everyone being equal and doing equal jobs, the above shouldn't
really be an issue?

~~~
bb611
> What is the end goal here?

Presumably these women would like more money.

~~~
DevinTheDude
So what? I'd like more money too. Should I simply get more money because I
want it?

~~~
bb611
I'm not sure why you are so grumpy and taking the questioning tone directed at
me, given that my response simply proposed a possible explanation for GP's
question.

The courts are a lever to improve compensation just like negotiation is, if
that makes you uncomfortable that's unfortunate, but it is how the US economic
system is structured.

Court cases have significant costs, they don't simply "want it" but hired
(presumably) decently skilled attorneys to argue their case, have real social
and personal risks associated with being publicly associated with this case,
etc.

------
eksemplar
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.

It's not fair though, that's the entire point of the inequality in the wage
gap.

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.

------
danschumann
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.

If women get paid less, why doesn't google hire only women to save money?

~~~
unescape
Disagreeable people also tend to get fired more, in my experience. Perhaps it
balances out, which would explain why there are still disagreeable people.

------
mirimir
I gather that Google has pay grades. But are they reviewed in periodic
performance reviews?

And to what extent is salary synced to that negotiated at hire? I mean, if
women (as I've read) generally don't negotiate on salary as hard as men do,
are they indefinitely paid proportionately less?

------
AlexCoventry
I don't know much about civil suits... Is the complaint a matter of public
record already? Would be interesting reading.

------
snambi
Really?

------
manbearpigg
Google asked for this. You reap what you sow.

~~~
brad0
Would you be able to expand on this? I think the reason your comment is being
downvoted is because you haven't backed up your opinion with anything.

------
vcool07
I'll be shocked if its true. I'm working in the tech industry for like 13
years now, I'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 !

~~~
sumedh
> I've never heard of anyone getting a lesser pay on account of gender (at-
> least here in India)

and so you can speak for all Indians?

I have heard one of my Indian manager saying they dont prefer hiring single
females who are not native to the city where they are hiring because once they
get married the females would leave the city and so the company loses all that
training/skills etc.

~~~
kamaal
The attrition in most IT firms in India has been around 13% on an average. It
means they have to hire endlessly to merely survive, let alone grow.

That argument you made I've heard many managers say in many situations. You
can't blame them because they have a situation in their teams where if the
team size is say 20. There are on average 5 people who are expected to slog
till death, while the remaining chill. You also run into situations where the
most laziest ask for never ending accommodations. Leaving office early, WFH,
never showing up on a friday, onsite, unjustfiable hikes etc. There is an
upper limit how much a few people can work to make up for others.

Regarding that training part. The problem is in a country like ours(India)
where merely getting a job can be a ticket out of poverty. Expecting companies
to pour in several hundreds of crores to train people, all because they were
bored at home so wanted some place to sit and while away time till marriage,
and move on later is a national waste. Especially if you are taking resources
for people who are more committed to using that training to do something for
themselves and the company.

Don't expect others to take your career and life seriously, if you yourself
don't.

------
dogruck
This is noise because these lawsuits are common, and Google has deep pockets.

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.

Once a company is at Google'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.

~~~
tyingq
>Once a company is at Google's size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic.

It would be pretty difficult to make completely objective formulas for salary.
I assume it maps back to perceived performance (in the interview, or after
hiring), which is always biased, conscious or not.

~~~
dogruck
Ok, let's think about the compensation process.

You start with the obvious -- managers assess the value of each employee.
Roughly, for each employee you derive a dollar amount that is: 1\. Larger than
what the employee could be paid elsewhere (otherwise, the employee leaves) 2\.
Close to the employee's contribution to the company's bottom line.

That's a rough science though. #2 is certainly harder than #1.

So, next, you put all that data into a big database. Then you run a variety of
sanity checks (aka formulas): 1\. Large changes in comp, year over year 2\.
Discrepancies when broken out by factors including age and gender.

Finally, you're faced with a choice. If you override all of your initial
estimates with the formulas, then you have formulaic comp. Otherwise, you're
at risk to lawsuits.

Imagine a GOOG executive defending "yes, we paid women less because we
honestly think, on average, the male employees contributed more to our bottom
line." That's not gunna happen, which sorta leads to formulaic comp, no?

~~~
geofft
#1 directly reflects biases from other companies, which could arise for lots
of reasons. If, say, many of your male engineers are getting offers from Uber
and the rest aren't comfortable applying, and Uber is giving extremely high
comp to lure people away from Google, then your formulaic comp will end up
with men getting consistently higher salaries.

Google is pretty opaque about how they make salary offers, but from reports on
the internet plus my own experience and that of friends, it seems like they
have rough comp bands within each level, and they don't _really_ "negotiate"
in the conventional sense, but they do have lots of leeway to match/exceed
competing offers or your current salary if you name them before the initial
offer. So if you have those offers on hand from other companies, or if you had
a particularly strong current salary, you can get a much higher offer.

Also, don't forget that this lawsuit is specifically alleging that they
_underlevel_ women, not that they're directly paying women less. There are
lots of easier ways for an executive to defend that, e.g., "like everyone else
in the industry we'd love to hire qualified women but it's a pipeline problem"
etc. etc. (The executive might even genuinely believe it.)

~~~
dogruck
I agree with everything you said, and your experiences match my own. I still
say that situation leads to formulaic, systematic management.

Let's say that GOOG developed a sophisticated machine learning algorithm that
made all hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation decisions. The code is
open source, and everyone can see that it doesn't contain explicit logic for
bias.

Now, a short, 44 year old, male engineer sues because of a statistically
significant observed bias against one of his cohorts. Is the program biased,
or just insightful?

With humans, it seems we have no choice but to assume their collective algo is
biased. And it often is! But, when you're a massive monopoly with tons of
cash, the safest thing is to make formulaic decisions that are statistically
clean. It's just good business.

~~~
geofft
This seems essentially like Searle's Chinese room. The program is not biased,
in the sense that there is no line of code that adds bias, but the application
of the program to the available data clearly produces a biased process.

We've seen this exact thing with other machine learning algorithms - there was
the one in the news recently that insisted on classifying a photo of a man in
the kitchen as a woman, because all its training data firmly convinced it that
women are the only people in the kitchen.

I guess the thing worth explicitly asking is whether biases for entirely
logical reasons are defensible - for instance, if you start with an industry
where (for whatever reason) men are paid much more highly than women, it's
okay to offer people their current salary + fixed delta to poach them from
their jobs. I would say no, because the goal of legal policies like this is to
achieve a specific result in society, and specifically _not_ to punish bad
people in charge of companies, so the question is not whether people had a bad
motive, but whether the result is being achieved. If you're allowed to apply a
non-biased algorithm to biased starting data and have it yield an equally-
biased output, you're not actually solving the bias.

~~~
dogruck
What if we observe differences in said algo(s), when applied to small
companies and the Googles?

Said another way, if Google's employee stats are biased, is there any feasible
defense?

