
Google accused of extreme gender pay discrimination by Department of Labor - hudibras
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pay-disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit
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anotheryou
So what's the data? Why even bother discussing (this specific case) without
that?

Assume the ideal of simmilar pay for simmilar positions: Here google might
employ 3 top tier female programers and 7 top tier male programmers with
equally high pay, while the rest of the workforce is split even, also with
simmilar pay. So they might have sourced from the top tier of progammers where
there might be a gender imbalance and it would cause the average pay of men to
rise.

On the other hand discrimination might have a far bigger impact on which roles
equaly qualified men or women get in the first place and how many promotions
they get. I also wonder how broad job "roles" are defined. You'd need that bo
be quite detailed to compare equal roles and avoid the scenario above.

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michaelmior
Why should a gender imbalance among top tier programmers cause the _average_
pay of men to rise?

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anotheryou
In lower tiers you might be able achive something closer to a 50/50 gender
balance. So you have e.g.:

low tier: 50 women, 50 men

high tier: 30 women, 70 men

So the average man as more paid like a high tier employee.

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dTal
I strongly suspect this is a DoL methodology problem. Can we really believe
that the same company that puts huge effort into retaining women through its
maternity policies (5 months maternity leave with full pay [paternity is 7
weeks] and a $500 stipend for takeout meals after a baby's born, among other
things) has a conspiracy reaching the highest levels to short change women,
such that its legal department refuses to comply with court orders to hand
over data in order to hide its crimes?

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travmatt
Wasn't google a conspirator in Job's illegal scheme to depress engineer wages?
I don't see what's shocking about the notion that a company that conspires to
suppress wages may do so again.

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seanp2k2
Yes [http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-anti-
trust-2013-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-anti-
trust-2013-10)

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MS_Buys_Upvotes
I love it when real news like this gets 40 upvotes but stuff that's blatant PR
gets hundreds.

HN is now a place to discuss corporate press releases and little more.

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oculusthrift
Depends if the company is in the hivemind's favor or not. IE what you are
saying holds true for Google. For Uber, Microsoft, and really recently Apple,
the inverse is true.

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oculusthrift
I'm sure people will treat this the same way they treated Uber for the same
thing /s

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merrua
Unsurprising given the stories.

