
Google faces new discrimination charge: paying female teachers less than men - YeGoblynQueenne
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/03/google-childcare-center-teachers-women-pay-pay-discrimination
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Houshalter
>the technology company employed roughly 147 women and three men as pre-school
teachers

Three men isn't remotely statistically significant. They can't make any kind
of statistical claim based on that.

Second a gender ration of 1 male to 50 females is obscene. Tech is supposedly
incredibly sexist for having a gender ratio of less than 2 to 1.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Second a gender ration of 1 male to 50 females is obscene. Tech is
> supposedly incredibly sexist for having a gender ratio of less than 2 to 1.

Teaching, _especially_ pre-K teaching, has long been held out as an extreme
examples as a field extremely effected by unequal social gender roles, and one
where that distortion is particularly socially harmful. And Google is pretty
much dead average for pre-K teaching with this ratio.

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prepend
So there’s some systematic bias in pre-k teachers that even the hiring
officials aren’t aware of?

What kind of programs can be put in place for gender equality in teaching? Is
there some sort of National problem?

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sudosteph
Wow. $18 an hour, for someone with 5 years experience and a masters degree in
early childhood education. I know she deserved the L2 salary of $21, but even
that is terrible! A software intern will make almost double that with barely a
data structures class under their belt!

Seems like Google is no better than anyone else when it comes to using letting
"market rate" limit the income opportunities of workers in "pink collar" jobs
like this. Google could easily give a decent 55-60k salary to each skilled
education professional that works full-time in their pre-k program. The fact
that they would play games with this woman's economic well-being over a petty
3$/hr shows that they've coasted on their reputation as a good place to work
for much longer than deserved. Hope they pay out well for this.

~~~
mc32
Unfortunately that's pretty much the going rate, as I understand it from
people who've been in that field. Some of the better ones may go up to
21-ish... Yes, in the bay area with years of experience.

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dmurray
> Lamar, who worked at Google for four years before quitting in 2017, alleged
> that the technology company employed roughly 147 women and three men as pre-
> school teachers

Sounds like affirmative action is drastically needed. Hire some men to
increase diversity in the workforce. It's especially important to ensure men
are equally represented in the more senior roles at level 2 and above...right?

~~~
shaki-dora
Yes, indeed. You're being sarcastic, enjoying how you've supposedly caught all
those SJWs in hypocrisy.

Yet Google news finds more than 600 articles with titles such as:

\- Male teacher drought may hurt boys

\- How do we recruit boys into female-dominated professions?

\- Our schools are failing boys, which is bad news for Britain

\- Most schools would love to have more male teachers to serve as role models
for boys, but not many volunteer. (first line of article, not headline)

etc...

[https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&biw=1324&bih=1190&tbm=n...](https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&biw=1324&bih=1190&tbm=nws&q=%22more+male+teachers%22&oq=%22more+male+teachers%22)

The higher salaries for the male teachers this very article is about may
actually be a sign for Google's attempts to improve the gender ratio.

~~~
Anderkent
The difference is in how the issue is phrased. You usually see people argue
that the tech imbalance is in men/nerds/whoever discriminating against women
and pushing them out. You usually see the school teaching problem phrased as
"men don't want to work as teachers".

Those two phrasings call for completely different action.

~~~
shaki-dora
> You usually see people argue that the tech imbalance is in men/nerds/whoever
> discriminating against women

Now we're moving the goalpost.

But anyway, I doubt your impression.

["women in it" discrimination] get 1.2 million hits on google, while ["women
in it" culture] gets 37.5 million hits.

Note that "changing culture" means nothing else but "making the job more
attractive for women", or "women don't want to work in IT".

Here's the first headline I get on Google News for ["women in IT"]: "Why We
Should Encourage More Women to Work in IT"

That's awfully close to the "How do we recruit boys[..]" I cited above.

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ebikelaw
Nevermind the merits of this case. I'm shocked that a child care that costs
what Google charges pays its educators only $20/hour. This isn't a company
perk, it's astronomically expensive. Much more expensive than my kids' private
grade school, where the teachers are paid far more.

~~~
sudosteph
The way that it's presented in the article, I had assumed it was a free
service to employees. The fact that it's not makes this even more frustrating!

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MollyR
Wow the gender ratio is 1 male to 50 women for teachers!

This would be a great chance for google to show the world how its done on
equality, and have a google branded push for more males in teaching and more
women in tech.

It would definitely show the critics of hiring more women in technology, that
it really is about equality.

~~~
jdoliner
> It would definitely show the critics of hiring more women in technology,
> that it really is about equality.

Given that they haven't done this does that mean that critics of hiring more
women in tech are right in their conclusion that it isn't about equality?

~~~
MollyR
I don't think so, because Google is primarily a tech company not a teaching
company.

However I'd be disappointed in Google if they didn't try to even out the
gender ratio of the teachers and hire some more males as well. I can
understand it would look like hypocrisy to some.

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goliatone
Im actually wondering if Google was using the number of employed female
teachers to increase their overall male/female ratio... it seems like a 50/1
ratio has to have an explanation behind rather than pure chance

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MollyR
It looks like that's a somewhat normal ratio for pre-k teaching. The
percentage goes up for male teachers as kids age for some reason.

[http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers](http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers)

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ipsum2
(Ex)-Googlers, do you know if the daycare center employees are contractors or
are hired directly by Google?

~~~
DannyBee
All the ones i've met had full time employee badges ;)

