
Google found it paid men less than women for the same job - ChefboyOG
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/04/google-found-it-paid-men-less-than-women-for-the-same-job/
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_thrownaway_
Throwaway of a googler here. These results could be explained by not promoting
women as fast as men, because every year it is expected you will get a CoL and
performance based raise if you exceeed expectations for your role, regardless
if you exceed enough to convince a promo committee of a level change.

So this could mean that women stay at lower job titles longer.

It could also mean that they sign into the company with higher base salaries.
I have seen that maybe happen once in my experience for the same experience
level but I have no way of correcting that for their interview performance or
how well they negotiated.

Basically I don’t think this data point is super useful on its own.

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organsnyder
Discussed yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19303039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19303039)

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notadoc
Well, the people demand another comments section to complain about the study

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sp332
Just to be clear:

 _The company’s annual analysis only compares employees in the same job
category, so the results do not reflect race or gender differences in hiring
and promotion._

[https://www.wired.com/story/men-google-paid-less-than-
women-...](https://www.wired.com/story/men-google-paid-less-than-women-not-
really/)

~~~
doitLP
What needs clarification? The article’s title and content make it quite clear
it is about compensation for the same role.

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Tycho
Surely this is the expected outcome of supply shortage and diversity
commitments.

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crooked-v
I find it unlikely that Google, specifically, has a supply shortage in any
possible niche all the way down to "software developers who are also
unicycling clowns".

~~~
weberc2
Their diversity quotas are presumably expressed relatively, not absolutely. In
other words, they don't say "we need 10000 'diverse' engineers", they say "we
want our engineering organization to be 60% 'diverse'" (I'm obviously making
up numbers here). Ergo, the shortage in question isn't an absolute number of
'diverse' engineers, it's a shortage of proportions in the pipeline. And they
can't do too much to stray from the proportion because they're constrained on
one hand by hiring laws (there is only so much you can do to avoid hiring
white/asian guys without overtly violating the law) and on the other hand by a
fiscal need to hire more engineers at a sane price point.

Note that 'diverse' is quoted here because the whole corporate diversity
enterprise is utterly superficial or it wouldn't categorize individuals as
'diverse' or 'not diverse' and it wouldn't choose the most superficial
criteria (race, gender, etc as opposed to viewpoint, perspective, or cultural
diversity) to make those assessments.

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bdcravens
The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t adjust for h1b etc which
tend to be lower-paid while being overwhelmingly male:

[https://cis.org/North/H4s-Data-Shows-MirrorLike-Strong-
Biase...](https://cis.org/North/H4s-Data-Shows-MirrorLike-Strong-
Biases-H1B-Males-and-Indians)

~~~
docker_up
H1Bs at Google do not get paid less.

~~~
bdcravens
Google doesn't have an "h1b salary", true. My position is that h1b's tend to
lean towards the lower end of a published range for a role, creating a salary
marketplace that benefits the employer (which is an abuse of the h1b system;
it's to be used to fill roles where domestic talent isn't available, not where
it's too expensive)

~~~
docker_up
You have no proof, just your own biases. You WANT to believe this is the case,
but it's not true at Google.

~~~
bdcravens
Aren't we both doing the same thing, only coming from different ideological
perspectives?

I'd love you to prove me wrong. If Google has domestic talent available at
$150k, and can pay $110k to an h1b, they are supposed to hire the domestic
talent. That's how the system works (or rather, it does if a company doesn't
abuse it). I'd love to find out they are instead having to pay the h1b $175k
because no domestic talent is available. If Google is doing this, and is the
statistical anomaly, then good on them. However, all the evidence I've seen
(anecdotally and in writing) suggest otherwise (though at an industry-wide
level, not at the Google level)

~~~
docker_up
I know many, many H1Bs around Silicon Valley. Many are making more than me, a
"domestic talent". My base salary is over 200k/year. I know one making $300k
base at one company and $600k base salary at another. I know many others that
are making the same as me, and the only ones that make less are the less
talented ones which is right.

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gerbilly
I understand this makes a great headline, but it might be because they don't
promote women as quickly as men, leaving the women 'overpaid' compared to the
other men at their level.

A better comparison might be to trace the trajectories of men and women who
started out in similar jobs and at similar pay levels, and the see how many
women appear overpaid.

I bet you won't find too many.

~~~
cxseven
That would be useful information, but it would also need some way to judge how
biased (or not) the promotions are.

There's also another likely contribution to higher pay for women: a shorter
supply of them, and Google bidding to hire/keep them versus other companies.

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turc1656
This whole article is a big fat nothingburger.

This is less than $1,000 per employee that was adjusted. Given the salaries at
Google, this is almost certainly a <1% difference and the pay bump is pretty
much negligible. It's less than the cost of living adjustment that they
probably get every year.

~~~
benjohnson
You're correct that the magnitude is insignificant - but it's still important
because the study's conclusion contradicted the expectation that men are paid
significantly more.

~~~
turc1656
I suppose you have a point. I have believed (known?) for a while that this was
simply not true so since the magnitude of this difference is what most would
call not statistically significant, I treated it as worthless. Though, I
imagine those who were still of the mindset that men were still paid much more
would find this much more interesting.

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fixermark
Did the analysis in the NYT report that TechCrunch is cribbing from here
account for Simpson's Paradox?

Google employs more men than women. Even if a higher percentage of women are
underpaid, we could see a situation where more men get raises in an
equalization.

~~~
rjf72
This is not how they did their calculations. It's described here [1].

They were not comparing _individuals_ against some set average and making sure
each employee was then brought up to that average and then saying e.g. x% of
men and y% of women were bumped up. What they did was compare _groups_ against
one another and ensure that there was cross-group consistency. E.g. - the
regression formula to determine a man's compensation based on various inputs
(such as e.g. performance ratings) should yield a mostly identical result for
a women of the same inputs.

And then they contrasted groups against various groups. They found that if you
were a women, you were paid disproportionately more than other employees. This
is why in their announcement they speak of groups instead of individuals, _"
[T]he 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software
Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for
adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women."_

Remember the goal is not to have every _individual_ be identical, but to
ensure that there is no specific group bias. Any given man/woman/etc may be
paid more than another employee for reasons that cannot be easily quantified,
but when the entire group of _all_ e.g. men or all women are
disproportionately paid more than other groups of the same quantifiables then
you either have inadequate quantifiables (e.g. - you are missing _why_ certain
people are paid more), or there is simply no good reason and you have a bias.
In this case, they decided it was a bias.

[1] -
[http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/pay_equity_info_sh...](http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/pay_equity_info_sheet.pdf)

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petercooper
_paying $9.7 million to adjust pay for 10,677 employees_

So an average of $908? That sort of rounding error pay adjustment isn't really
what people are discussing when the topic of unfair pay comes up.

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IshKebab
Are you suggesting that Google's analysis is flawed?

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magwa101
JFC

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herpderp3dtwerp
Well, this doesn't fit the narrative at all.

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mnd999
Perhaps those that keep posting the same story over and over have some kind of
agenda?

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notadoc
What is the agenda you are suggesting with your conspiracy theory?

