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.
I don't mean to minimize the level of technical competence in these roles. It is great that there are SWE-adjacent roles with 30%+ women. It irks me deeply that Google puts out these misleading statistics which then get parroted by the media and then everyone else.
Don't have the talent/drive/connections/hustle/luck …. There are more possibilities than just sexism vs. meritocracy.
Edit: hey downvoters, I'm talking about why a random given person of any gender may not be progressing in their career. Read the context.
That is: lack of ability to do what? Can you clarify?
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.
With regards to ability, we seem to intuit the existence of an unmeasurable "ability factor" that underlies real, measurable metrics of performance. I have no idea how Google measure this kind of thing or any statistics qualifications, but a very dumb first attempt might be to get all the engineers to recommend five top co-workers, break the recommendations up into male/female groups and discard cross-group recommendations, then look at the attributes of the most recommended co-workers in each group.
To be recognized as more valuable.
1) Women who are in tech get paid less then men.
2) There are less women in tech to begin with.
They are related, in multiple ways perhaps and it's possible tease some links and accompanying explanations:
a) Maybe women know they'll be paid less so they don't go into tech to start with. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem.
b) As you've identified, because of so few women in tech, individuals who end up in well paid positions by chance are less likely to be women as well. So it's a statistical explanation in way.
c) There is sexism. I've seen it, together with xenophobia and other prejudices. And because of that women are rejected, as in not getting offers to start with, or even if hired not taken seriously.
d) In order to fix 2) women were hired but they didn't have an equivalent skill set or experience as men, so they got the job, perhaps to fill some diversity metric, but they did worse in performance reviews later on so they get a smaller salary, less bonuses etc.
Regarding d), I remember going out of the way to bring more women for onsite interviews trying to "fix" 2), that is I wanted to provide more opportunities for success and wanted to increase the diversity in the office. Most of the women failed the interview. I am sure c) was a contributing factor in some cases why the higher ups rejected them. But many simply didn't have their skill set at the level we were looking for. Had they've been offered and taken the job, they might found themselves in the position of getting a smaller salary and poor performance reviews down the road.
Now this doesn't present any good solutions, and doesn't address the lawsuit at hand because I don't know enough details about it. So it is mostly a breakdown of the issue as I see and from personal experience, as I was in charge of recruiting and interviewing for a good number of years.
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.
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.
Of course, there are jobs in all these fields that are fascinating, and people with boring jobs often have had a project here and there that was interesting, so that's what you hear about and how your impressions are formed when you aren't part of another field. After all, people at parties don't like to talk about how boring they are.
While only a handful such jobs exist in any company.
The standard response for these things used to be 'Go find a different job which you think works for you'. But these days its either 'do as I say' or 'prepared to get sued'.
Sometimes we deserve less than others. Gender/etc aside, some people are less talented/effective. Society seems to be afraid to say this, but not everyone is created equal upstairs.
> They both had four years experience.
Obviously, on the job years is almost entirely unrelated to pre-work experience, so this is just silly. I hope there's more to it.
I'm curious how their resumes/accomplishments compare for those four years.
Years experience is not an indicator of seniority. I have two friends that graduated at different years.
One has more than 10 years experience. The other has three years.
10 year guy has been working with jquery and HTML the whole time. He avoids any other problems or domains.
Three year guy wants to work in every area possible. He actively pursues internships and work that provides a wide range of experiences and technical variety.
Now who do you think is more valuable as an employee?
This is a bit of a ridiculous statement. You seem to be claiming that everybody who shows off their skills rises to their correct level. I don't see it that way. I see that there are way more people capable of doing a senior position, but only a few positions are available.
It might be that the plaintiff didn't do as well on the interview as her colleague. Just because both have have 4 years experience doesn't mean that both did equally as well on the interview.
It's impossible to say without more information but it could just be a case of the old 4 * 1 year experience for her and 1 * 4 years experience for him. Comparing people on years of experience is the sort of irrelevant laziness I'd expect from a recruiter, not a developer.
Yah, this sums it all up, Google makes this assumption that everyone they hire has the same mindset, and this is not true.
Then what is your problem with them suing ? They go a different way than yours, but if it's broken in the first place why not ?
I think the poster's point was that hiring is broken equally for everyone, which is inefficient but not illegal.
> You always get attacked by the very people you're trying to help.
helping how?
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?
I think you give companies too much credit. Those pretty good reasons are typically that that's how much they asked, it wasn't unreasonable, and they passed the interviews.
People's salaries are all over the map for the same sorts of positions, and it's not just IT and development.
But, even though it might not be a clearcut answer to whether there is discrimination or bias in salaries, it should be explored. Even data with a wide, overlapping range doesn't mean that the mean and median can't be compared and valid conclusions drawn about probable bias.
Google seems to take bias seriously, and I think if it could be proven with adequate certainty that salaries were affected by the sex of the employee alone, they'd do something about it.
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.
If an employer pays people who are a flight-risk more (a-la "the squeaky wheel gets the grease"), and women are on average a lower flight risk because they are more risk-averse - is the resulting pay disparity a case of illegal discrimination?
My intuition says no, but I'm not sure everyone (including the legal system) necessarily agrees.
So if it's biased externally it's gonna look that way internally if you're not proactive.
The entire premise of the lawsuit is that the managers are working contrary to the best interest of Google. Companies are made of people, and no matter how much CEOs might want employees to behave a certain way, employees are still beholden to their cognitive biases.
The optimum situation for Google would be to pay all employees the market rate for the level of quality they desire. This would basically yield a meritocratic pay structure. But this is not what happened. The plaintiffs were awarded different pay grades for measurably comparable ability. This is suboptimal for Google and for society; that is why Google is being sued.
The article doesn't say that. It says they were awarded different pay grades given an equal time spent in the worforce, not that their abilities were comparable.
What amazes me is the confidence with which people equate the work of engineers when they actually have no stake in making that judgement correctly.
You see, if you are paying the money and living with the results, you have a much greater incentive to make this call correctly.
And those who are unhappy with these judgements have a much greater incentive to equate engineers who aren't actually comparable. It's called politics.
And they did land one of those less interesting jobs, earning similar to those coworkers who had been there for 10 years, and there were nothing illegal in this. Have a bunch of employable credentials, send out enough applications demanding above average pay, and you are going to likely end up with above average pay.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career
They won't for exactly the reason the lawyers do this. This is a trendy, hot topic (look how many comments it has on HN so far). This is "news" fodder for media outlets. They don't mind that they're being taken advantage of as long as they get a non-zero amount of ad views out of the deal. Win/win for the lawyers and the media, although definitely a loss for those reading.
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.
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.
They even remove names from resumes for hiring decisions to avoid unconscious bias from the decision makers.
This is about as close as you can get to a completely fair system and is far above and beyond what can be reasonably expected from a business.
It seems that your solution is to simply increase bias in the labor market rather than try to make it more efficient. Over time, marketplaces tend to abhor inefficiencies and seek equilibrium, so not only would "give women more money" inevitably have unforeseen adverse side effects, but it also runs counter to our fundamental social and economic principles.
Let's look at the causes , and address those.
I think that's how you solve it. It is pretty sexist to say , "give someone more money because they are a women"
Similarly, giving women more money solves the problem of women getting paid less money.
I don't understand why this is so difficult to understand or controversial - especially in an industry with such a skills shortage.
If you want more and better employees start hiring more women and paying them.
That is a market solution - consider it an investment. Pay them now, pay them more, have a larger hiring pool later.
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.
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-...
Leveling is a function of interviewer recommendations and hiring committee approving a candidate for a certain level. We usually interview people with a target range in mind (e.g., L4-L5) that's based on your experience and current role.
Base salaries don't have a huge range until you get very senior (e.g. Director). There's a LOT more variance in stock grants. I'm sure there are people two levels below me that have a higher overall comp due to huge stock grants.
Source: I work for Google, interview a lot, but don't serve on hiring committees. This isn't advice, and may not apply to all areas of the company.
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.
Is this what the lawyers want?
That being said, salaries are not determined by how hard you work but rather how much the company needs you to stay.
You don't. And that's where it will all begin to break down. Things as a whole will be mediocre.
Isn't that the ideal?
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/episo...
It's the socialist dream!
General grad CS populations are split 4:1 in favor of males. It won't end well when you cut out a significant amount of your candidate pool because you want to promote "diversity". Why 50:50? Why not majority women? Any cutoff would be arbitrary.
For example: http://abovethelaw.com/2016/06/breaking-ny-to-180k-cravath-r...
This is how Japan worked for a long while; now it's moving toward a more meritocratic approach with performance bonuses and raises because the fact of the matter is that it sucks for people who work hard to be paid the same as the guy who comes in 9-5 and does average work.
That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.
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.
At Google, the "frontend" work also usually includes the server which serves the frontend code - this means engineers need to be not only capable at UI development, but also be familiar with the Java systems that exist at Google.
From this perspective, frontend at Google is indeed similar to a full stack role at most startups running on AWS or GCP. Backend at Google is more like working on AWS itself.
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...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-...
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.
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.
But the negotiation and sales part. That's the issue. Its not easy to get good at that.
Can you elaborate on this? Namely, the burden of proof is higher than 'might be true.'
I'm guessing you meant something more like, 'If this is true, I hope they win.' I can never tell, anymore.
I have been told many times that I need to work on my negotiation skills. One manager has even asked me whom do I go lunch with. And why don't I go to eat with the big shots. Of course you need to act all pally and buttery, saying yes to anything they say all the while.
What they mean to say is stop expecting the system to be fair and do what it takes to win.
To win, they have to prove that they could reasonably have been paid more but weren't because they were female. If they show that they could reasonably have been paid more but weren't because they are bad at negotiating, they get nothing.
So, yeah, don't mistake discrimination law for something which would make sure people are paid what they are worth.
I'm only saying if you replace 'female' by:
1. 'not good at negotiations'.
2. 'not good at making friends up management'.
3. 'not having good political skills'.
etc.
You still arrive at the same result, regardless of the gender. Which happens with us men too.
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?
Presumably these women would like more money.
The current situation is not a meritocracy and it needs to be fixed.
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.
If women get paid less, why doesn't google hire only women to save money?
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?
We're in the middle of an election right now with one of the political parties campaigning on forcing companies to make what they pay public so that we can ensure that minorities are being paid the same as others.
So, naturally the discussion turned to equal pay at work and one of the new Indian hires said that in India his boss told him that he didn't like hiring females and when he did he always paid them less as they were stupid and lazy!
That is obviously horrendous.
This isn't an attack on India, I've never worked in a workplace with gender bias as far as I've seen, but just because my experience is positive it doesn't mean that it's positive everywhere. There are good and bad workplaces in every country unfortunately and statistics back that assertion up.
Because I've never experienced anything bad it doesn't mean that bad things don't happen.
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.
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.
I agree with you though, gender does not matter, and should not matter, when it comes to compensation.
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.
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.
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?
And my original point was that there's much more bias at small companies.
