Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men (opens in new tab)

There is simply not enough information presented in this article to know whether there is truly a gender bias (in either direction) regarding how Google pays their employees.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19303989

Human beings just have very strange presuppositions regarding probability and statistics that are almost always wrong.

The real reason for the Berkeley study is that the seeming acceptance disparity worried administrators, who proactively asked Bickel to look into it. https://outline.com/2HMrKV

To support this claim the study pointed out that the percentage of male applicants _out of all male_ applicants that were granted admission was lower than the percentage for female applicants, for all (examined) departments.

However, according to the study, there were 8442 male applicants and 4321 female applicants. So while a larger proportion of female applicants were granted admission, it still meant that many fewer women were addmitted.

To clarify, a higher proportion of a smaller number can still be a smaller number. 5% of 1000 is 50, 10% of 100 is 10.

Imagine we split a pie in 10 pieces, you keep 8 and I keep 2. I eat my 2, you eat 4 of your 8 and then you accuse me of hogging the pie because I ate 100% of my share while you ate only half of yours.

That is what the study actually showed happenned with admissions in Berkeley.

_________________________

[1] Sex Bias in Graduate Admissions: Data from Berkeley

https://homepage.stat.uiowa.edu/~mbognar/1030/Bickel-Berkele...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Korea most assuredly is not a country with "the most equality in the workplace". It routinely ranks as having the worst gender inequality of any developed nation, and one of the worst in the world generally. It came in 115th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2018 Global Gender Gap Report* and has hovered around that number for years.

*http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf

Yeah, I am not sure what to think of the data. It's not what I would expect.

How is US, Canada, Austria having such a large gender wage gap, followed by Canada.

Then Greece, Bulgaria and Romania are all the way on the left. Having lived in Eastern Europe, I would not consider it overall a bastion of women's equality and rights, not according to the West European standards at least. Granted though, during the Soviet times women and girls were studying math and science just as well as the boys even if not better and it was never specifically promoted or pushed via a "women in STEM" or such similar programs I have seen here, it just happened. Perhaps there is a remnant of that mentality and maybe there is something to be learned from there.

That's not a solution, that's another problem.

Romania, Costa Rica, Luxembourg, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Norway, New Zealand, Colombia, Malta, Hungary, Poland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Lithuania, Cyprus, Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Switzerland, Slovak Republic, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, United Kingdom, Canada, United States, Chile, Latvia, Israel, Japan, Estonia, Korea.

See the pattern there? Neither do I. Usually there is some correlation by continent, cultural area, GDP, HDI, etc. In this case there seems to be nothing. Romania and Costa Rica and Luxembourg are the countries with the smallest wage gap; Netherlands, UK and US are way up there, in company of Chile, Canada and Estonia. Turkey is wedged right in between Denmark and Norway. Netherlands' pay gap is 4 times that of neighbouring Belgium. Mexico and Ireland are the same. Lithuania's gap is half that of Estonia and Latvia. Strange.

Do you know this for sure? Developed East Asian countries are some of the worst in terms of work equality for women, particularly if they want to have children. Not a good example to use.

In the end, we would get 5 to 10 times as many talk submissions from men, accept nearly all of the talks by women (often turning down higher quality talks from men) trying to get diversity numbers and have a much higher cancellation rate form the women for various reasons, especially money. If we were lucky we would get 20-30% women speakers when all of that was done. I've also been told by some diversity activists that, in order to get women to speak and to get higher percentages of women as speakers etc., unlike most of the men, you need to pay for their travel etc., offer free tickets for women attendees, consider offering stipends for women who speak etc..

Others, organizing other conferences have shared similar experiences. It's one thing to fight against blatant sexism which I'm for, but this is turning into something else.

My daughter who is finishing the primary school has recently asked me if it's okay if she doesn't like math, but likes animals and babies.

Sounds like some pressure is being applied...

This describes basically every tech job I have ever had. Real life engineering woman here reporting in.

In 2014 I joined a series B startup as engineer #15 and was the only woman in the office other than the admin; food delivery dudes often brought things to my desk, assuming I must be the office mother. When I was late to work one day after being groped by a strange man on Caltrain, my supervisor questioned my commitment to meeting deadlines. When I moved on, they returned to being a 100% straight white male company.

In 2015, I was the first female engineering hire at the new office of a growing mid-size tech company. A second woman wasn't hired until we'd reached a headcount of about 20. Men, especially clients, often forgot my name. E.g. Janice vs Janet vs Jan (none of these my real name, but you get the idea. The point is that I wasn't important enough to these men to remember.)

Fast forward a few years. Now I am by far the most senior of four engineering ladies at the satellite campus of a household name tech company. Total headcount at this office is about 100 engineers.

I have never had a female manager.

For those keeping score, I have never worked anywhere with more than 5-10% female engineers. For my entire career, even as a noob, I have been the most senior female engineer I know.

I count myself lucky because I've never had to deal with anything resembling actual harassment. (It helps that I am not conventionally attractive). But there is a psychological burden of always feeling alone, always being the first or only, worrying that your actions will be taken to represent all people of your kind, and wondering if assholes in your midst think you've only got where you've gotten because you're a woman.

Your dismissive attitude toward women's supposed advantages is as common as it is damaging. Whatever unfair advantages you think your women colleagues have, unless you are black or latinx, it is unlikely you will ever experience the feelings of isolation and otherness that most women deal with throughout their tech careers.

However a distinction must be made between the formal systems (extremely sexist favouring women), informal systems (potentially extremely sexist favouring men) and workplace environment (women are continuously sexually propositioned; pretty overwhelming evidence for that IMO).

Making the formal systems sexist is a stupid response to the informal systems being sexist. I wish that people would stop advocating that and instead work on the informal issue - if it isn't due to innate ability (a safe bet) then there must be something that can be done. The propositioning thing is a bit of a poser though, it is so pervasive that I suspect it points to deeper issues.

Also the anecdotal evidence is that if propositioning was successfully stamped out that would do crazy things to the fabric of how relationships get established. Might be a net good or bad.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren...

In France there is a dedicated system for engineering studies (Classes preparatoires + Grandes Ecoles).

You do 2 years of intensive Math and Physics (classe preparatoire), than pass a ranking exam, then go to the school of your choice provided you ranked high enough to get into this specific school.

Basically, the ratio was 1/3 women 2/3 men at the "classe preparatoire" stage, and overall it's the ratio for engineer when all specialties are mixed together.

But then you have disparities between fields, CS schools get between 10 to 15% of women while Chemistry is about 50%, other fields like Electronic, Civil Engineering, Applied Physics are roughly in the average of 30%. Only the schools to become a military officer have an higher disparity than CS (and the air branch is actually in the same area).

For those who can read French (or have the courage to decipher) the statistics are available here:

* http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/mp.html (math dominant)

* http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/pc.html (physic dominant)

* http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/psi.html (technic and mechanic dominant)

(Hint: CS == Informatique (often abbreviated to "Info")

What's the percentage female graduates in STEM fields? The 57% may not be representative for the fields which matter for engineers. Not saying the delta is big, I honestly don't know and am curious.

Of course, this could have, and does[0] happen in the Bay Area, too - in just the last year even.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/technology/uber-sexual-ha...

I think the "me too" thing proved the coastal elite were part of the problem.

What is the graduation rate of women in STEM fields? 57% is not the graduation rate in STEM fields, which makes it sound like you are cherry picking statistics. What fields are all the women graduating in?

Aside from Google, the pay gap still exists and women earn less than men. The WP article estimates 94 cents on the dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...

You're right that women are getting positive reinforcements, it's because (whether you agree with them or not) we have affirmative action programs for women. Affirmative actions always have and always will be debated to death, but the question you should be asking and answering before dismissing this issue is, if there's no affirmative action, how do you equalize opportunities for groups known to have been discriminated against? We already tried not having extra programs and not having extra awareness, and the result was lower pay. How would you correct this?

This sounds like an uneducated opinion. Sample size of 1: My department had maybe 1 female professor for every 10 male. The student ratio was pretty similar.

In your sample, you asked "your friends", which is a really biased sample. How did you meet them? Did you only meet them because they already had the high paying job? You aren't accounting for variables, and you are ignoring evidence.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOjzCi9wIhE

.... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?

Though even if they were, maybe they are making a premium because they aren't adding sexism to their workplaces and exposing their company to the legal liabilities you are.

Usually it's the opposite but for the same reason: women seem underpaid but when you correct for experience on the job, they make something like 98 cents on the dollar compared to men.

It says that the raises resulting from the study disproportionately went to men. Not just in absolute terms, but proportional terms:

> The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men, is done every year [...]

> In response to the study, Google gave $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees for this year. Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a higher percentage of the money.

I worked for around 4 years before joining Google and was also hired as an L3. I'm male.

Two of my new grad friends were hired as L3's at Google too but make like 100k more than I do in total compensation. One is male and one is female.

I'm not saying there isn't sexism but I'm not really convinced by this example. It's pretty common that people get "demoted" when coming in from other companies.

I made the mistake of not getting competing offers (I wasn't actually looking to change jobs at the time).

So the L4 person probably had some better story/negotiation which allowed them to start at L4. It of course could be bias.

It was really frustrating for me to be at the same level as new grads, though on reflection, I was not at a the same level as other L4 employees around. Some transparency around these processes I think could help candidates a lot.

I think the bigger issue is that new-grad phds are almost always hired at L4. They are often less experienced at software engineering than someone with a bachelors and a few years of experience. So unless the person is being hired into an area that actually makes use of their phd, it seems that Google is just willing to pay for the title.

I asked my boss about this and he said it was because this was her first real job. When I reminded him that this was also my first real job he just said "that's different" without further explanation.

Also, a L3 at Google makes ~$200k a year. Someone getting paid that 4 years out of college is not being discriminated against.

Source: https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft

You've spent four years of your career doing some crappy data entry job? Undershot. Rejected.

You've been running your own company after the college? Overshot. Rejected.

Salary transparency without job descriptions would be akin to showing house prices without describing house details - location, square footage, number of bedrooms, etc.

As a fun thought exercise, imagine that you were the head of a multi-national conglomerate (or working in the interests of a multinational conglomerate) who stood to gain from paying people as little as possible. Would it be in your best interest to: a) standardize pay fairly or b) convince some people that they were being mistreated to the benefit of some other people and watch them fight each other while you laughed from your corner office, puffing cigars lit off of $100 bills?

But that's not how a lot of jobs, software development included, work. It's entirely possible for someone fresh out of school to be a far more valuable team member than someone with ten years experience... yet we would point to a disparity in pay between those two people as [sexist, ageist, whatever-ist]. Now let an experienced employee find out they're getting paid less than someone with far less experience? Hooo boy, talk about creating a toxic environment.

Granted, that probabbly wouldn't stop recruiter spam and of course there is MUCH MORE to a good job than pay.

(Equity being what some here are referring to as 'equality in outcome'.)

In this image, it's hard to argue that equity isn't clearly better. In other cases like admissions, it's much more debatable, and personally I think equality ('in opportunity') makes more sense there.

Why not? It's good and bad news for men but men definitely shouldn't be discriminated against

> In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.

https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...

BTW, in the same vein the article could be titled "Google finds it is overpaying many men (or women)" - since unless everybody has the same salary, half of the workforce would be paid less than median - thus being underpaid - and half would be paid more - thus being overpaid. Well, there could be lucky ones being paid exactly the median, but they are too boring to write an article about them.

The media really needs to stop this practice of just saying "experts say" without any attribution.

I suggest when reading any article, when you read, "experts agree" or "sources say" or "critics have said" or "others are saying" -- just replace it with, "I, the author of this article, think ..."

I don't think the context is completely unjustified. It just happens to be more complicated than this. The reason that women generally drifted into higher compensation compared to men was that their direct management chain was adjusting their compensation disproportionately (when measured in aggregate, across the company).

You could come up with a lot of explanations for this effect. Women could have been hired at lower levels than appropriate and were therefore outperforming men of the same level, for instance. Or, perhaps, there's a lot of emphasis in the company towards retaining and compensating women fairly, and the effect was that managers were primed to reflect that in their pay raises -- in other words, people were personally overcompensating for the intrinsic biases they were told that they had. Still another reason might be that women just make better engineers, in aggregate.

Google decided that the goal was "equity" here and decided to correct it, for better or worse, and yet it's false to say that we already understand the cause behind the disparity.

As a young, middle class, educated, employed, healthy white male, I'm perceived as the "default settings" of society. No groups are advocating for me because I apparently already have plenty of support.

There's nothing I can do to celebrate who I am because the conversation is so zero-sum. If I'm a white guy making a lot of money in tech, I'm part of the problem.

It's exhausting. Instead of being a booster for causes I think are important, I just stay on the sidelines.

I wonder if all the upvoters are just quieter than the down voters.

"Instead many women just avoid HN" - based on a couple of your friends? I am sure lots of people, regardless of gender, avoid HN for a variety of reasons.

No one knows your gender on HN unless you tell them. There's no pictures or even real names to go by. Things get voted up based on merit.

You can have an accurate or inaccurate belief on a question of fact, but “accuracy” is not a measure that applies to matters of opinion.

So how do we solve this? How do we be more inclusive from day zero? Where does it all begin?

I think you'll find these problems stem much earlier in a man's life when the education system helps teach them to be men and helps women be women in the traditional sense. We're all placed in boxes and told to be a certain way.

So what do we do?

It seems like a ripe opportunity to create women-only HN.

For example, imagine a company with 7 male employees and 3 female employees. That company has 9 engineers and one administrative assistant. All the engineers are underpaid. The male engineers are underpaid by $1000 and the female engineers are underpaid by $1200. The administrative assistant is a woman who is fairly compensated. That means the men are underpaid by $7000 total and the women are underpaid by $2400 total. Men make up 70% of the employee workforce and are roughly 75% of the underpaid total. More men are underpaid than women. The per capita underpayment of men is $200 more than the underpayment of the average woman. There are plenty of ways to frame this data that make it look like men are the biggest victims and yet woman engineers are all payed $200 less than their male counterparts.

Similarly, I think imagine Google will find similar flaws with how these numbers were generated.

Ideally two individuals in the same or similar roles, with similar performance over time in that role, should have the same salary regardless of background or negotiation ability. The major issue with this is that you can't reduce pay of rockstar negotiators (who may or may not be rockstar performers), and a correction that pays everyone as much as the highest earning equivalent employee might be hard for even Google to swallow.

They needed to compare the number of men who were underpaid as a proportion of all men to the number of women who were underpaid as a proportion of all women.

Using bum-pulled numbers, your company has 1000 employees, 667 are men, and 333 women, and they all do pretty much the same job. Your payroll is $100M, and 70% of it goes to the male employees. The mean pay for men is $105k, and the mean pay for women is $90k. Mean pay is $100k--let's say this is fair pay for the work. Overall, the men are overpaid, and the women underpaid.

But the mean is a fool's game; the median is more telling. Now say 445 men get $90k, and 222 get $135k. 2/3 of men are underpaid. Now let's say 222 women get $101k, and 111 get $68k. 1/3 of women are underpaid.

On a per-person basis, a man working for the company is twice as likely to be underpaid as a woman, but the amount by which they would be underpaid is much less. Going by the aggregate numbers, one could say "men at Company X are overpaid, compared to the women" and then any given underpaid man might not even realize they are being underpaid, thanks to the misleading statistic. When one of the $68k-paid women complains (naturally, as the worst-off of the bunch), and the company analyzes its own payroll at a more detailed level, it realizes that men are more likely to be underpaid than women (and also that increasing its payroll by 8% would make no-one underpaid).

>That is not the same as addressing “equity,” she said, which would involve examining the structural hurdles that women face as engineers.

Consider the following situation:

Men get promoted faster than women for similar work. They're seen as more assertive or something. Managers, noting the systemic inequality, take individual action to compensate women fairly for their contributions, despite the failure of the larger system.

The structural hurdle: that women find it more difficult to get promoted, is not addressed. And as a result, they end up paid less for similar work, despite attempts by ground level mangers to address the inequity.

The HN guidelines suggest that you

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I think this should apply to articles posted as well.

They don't give unlimited access to all content (recipes and crosswords are apparently excluded), but you can read all the articles you want.

This site looks like it has the rules more formalized, if you’re interested. I think it’s something most native English writers do without thinking by adulthood.

https://capitalizemytitle.com/