> Oracle is budget conscience and seeks to make money, but there is no evidence that this is driven by discriminatory intent or that Oracle intentionally discriminates in order to save money.
> Lower-level managers are the primary decision makers in compensation outcomes and the potential mechanisms of discrimination that are available to Oracle's higher-level executives and HR personnel (budgeting, instructions, approvals) are not likely means for the sort of discrimination alleged.
https://www.hrdive.com/news/judge-shuts-down-labor-departmen...
>there is no plausible mechanism for systemic discrimination by the alleged wrongdoers. Lower-level managers...
If the suit is about systematic bias, this seems to be a pretty good line of reasoning. Complete chaos in compensation outcomes == no bias, or at least if there is, it's probably not coming from the top down
But seriously, if you can't pin that kind of discrimination on upper managers you will never be able to root it out.
"Systemic" means a problem throughout the system, regardless of design. For example, systemic infection.
"Systematic" means creating a plan or system to do it.
"Disparate impact" is a legal theory for proving systemic discrimination.
This is interesting, because Google was underpaying male employees just 2 years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
This is the consequence of heeding calls to Do Something based on uncontrolled aggregate statistics.
If 50% of the qualified applicants are Asian (despite being ~7% of the US population) and then your company ends up being 50% Asian, people who don't understand what's happening start yelling at you because 50% >> 7%.
If your response is to Do Something and that causes your company to be 40% Asian, the Something was plausibly some kind of proscribed discrimination, even though Asians are still quite overrepresented relative to the general population.
And so on for all of the other cases and demographics where people are caused to be angry based on misleading numbers and then the same thing happens.
It's also known as "outsourcing" if you don't mind your Indian workers still being in India. ;)
(For the sake of completeness: Google is also required to set aside a cash fund for salary fairness adjustments over the next 5 years, though it's tiny and there is no guarantee any of it will actually be paid out.)
$3.8M for 5k+ employees at Google rates seems low.
Plus they're "allocating a cash reserve [for] pay-equity adjustments for the next 5 years". Wouldn't the DoL prefer that Google stop systematically paying women 0.1% less than it pays men? Why is the solution "keep some petty cash on hand, in case we sue you again"? Why in the world does Google need to post a bond for $1.3 million? When has it had less than that amount freely available in its metaphorical pockets?
Which is to say, this is barely a slap on the wrist, par for the course on government actions against Google. Sundar Pichai will still continue to act like a crook because it pays to do so, he can't be thrown in jail for it and the penalties are always a fraction of the profits.
I think the important takeaway is that https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-google-discriminat... ("Google denies charges, says there is no gender pay gap") was a lie. And that https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-... ("Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity") was also certainly a lie.
And that there probably should be a lot of punitive damages here in addition to "back pay". At the very least, the taxpayers should be getting something back from all the years the DOL had to waste dealing with this case.
Huh? They tell you the amounts. By these back pay numbers, there definitely was no gender pay gap. And then...
> And that there probably should be a lot of punitive damages here in addition to "back pay".
Why? The putative victims suffered a barely measurable injury. Why would that indicate huge punitive damages?
So that's 2.585M / 5541 = $467 per employee. Assuming an average comp of $250K, that's a 0.2% difference. How can that be determined to be discrimination? Is that even a statistically significant difference?
Not that Google would care to fight this. For Google, $1.3M is like getting back a Canadian quarter in change.
$3.8 million is just pocket lint to Google. The sum is so low, it's like someone walking by and ignoring a penny on the ground.
I did see a lot of discrimination/harassment (a lot still being very rare, but a lot more than I expected) at lower levels. It was usually dealt with swiftly by HR. Unless it was a "superstar" of course.
