Comment by ChrisRR
7 years ago
So the first demand is "A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequality"
I'd like to see the actual data behind this constant inequality claim. I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men, I've also heard that the data is never accurate because it doesn't compare the same jobs. I want to see some actual numbers so people can figure out where the issue actually lies.
Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism, had an article about this http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/ , which had more hard-facts than anyone else I've seen, but the conclusion was that most of the claims made by the wage gap supporters are cherrypicked and false. Although, if Google specifically has a problem with it, I'd definitely be willing to listen. If they are protecting people like Rubin, it does seem plausible that other things could be going on.
Working link: http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/
Thank you and sorry. Updated it now
I feel if anyone has enough employees with similar roles, at similar levels to pull together this kind of data, it's a big company like Google
> Time magazine, which doesn't exactly seem to be a bastion of conservatism
Although Christina Hoff Sommers does have a noticeable bias/axe to grind since she's pretty anti-feminism and considers there to be a "war against boys". Also she works for the AEI which is a conservative think tank.
When she talks about the "war against boys", she's talking about the school system. Schools overmedicate and overpunish boys. The system drives boys out of school and as a result, only 40% of college students are male. If an inequality like this went the other way, there would be national outrage.
But it's not exactly a "conservative" issue. Plenty of liberals have written about it too:
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/stop-penal...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the...
https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2015/...
"Christina Hoff Sommers does not agree with my positions on issues therefore is biased and cannot be trusted, compared to people who do agree with my positions on issues, who are not biased and can be trusted."
"a noticeable bias/axe to grind since she's pretty anti-feminism and considers there to be a "war against boys". Also she works for the AEI which is a conservative think tank."
This strikes me as "poisoning the well."
5 replies →
>considers there to be a "war against boys"
How is there not? Literally every modern school system favors activities that disproportionally disadvantage young boys. Boys and young men are dropping out of school at a far larger rate than women, and literally nobody cares. It's a travesty.
Agree. When you perform an online search for articles on the "wage gap myth," the majority of the articles seem traceable back to her.
10 replies →
Time magazine is absolutely a right-of-center publication. Here’s a nice piece they published last week calling for more nationalism in the US: http://amp.timeinc.net/time/5431089/trump-white-nationalism-...
No it's not. You cherry picked an editorial written by an outside contributor. At the bottom you have:
>TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
You cannot label an entire outlet conservative or liberal because they bring in people of opposing views to write editorials unless there is an established bias over time (which you have not shown.)
It took me all of twenty seconds to find a liberal leaning editorial: http://time.com/5431836/dna-transgender-history/
Which part of the wage gap article do you disagree with?
Left of Center Bias
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/time/
UK Office for National Statistics publish good data for the UK.
My impression (based on 2016 stats [0]) is that as most C-suiters are men, and they can get 100s or 1000s of times the money that ordinary employees get, that in the UK this likely accounts for most of the effect that's not accounted for by career breaks (childcare, for example). To reiterate, this is my _impression_ when looking at the data.
Men who work part-time get lower wages; no one cares, it seems.
0 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
1 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
As an example, company of 100, 50 women. Boss is paid £500k, everyone else gets UK median £35k. Whichever sex the boss is they now show a 26% gender pay gap.
If the boss gets 3x the median, that's a 4% gap.
I'd like to see analysis which looks at same qualified people and charts their progression with attempts to understand why their wage changed and whether those changes have any discernible sex bias.
Men seem to fall across a wider distribution (both higher and lower paid), as appears in other characteristics.
Here's one example of the ONS data: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
Not only is the data missing variance, but the small print also say that it excludes overtime.
Could I please see the variance in the data which is a very simple, important and often missing aspect when presenting data? I would also like to see the average amount of work hours (and overtime) per industry and gender, the average amount of flex time and other non-income benefits, and common known sources for wage differences such as how often a person changes job. All this is missing, but again the lowest hanging fruit is the variance which make any dataset completely useless (and I stand by this statement) for any complex dataset.
Cool, I'll have to look at the new data clearly, a priori it contradicts my analysis - I only recalled one situation previously where discrimination appears to give higher wages to women (over 30, working full-time), 15% is quite the gap did it make headlines?
Note they don't compare like roles here, just same industry sector IIRC.
The largest gap is 95% in favour of female archivists; that must be anomalous.
Men under 30 earn much less than women under 30. No one cares either.
Isn't that contradicted in Fig. 3 of parent's [0]?
Might have been true until 2015 but not anymore.
Yes, younger women friends post on Facebook how they're stopping work for the year in October (?) to make up for the pay-gap. I assume maybe that's true to some extent in USA -- they're certainly sold on the idea all the men around them are getting an easy deal.
2 replies →
"Another stunning but perhaps unsurprising finding was that 63% of the time, men were offered higher salaries than women for the same role at the same company. The report found that companies were offering women between 4% and a whopping 45% less starting pay for the same job. "
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/2018/04/04/by-the-num...
Report referenced: https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report
At a casual glance, the 4-45% statistic also applies in the inverse direction, so it's fairly meaningless when discussing gender inequality.
The more appropriate statistic would be that "on average, women are offered 4% less" which seems to have been produced by integrating an estimation of the probability density, and looking at the non-symmetry of the distribution. It seems most of that difference is concentrated within 10% on the mean.
So (roughly) if you're a man, you had a 50% chance of being offered 4% more than a woman, and maybe a 30% chance of being offered 4% less than a woman.
> to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
What if the pay is equal for like-for-like jobs, but for the higher paying jobs one sex is vastly underrepresented? Not saying it is, just that discrimination and bias often runs deeper than some simple comparison.
What if one gender has a higher variance than another gender? Just don't say that to Google or you may get fired.
The measured difference in distributions is very small.
And if we believed that this was the cause, you'd need to think that Googlers were wildly off the norm in terms of ability. They've got like 90000 employees. They aren't exclusively hiring mega geniuses.
1 reply →
or to Harvard
Then that would be the point of the data. At the moment people are acting on claims of differences in pay across a number of sectors and roles and it's way too vague to pinpoint what the actual issue is.
If the data found an actual issue like this, the it would need to be addressed, but at the moment simply claiming that women are paid less doesn't offer any solution apart from paying women an extra 20% across every single job.
What if one sex is statistcally proven to work more overtime than another sex?
What if one sex takes more paternal leave than another so the other sex spends more time in the office improving skills?
Both of those can be seen as a cultural problem.
1 reply →
Then that's not the same problem at all and it needs to be addressed as such.
>I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men,...
It's not just arguing for higher salaries but being trusted to follow through when "the going gets tough".
Display of confidence is hard to distinguish from actual capability. Confidence is often mistaken for "can-do-spirit" or "positive attitude" and therefore always favored.
Women are more honest than man about their abilities in the workplace. They are more honest about previous experience in a job interview, and more reluctant to "fake it until they make it":
Excessive confidence displayed by men regarding their ability to follow through even their chances of success are equal to women, leads later to the assumption that the man knew what they were doing (and knew in advance that they will succeed) and hence men are seen as having been in full control the whole time. But actually it's hindsihgt-bias.
>I want to see some actual numbers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517651...
you mean more honest people who don't fake it should be paid more? What about meek men then
A lot of replies to ChrisRR's comment go out to the global level, but Google can't fix that. The interesting question is "what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs" at Google. That's what they can address. Does it exist?
If it does exist, that's a very serious problem, because if Google can't and/or hasn't attained pay parity that would satisfy the people writing this, then pack it in; there's no way it's ever going to happen. Google is just about the best possible environment for parity to happen in, with an almost uniform culture that would support it from top to bottom and enough money that it can pursue almost any parity policy it wants without a serious problem, and a long time frame in which this all should have been true.
If there is still systematic, unsatisfactory bias at Google, what hope is there for these ideas in the rest of the world?
One of the issues is that Google is rather reactive in its compensation - e.g. it only provides high-compensation offers to those who obtain competing offers. This essentially ensures that the highest offers go to those who prioritize being able to get high compensation. In my experience, a lot of software engineers tend to prioritize things other than compensation, and don't really care to try to extract higher compensation if they get to do work they find meaningful or work for a company they think is good. And for whatever reason, a much higher proportion of my male peers have prioritized high compensation compared to my female peers.
I suspect that if Google wanted to remove pay differences between men and women, they would need to start making strong offers to all their candidates - not just those who obtain competing offers and try to negotiate.
They could just make salaries transparent. That would fix the issue really quickly, people usually don't like being underpaid.
That's what they're asking for too: more data.
If any company has the data, it's Google. If they had a good story to tell, I think they'd be sharing that data.
Google has refused and insisted "It's too hard" to release this data.
__If__ it's really a problem, the only way to actually fix this would be to remove any kind of negotation, because two people with identical CVs might settle on vastly different salaries and it's highly unlikely that the employer is going to overcompensate them. However, I've heard people argue that a right to ask for a lower pay is also an advantage in labour market because it's yet another axis of competitiveness.
How would you remove any kind of negotiation though? Say that it's illegal for an applicant to say "You have to pay me X or I won't accept the offer"? Or for an employee to say "Give me a raise of Y, or I'm leaving"? What if they already have an offer from a different company for more money? Can they tell their current employer? And if they do, can the employer offer to increase their wage to keep them? And if they can't, can they offer the employee a "new" higher paid position so it technically isn't a raise/negotiation?
I don't think it's really feasible, for the reasons you mentioned, among others. Nevertheless, there are countries which try to govern (or at least suggest) the min-max salaries that you can expect given your profession/experience/skill, e.g. Germany.
Like many people replying to the OP, I'd like to see some data that looks at it from different perspectives, tho, instead of just picking a side and arguing for it - "there's a wage-gap" vs "look, there actually isn't".
It actually says "inequity" which has a different meaning than 'inequality'.
It actually says "inequity" which has a different meaning than 'inequality'.
Src:
https://mobile.twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/105780420389...
great, now we have to figure out if the authors know the difference between inequality and inequity.
The most rational, fact-based reporting I've seen on the wage gap comes from Freakonomics. They have several episodes [0], [1] that dive into the current research.
The TLDR, if I remember correctly, is: Yes, there is a wage gap between genders. It is smaller than most headlines claim, but real. Lots of factors go into this, but it is probably a mix of: companies _can_ pay women less, so they will, and women tend to value some things greater than salary. However, there is no smoking gun we can point to as a definitive root cause.
[0] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
[1] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about...
Why should spending your time and effort arguing for higher salary entitle you to a higher salary? Surely, just the opposite.
So I've come to develop a nuanced opinion on this.
I used to fully believe what you said, on the grounds that willingness and ability to negotiate have no bearing on how valuable the employee will be (at least for engineering jobs - it could be different for something like sales where dealmaking ability actually matters).
However, one counterpoint I've come to realize is that if an employee doesn't value higher salary that much, it's a waste of money to pay them more. Thus, by only paying higher salaries that put time and effort into arguing for higher salaries, you make sure to only spend that money on the employees that will actually value all the extra money you're throwing at them.
It is, of course, reasonable to make a "waste of money" argument if you are a pure capitalist.
In any case, this does not constitute an excuse for paying women less.
> I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
There really aren't any differences. Just do a simple mental exercise.
Imagine if the gender gap is real. Male programmers demand $100K while female programmers demand $77K for the same exact quality of work. What would this mean? It would mean all tech companies would only hire females.
For comparison look at seasonal farm work. Imagine if migrant workers deman $7.70 per hour while citizens demand $10 per hour for the same quality of work. What do you think the composition of the labor foce on farms would be? I'd imagine it would be mostly migrants. Right?
If the wage gap truly existed, clever feminists would start companies exclusively composed of women and would be putting everyone out of business because they have a 23% profit margin built in.
Sigh.. I've seen this argument so many times I have to wonder if the people peddling it has ever sat on a hiring panel.
The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value. Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech, where compensation packages are routinely so large and supported by large VC funds that those of us who do hire can see those salary differences as negligible. And, even if I were sensitive to those differences, I would not hesitate to pay 30-50k in order to get the right person for the role.
The question here is: are we doing a good job of finding the right person for the role? That is why the Google women are demanding "opportunity equity." Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
> Sigh.. I've seen this argument so many times I have to wonder if the people peddling it has ever sat on a hiring panel.
I have interviewed for jobs and have interviewed others for positions on my team. Both startup and traditional 9-5 tech jobs.
> The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value.
It's a bit of both.
> Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Is it society or nature? Also, society socializes males to be less aggressive. So I don't agree with your claim.
> Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech,
Because in the tech world, aggression is what is sought?
> Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
If that is the case, why don't these women create companies and hire only women ( who are supposedly doing the same job for 77% pay of their male counterpart )?
Maybe in construction work or farm work, male traits are highly preferred. But in programming and tech world, it's pretty much what you can do.
You really didn't address my point. If what you are claiming is true, why don't you start a search engine company and hire only women? You would put google out of business in a few short years given your built in 23% profit margin.
Do you realize how significant a naturally embedded profit margin of 23% is?
So I'll ask again. What is preventing you or any other person from starting companies and hiring women if women truly make 77% of a man's wage for the same exact work?
People keep saying this, but it assumes that companies are completely rational actors in hiring, unaffected by human bias. Which is clearly bullshit. For one thing, you can simply prove this by considering the existence of discrimination in the other direction - surely, if companies were hell bent on optimizing their hiring for optimal return on investment, we wouldn't have some of the most profitable companies in the world engaging in the kinds of hiring practices that, e.g., Arne Wilberg is suing about?
See also Dan Luu's discussion of this argument: https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/
Why make assumptions? I'm an engineer and I make decisions based on data and information presented to me, and try to avoid guess work and assumptions as much as possible.
What about the assumptions you haven’t identified?
Why would you pay people who walk out the same as those who don’t?
Combining "pay inequality" and "opportunity inequality" makes it more difficult to discuss the issue.
We know already that "pay inequality" is fictitious at this point.
So by elimination, that leaves opportunity - however as anyone who has ever worked in a large company knows, it is very difficult, except in a very regimented corporate culture like the military, to have equivalent opportunity spread around evenly. I somehow think Google has a corporate culture that is not very regimented.
How are you defining "pay inequality" while claiming it isn't real?
If I interpret "pay inequality" as "the average pay for women ages 20-60 is less than it is for men 20-60 in the US in 2018" then I've seen data suggesting it is real.
When corrected for all factors there is no pay inequality.
In some instances, such as Hooters waitresses and associate lawyers, women earn slightly more.
You can search for "pay inequality myth" and figure out which argument makes the most sense. Both sides are presented in the search engine I used.
Myself, I think that the issue that pay varies specifically because of the choices that are made is very valid.
1 reply →