Comment by jerf
7 years ago
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.