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April 8, 2017 11:03 AM

Google promotes gender equality through emojis, film analysis, diversity training and family leave. But according to the US Department of Labor, discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry based on salary data provided by Google. Google disputes the finding and has dismissed the Department of Labor's request for more data as a "fishing expedition that has absolutely no relevance".
posted by clawsoon (25 comments total)

Surely this...!
posted by slater at 11:05 AM on April 8, 2017

I would love to see a company handle criticism like this in a really different way. "You know what, you're right. We fucked up. For the next X months, we're going to hire 75% women."

Which sounds crazy, except that's what literally every tech company does, but for men (and honestly, probably more than 75% men)
posted by RustyBrooks at 11:23 AM on April 8, 2017 [12 favorites]

Honestly, for an organization as large as Google, this is mostly a pipeline PR problem. If they invested more in spreading misleading memes about early childhood and STEM education and so on, it'd be much easier to dismiss the appearance of overt discrimination without any embarrassing acknowledgement of implicit or structural bias.
posted by emmalemma at 11:43 AM on April 8, 2017 [8 favorites]

Dear Microsoft: absolutely not.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:52 AM on April 8, 2017 [7 favorites]

"You know what, you're right. We fucked up. For the next X months, we're going to hire 75% women."

This particular controversy is about a pay gap between men and women, not about hiring. And Google is refusing to hand documents over to the Department of Labor, which they're obligated to do as a Federal contractor. I suspect that they are hoping, probably correctly, that the Trump administration will stop pursuing cases of gender discrimination, and if they stall for long enough the problem will go away.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:54 AM on April 8, 2017 [31 favorites]

Google? Systematically suppressing the wages of a group of their employees, regardless of ethics or legality? That's ridiculous -

"Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe will shell out $415 million to put to rest an antipoaching civil lawsuit that accused the companies of conspiring not to hire each other's employees."

- oh.
posted by galaxy rise at 12:03 PM on April 8, 2017 [15 favorites]

"You know what, you're right. We fucked up. For the next X months, we're going to hire 75% women."

Right, as A&C says, that's not what this is. But also, that usually doesn't work, because the culture that only hires 25% women doesn't only show up at selection time. It's there ALL the time, developing a reputation for being a place women don't want to look for a job, subtly discouraging people with feelers out, reading resumes with an "assumed bad" attitude instead of an "assume the best" one, paying them less, treating them with less respect, and ultimately driving them away. So even your 75%-woman cohort you hire is the desperate or naive ones, and then they go away as fast as they figure it out.

You have to find out WHY and fix that, not just jam more in the pipe. It's harder than it sounds on the management side and begins with "stamp out the shittiness for the ones we DO have". The pay gap is (only one, important) part of that.
posted by ctmf at 12:13 PM on April 8, 2017 [8 favorites]

Hired did a report recently about the Gender Wage Gap using their own data (Hired is a recruiting site for software engineers.)

It's a pretty bleak read, but gives actual numbers that I think brings home what the gap looks like in practice.
posted by ProtoStar at 1:06 PM on April 8, 2017 [7 favorites]

I'm way too close to this to comment on the particulars but in the unlikely event that this actually gets to trial this is how I picture it going now that the current administration is in charge:

Google lawyers: No, you don't understand, Google is a pure meritocracy. What you're seeing in these numbers is just that the particular men in question happen to be better, in aggregate, than the particular women in question at their jobs. That's all! We just happened to hire a crapton of really smart men, and lots of just pretty-good women! When they start making smarter women the numbers will even out.
Department of Labor: Story checks out! Drop the case, fellows!

Then they all go get free Google lunch.

fin

PROVE ME WRONG, 2017
posted by potrzebie at 2:10 PM on April 8, 2017 [20 favorites]

What happens when you talk about salaries at Google

[previously]
posted by ryanrs at 3:21 PM on April 8, 2017 [6 favorites]

As much as companies and management teams are at fault, it starts way before anyone enters the job market. It starts in grade school and just gets worse as people progress through education and into profession. There is strong cultural programming that pushes women away from STEM in addition to the hostility and idiocy exhibited by men in similar positions. As other folks have noted, it's not a pipeline issue. It's a cultural problem with our society. It is the same in gaming culture and other stereotypical, male nerd cultures. I don't know how we change things so that we raise boys into men who are not shitheads. Complex problems usually don't have simple solutions. As depressing as it is, it will probably take generations to correct these problems, assuming we get to a point where they are regarded seriously by a large enough fraction of our society. I often feel that we take one step forward, then two steps back. There is scads of data on this, and it seems like awareness is trending upward, but it is so deeply entrenched in the US that it is hard to see progress unless you are looking at multi-decade time scales.

As an aside, when I worked for Google, it was a cardinal sin to discuss your salary with anyone other than your manager. I believe it was, and probably still is, a fireable offense. They really, really don't want anyone to know what anyone else is making. I have zero doubt that there is structural bias against women in compensation and several other areas in the company. It is also the case, though, that there are insane wage gaps regardless of gender. There are a lot of people making $150 - $250k who sit next to someone with the same title who makes $2.2M/year. No doubt the equity grants are smaller for women, but they were also systematically reduced for all hires every six months when I worked for the company. By virtue of starting one year earlier, an employee ten years ago might have a compensation package that is 10 - 100x that of their peers. This is one of the reasons that Google doesn't want anyone talking about comp, ever. It was also pretty common for comp to be completely static unless you were in the top .1% of performers. I worked on very big projects and won (as part of my team) both an Executive Management Award and the Google Founder's Award. My comp was static for my four+ year tenure with the company. I was granted an equity bonus for my founder's award along with several other people, but the awards varied insanely. My mentor on the team, who was female, received 1/10th the equity that I did. My PM and the lead engineer received 10x what I received.
posted by drklahn at 3:49 PM on April 8, 2017 [28 favorites]

Yeah, I don't believe that it's about the culture or the pipeline or any other nebulous thing that is just so unfortunate but can't be corrected by any concrete action. It's about companies choosing to pay men and women different salaries for the same roles. They can fix that if they want to, or if they're forced to by a justice department that gives a flying fuck about discrimination.

As an aside, when I worked for Google, it was a cardinal sin to discuss your salary with anyone other than your manager. I believe it was, and probably still is, a fireable offense.

Since April 2014, employees in the US have legally had the right to discuss their salaries. It would be illegal for a company to retaliate.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:03 PM on April 8, 2017 [18 favorites]

As an aside, when I worked for Google, it was a cardinal sin to discuss your salary with anyone other than your manager. I believe it was, and probably still is, a fireable offense.

posted by drklahn at 3:49 PM on April 8 [4 favorites +] [!]

It is illegal for employers to prevent employees from discussing salaries. This is a basic labor protection. Of course, companies will still try to discourage employees from discussing their pay. But if they were to fire you specifically for disclosing your salary, I imagine that would be a very easy lawsuit for the employee to win.
posted by cruelfood at 4:56 PM on April 8, 2017 [7 favorites]

Here is a storify of the Wired story that ryanrs linked to, in case you have an ad blocker on.
posted by clawsoon at 4:58 PM on April 8, 2017

Well I guess I feel extra good now that I turned down the maternity-leave-replacement position Google offered me last summer, which (because it was through their temp agency) paid about 1/2 of the reasonable rate for my position in that area. Which is Silicon Valley. Which is FUCKING EXPENSIVE, utterly unlivable at the salary they were offering. This was not a fuck-off offer, they were working so hard to get me in that the interviewer gave me the hard sell all the way out to the parking lot. The line was "it's maternity leave replacement but so many people get hired after their temp jobs here, and hey did you see our cafeterias and the bikes we give you to get across campus and hey we have mini golf." Nope, Stepford all you like, I am not joining your cult for half what I'm worth only to be out of a job again right after the presidential inauguration...
posted by Oda_a_los_calcetines at 6:13 PM on April 8, 2017 [9 favorites]

"You know what, you're right. We fucked up. For the next X months, we're going to hire 75% women."

Also, not to pick on RustyBrooks too much - I see this same obvious-seeming idea a lot, it just doesn't work like it seems like it should at first glance.

Curiously, I NEVER see the companion idea for the pay gap: "Why not just start paying women 1.3x what men make?" Wonder why that is?
posted by ctmf at 6:46 PM on April 8, 2017 [6 favorites]

I'm going to say flat out that eventually this is going to come back to bite Google and Silicon Valley hard. There's a huge amount of talent that is being wasted because of this crap, abs eventually somebody is going to use that talent to do the same thing to Google that it food to its competetors. Eventually.
posted by happyroach at 7:27 PM on April 8, 2017 [2 favorites]

Or better yet, let's give all our female employees (past and present) back pay (plus interest) to make up for their lost wages, and pay them fairly going forwards.

Of course, they could just continue on as they are until someone starts a lawsuit. They might not like the result though.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 7:32 PM on April 8, 2017 [6 favorites]

I cannot wait for the day that "male-dominated industries" is no longer even a thing. I am a woman in STEM, and it took me 15 years to get to the point in my career where I could demand equal pay and give the finger to companies that didn't want to pay me.

To hear that Google is likely just another one of the boys' club that I've been fighting against my entire adult life makes me deeply sad to be using any Google products at all.
posted by tryniti at 9:05 PM on April 8, 2017 [16 favorites]

...makes me deeply sad to be using any Google products at all.

I'm with you. Fuck Google
posted by BlueHorse at 9:56 PM on April 8, 2017

Hired did a report recently about the Gender Wage Gap using their own data (Hired is a recruiting site for software engineers.)

Here's Google's former head of HR Laszlo Bock on the same topic: In 2015 we added 8,214 employees to Google. And the women we hired, on average, received a 30 percent bigger salary increase upon joining the company, compared to men.
posted by effbot at 11:26 PM on April 8, 2017

Google and their ilk have actively denied government requirements to reveal detailed information about their personnel, in the name of corporate secrecy. Bullshit! It does not hurt your competitive position to state that you're hiring white and Asian men, a smattering of women, and virtually no blacks or hispanics. Which is what it broils down to when the figures are finally released.

Google is a government contractor. They need to cough up this information or be barred from government contracts. End of story.
posted by oheso at 6:39 AM on April 9, 2017 [6 favorites]

Here's Google's former head of HR Laszlo Bock on the same topic: In 2015 we added 8,214 employees to Google. And the women we hired, on average, received a 30 percent bigger salary increase upon joining the company, compared to men.

Nothing to see here. Trust us!
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 6:42 AM on April 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

effbot: "Hired did a report recently about the Gender Wage Gap using their own data (Hired is a recruiting site for software engineers.)

Here's Google's former head of HR Laszlo Bock on the same topic: In 2015 we added 8,214 employees to Google. And the women we hired, on average, received a 30 percent bigger salary increase upon joining the company, compared to men."

Hopefully this was obvious, but this is a weasel statement that doesn't say women are paid equally to men. It says women got bigger raises over what they were paid before working at google. I see it as a tacit admission that women are paid less - because if they were paid equally, google would have said that instead of weaseling.
posted by medusa at 12:34 PM on April 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

I see it as a tacit admission that women are paid less - because if they were paid equally, google would have said that instead of weaseling.

Did you read the entire article or just the opening quote?
posted by effbot at 1:34 PM on April 9, 2017