This is not a Google specific thing, it happens in almost every company in the United States. Salesforce is a great public example of a company trying to eliminate gender bias in pay and they are having trouble doing it with constant internal monitoring/feedback. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/compani... Also since Google claims to be gender neutral yet unable to reveal the data, we can't judge whether or not the problem is if pay is tied to position - is it similar to the original programmer salary question, did the pay go up because the culture changed or do fields requiring a lot of time in the office just get more salary - https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/what-pr...