I think you give companies too much credit. Those pretty good reasons are typically that that's how much they asked, it wasn't unreasonable, and they passed the interviews.
People's salaries are all over the map for the same sorts of positions, and it's not just IT and development.
But, even though it might not be a clearcut answer to whether there is discrimination or bias in salaries, it should be explored. Even data with a wide, overlapping range doesn't mean that the mean and median can't be compared and valid conclusions drawn about probable bias.
Google seems to take bias seriously, and I think if it could be proven with adequate certainty that salaries were affected by the sex of the employee alone, they'd do something about it.
What do you do? Realistically you give them both what they ask and pay them unfairly. Congratulations, you're now part of the problem.
[1] Yeah, one is a dude.
Ultimately, the only alternative is to pay people equally. Which won't fly generally, as companies always want to pay the minimum amount that can keep the employee from leaving.
The fun thing about making a straw-man is you make yourself immune from criticism. I can't attack this point without having to completely define someone who is "pro-diversity" (what's that even mean?), and give evidence that no one in that group has the traits you claim of ("look at this feminist, see I was right!").
More importantly, what's even your point if this straw-man were true? I could just as easily say this about anything.
"Oh your life is shitty? Well I bet you wouldn't complain if things were working out well." It's an interesting case of vacuous truth!
The argument is to make things better for the people who have it worse at the moment, correcting for previous inertia. In this case, the inertia is that men were previously paid more or gained an initial advantage that allowed them to be paid more, and then that advantage has percolated across their various positions until the difference becomes more stark all because as you say "companies always want to pay the minimum amount that can keep the employee from leaving". If that's the case, then if companies could pay women less for the same work, why wouldn't they? Similar arguments apply to affirmative action and similar programs. That's the argument at least, whether I agree with it is an entirely different question.
What irks me is you dismissing the argument with your little straw-man and moving on to "the only alternative". You completely disregarded the points of everyone opposite the aisle of you in the most condescending way.
I don't. You just criticized me at length :). Some of it I could even agree with :).
My point is, the current narration coming from "opposite the aisle of me" is, on the one hand, "gender discrimination is bad", and on the other hand, "we need more discrimination to correct for existing one". Even if we leave out that I don't think there's that much discrimination happening as feminists would want you to believe (in fact, I think they're just reinterpreting everything in terms of gender, whether it is actually related or not) - still, you can't have it both ways.
I'm just against hypocrisy, especially this extreme. When someone admits that they are advocating literal sexism as a corrective action (hopefully temporary), I'll accept that (even though I don't agree it's needed). What irks me is condemning sexism when it goes in one direction, while at the same time advocating sexism in the other direction.
I like the following analogy. Your body has cancer. The cancer is bad, and you don't want it. Obviously killing your own cells is also a bad thing, but you choose chemotherapy because it's the best way to get rid of your cancer.
How do you quickly get rid of the cancer that is discrimination?
...
I know you're itching to say, "Make everything equal!". But hold on, how do you do that? Can you ever do that? In my opinion, the answer is no.
First let's suppose we do it through regulation. The logistics involved in such a thing would be astronomical and more importantly would involve massive governmental regulation of basically all employment.
The other option is that we deregulate everything and just let the free market handle it all - wait it out till all the racists and sexists are dead! It's so easy. But that doesn't work either - humans tend to cargo cult. We haven't had slavery in this country for a long time, yet the effects of it are widespread and evident everywhere you go here. It's in the way people talk, the movies they watch, and the music they listen to (or don't listen to). You can't just shut off the lights, pretend none of that bad stuff ever happened and move on. People still walk and talk with that knowledge in their head.
More or less, we can't easily eliminate discrimination without drastic actions, and it definitely can't be done immediately. One of these drastic actions is to counteract the discrimination. In other words our chemo.
In my view, this is fine morally and not really hypocritical. It's also one of the things that's less difficult to actually implement in practice. Let me spin just one more analogy to illustrate:
Say a dude beats your face in at a bar. Completely wrecks you. Puts you in the hospital. The whole thing. Three years later you've finally regained your ability to walk. It still hurts every once in awhile but here you are. So you go back to that bar, and that guy is still there. He's gotten a lot weaker, doesn't have as many friends, but he's still there. Then he tries to mess with you again, so you punch him in the face and move on.
Are you a hypocrite if you think he shouldn't have beaten you to a pulp even though you punched him later on?
The point is that the thing we're counteracting with policies like this is so astronomically bad ("Black people are more suited to physical labor" "Women can only handle childbirth" "Women can't vote") that the policies that correct them ("favoring some black kids with equivalent records as the white ones because in theory they might have had a harder life" "favoring a woman for a position because she might have had a harder time getting there and you want to encourage more women") aren't nearly as bad in comparison.
Sure if you take the "any decision based on [race/sex/religion] is bad and always bad" then yeah, I guess it would be hypocrisy. But I'm not sure I believe that myself. Until we actually hit that mythical day of equality, we're always gonna have imbalances like that. In my eyes, it's better to try and correct them (while not actively hurting anyone of course - there's a big difference between Johnny getting into Yale but not Harvard and sending Johnny to a work camp for the summer).
These are of course debatable points. Any one could be argued about through an entire undergraduate course, but they're still arguments. I highly recommend you become more familiar with the points you are debating and the merits / downfalls of those arguments. It's much more productive than creating straw-men to argue against.
bell hooks' books on feminism are especially good for someone new to the field and interested in such topics.
> "...aren't nearly as bad in comparison."
Certainly from the perspective of rich whites, poor whites, on the other hand, are probably the least advantaged group we have today, but I could be wrong.
"little" straw man is also condescending.
Plus, a straw man is "an intentionally misrepresented proposition" - not only can we not conclude what OPs intention was, but also it's not clear to me that it is a misrepresentation of the original comment.
Find me someone (anyone, anywhere) who defends (even in the abstract!) a situation where women are paid more than men for the same work. That's a horrific strawman, and it tells me that you're looking at this as a war (with feminists as your "enemies" I guess) instead of a problem.
And no, you don't have to pay people equally. You have to pay them fairly. If there differences between individuals, that's fine. If there are systemic differences between easily classified groups of individuals, that's discrimination.
Isn't that their very argument?
Their point is a few need to be paid more even if they don't work for it, to make up for what is lost.
They are asking for inequality by very argument. Equality by their definition would be injustice to them.
Also, empirically, women tend to be more risk-averse than men on average, so Google (and other companies) could be paying less knowing the chance they’d leave is lower than a man of similar skill.
If an employer pays people who are a flight-risk more (a-la "the squeaky wheel gets the grease"), and women are on average a lower flight risk because they are more risk-averse - is the resulting pay disparity a case of illegal discrimination?
My intuition says no, but I'm not sure everyone (including the legal system) necessarily agrees.
So if it's biased externally it's gonna look that way internally if you're not proactive.
The entire premise of the lawsuit is that the managers are working contrary to the best interest of Google. Companies are made of people, and no matter how much CEOs might want employees to behave a certain way, employees are still beholden to their cognitive biases.
The optimum situation for Google would be to pay all employees the market rate for the level of quality they desire. This would basically yield a meritocratic pay structure. But this is not what happened. The plaintiffs were awarded different pay grades for measurably comparable ability. This is suboptimal for Google and for society; that is why Google is being sued.
The article doesn't say that. It says they were awarded different pay grades given an equal time spent in the worforce, not that their abilities were comparable.
It's not that the companies are sexist
Or the managers are sexist
Or the engineers are exist
Or you're sexist.
That's not what anyone has been saying this whole time - ever. You have completely misunderstood the point.
The system is sexist. Not the people in the system, but the system itself (similar arguments exist for police departments being racist - it's not the cops that are, but the system). In this case, the general consensus is that women are paid less than men in tech due to a variety of reasons.
A culture can also be sexist. While the people within it can harbor no ill will whatsoever, their behaviors and group dynamics can actively prevent a woman from being welcome. In this case, people are calling the tech "culture" sexist.
Here's a couple examples of a sexist culture I've seen in my own workplace. Note that none of the people here meant any harm, nor were there actions actively "sexist" in the common parlance, but they still did things that made people want to GTFO if they're a chick:
* I had a coworker who used to grill the woman on the team much more fiercely than the men. I never asked why this was - didn't have a great way to broach the topic. But it was always extremely obvious, and I have noticed it on HackerNews, Reddit, and pretty much every video game I've ever played. Men are very critical of women in jobs that men are already the predominant workers in. Female doctors and lawyers have had this issue for decades as well. It's not a sexist action. In my eyes it happens totally accidentally (My pet theory is that because we aren't used to seeing women in the field, we tend to be more involved when giving them criticism)
* My coworker had this anime poster in his cube with some half-naked bikini clad girl. Do I even have to mention why a girl might feel a little awkward here?
See how these things aren't actually bad in isolation? But over time, and in great numbers, they add up and make women feel like shit working at your company because they can never truly "fit in" with the guys. That's sexism in work culture and whether it's ever truly fixable is a great question.
I highly recommend you read some literature from across the aisle to become more familiar with the arguments you're facing, rather than the arguments you think you're facing. I highly recommend bell hooks' books on the subject. She's extremely clear and lucid and helped me grok a lot of the logic my first time around.
But again, it only takes one workplace, one manager that doesn't treat women more harshly and doesn't allow pinups or have these other sexist behaviors to foil the entire sexist system, because that one employer would get all of these great women who are just as productive for a lower price and would take over their market. It only takes two such employers in a market who are competing for those women to get women up to income parity with men.
I'm not making any arguments whatsoever about sexism in the workplace. I'm only talking about the wage gap. "The system" having these latent sexist rules and behaviors in place almost certainly drives women away. But that's a different problem than whether women engineers make the same amount of money as men for the same work.
> that one employer would get all of these great women who are just as productive for a lower price and would take over their market. It only takes two such employers in a market who are competing for those women to get women up to income parity with men.
Yet companies will always want to hire someone for the least possible amount they can - regardless of the manager's personal views.
Two potential employees walk in the door at your hypothetical perfect company. They are perfectly equivalent. One was originally paid $40,000 while the other was paid $55,000 at their previous position. They each want a 10% raise to come to your company. One is a woman, the other is male.
Now you end up paying the woman less than the male, purely because her previous position paid her less. And the cycle continues until eventually you get to some sexist manager back at her first company that thought she wasn't as skilled for some reason or another (apparently).
That's the point I'm trying to make. Your hypothetical situation would not be the panacea to these problems because companies don't offer salaries like that. You're also making the astronomically huge assumption that every person wants to change positions in the first place. Some people like the job they have and stay there for much longer than would be competitively optimal for them.
Systemic sexism is the sexism that manifests in these cycles.
what do you mean?
> My coworker had this anime poster
And that's "culture"?
> because they can never truly "fit in" with the guys.
Your examples don't really back up this point.
B) Yes. As it turns out, the behaviors we normalize in the workplace (like putting up scantily clad women) are part of a workplace culture.
They feel unwelcome, different, and unfairly questioned on the basis of being a woman and a woman alone. How do my examples not back up this point?
You give an example of one guy with a posted, and one manager, and then conclude "culture" in general, and that they can "never truly fit in with the guys"; But why is this the case with the anime poster guy? How does the managers treatment of the employee relate to their relationship with the other guys on the team?
> the behaviors we normalize
This is along the lines of the "role model" argument; all must conform to prescribed behavior lest a slippery-slope epidemic of deviance should arise. Do all the cubicles have scantily clad women?
> Videogames, Reddit, and HackerNews all have examples of this
The first two are verymuchnot the workplace. Reddit has many different cultures, depending on which subreddit you are in.
You list HN too (which is maybe a little closer to the workplace), as in "Women are overly criticized on HN when they're doing anything that's a male-dominant activity" - I'm not sure I agree, can you give an example?
What amazes me is the confidence with which people equate the work of engineers when they actually have no stake in making that judgement correctly.
You see, if you are paying the money and living with the results, you have a much greater incentive to make this call correctly.
And those who are unhappy with these judgements have a much greater incentive to equate engineers who aren't actually comparable. It's called politics.
I mean, if a company can get away with paying women 70 cents on the dollar, because women are worse at negotiating or have less negotiation power (ie everyone ELSE is also discriminating against them, therefore they have less counter offers), then of course they would do it.
It has nothing at all to do with "making the correct call". It has to do with making the profit maximizing decision to pay a group of people less because you can get away with it.
That doesn't change the fact that this is still illegal.
Seriously... if there's some nefarious bias, it would mean a company hiring more women than expected, bc they can "under" pay them. Silly irrational people.
The problem is quantity. At the end of the day, if only X people that you interview pass your hiring bar, it is impossible to hire more than X. You can't just say "Lets double X!".
Now, would companies do things like try to reach out to women groups, so as to increase the amount that interview with them, and therefore increase the proportion that are hired?
Yes, absolutely they would do that. As has been demonstrated by all the diversity reachout efforts that companies are doing to women and minority groups. Diversity efforts are PROFITABLE.
All diversity efforts that I've ever seen are the exactly opposite of profitable and result in sexist/racist/otherist selection of candidates. The unfortunate end result of worse selection is that worse candidates were hired.. every. time.
Why wouldn't a company want to target groups that other people are missing? It means that you can get good candidates for cheap.
Obviously you don't lower the bar. You kept the hiring bar exactly the same, but get more people from certain groups to apply.
IE, if you can find someone who passes your hiring bar, but no other company has noticed, that means a cheap candidate.
If you target the group that everyone else is going after, they are going to be much more expensive for a given quality level.
And they did land one of those less interesting jobs, earning similar to those coworkers who had been there for 10 years, and there were nothing illegal in this. Have a bunch of employable credentials, send out enough applications demanding above average pay, and you are going to likely end up with above average pay.
No, they're paying somebody more because they don't want them to leave.
And if they are paying you less than somebody else, it's probably partially because they don't think you are as much of a flight risk.
And if Google is wrong about these decisions, I'd guess we'd see a lot more female engineers leaving Google to start their own companies. But is that what we see?